30th
June 2010
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It’s been a while since we last peered down the sinkhole at the countless office-workers, bored partners and under-achievers who spend vast quantities of time wasting their lives on various websites.
Be it flash gaming, info-packed wiki-sites or aggregated cool content, we’ve been sniffing around the internet, looking for fun, interesting or downright absurd stuff for you to look at, read, play with and – most importantly – while away your time with. Prepare yourself, reader, as we once again send you off in search of procrastination. Good luck out there. And don’t get too addicted.
Starting this session off on a literary, intellectual level, Brainyquote.com is a cut above other quote-based sites in that it only seems to feature interesting figures and the clever words that tumbled from their mouths and were caught on record. I found it by accident while looking for quotes from political figure Nye Bevan. I not only found a wealth of them, but when moving onto quotes from Ginsberg, found myself clicking around the site all day, looking for killer quotes from people I’d only heard of in passing as well as established intellectuals and inspirational figures.
The site is particularly useful if you need to make an article you’re writing sound particularly brainy. Every good writer knows that quoting a great is the shortcut to making a halfway decent point. It’s not cheating, it’s using every resource available to you.
You know you have that fried who always seems one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to sending around viral web content? The one who’s always first with the latest video of a dancing cat falling into a paddling pool?
He’s annoying, isn’t he?
Well now you too can be the annoying pulse-fingerer in your friendship group, because Buzzfeed is the absolute Daddy of new, amusing and sticky content, absolutely filled to the brim with funny stuff. Sign up, and you can rate and submit content yourself. Often it will get lost in the void, but all entries are viewed by Editors who can give it a push up the ladder if they feel it’s particularly well made, or amusing enough to make the grade. You can also join in with the informed and frequently hilarious discussions below each post, as well as labelling and rating content with your own reaction, be it ‘LOL’, ‘WTF’ or ‘EWW’.
We would usually recommend you an entire gaming site, filled with time-wasting capabilities, but sometimes something comes along that wipes the floor with all the competition. Certain Flash games are described as ‘fiendishly addictive’. Well, Warzone Tower Defence isn’t just fiendish. It’s a demonically, diabolically and devilishly corrosive brain-worm. Tower defence games are often the kids of applications that can suck whole hours from your working day, but this one is essentially Tetris with really heavy weaponry. Everything about it is designed to suck you into its void. It’s the reason I’m submitting this article late.
Armed with a range of cannons, a range of anti-aircraft arms alongside flamethrower, pulse emitters and standard heavy machine guns, you’re charged with destroying an increasingly hardy fleet of enemy tanks and planes. At first it seems simple. Then they come at you in endless waves, and when they get to base they just plough on in there, destroying all your hard work in a battering assault. If you haven’t set up their route to your base with anything approaching insight, they will surely destroy you.
Having a bad day? So what. So are millions of other people, worldwide. What better way to feel slightly less awful than to check out the terrible, shameful, upsetting and downright unfortunate tales of woes from a worldwide submission base? FMyLife – you can guess what the ‘f’ stands for – is just that. Essentially a database of bad experiences, constantly updated to provide the miserable with a reason to be cheerful. At least you’re not the poor sucker whose best friend just deserted you for your girlfriend, and is now the proud owner of your beloved dog. Or the office worker who just got the blame for a string of nightmares that all occurred while she was on holiday. Or the guy whose mother is keeping him awake, singing the same song, on the toilet, drunk at one o clock in the morning.
FMyLife is also a particularly great resort if you’re having a fantastic day for once, and feel the urge to be silently smug as you indulge in the schadenfreude that accompanies feeling on top of the world as you cast an eye over the details of some poor souls rotten day. It feels a little bad, but it also feels very good.
As a reader of the Basekit blog, you’re probably web savvy enough to know what an Internet meme is. Just in case you’re not, Wikipedia has this: The term “Internet meme” refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, social networking sites and instant messaging’.
So – all the stuff you see on Buzzfeed (above) or receive in your inbox daily, or see littered around the web like an old joke half-remembered. Know Your Meme isn’t simply a collection of past, worldwide memes, but also sets out to explain their origin, the reason for the popularity and also traces how the trend changed over time. For anyone even only partially interested in web culture, it’s a guaranteed time-hole as you’ll see memes you never heard of, memes that pretty much passed you by as you couldn’t work out what was so funny, and some you remember all too well because they caused you to spit coffee all over your keyboard.
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Enjoy your time down there. I’ve a game of Warship Tower Defence that needs my urgent attention.
This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. Which is another great way to waste your day. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.
