Fortune Cookie Chronicles is one of those classic modern ideas - take something all Americans have some kind of relationship with (American Chinese food) pursue the idea to the ends of the Earth and then smear it across a plethora of mediums (book, blog, and upcoming documentary) like so much garlic sauce on so much stir-fried chicken.
These guys are just a tiny bit harder to blog about then the motley bullshit I've been posting lately. They're a family of musicians (husband, wife, daughter) who mostly write songs about boxes of slides they pick up at garage sales and such like, then play along with the slideshow.
Now, in my big, secret list of personal time wasters from which I'm getting my big, public amalgamation of time wasters for you, I just have this link to the video for the Trachtenburg Family song"Mountain Trip to Old Japan" (it's even a bit higher quality than the embed below.)
Where did I find this thing? Who knows?
Now, I'd say this is a pretty representative video, but of course I started poking around. Predictable, as a kinda cute, kinda indie established mid-level act, the TFSP have a wide and diverse internet presence.
So then the question becomes, just how much do you want to know about this family? I mean, daughter Rachel has been an active musician since she was six years old. Of COURSE you're going to be able to find video of her ragging on Bloomberg in a public hearing. I'm not linking to it, though, because we are here to waste your time - not to watch other people waste theirs.
Then the issue is, what do I link to? I say, let's keep things simple. Let's Go On Tour With Kate (i.e. Nash) is my favorite TFSP song so far, so here ya go:
Finally, a new way to waste your time on the internet.
This morning's time sink: the collected Sawbuck Gamer, gathering years of AV Club columns about cheap games.
I know Sawbuck through Teti. Ages ago, Teti wrote a blog called [Blank] of the Day, which he's since largely taken down. With a lot of dedication, you can read through the archives, post by post, by following this link to a post Teti wrote where he explains why he isn't apologizing for not posting the day before and clicking the links below.
Know how I said I was here to waste your time, not mine? Well, I've read through those archives twice. Quick summary: funny.
Angry Zen Master is a nerd entertainment aggregator blog. It kinda reminded me of Monkeys for Helping, which I've linked to before but not in this context. So I went and checked MfH again and, low and behold, both linked to this extraordinary Bollywood terminator derivative:
Today's internet time waste: the fucked-up mind of Eliza Skinner.
We showed one of Eliza's videos at Iron Mule back in the day. I picked up the DVD from her and I was all implying she should be all excited to see her short in front of an audience and she was all "yeah, I did that motherfucker on STAGE, BITCH!!"
(I'm, uh, paraphrasing.)
And then she quit her day job and went pro, so, BOY. Egg on MY face, I tells ya.
At time of writing, Eliza's latest project is Nasty Cute, in which she writes inappropriate stream-of-consciousness captions for photos of animals, from the animals' perspectives.
Here's that particular short in that I may pique your curiosity:
Unshelved is a webcomic about librarians. For a long time, I thought all the book reviews were written by the author of Unshelved, Gene Ambaum. Turns out there's a whole crew.
I am ballparking now and anticipating somewhere north of 100 of these posts, BTW. With my new, two-a-day pace that's, what? Another month and a half of content?
Finally, you as well as others can waste time on the internet.
This post's internet time waste: Videojug, a collection of How-To videos.
First video I watched here: How to avoid trapped arm whilst cuddling in bed. I've tried a few of these techniques since, and I believe the key is to show the other person this video beforehand so they are unconsciously compliant once the time comes.
I started this project because I had a folder full of internet time wasters and nothing to do with them. For some reason (possibly because as I write this in late January, I have been reading a lot of Homestuck), I decided to post the links in this folder reverse chronologically, with the sites I bookmarked most recently at the beginning and the sites I bookmarked the longest time ago in our distant future.
At this point, I'm posting something that even I remember getting overshared back when the first one came out. This is by no means a new way to waste your time on the internet - I'm actually slowly getting in to older and older ways.
It turns out, though, that most of these time wasting sites I bookmarked oh so long ago have aged pretty well. Like this, for example: Search Stories turned out to be pretty moving despite the fact that we are talking about basically a giant ad (maybe because this is a new medium for our modern age? Or something about a missing narrator? I dunno whatever not the point.)
The nice thing about posting a bunch of bookmarks that were no use to anybody, on this blog that I certainly wasn't using for anything for the last year or so, to an audience of nobody under headlines that already profess that everything contained therein is a waste of time: I am setting the notability bar pretty low.
Of course, I reserve the right to give up at any time.
I am thinking of changing the tagline for this feature, which I think may be overstating my case. Are these really NEW ways to waste time on the internet?
UbuWeb is some sort of avant-garde art link clearing house, I don't know. This stuff is complicated. I couldn't even make it through their Wikipedia entry. I'd feel a little guilty linking to something I didn't fully understand if I thought anyone was reading this.
I think I only discovered UbuWeb because of something a friend said. I had thought I only wandered on there because Kevin Maher linked to the Sun Ra film Space Is the Place in one of his show emails, but actually it turned out Kevin had linked to the Sun Ra Batman Concept Album, which, trust me, makes much more sense. Which I'm now realizing means that I book marked Space Is The Place on my own, then never watched it.
Just because I have not fully grasped UbuWeb doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. I'm just here to waste your time rather than my own. For some, UbuWeb is serious business.
Such is the pull of UbuWeb that I mentioned to a friend that another friend recommended UbuWeb to me, and now literally EVERY TIME I mention the second friend to the first friend, the first friend says "oh, yeah. That's the friend of yours who likes UbuWeb."
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