It’s amazing how a little subtraction can change things. A BLT with the bacon subtracted is taste bud cancer. A car with the wheels subtracted is a hunk of steel, a hunk of steel that can double as shelter during the zombie invasion. A spider without a web is a tarantula.
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The first issue of Richard Stockton OVERDRIVE (The caps are necessary to stress the extent of the overdrive. It’s similar to the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive.) is up on an Internet near you. (Read more…)

It used to be called “Found + Instane,” but Ubuweb’s Outsiders section is still a trove of ephemeral, engimatic weirdness that pays revisiting. Just ask Ling-ling. She’s (?) sitting on my lap right now, which would be really cool except I can’t find her body.

The collection’s origins are in ubu.com’s creator Kenneth Goldsmith’s collection of notes, posters and other odd bits of signage that he found on New York’s streets and subways. including an ambitious sequence by whomever-the-heck-it-is now known as the “Free Jack Ads.” The city speaks, Kenny listens, and though this could hardly be called a conversation, given the right sort of attention (and perhaps a bit of paranoia), you can find messages from the invisible in any urban area. Beats reading Apple ads.

The collection has expanded to include ”found” audio files and other projects inspired by making art out of the culture’s detritus and wonkiness. Good place to hunt for ideas! 

One of our very own Stocktonoids, Brian Sullivan, has come up with a great web project called “treefingers” which is really interesting and fun, and very unpredictable.

When you go to the site, you are greeted with several index-card size phrases that were contributed by previous visitors. You get to ”water” or “weed” the phrases – kind of a voting process, in which watering makes the phrase greener and weeding makes it browner (and less readable).

You can, of course, contribute your own phrase. The process of watering/weeding tends to, quite literally, weed out the spammy or obscene phrases (though, as you can tell by my screencap, some do get to linger a while). This is a communal pruning process that makes this feel like a Wikipedia in miniature — multiple editors clashing over the relative merits of these haiku-sized phrases — and a series of Facebook comments in isolation, with contributors challenging each other to be funnier, more risqué, more confessional, more… more, in a very tiny space, or risk deletion.

Sorry… it doesn’t work on Internet Explorer. Sullivan and his co-horts (Mathew Preziotte, Bilal Shaikh, and Brian Shlosberg) explain in a press release that they decided to favor the underdog browsers since, alas, the coding worked on them, and the time it would take to debug for the corporate dinosaur IE just wasn’t worth it — i.e. (no pun intended), no coding for The Man.

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Ever try to come up with a website idea with a group of your friends? Me and my friends’ conversations usally end with statements like, “….But I can’t draw.” or “No one wants to see that part of the human body” or “Yeah, but we can’t get one of those into the country.”

The creators of The Superest, Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter, seem to have hit on a rather great idea that actually made it past the development phase. The idea of The Superest is that a superhero is drawn by either Kevin or Sutter and then the other draws a superhero to counter. This goes on forever, which is great because that makes The Superest an archive filled with awesomeness in art and originality.

Thanks to Lore Sjöberg, one of the funniest writers working the online humor game, for posting about The Superest on his blog.