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If you’re in the kind of mood to have your mind blown, allow us to suggest that you visit the website of the street-artist BLU. Street art like graffiti? Sort of, but in motion. Check out the “Video” tab on the BLU website for a collection of four stop-motion street animations that are as insane as they are long. To see the craziest one first, start with “Big Bang Big Boom.”
In another testament to the fact that nobody wastes time as spectacularly as hundreds of people wasting time together, Mr. Wong’s Soup’Parments is a collaborative pixel-art image of a tower—each individual floor drawn and submitted by a different person. The final product is the “tallest virtual tower in the world” and a great way to kill a few minutes. Prepare to wear out that scroll wheel!
Another example of community-driven pixel art, the Blue Ball Machine consists of tiled animated gifs representing the Rube Goldberg-esque workings of a giant blue-ball-processing facility. Originally spawned as part of a challenge on the Something Awful forums, the original Blue Ball Machine image became a popular YTMND site, and spawned a number of follow-ups.
The Million Dollar Homepage contains only a single image. That image is a giant, ugly, expensive advertisement. And that giant, ugly advertisement made some college kid in the UK one MILLION dollars.
The idea is simple: Create a 1,000,000 pixel image, and sell those pixels off for a dollar each (in blocks of 100). People are free to use those pixels to link to advertise whatever they want (online casinos and scams mostly, it seems). Every single pixel sold out, and Alex Tew of Wilshire England made a cool milli. How could he make so much off of something so dumb? Because he thought of it first
It can be hard to keep up with who’s currently winning the “world’s largest photo” race, but right now the king is this360-degree panorama of London. Clocking in at 80 Gigapixels (that’s 8,000 times the resolution of your average point-n-shoot camera, for reference) this panaroma is detailed enough to read the license plate on a faraway bus.
Another piece of internet history (both itself, and as a tool for exploring internet history) is the Wayback Machine. Simply put, the Wayback Machine will take any URL, and create a gallery of historical versions of that website for you to explore. Check out some of your favorite websites, and marvel at how far we’ve come in just 5 or 10 years.
You can’t call yourself a true connoisseur of internet curios until you’ve attempted to have a full-fledged conversation with a chatbot. People have been trying to make convincing Chatbots since the 70s, and even though we’re still far from something that’ll pass the Turing Test, it can be a real kick to try talking to one of these. Like it’s predecessor Jaberwocky, Cleverbot learns more with each conversation it has.
After you’ve fooled around for a while, check out the “cleverness” section for a collection of funny or impressive conversations between Chatbot and other people.
We don’t have a whole lot of blogs on this list because—by their very nature—they’re not really a single-serving kind of thing. All the same, Rules For My Unborn Son’s been getting regularly updated for long enough that pretty much anyone can get a healthy dose of awesome advice just by spending an hour or two paging through the archives.
If you’re not familiar with the demoscene, here’s what you need to know: there’s a subset of computer programs, musicians and artists who engage in competitions to fit the most impressive and extravagant visual displays (and sometimes even games) into teeny-tiny chunks of script. We’re talking whole music videos crammed down into 64K or smaller. At Demoscene.tv, you can get a feel for what the demoscene is all about without having to run any strange code on your computer—all the demos are streamed, a la YouTube.
One of the few truly classic webcomics, The Perry Bible Fellowship is a pitch-perfect mixture of whimsical art, extra-dark humor and good, old-fashioned surrealism. The author Nicholas Gurewitch still updates sporadically, but you can absorb the whole archive in one sitting (if you’ve got an afternoon to spare).
Comments are closed on this article
Mortal_M
September 26, 2011 at 8:36pm
I went to Ted’s Caving Page and I was hooked, I couldn't stop reading and I even got scared. I will remember this story for the rest of my life. I would recomend to read it at nigth.
If whoever wrote this makes a book I would buy it without thinking about it.
kubo.almighty
February 23, 2011 at 6:44pm
Big fan of www.albinoblacksheep.com. Several funny/stupid videos and plenty of entertaining, time wasting games.
almekhlafi
February 14, 2011 at 6:35pm
Very good article and this nice explain
I want to post this article on my web site http://www.almekhlafi.com with write this site source if you no have any problemThankyou
franklyn
January 17, 2011 at 7:56am
input :
"there are more things in heaven and earth than are imagined in your philosophy"
...10 translations later we get:
"Heaven and earth will have some more of his philosophy"
synthetic_man
January 10, 2011 at 2:23pm
http://www.111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com/#
It used to have an awesome midi soundtrack as well.
