Category: The Internet

If you can read this, you’re on the internet. These articles cover everything from Tumblr to Steamed Hams.

A supercut of Murder, She Wrote jokes by PushingUpRoses

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Hilarious Murder, She Wrote Supercut - My Favorite Jokes, Moments, and More!

At the end of last year, I discovered PushingUpRoses, a content creator who makes comedic introspective videos about various media including Murder, She Wrote, Golden Girls, Goosebumps, and the odd Let’s Play and retro PC game analysis. It gave me a lot of needed laughs and made me appreciate Murder, She Wrote all over again.

In the above video, PushingUpRoses made a supercut of jokes and moments from her series, That Time on Murder, She Wrote and it’s so funny. Subscribe to her channel and check out her Patreon too.

Weird and wild Wikipedia rabbit holes

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During my first attempt at a university education away from home, I spent a lot of time falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes to combat loneliness. It filled my head with even more useless information but I had fun doing it.

Back in January, writers from The Ringer discussed some of the weirdest Wikipedia wormholes they’d found themselves in. Some were straightforward like John Gonzalez’s trip from Prometheus (the movie) to Prometheus (the Ancient Greek god who stole fire from the Gods to give to humanity, which he made from clay, and suffered the consequences).

Others were more long-winded like Michael Baumann’s route from Sir Arthur Currie, an officer in the Canadian army who fought in WWI, to Sea Dragon, a concept-designed rocket that could launch from the sea (At 150m long and 23m in diameter, it would have been the largest rocket ever built.)

My point is: All Wikipedia wormholes lead to giant rockets and/or giant explosions.

For me, I can’t remember any specific Wikiholes but I’ll make some time and report back.

A Bloodborne comic but it stars Frasier and Niles Crane

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I’ve never played Bloodborne but I did watch Frasier and that’s all that matters in this hilarious comic by Joe Chouinard. And if you didn’t read this in their voices, you’re not a true fan!

Speaking of Frasier, here are some of Niles’s best deep burns.

Burrito speedrun

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Burrito speedrun in 13.97s by Arcus

Everything’s a speedrun now, including home food preparation. Above, Arcus made a burrito in under 14 seconds in his kitchen using:

  • Beans
  • Cheese
  • Sour cream
  • Tomatoes
  • Green Chilis
  • Lettuce
  • Hot Sauce

If that’s not comical enough, check out the comments illustrating the various quirks of real video game speedrunning. Perhaps this will look like a regular day of work in a Tex-Mex street food but maybe this will spawn more videos and better techniques.

What do you actually get when you buy an NFT token?

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bitcoin

I’m a vocal critic of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). I think they stink and they’re a serious moral and environmental hazard. Earlier today, I saw a Twitter thread about what you get from an NFT token and, well, it caused the tweeter’s eyebrows to break the laws of physics and biology:

@jonty tweeted: Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

I recommend you read through the thread but the key part is: whoever sells you the NFT keeps all aspects of the NFT and you get a file that references the digital file you pay for that can be lost if the server hosting it disappears. In essence, they’re worthless.

Short version: The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from. Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Second tweet from the thread

I’ve seen a suggestion that NFTs can help marginalised artists make money from their art in an easier way. But how many marginalised artists are making $70m from a JPG like this monstrosity?

The Wobble Dog 9003i

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I remember finding this on a day I wasn’t feeling too good and it gave me a much needed laugh.

The Wobble Dog 9003i is a hot dog sausage wobbling machine. That’s it. A peculiar contraption on the surface but watching the sausages wobble is hilarious. The phallic nature of it all adds to the childish naughtiness (or maybe that’s where the humour stems from.)

Whatever. Stream it below and laugh along at the wiggling wieners.

Wobble Dog 9003i Hot Dog Sausage Wobbling Machine - Just The Highlights

(via Kottke.org)

UROULETTE takes you on a random journey through the Web

There’s nothing I love more than falling down a small Web rabbit hole and UROULETTE gives me that buzz along with the risks associated with its namesake.

Those risks relate to the potential broken links. As the site launched in 1998, a lot of the random links you’ll find won’t go anywhere. Link rot is a growing problem on the Web and sites like these are akin to visiting abandoned buildings in major cities.

But if you’re lucky enough, you’ll find an awesome site that hasn’t changed in decades and nothing beats seeing Times New Roman and minimal styling on the internet (before it was called brutalist web design).

Internet related: the internet art of Mazaccio & Drowilal, a gallery of early internet images, and over a sextillion ways to spell Viagra.

Hug It Out: a series about starting over and snuggling

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Hug It Out: a series about starting over and snuggling

I found this series last year via a scene from an actor’s showreel on YouTube and it offered some comfort during Lockdown 1.0.

Hug It Out tells the story of Gwen, a recent divorcee from LA who restarts her life as a professional snuggler (someone who is paid to cuddle or snuggle). Cue all kinds of awkwardness, inappropriate exposure, emotions, and swearing from a host of characters.

Kincaid Walker executive produced the web series and stars as Gwen alongside Jason Eksuzian who directed.

Hug It Out isn’t relatable on the surface—I neither have the money nor the necessity to hire a snuggler, in or out of a pandemic—but the subtext resonated with me a little. Having to start again after a relationship break up and not knowing where to go or how to navigate your new life is difficult and Gwen’s character had her fair share of mishaps throughout the series. But she grew into her new job and gained some confidence back for herself, expertly shown in one episode where she confronts an old friend who she’d fallen out with after Gwen’s marriage and subsequent breakup.

All 6 episodes are streamable on Vimeo or you can watch them via the Hug It Out website. And there’s a special COVID-19 short which answers the question “how the hell does a professional snuggler survive during a pandemic that dictates social distancing?” In case you were wondering.

The internet art of Mazaccio & Drowilal

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Skɪz(ə)m exhibition view (copyright Martin Polak, 2020)

Mazaccio & Drowilal are a French art duo that make artworks from found internet images.

Whether it’s IRL still lifes of desktop icons, dogs staring wistfully into sunsets, or celebrity snapshots defaced with paint and tape, the duo’s subject matter is universally familiar to anyone who’s found themselves in a thumb scroll wormhole, and that’s exactly the point.

Quote from It’s Nice That

It’s all trés cool, trés French, and trés internet. That sentence didn’t make any sense. But the art does to me and that’s all that matters.

Internet-related: Internet Archaeology: a gallery of early internet images

There are over a sextillion ways to spell 'viagra'

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blue viagra pills

I’m asking for trouble putting that word in the title but I thought it was a quirky internet thing.

Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com discovered something unique about viagra emails:

Because internet marketers love teaching others about medicine and the alphabet, the word “Viagra” is always spelled in hot, new, creative ways. For example, it might have a lower case “L” in the space where a capital “I” would go, or perhaps an “@” symbol where the letter “a” should be.

After I received 80,730 different emails trying to sell viagra, I started to wonder: How many different ways are there to spell Viagra?

I began my quest by simply collecting the Viagra spellings that showed up in my email. In 12 days, I had 79.

With two single letter substitution and addition characters used between letters, he found 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 variations of the word ‘viagra’ (that’s over 600 quintillion).

But upon further inspection, Rob found more and managed to get up to 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 variations (that’s over 1.3 sextillion). Put into context, if each variation was a grain of sand, that’d be enough to cover ever beaches in the world (approximately). Also, sextillion… viagra… it was destiny!

Then that got me thinking: I wonder how many variations there are of ‘COVID’ or ‘COVID-19’? If anyone can be bothered to work it out, let me know!

Word related: The man who submited a 52,438 word dissertation without any punctuation and passed and the etymological debate around daughters and milking cows