Things to Amuse Yourself (or family) With On The Net
When you're a geek. And you have time to kill. See below.
Like, for example, when you're being forced to visit family over the holidays and everyone else is glazed over watching football, and you're on the Internet but can't exactly watch porn while your cousins are in the room. And you may have young geeks in your family. You can introduce them to the following time wasters:
Text-Adventure Hamlet http://versificator.co.uk/hamlet/ When I was growing up, a friend of mine's father had one of the only IBM PCs in the neigborhood and on it we played a game called ADVENTURE. Adventure is to gamers today what building your own scooter with a wooden fruit crate and roller skate wheels is to skateboarders today--a very early example that bears a passing resemblance to the current pastime. If you've never played ADVENTURE or a game like it, this will give you the experience of doing so, but in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. Figuring out how to play it is half the fun (i.e. figuring out what commands it will accept and so on). If you know the major plays of Shakespeare and have a hacker-ish spirit, you'll get through it in under two hours. Rated G, except well, it is Hamlet, so there is poisoning, stabbing, Oedipal weirdness, and a ghost. So, maybe PG.
Launchball http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/launchpad/launchball/ I think ostensibly this is hosted at the British Science Museum site because it teaches physics and physical principles? Each level of this game your goal is to let a bouncing ball loose and get it into the goal. In some levels you will have to use fans, conveyor belts and electromagnets to do so. I spent, oh, six hours playing around with these one night recently. You can also design your own levels! Rated: G.
Cat Macros http://cat_macros.livejournal.com Also known generically as "LOLcats." Everyone knows there are tons of sites on the net where you can look at cute cat pictures. Like the ever popular Stuff on My Cat, Rate My Kitten, Kitten War, and so on. (Check those out to amuse your cat-loving relatives.) Perhaps in reaction to the deluge of cute cats, people in recent years have been combining the pictures with netspeak captions and other humorous text. There are fresh images posted just about every day in the Livejournal community known as "cat_macros. Rated PG-13 for language. Because sometimes things are just fucking funnier with profanity.
Web Comics If you're reading this journal, you're probably already part of the cult of XKCD. XKCD is a webcomic that revels in its geekiness and if you don’t find it funny you probably are not a geek or don't spend much time with them. In which case, my condolences. For something with a bit more narrative, how about MegaTokyo? It started out as a daily gag webcomic and developed into a full blown manga with interesting characters, soap opera-like twists of plot, and yet it's also a meta-commentary on manga/anime/gamer fandom. The basic plot: two gamer geeks from the US end up in Tokyo more or less by accident... hilarity ensues. Tokyo, it turns out, is exactly as one imagines it if one learned about it from Japanese pop culture (i.e. there are actual giant monsters rampaging from time to time, ninjas, cops in mech suits, etc...)
TV Commercials of Other Countries YouTube, of course, delivers the following hilarious or nifty television ads:
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ceciliatan) wrote,
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cat_macros. Rated PG-13 for language. Because sometimes things are just fucking funnier with profanity.
