So you find yourself with time to kill on your lunch break and are looking for something to do online. Here is a list of ten interesting sites to entertain you for short periods of time each day. All of these area purely subjective and based on nothing more or less than my opinion.
1. Factoidz - factoidz.com. Shameless self-promotion. Learn something new or share your knowledge with the world. Features a revenue sharing system that allows you to make a little bit of money for articles your have written.
2. Gawker Media Network - www.gawker.com. The actual gawker site features frequently updated world news - the kind of news that shows up on TV at 6:00. But the real appeal of the Gawker Media Network is the branch sites. Wherever your interest falls, you are certain to find a site that will keep you obsessively updated on that topic. io9, for example, monitors science-fiction and fantasy television, movies an books. Kotaku (my personal favourite) is about video games and everything video game related. Jalopnik is about cars, Deadspin is about college sports and Defamer is about celebrity gossip. With eleven different sites in the network, you are sure to find one that interests you.
3 - 6. Stumbleupon, Shoutwire, Digg and Reddit. Rather than name specific fun sites, it is easier to name sites that help you find fun sites. Shoutwire, digg and reddit are democratic news sites, meaning that people find interesting websites, post them and other people vote on whether they’re interesting or not.
7. Cracked. www.cracked.com. Funny, interesting articles, usually presented as countdowns. Articles include things like: The 6 Most Pointlessly Elaborate Movie Murder Plots, 5 Government Programs That Backfired Horribly and the 15 Most Completely Useless iPhone Apps.
8. The Editing Room. www.the-editing-room.com. The best (and quite possibly, only) source on the web for funny, abridged movie scripts. The basic idea of the site is to rewrite movie scripts if they were ten times shorter and one hundred times more honest. Basically, they make fun of movies. If you actually wasted time watching The Happening, I highly recommend their rewrite, it won’t refund the time you wasted on that film, but it will make you feel better to have it mocked mercilessly.
9. Kingdom of Loathing. www.kindomofloathing.com An online, browser-based role-playing game where you can play as a Pastamancer (or a Sauceror or several other classes) and fight in places like the Misspelled Cemetary or Degrassi Knoll. Fight monsters like the Paper Towelgeists and Zombie Chefs.
10. The Usual Suspects. There are certain sites that are so famous, so elemental to the existence of the internet that almost everyone knows about them. For this reason, I won’t go into detail and will combine them into one item on the list. Visit www.youtube.com for user created videos, www.craigslist.org or www.ebay.com for classifieds or all kinds of auctions respectively. For vast amounts of information that isn’t compressed into convenient Factoidz, www.wikipedia.org is a good site.