2nd
June 2010
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Sometimes when you have been knee deep in a design project you feel your creative spark fading. After spending hours getting just the right shade of green sorted for the background you may want to give up on design all together and run off to the country to start a new life as a beekeeper (or something)
Never fear – when the design-blues hits simply stop work and have a bit of a play. And with theses web based design toys, you don’t even have to leave the desk.
OdoSketch is a lovely toy that allows you to create watercolour style sketches with a swish of the mouse. Because the brushes are designed to be a little random, all drawings done here have a lovely hand made quality.
Not got much time to play? Surely you’ve got five seconds! See what you can draw in a tiny amount of time. Even better – once you’ve finished, your drawing (or squiggle) morphs into past efforts!
This one starts out simple and gets complicated and cool very quickly. Just draw a line as it spins. Once you’re done click the Spin button at the bottom and see your squiggle turned into a very cool looking 3D type render. Oce you’ve had fun with that you can move on to the advanced version
Draw a line and watch the little guy on the sled slide down it. But try not to let him crash! OK, not the most creative toy here, but probably the most addictive. Your productivity may be proportionally related to how long you can keep that sled going…
Dirt simple and fun Graffiti wall. Nothing much more to say!
26th
May 2010
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It’s Wednesday! So we take a sidelong glance at the wider internet and bring you something a little more fun than usual… We’re back with five more single serving Tumblrs – sites on Microblogging platform Tumblr devoted to a single, obsucre subject
Originating from meme fatory 4CHAN, Dog Get Down From There shows us pictures of animals in unusual situations. Situations they are hopelessly unqualified for. It doesn’t really make much sense, but it makes us laugh.
Things My Date Really Said Last Night
The clue to the content of this blog is in the title, but it doesn’t reveal quite how ludicrous some of the quotes are. Some are misguided attempts to be romantic, some are just downright misguided. Dating Protip: don’t say anything you read on this site!
Passed Out On Public Transportation
Or POOPT for short. Just pictures of people sleeping on various buses, trains and trams. It’s a little voyeuristic, but also facinating to see how certain people can sleep anywhere and in any position…
For those without children, this is the ’strongest visual birth control on the market today’ – a warning against kids. For those with little ones of their own this is a place to vent and share the destruction wrought by your bundles of joy.
Graffiti is bad, OK. But when it’s god enough to be featured in this blog of great looking vandalism, maybe we’ll let it pass…
19th
May 2010
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OK, OK, you don’t have to read them. But it is recommended. We feel that perusing these blogs we give you, the web-worker a daily dose of what’s new online. You don’t want to receive an email referencing an obscure meme or new start up and be utterly confused do you? Course not! Checking these blogs every day should keep you well abreast of what’s happening…
1. BoingBoing
A groupblog of epic proportions. BoingBoing is like Reuters for geeks. A daily check on BoingBoing will usually involve new steampunk nik-naks, homemade robots, memes, reports on the latest fights against draconian copyright laws and awesome looking artwork. It’s a treasure trove of awesome stuff. They also have their finger on the pulse of popular internet culture, so if you see an upsurge in posts about whatever the latest pirate/ninja/Chuck Norris figure of fun and awesome, rest assured that it will be hitting the popular consciousness very soon.
2. TechCrunch
The best source of what’s happening within the Tech scene. If it’s a startup, it’s there, if a company has been bought, it’s there, if a company goes under, it’s there. For many people TechCrunch asts as a helpful guide to interesting new web services – not everyone has a vested interest in who the new CEO of a dot com giant is. But when staying ahead of the curve on what the next Twitter or even Google is is an issue – TechCrunch is hard to beat.
The web design blog. If it’s not on Smashing Magazine, then it’s on the equally excellent Smashing Network – a group of like minded blogs delivering even more excellent web design content. It’s often a wonder to me how web designers get any work done when there is such a wealth of content to read. And for non-web designers, there is still plenty of inspiration on offer that can be applied to any project.
4. LifeHacker
Want to do something? Check Lifehacker first. They’ll show you how. Want to do something better? Check Lifehacker. They’ll show you how. Don’t really want to do anything, but want to marvel at how people do thing efficiently? Check Lifehacker. They’ll show you how. Pretty much everything tech-y you’ve ever wanted to do explained.
5. Gizmodo
You work on the web. So it’s almost a certainty that you’ll be interested in the next shiny piece of technology to hit the market. Gizmodo is the place to find out about them and see if they’re worth splashing any cash on. Written with the exact amount of snark and humour to temper the undistilled nerdiness on display when discussing the various merits of differing cable types, Gizmodo rules the gadget-web.
Only five here, there are sure to be more ‘must reads’ – what blogs are on your feed reader? Hit the comments!
