It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when browsing the web, visiting the same few sites over and over and over again in a vain attempt to find something new to waste your ultimately meaningless existence with. Facebook is usually the timesink of choice for many people, closely followed by Twitter, TVTropes, Wikipedia and a few others.
As such, it’s easy to forget that there’s a wider web out there, filled with sites that you may not have ever come across during your daily browsing routine. Some sites you would never have wanted to discover, ever. And some are real gems that you’ll be happy you came across.
So what better way to explore the web than to make it into a little game? There used to be a website devoted to this very philosophy. Called ShuffleTime, it allowed players to jump around the web seemingly at random, answering trivia questions about the pages they were seeing. Correctly answering the questions allowed the players to collect cards and coins and purchase rewards and entries into prize draws. Sadly, it didn’t last very long, but I thought it was a great idea.
So here’s a variation on it. I can’t promise any kind of reward (short of discovering something horrendous/wonderful) but it’s a good time waster. Probably not safe for work, but if you’re reading this at work then you’re probably not concerned about that, either. Here is a picture of Rise from Persona 4 in a bikini to make you feel uncomfortable about reading this at work.
Well, it serves you right. Get on with what you’re supposed to be doing and I won’t have to embarrass you again.
Alternatively, you could embarrass yourself further by playing TinyURLette, a game of discovery. The rules are very similar to The TwitPic Game which I informed you all of a few days ago (and no-one participated, boo) except this time we’re dealing with websites.
So here’s what to do. Visit your link-shortening service of choice and simply add whatever you like after the URL. I will attempt this with both TinyURL and bit.ly links to demonstrate.
So first up, we have http://bit.ly/blargh, which takes us to a page of YouTube comments for this video. It is a Scottish guy who has obviously been studying phonetics recently. He also says hello to a lot of people. And goes off on a rant against one of the members of his channel. He also does that irritating “quick-editing” thing that people are doing all the time on YouTube. “Hello! I am [edit] a person [edit] who is [edit] talking [edit] to you about [edit] rubbish.” Enough of him.
http://tinyurl.com/ihateyou, conversely, is appropriately named and takes you to a picture you really don’t want to see. Especially if you’re at work. You have been warned. It’s not porn or gore.
http://bit.ly/arse takes us to BioEthics Bytes, a blog about multimedia resources for teaching bioethics. An unfortunate URL for a page that looks quite interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/what takes us to an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the death of Margaret Singer, an expert on brainwashing and cult activity. The obituary is an interesting read, actually, with some quotes from Singer herself.
By extension, http://tinyurl.com/whatisthisidonteven takes you to a page clearly intended to RickRoll you. Unfortunately for them, the video they have been using for RickRolling purposes is a broken link, meaning that this page is, in fact, a failed RickRoll. A RickStumbleAndFallOnYourAss, if you will.
http://bit.ly/yourface features a news headline from Twitter very literally about your face.
http://tinyurl.com/stopit gives us a blog post in Russian about Lifespring, the now-defunct “human potential training” company. Or, as Google Translate puts it, “Layfspringe”, which is a much better name.
Finally, http://bit.ly/borednow takes us to a page from McCarthy Psychology Services from Australia about care provision for the elderly.
I’m a little disappointed. Out of 8 different pages, only one of them is the slightest bit inappropriate. You are not doing your job properly, Internet.
Found any entertaining TinyURL or bit.ly shortlinks through playing this stupid game? Let me know in the comments.
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I bet you could find some serious success if you created a website that randomized links that people could visit. I’m serious. I don’t have the technical knowhow to make it work, but instead of people doing it manually, they could just visit your site and have it completely automated. What I’m trying to say is, someone smarter than me should make this happen.
Well, that was kind of the thinking behind ShuffleTime that I mentioned above (though sites had to be “submitted” with the trivia questions in that case). Isn’t that also the principle behind StumbleUpon?
I used to do this with 1UP pages. Every user has their number, so I’d pop in a random one or do it with clubs and see what I’d get. Nothing ever NSFW, sadly. Here, let me try a Bitly in REAL TIME
http://bit.ly/iampete
Y U NOT FOUND PAGE?
bit.ly/pete leads to Pete Freitag’s blog, which has a terribly dull layout. Someone should tell him.