30 StumbleUpon Sites in a Row

Ah, Stum­ble­Upon… Never before has wast­ing time on the Inter­net been so easy, so addict­ing. What is it about the lit­tle “SU” but­ton which makes it so tempt­ing? Click after click, site after site… Min­utes eas­ily turn into hours, and my excuse that I’m just look­ing for some­thing to blog about becomes increas­ingly weak.

So I’m going to blog a cross-section of my stum­bling — thirty clicks on the “SU” but­ton (minus sites which do not load for what­ever rea­son), thirty sites listed. Keep in mind that these are sites which other Stum­ble­Upon users have liked, have rated, and have added to the pool of sites which can be stum­bled upon. Thirty sites later, maybe I’ll have a vir­tual proof of total deprav­ity online?

1. An image of two peo­ple at a beach — A girl in a bikini is look­ing down the trunks of a guy… Off to a great start, StumbleUpon…

2. An ani­mated image of a pole vault­ing fail­ure — Actu­ally, this is kinda funny, though I wish it had some sort of con­text to it (Stum­ble­Upon images rarely do, though, so I’m used to it).

   

   Pole Vault­ing Failure

3. QDB: Quote #641942 — I guess I’m not geek enough to think this is funny. Prob­a­bly my loss.

4. How to Blog Like an ******** — Not sure how offen­sive this title will be, so you’ll have to excuse the minor cen­sor­ship of it. The site is a list of things not to do while blog­ging. I’m unsure if the last item in the list (“End your posts abruptly, with­out a clos­ing para­graph…”) is meant to be seri­ous or not; after all, that post itself has no clos­ing para­graph. Either way, I agree with the list. Far too many blogs out there are filled with such junk!

5. Mon­key with a Death­wish — An ~3 minute video of a mon­key pick­ing on a pair of tigers. I actu­ally really enjoyed this — that’s one brave monkey!

6. Sweeney Todd & Mrs. Lovett, as they appear in the 2007 film, por­trayed by Johnny Depp & Helena Bon­ham Carter. The still is from one of the fun­ni­est scenes in the film, which the play ver­sion (which Ali­cia, her mom, & I just saw yes­ter­day in Cincin­nati) didn’t really do jus­tice to.

7. DTWOF #522 — The first web comic in this stum­bling jour­ney, and unfor­tu­nately it didn’t make any sense at all, though it did have at least one polyamorous les­bian, which is enough con­tro­versy to assure that it’s read be some­one, I sup­pose. Next…

8. Psy­chol­o­gist Attacks Tom Cruise — It’s kind of like shoot­ing fish in a bar­rel. Of course celebri­ties are going to be attacked for their lives (whether they’re screwed up or not), never mind the fact that the lives of non-celebrities are just as screwed up — if not more so — and never mind the fact most celebri­ties’ lives would prob­a­bly nor­mal­ize quite quickly if we as a loving/hating pub­lic would just get our noses out of their business.

9. Amaz­ing Human Pow­ered Roller Coaster — This actu­ally seems really fun, though I’d have to get over that pesky fear of roller coast­ers first! Oh, and appar­ently I’d have to go to Japan to ride this.

   

   Human Pow­ered Roller Coaster

10. Car­tog­ra­pher Ian Thomas sacked for reveal­ing Alaska destruc­tion plans — A map-maker makes a map which is too detailed — so detailed, in fact, that the map inad­ver­tently revealed secret gov­ern­ment plans for a refuge. Neat.

11. Star Wars: Sweded — A par­ody of Star Wars: A New Hope in the style of the new Jack Black & Mos Def movie Be King Rewind. I want one of those X-Wing cos­tumes for next Halloween.

12. The Awk­ward­ness Sur­vival Guide — Hilar­i­ous advice for what to do when you find your­self in a vari­ety of socially awk­ward sit­u­a­tions. There is some “adult lan­guage” toward the end, so tread lightly if you’re eas­ily offended. Oth­er­wise, con­tinue on and learn what to do if you’ve just called your teacher “Mom” or if you’ve ended a phone call with a col­league by telling him “I love you.”

13. An episode of the Flash-animation series “Home­s­tar Run­ner” — … I still have no idea why peo­ple find this funny. I’m stum­bling on, attempt­ing to for­get what I’ve seen.

14. Maze Design — What makes a maze com­plex or aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing? That’s what these folks set out to fig­ure, and in the process they’ve made some pretty cool look­ing mazes, includ­ing one which resem­bles Abra­ham Lincoln!

