Link Round Up: Interactive Edition
Things You Can Play With
Generally speaking, these collections of links point to things out on the broader Web, but I reserve the right on occasion to highlight my own stuff. Earlier this week, in a fit of early-aughts nostalgia, I recreated a web toy that had been a very popular feature of my ancient, defunct blog: The Potty Humor Name Generator. Rebuilt from scratch as a client-side single page app, this little amusement will help you, too, relive the joy of pointless Web tools featuring the comedic stylings of the Captain Underpants series of kids’ books.
After you’ve wrung all the enjoyment out of my own humble contribution to making the Web fun again, which shouldn’t take long, some more worthwhile ways to use your time could include the new (launched today!) daily game Tiled Words, an interesting cross between a crossword and a tile-laying puzzle.
There is also the 10,000 Drum Machines project, whose name describes its goal better than its current state. Still, 55 Web-based interactive drum machines (as of today) is a pretty impressive collection. I love these kinds of creative tools and really want to see more of them.
Things To Think About
I was recently thinking about contronyms, which are words that can be their own opposites. One classic example of this is the word “dust,” which can refer both to removing dust (e.g., “he dusted the bookshelves”) and adding dust or powder (e.g., “he dusted the counter with flour”). In my case, I was thinking about the word “deliver,” which means both providing something (“deliver the package”) and taking something away (“deliver me from evil”). In the course of my wonderings, I happened upon the phase “skunked term”, which to me captures not only the specific linguistic experience of a term’s usefulness diminishing because of changes in its usage but also something larger about the experience of trying to communicate more generally as semantic drift seems to accelerate in these first few decades of the millennium.
Things To Watch
You think you know about bowling, but do you know about duckpin bowling? What if I told you there are a whole bunch of YouTube vidoes containing full telecasts of duckpin bowling matches just waiting for you to watch? When I was a kid, it felt like this stuff was on local TV all the time, and honestly, we’re worse off without them.
And as a bonus this week, a modern classic of the YouTube Poop genre, especially for Columbo superfans such as myself: