June 2009

  • Stars of the Internet: Bobby Convict

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    I've been remiss in my duty to cover the full range of the Internet. Though they are the bread and butter of this ridiculous place, I have covered only a scant few blogs here. Granted, most blogs are terminally boring, a sort of mayonnaise on the sandwich of stupidity that is online self-indulgence. Blogs require more commitment than ready-made inanity generators like Twitter (which is also in my sights, worry not), but many are also free from the monetary expenses and overall effort of full-blown websites. While blogs like Net Insanity are paragons of new media intellectualism maintained by respectable professionals who definitely don't write their articles in their underwear while drinking cheap bourbon, the Net is currently choked with lesser varieties that seemingly exist for the sole purpose of exploring whatever ridiculous frame of mind the author may occupy at the time.



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  • Youtube Nation: Citizen #1

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    There is no mercy in this world. None. If there was, I wouldn’t have to enter the shrill media void called Youtube every week. Since nature is cruel and I'm reasonably certain that there is no God, I have been forced to welcome you to Net Insanity’s newest feature, Youtube Nation. Every week I'll be looking at a different video and trying to figure out what's going on in it and why exactly someone deemed it necessary to share it with the world. I have some ground rules, though. Every video has to originate on Youtube. No crazy foreign TV clips, no sketches re-posted from other sites. Without further ado, let’s meet the President of the Youtube Nation, shall we?

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  • Craigslist Files #27: Platonic Ideals

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    Preemptively DisappointedPreemptively Disappointed

    The philosopher Plato was an interesting thinker with some good ideas. Unfortunately, his name has gotten dragged into some pretty ugly territory thanks to opportunistic creeps and a small horde of undergraduate philosophy students who promptly shove their heads into the Socratic Caves of their own recta at age 18 and never, ever come out again. The Platonic concept of mentoring, which he explicitly states is spiritual in nature, has been twisted into a pedantic excuse for pederasty and the otherwise intriguing thought experiment of his Forms has led a cavalcade of mouth-breathers to posit the existence magical super-trees and the perfect, ideal chair. In modern parlance, "Platonic Friendship" is basically a synonym for "No Sex", which is blunt enough approximation of the concept, I suppose. Because it finds a way to somehow further ruin things that are already disasters, the Internet has taken that once-lofty idea and made it into a craigslist board. Here's what you'll find there.



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  • Toys With Dicks: Thanks, Internet!

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    If Lewis Carroll wrote Alice In Wonderland in the 21st century, Alice definitely would have stepped through her computer monitor instead. The Internet is a nonsensical, utterly backward place in which no avenue leads to reason, no corner is properly lit and the tea parties are frightening disasters.

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  • Craigslist Files #26: Egypt

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    In my endeavor to go ever-deeper into craigslist I have taken to trolling listings from outside of my own country's borders. My last trip to an exotic CL page brought me to jolly, creepy England where I discovered that all of those stereotypes about Brits being more well-spoken and polite are actually true, even if their desires are no less ugly than our own. I've hesitated to dive into the pages for non-Anglophone regions for fear that people outside of America gasp don't speak English. But then I remembered that, if craigslist is any indication, there are plenty of Americans who don't speak English, either. So, I decided to make my way into the listings from a country that is supposedly very different from the US of A.

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  • My Ancient Inbox

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    Back in the earliest days of webmail, I established an all-purpose email address that for some reason still functions today. I created the account some time in the first half of my high school education, which means the address has existed for approximately one decade. It was established before the first spam filters were even a glimmer in some Indian tech specialist's eye and it has not coped well with the many spurious security updates applied to its ancient structure. As a result, this address accumulates something on the order of 150 spam messages a day. I only keep it around as one of many puppet accounts and for a few laughs. The messages I receive through this address run the gamut of junk mail. Advance schemes, bogus job offers, ads for various methods of organ inflammation, and other Greatest Hits of the spam world flood this account daily.

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  • Craigslist Files #25

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    Tom Waits wrote a song called "Come On Up To The House" that sounds like some kind of drunken, downtrodden spiritual, the kind of hymn you might hear in a run-down church where all the parishioners are failed, middle-aged clowns with morphine addictions. Waits repeats the title at the end of every line, urging the broken souls of the world to congregate and decompress together on common ground. Maybe he's talking about a place of worship, maybe a local tavern. It doesn't matter what "the house" is, so long as we come together to find solace in community. This is all just a really roundabout way of saying that I had to visit the craigslist page for Mobile, Alabama.

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  • Conspiracy-Rama: Nibirupedia.com

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    The most important question to answer when approaching a conspiracy theory is whether it's of the crazy variety or the stupid variety.

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  • Craigslist Files: The Whale

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    remember that old Reeses commercial "How do you eat your Reeses"? Well I came up with my own tv ad for it . Have Reese Witherspoon(the actress) holding a large spoon and then say,¨ How do you eat your Reeses?Witherspoon¨ Get it !!

     

    No, sir. No, I certainly do not. In fact, I'm not entirely sure you even exist.

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