Recently in Websites Inferior to Ours Category

And then there's the Misfits of Science wiki.

(No entry for the Internet's de facto last word on said Misfits? FOR SHAME.)

Remember those Lone Wolf gamebooks? How could you forget anything with such awesome covers?

Well, it was kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure, but a great deal more violent, and like 500 pages instead of 60. (Somehow those CYOA books packed just as many sudden-death scenarios into 60 pages, though. And when you kept your finger on the previous page, you were right to feel guilty, cheater. You suck.)

The bad news is that those books are now out of print (or as they say on the internet, OOP!) and stupidly expensive. (Mom, did you give away my old books? Ouch.)

The good news is that a dedicated team of nerd-o's has transcribed the books to HTML. Unfortunately, there's no snappy java applet to help you keep track of your items and whatnot, but you could print out the Action Chart page, I guess. (Having not completed the previous four adventures, I was stuck with only five Kai disciplines for the course of this one. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what a perilous journey that was! Snort!)

They've even reproduced the Random Number Tables from the back of the books -- a helpful invention that saved you from having to buy a 10-sided die and admitting to all the world that you were a virgin. You were supposed to, with your eyes closed, put the eraser-end of your pencil somewhere on that page, and the number you came up with was "random," except that you totally knew where the pencil was going to end up, cheater. Also this meant that much of the middle of that page was substantially faded and sometimes completely erased due to multiple playings. So don't worry, mom, if you did throw those books away, I probably abused them too much anyway.

And for you perfectionists out there, you can check out all the times the Nerd Squad changed any little thing in each book. "Replaced 'suspiciously, but' with 'suspiciously but'" -- wow, thanks guys. Or should I say "...wow, thanks guys.' I had a nagging suspicion that there was a comma in the original text. Now I can sleep at night.

Apparently the Onion AV Club has taken it upon themselves to answer pop culture trivia questions that should have been directed to us. And I quote:

"Dear A.V. Club,

I have been searching for the title of this for so long, I'm beginning to believe I invented the whole thing. When I was in elementary school (1985-89), I remember running around at recess pretending to be the characters from a TV show or movie about a bunch of people with extraordinary powers."

Stop right there, annoying younger person. You're clearly talking about Misfists of Science. Duh.

"One guy could shoot lightning out of his hands, and another guy could run really fast, and there was a girl (I think it was a girl) with ESP."

Yes, yes, yes, I already told you...Misfits. Of Science. And the lightning guy was the same as the guy who could run fast. And the girl, Courtney Cox, had telekinetic powers, not ESP. Duh.

"Even with the advent of the Internet, I have been unable to confirm what this show/film was called and who was in it, because I remember so little about it."

That's because you're a jerk who doesn't read our website, jerk.

Here's how confident the AV Club's so-called pop culture experts were:

"...after much discussion in the A.V. Club conference room, we think we have an answer..."

It required discussion? To remember the Misfits of Science?!?!

Furdell.com is hereby calling for all other websites to cease and desist all operations. You people should be getting all your information here, about everything. Ever!!!

Here is a forum for people role-playing as characters from The Virgin Suicides in some kind of alternate universe where they didn't kill themselves in the end. (So, The Virgin Standing Aroundening.)

Your mission: infiltrate, but insist on playing the role of Donnie Darko. Go wherever you want with it. I suggest using your time travel powers to teach the Lisbon girls all about American history.

"A deadly game of cat and mouse."

All you have to do is prove to Robert Sungenis that the earth revolves around the sun, and he'll give you $1000!

Challenge: You must prove this using only science that Robert Sungenis hasn't already rejected. Sorry, general theory of relativity.

If that isn't enough content for you, check out FixedEarth.com. I personally enjoy the advertisement for The Earth is Not Moving, a book which boasts the feature: "Non Moving Earth Illustration"! I figure it's like a flip book, but all the pictures are of Earth in the same spot.

No contest.

Alas, and also alack, georgewbush.com has changed the image on their front page to this:

The future is now.

Maybe it's the year 2594 right now, civilization has crumbled, and you, Earth's last human, perhaps using a miraculously-pristine computer in an old bombed-out library, have stumbled upon our site. In that case, the image on the front page of georgewbush.com has probably changed. In the past, when this post was written, the image looked like this:

That photo, minus the text and the big green bubble, is used in the Bush campaign's new internet ad. Ah, but look closer!

