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Greg Knauss is a funny guy. Though he thinks himself a geek, his not-a-blog and generally frequently updated site An Entirely Other Day provided pleasant looks at technology, kids, ant farms and more, with a refreshingly down-to-earth style not found with the hardcore bloggers today. Of course, “not found” also well describes EOD as it has vanished off the web, existing only in caches (like the fantastic Internet Archive). Undaunted by apparent deletions and posting delays, and with a published version of many of his old posts under his belt, and with sarcasm, cynicism and wit to spare, Knauss has set his sights (or rather, his site) on a new project: the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0, an update on the Ambrose Bierce classic.

He’s just started and has only written a handful of definitions, but the ones there are funny and show a wealth of potential for the future. An attribution line at the bottom foreshadows a possible guest authorship for entries, but nothing is certain. It’s going to take some time to flesh the whole thing out, but hey, it took old Ambrose over five years to compile the final edition of his Devil’s Dictionary–and to think, it started out for just cynics.

Some guys have all the luck. Eric Harshbarger found a way to turn a fun hobby into a full-time career. Playing with Lego buillding blocks pays his bills. All of them. In the past he’s been webmaster for a Winona Ryder fan site, a Sun Microsystems employee, co-owner of an independent record store, and now he plays with Legos for a living. The only obvious downside is that he has to glue his creations together and part with them.

Eric’s made some really cool and complicated pieces, including a life-size, usable desk, a stegosaurus, reproductions of many famous artworks, skyscrapers, cakes and everything in between. And he gets money for doing it! As adept with web technologies as he is with building blocks, Eric has built a site showcasing not only his sculptures and construction details, but also a good amount of personal content (like his Alice collection) and a whole lot of photos. He’s a tournament Scrabble player, even, and posts information about the game including some fun wordplay. And he gets paid to play with Legos.

Ever kept an email because the attachment was funny? Or reached quota from having too many Flash games stored? Now there’s a better way. Lycos UK maintains a repository of all those meme files floating around in a categorized and rated database, free for all and much easier than sending actual files. Every potential attachment can be downloaded, viewed, linked and emailed directly from the site. Everything from childish flash games to photoshopped celebrity photos and raunchy
movies can be found and done with what will. So stop sending those huge files to each other.

With all of the information and disinformation floating around the web, it’s refreshing to find a whole bucket of untruths. Witness Dave’s Web of Lies, an entirely false collection of lies and deception that is as comprehensive as it is wrong. Extensive cross referencing only enhances the experience and ensures long, repeated visits. Updates are done every week and day, if the site’s creators are to be believed.

Does leaving a calling card diminish a random act of kindness? Something nice is still done, and if done right only one person’s the wiser. Aiming to clarify that ‘doing right’ are the folks of the Generosity Game, a game with no losers or top scores. Participants do something nice for anyone else and afterward pass on a small card. What could be simpler?

This is for you!
Now it's your turn: go do
something good for someone else.
Do it anonymously.
Pass on this card.

As computer gaming has aged, logically some of the less recent games have become, in a word, old. Though generally virtual in nature, these forgotten gems show their age like any other artifact: unless preserved, they decay (i.e. are no longer playable on systems hundred-fold more powerful than those for which they were designed) and disappear (as when the company picks up ’shop’ and vanishes from the ether). The generally accepted term for such software is abandonware. A preservation movement of sorts has sprung up all over the ‘net, sometimes in esoteric, high-minded form, and other times indistinguishable from the w4r3z k1dz and their entirely illegal trade. Abandonware is generally determined to be no longer sold by any distributor, past a certain date (almost like a shelf-life), and, well, downloadable. One of the best abandonware repositories is the Home of the Underdogs.

Online for many years, the HotU champions primarily forgotten and underappreciated games for DOS, Amiga and Apple computers. Maintaining exhaustive lists of underrated and overrated games in a number of genres, publishing reviews and comprehensive links for more information, and even providing legal methods to obtain non-abandoned software, HotU further impresses by constantly adding new games to its collection.

More so than merely cataloging the games, the Underdogs seeks to document the historical significance of many of them. Prominent developers today may not be proud of their shareware roots, but that doesn’t make games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and Jazz Jackrabbit any less fun. Fun though they may be, playable they often aren’t on newer systems. Which is again where the Underdogs step in and provide detailed tutorials and helpful software to make even the fastest machines today capable of running software meant for yesterday’s 4.77 megahertz dinosaurs.

All of the games might not be deserving of posterity, but downloading and enjoying classic oldies is a whole lot cheaper than buying new games.

