Mental Checkout: The Internet's Inbred Child

special thanks to Andy Ward for the original image

If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you at least attended elementary school and therefore remember how short the list of interests were among your peers. The boys liked video games, dirt bikes, trucks and sports. I'm going to assume the girls liked horses, clothes and, hell, I dunno, sparkly crap. The Internet is a lot like an elementary school classroom, only with slightly more porn. Internet people like ninjas, boobs, ironic felines and guns. Beyond that, it's all secret niche interests. Go to any popular online forum and you'll find all of those memes and obsessions, but it only stands to reason because thousands of people log in. But why read the poorly-written comments of a mass of strangers when you can get a condensed dose of the Internet in a single website? That site is Mental Checkout.

Mental Checkout is the Internet equivalent of that guy at the office who can't quite grasp that other people have televisions and so most of them have heard the same jokes and factoids as him. Yes, Jim Gaffigan is a rather funny gentleman. I love listening to him tell his jokes. But when Chad from Web Marketing rolls out the "Hot Pockets" bit for the umpteenth time the magic has not only died, it has been exhumed in a police investigation and misplaced at an ill-advised picnic. Mental Checkout compiles supposedly funny images and jokes from all over the pop culture map and claims them as its own. A word for the wise: No matter how many times you label your fake motivational poster Image Source Unknown, we still know that you just lurk on 4Chan all day waiting for a giggle.

I do have a sneaking suspicion that some of the text-only jokes on Mental Checkout are original material from the site's author. Like unrealistic parents delude themselves into believing their ugly, stupid children have great potential, Mental Checkout's creator has a love for these utterly worthless jokes that only he can feel.

But I'm not just in the business of finding stupid, tedious things on the Internet. I promise at least some degree of insanity. In addition to being an archive of awful, awful jokes, Mental Checkout is also a digital warehouse of American jingoism. There are dozens of war images on the site chronicling every major conflict in the history of the United States. Cheap borders of M-16's surround photos of smoldering Iraqi cities and tanks rolling into Vietnamese villages. The intended sentiment is to portray America as a liberation force, but if a bunch of angry teenagers with machine guns and tanks showed up in your neighborhood, you'd smile and wave, too.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: At least a half an hour, maybe more. Mental Checkout is like fast food. It's low in quality and not very satisfying, but it's a decent enough approximation of sites you would normally visit when you feel like jerking around during work.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Low, unless the creators of all the images the site appropriates invoke artistic property rights in a coordinated assault on Mental Checkout, just like the Allied Forces did to those kraut bastards in dubyuh-dubyuh two... HOO-RAH!

MCDR: Go see an actual stand-up comedian and randomly apologize to a Korean, Vietnamese, Somalian or Iraqi person.

Internet Depth by Preposition: Of. I don't often get to hand out this designation, but I know that even the concept of Mental Checkout wouldn't exist without years of accumulated Internet culture.