Well, go on. Look at it already.

I'm guessing we no longer have enough marines for a photo-op. Times are tough.

I hate LiveJournal.

It's an on-line journaling system that tends more towards diary than blog. There's not so much an economy of words going on there; the most minute of life's daily minutiae gets posted. For example, I happened to click on this one, and the first words I read are:

Rachael has little nasty yeasties inavding her diaper area.

EWW EWW ick.

So there is such a thing as Internet TMI.

Fortunately for my sanity, there is a website that chronicles the best in LiveJournal Drama. Highly entertaining on all fronts.

If you're like me, you use the internet to research the background of any random thought you might have. If you're not like me, then my armies shall destroy you!

In any case, it often seems that the sites I happen upon haven't been updated in years. Why are these sites maintained? Who pays the bills? Unanswerable mysteries all. Here's a dead site you need to check out right this second.

Jujubes: The Perfect Food
Last updated: 2001

Summary
A fan site devoted to Jujubes, the chewy candy you throw at nerds in movie theatres. Features include a pronunciation guide, an essay on "Why I Love Jujubes," and a reader-provided Facts & Lore page that seems to contradict everything else on the site (including pronunciation and whether it is, in fact, "the perfect food").

Why This Site Is Awesome
* Excellent discussion of Jujube flavors; really opens your eyes to the Green Jujube Controversy, which I wasn't even aware of.
* Site author identifies all of her friends and relatives by which Jujube is their favorite. ("My father, the food scientist (he likes the red ones), is distraught that I have described Jujubes as the perfect food, since they are really only carbohydrate. Lighten up, dad.")

In a Nutshell
"All I know is that, for as long as I can remember, I have loved Jujubes. Specifically the purple ones, but the other ones are nice, too."

Here's a new pet peeve: comic book fans who insist on declaring certain superheroes able to beat certain other superheroes, as if there's some kind of definite blanket answer. Seriously, I'm sick of this guy and his wrongness.

I'll make an example of him using the page I linked to. He's done five of these "comic book duels" pages, and they're all equally irrelevant, but I'm just going to go over the one and you can take my word for it on the others.
Continue reading only if you are a big nerd.

Apparently Kt Kilborn is having a final show on Sunday. This will be my last chance to witness firsthand "Underground TRANSit" at Theatre OUTlanta. You know, gays would probably have equal rights by now if it wasn't for puns.

Anyway, I want to see this show because I knew Kt (n?e Katie) in college, before everyone started using male pronouns to describe him and before he dropped the vowels, which, as we all learned from The Letter People, are the girly letters. We didn't get along too well, probably because she took everything really seriously, whereas I found humor in every murder-suicide. Her friends were just as humorless, as evidenced by the following excerpt from an actual conversation.

But I digress. Anyway, at some point Katie -- whose greatest accomplishment up to that point was being Craig Kilborn's estranged half-sister -- set out to blur the gender binary for underground theatre audiences.

OK, I admit it, all of this is just setup for a hilarious punchline. Perusing through Kt's weblog, I noticed the following excerpt which I simply had to share. Apparently Kt's girlfriend dumped him, and his musings on the subject can only be described as "stereotypetastic." And I quote:

"It's like my best Indigo Girls/Ani DiFranco mixes are amoxicillin and this disease won't die no matter how much of them I take."

That trannie needs 50 ccs of Tori Amos -- STAT.

Check out the least useful DVD review ever, of the new box set for '80s cartoon-slash-marketing-opportunity Jem and the Holograms:

Each disc features a "play video" function that will allow you to watch all of the videos from the episodes on that disc.

That's adorable.

Inexplicably, I own the five-part pilot of Jem on tape. It is really, really hard to watch. The songs are awful, and a lot of the animation is simply repeated during the music video segments. At least it's kinda funny when the members of bad-girl band The Misfits make their appearance by riding their motorcycles out of a record executive's office closet.

Now that's impressive.

...is a scary thing. Here's the Keeper's Court, where people put in a "claim" on something from Passions. It can be a thing ("Maggie is the Keeper of Timmy's Martimmies"), or feelings ("Anette is the Keeper of Ivy's Obsession For Sam"), or whatever ("Theresa is the Keeper of Hank's Cuteness").

Have fun staring into the abyss!