Tag: WEIRD

In what must be one of the oddest collaborations ever, Google and Nintendo have joined forces to create a search engine game. No, you don't earn Nintendo stars by searching on Google.com -- rather, this is a full, standalone game for the Nintendo Wii! The game consists of players competing to guess the most popular search terms, from a list. There are even additional, downloadable challenges... ...

Sure, Google Chrome has a rapidly-growing repository of extensions -- but Firefox's add-on platform is a bit more mature and robust. That enables developers to do certain things that just aren't possible yet in Google Chrome. Say, for example, creating an add-on for Firefox which allows you to install and use Google Chrome's extensions. Yep. It's called Google Chrome extensions manager and it ...

I grew up in Fidonet and the BBS culture. I remember whole nights spent online in my early teens, slugging my way through text MUDs (multi-user D&D games). I really liked it. But it's gone. Times have moved on, things have changed. We now have graphics. Apparently, one Zach Perry takes issue with that. He has recently launched AEIN, or Alternative Electronic Information Network. In a ...

HumanClock.com is a fun little site, letting you view the current time in photo form. The time in the screenshot above is 2:10 (there's a 24-hour option as well). Sometimes figuring what time the image shows is a bit of a riddle, but that's part of the fun for me. The site isn't new -- it's been around since 2001. Since it has been around for so long, quite a few images have accumulated for ...

I'm more of a Festivus guy, but apparently there are weird and wacky holidays every day of the year -- and that's just in the good ol' USA, where we can find a reason to "celebrate" anything. If you chart global weird holidays you have to zoom the chart out an order of magnitude. So in this holiday edition I'm going to stick to weird US holidays, the dates for which are lovingly curated by the ...

Ok, so maybe you don't have access to all the necessary equipment to pull this off, but if you did...It would look a lot like the contents of this Flickr gallery. Professional race driver Stef van Campenhoudt, typographers Pierre and Damien of PleaseLetMeDesign, and interactive artist Zachary Lieberman collaborated to create iQ font using a compact Toyota hatchback and an array of computer and ...

In some ways the olfactory (aka "smellable") web began 10 years ago. In other, more real ways, not so much. How many of you are able to smell your favorite websites today? Of course, among all the protocols and basic hardware required of modern computers, the ability to produce smell never quite earned a spot in the spec sheet. Too bad, maybe, as smells are powerful triggers in our brains. I ...

If you've tried to register a domain name in the last decade or so you're probably aware of the "cromulent word scarcity syndrome" (yes, I just made that up). In other words, most of the good names are gone. Scratch another off the list with purplemonkeydishwasher.com, a reference to a line in The Simpsons. As is my wont, I typed this random URL into my browser and was pleasantly surprised to ...

Before there was Weird Wednesday, we had Freaky Friday Find -- a crazy app every week. Nearly 3 years ago I wrote a piece on an app called Tele Hypnosis, and guess what? That app still exists. Yes, you too can remotely control whomever you wish, all for the low, low price of $99. Unlike those darned fairies, this thing has no rules; you can make someone love you, cheat at math, or get your kids ...

Everyone knows you can't swing a dead lolcat without finding weird stuff on the internet. Before the web, the internet was a haven for all sorts of crazy "underground" information that was difficult to get published and distributed. Fast-forward to the present day and you can indulge your weirdness with the push of maybe 5 or 6 buttons, tops. You don't need a real name, address, phone number or ...

Here's a weird one: In Lost Aliens your goal is to get all of the aliens to the bullseye. If you click on an alien, it'll move one space to the right, and if there's another alien next to it, it'll leapfrog over it. However, if an alien lands on the blue crystal it's stuck. To get it unstuck, you have to click on the pyramid, but this will only work if another alien, who will out some sort of ...

There's a lot of things you can do with RSS headlines, but this isn't one I had thought of: Average Shoveler is a Flash toy with old school adventure game-style graphics. You control a character who can do three things: walk around, shovel snow and talk to passers-by. The passers-by will tell give you news (scraped from Yahoo! News) and when you shovel the snow, news photos will ...

To call War of the Hell bizarre would be an understatement, as would calling it addicting. The object of this Japanese Java game is to capture the flailing stick figures with the rope that dangles from your cursor and drag them from the ground—hell, presumably—up the the top of the screen—heaven. Unfortunately for you it's a bit like capturing epileptic geese with fly paper. The ...