15. Has Win­dows Vista Failed? — A look at the expec­ta­tions and real­ity of Vista sales. And although Vista seems to be doing well, has it failed? Well, I don’t plan to upgrade, so for me at least, yes it has. My wife’s lap­top came with it, and frankly, I’m unim­pressed and dis­ap­pointed. Long live XP.

16. Old Age — This page looks like it came straight from the early days of per­sonal home pages on the web, com­plete with plenty of silly images and ani­ma­tions. The con­tent is a long thing about how being old is great because the unknown author has finally learned to appre­ci­ate life. On grow­ing old, I’d have to rec­om­mend my read­ers to check out Eccle­si­astes 12:1–7.

17. Make a Home­made USB Vac­uum Cleaner for Under $2 — Why you would want a vac­uum that doesn’t work well (see the demon­stra­tion at the end wherein a ton of dirt is still left behind) and is tied to your com­puter, I don’t know. Plus, I have a hard time believ­ing that the parts could be obtained for under $2.

18. The Mutt E-Mail Client — A text-based e-mail client for Unix sys­tems. As this is com­pletely irrel­e­vant to me (Gmail pro­vides every­thing I need and more for e-mail), I’m mov­ing on…

19. Another Ran­dom Day: Igno­rance — Another web comic. I actu­ally under­stand this one, but the punch­line sim­ply isn’t funny. This is turn­ing out to be a bad day for stum­bling onto gen­uinely humor­ous sites…

20. Edi­ble Land­scapes — Mmm, yummy.

21. Rejected Durex Ad — A pic of a fake Durex Con­doms ad fea­tur­ing George H. W. and Bar­bara Bush with text that says “Con­doms save lives,” the impli­ca­tion being that had the Bushes used pro­tec­tion, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been born, the war in Iraq wouldn’t have taken place, and count­less lives would be saved. I can’t help but won­der if the image cre­ator voted for Bush; it’d be a lot eas­ier to blame his par­ents rather than his own vote!

22. Punch­ing for a Con­ver­sa­tion — A wit­ness to a brief teenage fist fight won­ders at what point the fist becomes as com­fort­able (if not more so) as the spo­ken word in resolv­ing dif­fer­ences. Through­out mid­dle school I wit­nessed plenty of fights break out; thank­fully, I saw a greater num­ber of prob­lems resolved through talk­ing it out.

23. 20 Amaz­ing Fire­fox Short­cuts to Save You Time and Money — Some tips I didn’t know, many which I did… And I’m not sure how know­ing that I can press Esc to stop ani­mated images will save me time or money. I guess that it could save my san­ity on some sites, which is san­ity I can then use to save time and money else­where, but that’s a stretch.

24. Chem­istry Pick Up Lines — Ignor­ing the fact that physics is the most roman­tic of the sci­ences, the site pro­vides a list of chemistry-related pick up lines. Like most such lists, this one’s filled with the funny and the lame, and I’d feel sorry for any­one who would have these used on them.

25. epic Pole Vault Fail — Yep, the same image from ear­lier in this list… Not even to thirty pages, and we’ve already got a duplicate.

26. Strange Signs — I’m a sucker for strange and funny signs, and this list con­tains a few I’ve not seen before. I par­tic­u­larly like the warn­ing that toxic waste does not give you super­pow­ers, despite the fact it worked for Daredevil!

27. Top 10 Present Cloth­ing Styles I Don’t Get — Yeah, I don’t get these styles either.

28. A Writer’s Block — Another web comic. This one’s actu­ally funny, and I spent a few min­utes read­ing some of the older comics as well.

29. John 1:1–14 at sketchfu — A neat ani­ma­tion of John 1:1–14; this site looks fun…

30. Cave Explorer — Another funny web comic, though again it’s just an image out of con­text. Who made it? Where are the archives? Oh well, at least this one was enjoyable.

    Edit to add: Appar­ently the comic is from the Perry Bible Fel­low­ship series. Hat tip: Bucket, in the comments.

And that’s it, a look at thirty stum­bles in a row. How many of them are use­ful? How many are a com­plete waste of time? A few were inter­est­ing, but find­ing them cer­tainly doesn’t seem worth wad­ing through the rest of the bunch.

Per­haps I’ll refine the cat­e­gories I have set at Stum­ble­Upon and do another thirty in the future, to see if that list is any more worth­while than the thirty above.

If you are a Stum­ble­Upon user, is your rate of worth­while sites any bet­ter than mine?