AIGAlink virtual
gallery
Wonderful. The American Institute of Graphic Arts has developed a beautiful,
well-constructed Web site that walks you through a graphics arts exhibition
in Philadelphia. Click your way through three rooms (more are expected soon)
of outstanding projects, from interior signage to advertisement posters.
And fear not: high-resolution graphics won't clog your bandwidth. The images
are appropriately compressed to load quickly and maintain high quality.
A
DCIP Home
Page
Have you ever wondered who pulls the world's puppet strings? How can a
hopeless drone like yourself ever hope to identify one of the "hidden
masters"? The DCIP Home page was created to unveil conspiracy with
a set of pointers to the masters' "official" web pages. While
the concept and tone of this site is intriguing, there just isn't much material
here. The Conspiracy must have deleted it. The people responsible for this
page do a much better job with their Illuminati and Trilateral Commission
Homepages. Wait... Do I smell a conspiracy? -MP
C+
Internet in a Baby
Internet in a Baby is revolution in interface design. You are presented
with a photo of a baby boy on the phone. Clicking on different parts of
the baby send you to different spots on the web. Click on the hair, and
you go to Chewies Hair Cream page. Click on the right hand, and you go to
the Skywalker-worshipping Order of the Right Hand. You get the idea. My
biggest gripe about the site is that the title is misleading. The picture
isn't of a baby at all, but a five year-old child. I guess Internet in a
Pre-Schooler wasn't a catchy enough title.-MP
A-
looking
I looked and I looked, and I clicked on what I thought were tomatoes. The
more I clicked, the smaller they got. Wow. When I finally got to the main
page, I found a site organized by color - don't ask - filled with artsy
poetry, and essays on music theory, modernism, and the Greeks. The site's
aesthetic is clean and well-crafted like a Mondrian painting. And, like
the artist's work, is just a little more exciting than brushing my teeth.
But, hey, if you're into black turtlenecks and clove cigarettes, c'mon down!-MP
B-
Mad Hatter
Mary Holiday, the Mad Hatter, runs a fan club for himself. And why not?
While the site is mostly a collection of previous weird posts to various
newsgroups, he fills the balance with FAQs and figures about his life and
philosophy. Though the place lacks whiz-bang web stuff (or even graphics),
it's a monument to net-ego. Any net-god wannabe should visit and take careful
notes: Chastise anyone who asks you a question, and talk about how cool
you are. Incessantly. If you've got a smidgen of personality, people might
eventually believe it.-MP
B
Matthew and Jake's
Adventures
Matthew and Jake are two MIT students who first posted their collection
of hypertext stories way back in 1994 and haven't updated the site since.
The illustrated romps are told in a children's book style that gets old
quickly and makes me glad I didn't attend MIT. The web is a bit different
now in 1996, but if you feel nostalgia for a time when Mosaic was the hot
thing, it might be worth a visit.-MP
C
PavePage
A site devoted to the advancement of the Holy Cause of Paving the Earth.
The Holy Order of Asphalt wishes to flatten mountains, fill oceans, and
eliminate all animals except Blind White Cave Cows, which will be used for
hamburger in the Beer and Burger communion. The Plan purportedly teaches
knowledge of the twin pleasures, speed and convenience. Help this cause,
and you will be rewarded; defy it and risk the wrath. This example of tongue-in-cheek
ranting is a cut above most.-RK
B
Punchy
Advice
Humans, mostly college students, submit questions about love and roommates,
which are answered by a gaggle of quasi-muppets. Characters include a nerd,
a babe, and some creatures of indistinguishable ethnic origin that are probably
offending someone. Pictures of the characters mean excessive download times
for paltry laughs. Questions are sometimes amusing; the answers usually
less so. If you're interested in having these things appear at your party
or corporate training video, you can contact Leo Brodie, who has thoughtfully
supplied abundant marketing materials for his puppet company, Punch and
Brodie. -RK
B-
SpinnWebe
SpinnWebe brims with greatness. It's the home of the Dysfunctional Family
Circus, in which you replace Bil Keane's normally rollicking cartoon captions
with some of your own. Then there's this weird Magic 8-Ball thing that responds
to your queries by sending you to a carefully chosen URL somewhere on the
Web. Then there's the Nipple Server. Forget watching some boring coffee
pot, dorm room, or fish bowl - this site has a new nipple posted everyday!
View it, love it, and vote on its nippleness. -MP
A
The Illuminati
The Bavarian Illuminati are hell-bent on covertly taking over the world
- and maybe they've already succeeded. Here, on their alleged "Homepage,"they document their clandestine activities with video footage, pictures,
links to "controlled" sites, and even secret text documents only
available by e-mail. Don't cross them, though. A video of their dreaded
Dropped Wooden Rabbit Torture made me rethink trashing their otherwise content-anemic
site. It doesn't make them look that all-powerful. Their all-seeing pyramid
on your dollar bill may just be the beginning. -MP
B
The Mars
Earth Connection
Did little men construct a tower five miles high on the moon? Is that really
George C. Scott's face staring up from Mars? Richard Hogland seems to think
so, and this site provides the photographs to make you a believer. These
images are freaky. The Mars-Earth Connection is a jumping off point for
those interested in these and other interplanetary enigmas that NASA refuses
to acknowledge. The site itself is organized like a research paper. Long
documentation is stuffed onto one page, and many of the odd resources it
cites aren't even on the Internet. Do they think I'm going to visit the
library?-MP
B+
The
Neoist Path
The Neoist way encourages plagiarism as it saves time and shows initiative.
Had I known this sooner, I would have lifted whole segments for this review.
Links are often confusing, as is a lot of the babble about the Seven by
Nine Squares. Maybe basking in this disharmonious flux of gibberish is the
point. If so, we all need to ask ourselves whether we have better things
to do with our time than frequenting this site. If we *don't* have more
pressing pursuits, we should hand over the planet to the dolphins right
now.-RK
C
The Night
Gallery
This elaborate and visually first-rate homepage is devoted to horror, true
love, and body noise. By his own admission, the proprietor spends four hours
a day maintaining his site. An extensive audio gallery is devoted to burps
and farts. Other wonders include pictures of frightening food discovered
in the back of his fridge. I get the impression site master Kevin is the
Sara Winchester of the Web, driven by some odd demon to ceaseless construction
of his page. I'd be truly worried - except he's fallen in love, which is
another subject documented with meticulous detail.-RK
A
Welcome to Spatula
City
A wide variety of fictitious spatulas are on display, including the Five
Spatulas of Fury, and the 12 Gauge Spatula Attachment, which is effective
for cleaning even the most encrusted food off of any surface.You are encouraged
to submit ideas for spatulas, but if managers Stefan and Jenny Gagne don't
get back to you, it's because they don't like your idea - or are busy with
their real lives. The site isn't limited to spatula fun; you'll also find
odd links to such things as an online staring contest, where you go mano-a-mano
with a large eyeball. -RK
A
You Have
Found Us
Alien invasion paranoia as conceptual art. The site features products for
defense against extraterrestrials, though, as you will soon learn, no place
is safe. There's an abundance of striking black-and-white graphics, plus
subtle and well-conceived humor free of the literary sledgehammers most
web-site jokesters feel they must wield to get a laugh. A favorite was the
fine print disclaimer that degenerates into a rant by the company's disgruntled
lawyer. The site looks good and is easy to navigate.-RK
A
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