i2Culture

6 Online Curiosities to

Colin Slark
Team Member

trikes are no fun for any of the parties

involved. Students can’t learn, instructors
can’t teach, and administrators don’t have
anyone to administrate. After you have
finished all your homework, you are probably
wondering what to do with your spare time.
The sensible choice is, of course, to scour the
Internet for interesting things, hoping to find
an elixir that will cure you of your terminal
boredom. Thankfully, there are tons of things
online to interest people with a wide variety
of tastes. Here are 6 online curiosities to help
strike out boredom.

Breaking Madden/NBA
Y2K (sbnation.
com):

Sportswriter Jon Bois messes with settings
and player ratings in popular NFL and NBA
video games to create strange scenarios.
Sometimes Bois sets up a game to show off
the skills of a real life player he admires, and
other times he sees how Tom Brady would
fare if all of his teammates were as small
as possible and didn’t
understand the
concept of
football.
Bois is
able to
create

interesting narratives from games
that usually do not have stories, and
even non-sports fans will be able to
appreciate the physical comedy.

Chip and Ironicus Let’s Plays
(chipandironicus.com): You may have

heard of Let’s Play, in which people record
themselves playing video games for your
enjoyment. Many of these people tend to
shriek constantly while cultivating annoying
cults of personality. You may have seen

one of these videos and thought that the
entire Let’s Play movement is a waste of
time. However, it is possible to be done
right. Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus
offer interesting commentary on games and
are remarkably in-depth when it comes to
showing all a game has to offer. For instance,
Thad played many of the Metal Gear Solid
video games, but I had no idea about some
of the secrets they showed off, making the
experience feel fresh. If you like what they
have to say, they even have a podcast!

Reefer Madness (archive.org/details/
reefer_madness1938): I mentioned this
horrid 1930s anti-drug film earlier in the
school year in my bad movie article. The
nice thing about this film is that it is in the
public domain, so you can download it for
free, without any guilt. The depiction of the
effect of marijuana on the human body is
completely overblown, creating an amusing
spectacle every time someone pretends

to smoke a joint. Keep an eye out for the
actor that is both an omniscient narrator
and character in the film, showing that the
filmmakers did not understand how to write
points-of-view or narrative structures.

Atomic Robo (atomic-robo.com): Atomic Robo
is a webcomic by writer Brian Clevinger
and artist Scott Wegener chronicling the
adventures of an adventurous robot created
by Nikola Tesla. Robo fights a sentient
dinosaur, extra-dimensional horror, Nazis,
and science experiments gone wrong. If you

like Hellboy, you will enjoy this series that is
similar in concept, but is lighter hearted. This
comic was originally a print comic, but is now
being uploaded in its entirety online so there
are frequent updates with a promise of much
more content to be uploaded in the future.

First Person Tetris (firstpersontetris.com): Do
you like Tetris? Are you the Tetris master?
Well, I’m betting that you’ve never played
Tetris like this. In this version of the popular
Russian video game, you play from the
perspective of the game pieces. When you
rotate a block, it also rotates the game
screen. There’s even an “existential crisis”
mode where you can only see the area
directly around a block, making it hard to
plot its trajectory. First Person Tetris doesn’t
have much staying power, but it’s good

for a laugh, especially when you expose

it to an unwitting friend unprepared for
the swirling vortex that awaits them.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - 30th
Anniversary Edition (bbc.co.uk): This is not the
Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, nor is it the book,
the TV show, or the original radio dramas.
This is the 31-year old text adventure game
co-designed by creator Douglas Adams
made to work in modern web browsers. It
has all the same wit you love from the other
versions, but is brutally difficult. You will
die frequently, you will die before you exit
the first room of the game, and you will die
because you did not feed a dog a sandwich
an hour and a half ago. While this might
seem unappealing, the descriptions of your
untimely demises are hilarious and this
game has sections of narrative not featured
in any other iteration of the series.

Hopefully we will all be sitting in a classroom
sometime soon, but, until then, try one of
these Internet curiosity to keep yourselves
occupied. I guarantee that Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy will keep you amused for hours
before you throw your mac out a window.