Desidalal

Back once again up in your grill, to put the zeit in your geist and the Yulieski in your Gourriel: it’s another Wednesday of web-wide waywardness with the woolly, wondrous Woot Web Woundup. There’s snow all over the place in St. Louis right now; last week we were all smearing on sunscreen and grilling kabobs. What gives, Mother Nature? The mood around Woot North is uneasy as we contemplate the possible significance of this meteorological whimsy. I, for one, am retreating into the lulling, hypnotic labyrinth of the Web, where gratification is always an instant away. Join me, won’t you?

Sit-Down Comics
Judging by how often it’s ripped off in Photoshop contest entries, I probably don’t need to tell you about Perry Bible Fellowship. I’ll just say that it’s the funniest, most poignant, most wrenchingly existential comic strip this side of the Bayeaux Tapestry. And it usually has nothing to do with the Bible. (Not all strips are safe for work or kids, so browse sensibly.) In a similar if less polished vein are Toothpaste for Dinner and Dash Blank Dash. And they seem to update almost every day, just like Mallard Fillmore, only not crappy.

The Information Stuporhighway
Some links just seem to go well together, despite a lack of any obvious commonalities. For instance, there’s no reason an anti-video-game-piracy PSA from the early ’90s called “Don’t Copy That Floppy” should be grouped with a site that will put up anything you fax to them. And FeedoStyle, a free app that lets you add nicely-formatted scrolling RSS headlines to your site, has nothing in common with either of them. But here they are, all in the same paragraph - and loving every minute of it.

Better Than Meditation
Nothing blasts away the old mental cobwebs like a few minutes with a Flash game in the middle of the workday. Like all the good ones, Roboclaw is far more complex than it appears at first, working out my spatial and fine-motor skills. I’m not sure what the connection is between Squares and the unfortunately-titled Ball Toucher (tee-hee), but there must be one, because each game involves maneuvering a little square around to touch the right floating particles and avoid the wrong ones. Even the scores are displayed the same way. It’s like Asteroids, only your ship is unarmed, and you’re supposed to crash into some of the asteroids, and your ship gets bigger the more asteroids you crash into. Not really much like Asteroids at all, I guess.

Foul Territory
March Madness, Shmarch Shmadness - for me, spring means it’s time to shut off the hot stove and pull on the stirrup socks. Japan may have the best national baseball team in the world, but the good ol’ United S. of A. still boasts my favorite baseball-related web sites. (I can’t read Japanese or Spanish, mind you.) As a recovering gumcard junkie, I could read these witty deconstructions of old baseball cards all day. Then there’s the little matter of the so-called gyroball, an unhittable, possibly mythical pitch that has the small but zealous crypto-sabermetrics community abuzz. And even after all these years, I still find myself drawn to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Dressed to the Nines historical uniform database. Something about those yellow and brown Padres uniforms compels me to keep staring, if only to comprehend the depths to which human beings and baseball executives are capable of sinking. I was once ruthlessly mocked by a certain office-mate for owning the book from which a lot of these uniform pictures were taken, but now I’ve been vindicated by no less an authority than Cooperstown. Take that, Da- I mean, unnamed co-worker!

So, uh, that’s all I got. How about you?

  Wednesday Web Woundup: Snow News is Bad News