6.12.03
My god, I just found the nicest emergent feature in a web site I’ve ever seen. The late, great Brunching Shuttlecocks (R.I.P. you gigantic raving freaks), in one of their last forays put up the Apathetic Online Journal Entry Editor. It’s a briefly amusing toy. Its huge gaping drawback is that automatically generated apathetic journal entries are about as entertaining as manually generated apathetic online journal entries. It’s funny for the first few automatic entries, and then you recognize the only reason that it’s funny is because you’ve read journals like this and you recognized that they were bad at the time and now someone else has captured the dark, oily, evil essence of those entries, and aren’t we all so clever for all thinking the same things are bad, ha, ha ,ha.
But so also Brunching has an earlier toy called the Sarcasterizer that allows one to enter a URL and get a sarcastic version of the web page back. The way it manufactures sarcasm is through the time-tested method of adding quotation marks. So if you typed in
www.cnn.com you get back a page with sentences such as: House "vote" extends "child" tax "credit" to "low-income" families.So the beautiful part of all this that when you go to the Sarcasterizer and feed it the URL for the AOJEE (
http://www.brunching.com/cgi/journalgenerator.cgi) you get an apathetic journal entry with sarcasm added. So instead of just random, boring apathy, you get pointed, biting commentary on the human condition.
It’s "brilliant."
"Trust" me.