September 2009

  • Craigslist Files #41: Fantasy Corner

    By msarko on 9/30/09 4:20pm
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    Craigslist is a place where people can plant their weirdest, wildest, silliest fantasies and watch them either blossom into some kind of bizarre, meat-eating plant or wither and die like the unnatural abominations they are. As I've often tested and found to be true, it's also a place where people can be pranked into admitting their childish, screwed-up desires to someone who they assume shares their predilections. Today, we'll be looking at a few posts that run the gamut from completely fake to plausible, all that prey on the fantasies of Internet people.



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  • Awful Flash Game Roundup: Attack of the Suck

    By msarko on 9/28/09 7:21pm
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    What is the inverse of being entertained? It's not being bored. No, that's the opposite. I'm talking about the actual inverse, the state of feeling like past moments of entertainment have actually be removed from one's memories. That's what the following three flash games will do to you. They will actually make your life worse than it would have been if you had just sat in one place and stopped breathing for a minute or so. This is the Awful Flash Game Roundup. I'm sorry.



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  • Youtube Nation: Democractically Elected Garbage

    By msarko on 9/25/09 3:26pm
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    Youtube is the mitotic spawn of Paypal, one Internet giant crawling forth from the loins of another. It has been stomping around these godless fields since 2005 and I have indulged its services many times for such diverse purposes as finding music videos that have long been out of regular circulation to grabbing fragmented fan-dubs in an ill-advised academic pursuit of anime. Yet in all those years I never actually spent more than a few seconds on the front page of Youtube. I had no reason to watch a questionably legal copy of the latest Beyonce video and I sure as hell wasn't going to watch some teenage vlogger rant about all the "random" stuff that pops into his or her head. But then I realized that I have this column and I can't really talk about Youtube without exploring those items it wears on its face like some kind ever-changing tribal tattoo.



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  • Craigslist Files #40: A Spy in the House of Craig

    By msarko on 9/23/09 3:07pm
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    they don't need craigslistthey don't need craigslist

    Anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes on craigslist knows that the Men Seeking Women page is full of both ridiculous permanent adolescents and depressingly misguided nice guys who couldn't get a clue if they were in an orgy with Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown (that isn't a pedo joke. The youngest of those books was published some 40 years ago). But I'm not here to poke fun at the M4W again. Why? Because this is the 21st century and I believe in equality, readers. The Women Seeking Men page is just as ridiculous and for not entirely dissimilar reasons.



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  • Is The Secret of Invisibility Real or Fake?

    By msarko on 9/21/09 2:00pm
    2 Comments
    Honest to Goodness Insane
    33% (2 votes)
    It's a Bad Joke
    67% (4 votes)
    Total votes: 6

  • Interactive Skepticism

    By msarko on 9/21/09 1:58pm
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    seriously messed upseriously messed up

    I think I finally did it. I think I went and broke myself. A kind Net Insanity reader named Bill submitted today's featured website expecting me to apply my usual brand of insensitive, mocking deconstruction to it, but golly gee, folks, I am just plain confused about The Secret of Invisibility. I mean, on the one hand it seems like just another crackpot scam to trick idiots into buying a childish fantasy with actual adult money. But something just doesn't smell right about this site. Underneath the telltale tropes of crazy I detect a hint of failed hoax.



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  • Youtube Nation: Word Salad and a Martini

    By msarko on 9/18/09 3:00pm
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    Now that I think about it, Youtube is actually a pretty iffy premise. The site depends on the people of the world to provide video content at an essentially constant rate, which when it first launched was a rather shaky concept for a web-based business. Videos take time and at least a little effort. They take resources and an investment of confidence. I never would have believed Youtube would become the center for democratized media on planet Earth and yet it has. Even more than that, it is so replete with content that completely random phrases turn up results. Some are disconcertingly specific, others are only tangentially related. Still, I have seen more unusual things following the schizophrenic bread crumb trail of the Youtube search box than I have while actively scouring the Internet for overtly strange ephemera.



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  • Craigslist Files #39: Old Reliable Craig

    By msarko on 9/16/09 1:13pm
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    There's something to be said for the sheer consistency of content on craigslist. I've been scouring that site for close to a year now looking at posts I never would have considered otherwise. What I've come away with (aside from a distinct lack of sympathy for my species) is a sense of strange stability in life. Craigslist is like some network of villages on the Internet, each one going about its mundane daily tasks with surprising regularity. That it supports such wanton strangeness without devolving in chaos is actually rather admirable. Today, I'm devoting this column to three fine examples of regular awfulness on craigslist. These entries may not be particularly unique, but they represent the bread and butter of the site's weirdness.



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  • Amerikristianity and the Film Industry

    By msarko on 9/14/09 2:57pm
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    why did God give angels magic swords? Beats me.why did God give angels magic swords? Beats me.

    I never really got on board the whole Chuck Norris meme express to Dweebville. Maybe it's because I'm a self-respecting adult who still values dignity despite the myriad humiliations cobbled together by every waking moment in this stark, modern world, or maybe it's because everybody knows that Jean Claude Van Damme is inherently better than Chuck Norris. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure the whole Norris meme jumped the shark in 2008 when Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee used the fictional Texas Ranger for a campaign bump. Mike Huckabee, as I'm sure you all know, is certified Mondo Maxi-Lame by Le Departement de Rad-Awesome in beautiful Marseilles, France, so he definitely destroyed all the ironic popularity surrounding Chuck Norris. But how could this even come to pass? Surely Norris was aware of his new media windfall. Well, it all comes down to something Norris and Huckabee have in common: Amerikristianity.



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  • Youtube Nation: 'Merka Edition

    By msarko on 9/11/09 1:31pm
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    September 11th has become America's grotesque take on Independence Day. Instead of celebrating freedom and our victory in a war that threw off the yolk of an empire, 9/11 has become a ghoulish annual observance that marks the day everything really started to suck in this country.



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  • Craigslist Files #38: Pet Insanity

    By msarko on 9/9/09 1:34pm
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    he's sad because he's inbredhe's sad because he's inbred

    I've made it know several times before that I think pet people are actively out of their minds. I don't just mean people who happen to have pets, either. The difference between people who have pets and "pet people" is the difference between people who happen to be out at night and those who can be called "night people". There's a certain degree of devotion that goes into the latter, an identity that starts to consume other parts of one's personality the moment it's identified. By this standard, pet people are Grade-A whackjobs who have rearranged their priorities to focus on the perceived needs of an inbred animal. And yes, that's exactly what all domesticated creatures are: A naturally occurring species that has been so perverted by genetic manipulation that it is no longer suitable for survival in the wild. So, here's what craigslist has to say about your sick obsession with cousin-humping quadrupeds.



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  • Buzz Words Make My Body Melt

    By msarko on 9/7/09 2:32pm
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    what CT-BURN apparently does to your insideswhat CT-BURN apparently does to your insides

    There was a brief period in the mid-1990's when the old-timey apothecary and snake-oil salesman were viable, if easy and inoffensive, sources of humor. After all, when you strip away the lethal body horror of consuming accidental poisons brewed in the salesman's bathtub, all that's left is the inherent absurdity of buying cure-all tonics from the polar opposite of a credible source. But that quasi-meme up and disappeared by the end of the decade and now it's conspicuously absent from our culture's comedy repertoire. Why is that? Perhaps it's because the basement elixir alchemist has at long last found a new home in that latest, greatest refuge for petty criminals and undiagnosed insane- the Internet. The preferred products of the day are cosmetic rather than strictly medical. Instead of searching for miracle cures for polio or alcoholism, modern idiots scour the Internet for teeth whitening products and weight loss pills. Observe, CT-BURN, a contemporary roadside medicine.



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  • Smacked up by the Net

    By lafeeverte on 9/6/09 7:49pm
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    Addicted to the internet. Who isn't these days? Everyone I know practically lives on the internet, or on their mobile phone checking the internet, texting, chatting, playing games.... and I suppose some of those people surf porn and play online poker, too. Studies in the early 90's say a significant minority of Americans suffer from the disorder, which, is a disorder only when it interferes with 'normal life'. Nowadays, it is 1 in 8 Americans. Is that really any surprise? The whole world is pushing internet smack- from the prevelance of social websites and integrated chatting, emails, the information we need to feed our ambition for success, for progress, for instant gratification, and consumerism. What is a normal life anymore? Can anyone really define normal? I think the solid definition of a normal life was valid twenty plus years ago when typewriters were still in use and people received letters in their mailbox. 

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  • Youtube Nation: Backyard Wrestling is a Gift

    By msarko on 9/5/09 3:30pm
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    The Internet is like a set of information dominoes. Touch one chunk of data and you'll inevitably bump into another. I can't say for certain that the process is endless and a very significant part of me hopes that it isn't. While the prospect of an instantly referenced super-document is exciting in regard to legitimate intellectual pursuits, I know all too well that the majority of what's on the Internet is of no worthwhile substance. To this day, some of the longest, most detailed Wikipedia pages are those that discuss Dragonball Z and the exhaustive re-branding of the board game Monopoly. Like some sort of virtual galleon graveyard, the Web is a sea of detritus. So, it was only a matter of time before I bumped into the phenomenon of backyard wrestling.



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  • Craigslist Files #37: El Scotto, FTW

    By msarko on 9/2/09 3:25pm
    2 Comments

    I'm torn, readers. On the one hand (a twisted, broken, filthy hand at that), I am overjoyed that some of you have joined me in my weekly dumpster-diving expeditions into craigslist. On the other hand (an appendage so burdened with decency that it no longer associates with the likes of me), I wonder whether or not it's even ethical to encourage you to subject yourselves to the emptiness and stupidity of which so much of craigslist is comprised. Maybe I just crave some companionship in my dirty deeds or maybe I subconsciously desire the pain of my fellow man. In any case, this Craigslist Files goes out to all of you who scour the List to find nuggets of awful for the amusement of yourselves and others.



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