Slugbait
November 29, 2010 at 1:38pm
We've all googled ourselves, we've googled each other, but for something really scary, look up yourself at spokeo.com. People I can't find at all via Google, I was able to find at Spokeo, and sometimes the amount of personal information available is shocking.
cepheus42
November 29, 2010 at 11:37am
Boing Boing - http://www.boingboing.net/
For arts and culture (and TSA merchandise regarding groping your junk), Boing Boing is THE place to go.
The Art of Manliness - http://artofmanliness.com/
Want to tie a tie... or properly smoke a cuban... or wrestle a gator? Here is where men go to learn how to be... men!
Wil Wheaton in Exile - http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/
Mr. Wheaton is grown up out of the Crusher persona, and has become a guru of all things good and geeky. Remember what Wil says: don't be a d**k.
HaitianSensation
November 27, 2010 at 8:42am
http://www.inbflat.net/ : Create your own soundtrack with various videos of instruments
iDaeth
November 24, 2010 at 9:19pm
Here's another one you should go to before you die; The End of the Internet: http://www.endoftheinternet.com/
cjdavis7
November 24, 2010 at 7:43pm
The astronomy picture of the day. Fantastic pictures accompanied by educated summary of what you're looking at. Often some history thrown in too.
apod.nasa.gov/apod/
Also in the astronomy vein...a site that forecasts the "seeing" at a location (how good the conditions will be for stargazing).
http://www.cleardarksky.com
Not sure if these two meet the criteria, but they are two of my recent finds:
Free audio books.
http://www.gutenberg.org
Free, WYSIWYG flash web site creator.
wix.com
flash739
November 24, 2010 at 5:27pm
Has anyone been to Jim Carreys Website? www.jimcarrey.com really trippy for a celebrity site.
Portal
November 24, 2010 at 2:58pm
I really like http://www.translationparty.com/, it's an excellent waste of time. What you do is enter a phrase, and it translates it back in forth from Japanese and English until the translation errors are removed.
aaronj2906
November 23, 2010 at 10:33pm
Kind of reminds me of something like "Phantasmagoria" from the 1990's.
QuadCoreAbe
November 23, 2010 at 7:37pm
THE IMPOSSIBLE IS UNKNOWN AT ZOMBO COM!!! YOU CAN WASTE YOUR TIME ALL DAY AT ZOMBO COM. AT ZOMBO COM, YOUR BOSS DIDN'T REALLY FIRE YOU FOR STARING AT ZOMBO COM ALL DAY. ENJOY MY HISPANIC ACCENT FOR HOURS !!!!
ONLY
AT
..
ZOMBO COM
AmTGMan
November 23, 2010 at 3:27pm
"Therefore, go once, waste a day, and then never look back. You’ll thank us later."
I can tell you that the bolded bit is a complete impossibility. Once you visit TVTropes, you will keep going back...
Ghok
November 23, 2010 at 10:18pm
Not if you look once, spend 5 hours looking at it, and then never dare go back for fear you'll get trapped again! Laughed out loud when I read the description.
madmaxx
November 23, 2010 at 1:18pm
download all these site addresses to a folder in my Favorites for Internet Explorer 8
blindhorizon
November 23, 2010 at 11:00am
so many good sites so little time to get to them while at work...LOL
sniggler
November 23, 2010 at 10:55am
YTMND and LMGTFY, for those of us who never knew the internet existed until 5 minutes ago <_<
sniggler
November 23, 2010 at 10:55am
YTMND and LMGTFY, for those of us who never knew the internet existed until 5 minutes ago <_<
Cleaver
November 23, 2010 at 9:19am
I always thought that AtomSmasher's Error message generator ( http://atom.smasher.org/error/ ) was an excellent timesink.
jjrocks
November 22, 2010 at 9:57pm
Two sites
http://www.newsmap.jp/ <- covered on another post but I still love it
http://www.paulgraham.com/ <- simple but informative
gendoikari1
November 22, 2010 at 9:33pm
Same here, although I did manage to stump it with Louis St. Laurent and the main character of Turkish Star Wars.
nmanguy
November 22, 2010 at 10:55pm
Yeah, it got stumped on Morgan Grimes and Jack O'Neill's Robot Clone, but it guessed Claptrap right.
weaslem32
November 22, 2010 at 8:48pm
www.rayoflight.net should be on your list. The website just went through an overhaul, but you can still find the legacy site in its projects page. This site has always been truly amazing utilizing flash in the greatest way. The site has been around for over 10 years and the creators are incredible artist. Truly a must see.
probus
November 22, 2010 at 8:44pm
Great list, but maybe 10 a day for 10 days would be better, because frankly I'm already suffering from information overload. That's my fault, not yours, but still.
"It's not you, it's me."