TV guides have long condensed tv shows and movies to half-sentence capsule summaries. While for some shows (and even some films) like Seinfeld half a sentence is more
than enough to capture the essence of the plot, generally it is lacking sufficient detail to describe a movie. What, then, is the atomic “size” of a movie? A couple pages? The entire screenplay? It is this very question that Rod Hilton seeks to answer with The Editing Room: Abridged Scripts for Movies, though he doesn’t know it yet. On his site he publishes distilled screenplays for popular movies, ranging from a mere one word of dialogue (for Guy Richie’s href=”http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00007ELEP/mikelietdotor-20/”>Lock, stock and two smoking barrels) to comparably long discourses (as for Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence). They’re pretty funny.

He of course would explain the scripts, few longer than a page, to be some sort of humorous discourse. He claims to be writing them as screenplay practice, but in the ratings system lies the truth about his (subconscious) research. He rates scripts lower that offer less meat, such as the aforementioned Lock, stock and two smoking barrels and he gives high marks to brilliant abridgements such as his version of Being John Malkovich, excerpted below.

JOHN CUSACK finds a portal into the mind of JOHN MALKOVICH.

	
                    DIRECTOR SPIKE JONZE
            Look, this film is bizarre.  It is,
            therefore, good!
	
                        JOHN CUSACK
            Wow, this creates so many questions
            about the essense of self.
                 (pause)
            Audience, please take notice of all
            of these thought-provoking questions
            raised by the film.
	
                          AUDIENCE
            This film must be brilliant.  I
            mean, to just consider the notion
            that a human could enter the mind of
            another hu–
	
Suddenly, the AUDIENCE’S PROVOKED THOUGHTS are interrupted
by something EXTRAORDINARILY BIZARRE.

Complex moral and philosophical questions can be asked in the simplest terms. Such is the case with Zen koans (Is a tree falling in woods louder than the sound of one hand clapping?) and mind teasers. Deceptive simplicity like this can also be found in a more modern arena, the internet. Try this: Given two characters from pop culture and the news, which one should be killed and which spared?

That’s the idea of WhoToKill, a simple interface to a deeper question. Whose crimes are worse? Criminals, killers, or boy bands? All can be found and judged. And who is fit to pass judgment? Anyone with a web browser becomes an executioner with a mere mouse click. And another, and more as the killings continue and the choices become tougher.

Sometimes choosing is indeed difficult, such as between Indiana Jones or Bill Nye the science guy, both of whom are too cool to kill. Discerning music listeners might take pause before choosing between Metallica’s Lars Ulrich or Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst. Anyone with any taste at all will have a hard time deciding to kill only one of href=”http://www.whotokill.com/?One=403&Two=849″>Michael Bolton or Barney. The concept takes an even more surreal turn when it pits a dead dictator against a (life- and mouth-less) cartoon cat: Joseph Stalin or Hello Kitty. The absurdity is almost completely random, though matchups can be staged by some URL manipulation and a database search or two.

For such a simple diversion, the site can be a real time killer.

Throughout the ages, brave teachers have made science fun. Watching Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye or even Beakman made kids want to go out, pick up a lab coat and make some science. Or at least blow things up. Then those same kids would endure a Science Class in school, and, crestfallen and bored beyond belief, would turn toward other interests and activities for excitement. It would seem that it takes a certain enthusiasm and hands-on approach to keep kids focused on science and not, say, the cute girl in the next row.

Making science fun isn’t all that difficult. It’s the part about having a classroom full of kids with rubber bands and super balls and vaccuum tracks that doesn’t work well. Computer simulation, though, doesn’t take up space and leaves no big messes. Physics computer simulations, though, generally cost a lot of money and were cumbersome to use, let alone play with and tinker.

Not so with My Physics Lab. On this site can be found around twenty interactive Java applets of various physics toys, such as a pyramid made out of springs and a swinging double pendulum. Everything can be clicked on and manipulated, and each successive toy gets more interesting. They’re not necessarily interesting enough for most surfers to continue onto the explanations of underlying differential equations and matrix math, but those too are there for the hardcore readers. But everyone can enjoy interacting with the site at some level, even if that’s merely bouncing the sumo blocks around.

A long standing institution in the midwest (well, Madison, Wisconsin at first), the print ‘newspaper’ The Onion is a satiric and sometimes outrageously absurd skewing of the news. Some stories mirror current events, yet others reflect the staff’s (and audience’s) dryer sensibilities when it comes to humor.

In addition to fake news, The Onion also produces some real journalism in the form of The Onion A.V. Club, providing weekly reviews of books, movies and music in addition to hard-hitting artist interviews and general entertainment information.