Fark.com Comments Thingee (115999)

My friend Thomas just sent me something about http://meathats.com, which got me wondering whether anyone is doing sushi hats... But I'm not going to spend some of my insomniac hours looking.

Instead I wrote Thomas this note about a couple of other sites, and decided it's worth sharing here:


Speaking of online humor, have your students FARKed? Or caught the FARK vs. SomethingAwful rivalry?

That's http://fark.com and http://somethingawful.com

In addition to the bloggish (http://boblog.blogspot.com/, http://stepno.manilasites.com, http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/bob_stepno/weblog) site-sharing at fark, the virtual community of visual lampoon, satire and tastelessness at fark can be a hoot. On the other hand, I think somethingawful.com tries too hard to live up to its name and gets too ugly.

To see what I mean at fark, pop open the home page in a windoid next to this one... notice the column of thin, half-inch-wide banner icons that say things like "amusing," "cool," "stupid" and "boobies"? Scan down until you find one of those that says "Photoshop" -- with a text field next to it that says something like "Photoshop this Brazilian carnival succubus (hard)," and a number in the right column, like f'rinstance "133"

That means that someone has suggested an image to be hacked with Photoshop, and that 133 people have either hacked it and posted the hack, or posted a comment on the hack.

I haven't looked at "Photoshop this Brazilian carnival succubus (hard)" yet--not only because I'm afraid "hard" means "terribly disgusting," but because I'm on my modem connection at the moment, and one document with 133 images will grind my iBook to a halt.

The real "communal CMC visual speech deconstructionist academic researcher" in me might find something conference-paperish to say about the self-referential (in-joke) dialogue going on among fark users -- in that an element from a particularly amusing farked photo from last month will reappear being farked into a new photo this week, etc. (A pretty girl in a purple wig and a Diamondbacks T-shirt holding up a sign was one... Osama and his gang in front of a cave was another.)