Friday 8 July 2011

1 Way To Waste An Afternoon

The internet is full of almost limitless ways to waste hours of your day, from Facebook, to online games and reading arguments on Youtube that have nothing to do with the original video. However these days my distraction of choice is a website called ‘Cracked.com’; the self proclaimed only American humour site on the internet (a claim which does a terrible disservice to ‘The Onion’ which offers an extremely satirical and often just plain silly take on American politics and culture).

The majority of ‘Cracked.com’ is made up of lists, top 5s and top 10s, on all manner of topics, combining humour and genuine intelligence to make some incredibly funny stories that actually can be quite informative as well, so long as you mostly want to learn random trivia that only carries any value during arguments in a pub.

The two main topics that seem to get covered more than most are films and science, sometimes combining the two to look at the lies Hollywood passes off as scientifically or physically possible.

The articles are well written and entertaining, but the true genius/evil of the site is by surrounding every story with related links, so while reading one page, you end up adding two or three more to your “read before doing something more useful” list, creating a potentially never ending situation where you never get any closer to leaving the site.

I’ll recommend a few different articles that I’ve enjoyed over the past few days, but really I’d just advise you to go on the site’s homepage and just go from there, jumping from story to story until you realise you were meant to leave the house 20 minutes ago. You could find one detailing 5 romantic gestures in films that would be a little less sweet in real life, or if you’re one of my male readers, find out the scientific reasons why no matter how hard you try your girlfriend’s dad is going to hate you. You might be interested to find out about the evil genius that is your cat, or want to read about some fan theories that actually make more sense than the films themselves. Perhaps you’d prefer to discover the 5 most incredible incidents of extreme bravery/insanity in the history of war, or maybe you’d find a list of 7 natural events that scientists can’t explain more appealing. Basically, if you’re looking to waste some time or avoid some work, you could do an awful lot worse than go on ‘Cracked.com’ and see what geeky, pedantic or just plain weird stuff you can find.

Seeing as I've been watching their set at T in the Park while writing this, it seems appropriate I end today's post with an Arctic Monkeys song, one off of their new album, which after a couple of listens sounds a lot more interesting than their third effort.

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