Lasers are the shit. All sharks have lasers, I’m sure you didn’t know that. Some of you might know that most women incorporate lasers but to most of you men it must come as a surprise. My loyal readers should know that the little creatures on this site are capable of shooting not just two but four lasers on command. But unfortunately most humans (well men anyways) don’t natively support lasers. Until today.
Today the evil geniuses Kilian Valkhof and Paul Chaplin, launched the Laser Eyes webservice which lets you add lasers to pictures you upload. Only robots who were sent from the future can create something like that! For this reason you will need a future proof browser (Firefox will do, Chrome will do but is very slow on Mac). I think this is the most incredible thing you will ever see. As far as I can tell the internet is finished.
More and more I hear requests for so called easter eggs, hidden, funny features on websites. We used to redirect Minimalissimo to maximalissimo.com whenever you typed the Konami code. I changed this feature: it now turns the minimal layout to a maximalissimo one. It uses the incredible code you can find on the website MOTHER EFFING TEXT-SHADOW when you click the ‘all the way’ button. This site was created by Paul Irish, a true easter egg apostle.
During his talk on the Fronteers 2010 conference Paul Irish asked for more lasers whenever people press the letter ‘L’. I always thought this site would be just perfect for this feature. Try it. (For best results you should use a modern browser like Safari, Opera, Firefox or IE9. There is a weird Chrome bug on Windows which renders only half of the creature, that’s not how it’s supposed to be).
Know more sites with easter eggs? Let me know.
You would expect that 400 years after somebody rediscovered that the earth is not the center of the universe everybody would just accept that as a fact and move on. No, not everybody. On Saturday November 6th 2010 the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism: Galileo Was Wrong will be held in a small town somewhere in the USA. These people earn their money with writing scientific books about this matter! That is just amazing, literally. I’m jealous, I wish I could make a living just by publishing huge piles of nonsense. Unfortunately I don’t have the money to attend this conference, without a doubt it would be the best and most entertaining waste of time ever.
On May the third I tweeted an opinion about the Dutch Pavilion on the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The opinion was that it looks like a cheap tourist village somewhere in the Mediterranean. Kitsch. And embarrassing. It’s easy to express an uninformed opinion, 140 characters is more than enough. I’ll try to explain why I was mistaken, why I should never have tweeted that tweet.
Jonathan Keats, an American experimental philosopher and artist, is the creator of Cinema Botanica. This art installation was made to show stimulating images to ordinary American house plants. Your Sansevieria, which would otherwise only see the plaster ceiling of your appartment, can experience the blue Italian sky for once. But Keats took it a step further and also included plant porn; bees pollinating plants. He does not know what exactly happens to the plants, but his work definitely raises questions. “So if your children are supposedly vegetating in front of the television when they watch it for hours, what happens when you show television to vegetables?”
With their street view option Google added an incredible feature to their maps application. When you’re heading into unknown territory you don’t have to be prepared for the unexpected, you can explore the terrain from the safety of your hammock, looking for obstacles like traffic lights and speed cameras. It also helps finding a place to park. But not everybody seems to be happy with it. It can be considered to be a little invasive in ones privacy.
Most URL shortening services merely make your URLs boring. For example, http://www.facebook.com/ becomes http://tinyurl.com/4t993 and http://twitter.com/lovenonsense turns into http://bit.ly/bg6JpN. But now there is a lovely new URL shortener, called ShadyURL.
All kitchen necessities tucked to one wall and everything fits exactly. This is the ultimate efficiency, the ultimate minimalism in kitchen design. Why use a room when a wall is enough? And look at all the free space where you can, uhm, stand and look at your beautiful pots, pans and cupboards. I guess I’ll just leave that sink where it is and drink something else than water.
This post does not quite belong on a site about nonsense, because it adequately explains a phenomenon we use most every day; the Internet. What most people do not seem to realise, is that the Internet is made entirely out of cats. To make this field of Science more accessable to the public, Joel Veitch of rathergood.com has made a song with a video clip.
A clear trend on the interwebs is the rise of one issue sites. You have the simple single page sites that try to answer a question, like is it friday yet? or is it 2010 yet?. A site like this is built and published within ten minutes, you can’t really call that a waste of time. And they aren’t exactly nonsensical either. I wrote about a more complex one issue site, the incredible Defiant Dog a while ago and yesterday I found this very good reason to keep a computer with flash installed at hand: Giant Bat Farts. These two sites are not exactly built within a few minutes, somebody took their time to look at some trivial details (like the source code of the bat farts). But nevertheless, these sites are built and then they’re done. If we visit them next year chances are they haven’t changed.