…if I have to leave the house. But I do like the things that people do with it. Yes, they exist, people who enjoy wasting some time in the cold. And happy happy joy joy the internets exist and everybody shares all their silly snow adventures with those of us who prefer the heat. I saw an informative movie about building a snow man and, the one I like most because it gives us a feeling of hope, a movie about what happens to that snow man when the temperatures return to normal.
Cyriak “mutated monty” Harris is a wonderful animator, best known for his 2006 animation mix. But mutated monty brings more useless joy to the Internets.
He has left a solar powered calculator switched on since the 1980s. “During that time it has somehow developed its own form of consciousness,” Cyriak suspects. Every morning it shows different numbers. According to Cyriak these numbers are random, but I’m not so sure. For all I know, these numbers are the answer to life, the universe and everything. See for yourself and read a new number each day on Twitter by following mad calculator.
A friend of mine just bought an Itazura Coin Bank, a completely useless box with a mechanical cat in it. I promised this friend I would write a piece about it. But the more I think about the Itazura Coin Bank the more I think it’s not as nonsensical as it seems.
The city is building a new metro in Amsterdam. Things are not exactly going as planned, one of the problems is that some old but beautiful houses are on the verge of collapsing. In order to prevent further damage the ground in one of the pits is being frozen. The exhaust of this giant fridge is spitting out clouds of steam right outside the office where I work.
When you hover your mouse over the header of this page (or this article’s header, or a link), you might see an effect. Sure, you’ll see the color, or the background color changing but if you use the right browser you might see an animation instead of this simple swap of colors.
One of my favorite examples of truly nonsensical single page domains is defiantdog.com, a website where the visitor can try to order a dog on a picture to sit by clicking on a button with the word ’sit’ on it. You can click all you want but the dog won’t sit. The beauty of this web application lies in the fact that a button is used to give the dog the order. Buttons explicitly suggest than an action will occur when clicked.
As a tribute to nonsense, this site is here to celebrate people with too much time on their hands. Or maybe to celebrate people with a different preception of time, people who don’t necessarily think that efficiency is a virtue. People who think that time wasted is time well spent. This site is for those of us who know that building a useless machine is not a waste of time. It’s for people who take the time to show us, in a well designed and accurate graph, the percentage of a pie-chart that resembles Pac-man. It is a tribute to reinventing the wheel while we know it already exists.