Because You Can Read, And They Had A Web Site

January 28, 2010 6:26 AM

It's time for some nostalgia.

The best bits? The charts.

While you're out there, enjoy a good brunch.

posted by turgid dahlia (20 comments total)

Anybody smell Onions?
posted by punkfloyd at 6:31 AM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

Careful, onions make the mods cry. Them and Baby Jesus.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:36 AM on January 28, 2010

Careful, onions make the mods cry. Them and Baby Jesus.

Baby Jesus makes the mods cry?
posted by eatyourcellphone at 6:58 AM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

For some reason SatireWire is connected in my memory with another humor news site, albeit a monumentally unfunny one. Some kind of sister site to Slashdot? (Not UserFriendly.org, which would love to one day be able to hope to dream of being monumentally unfunny.)
posted by DU at 7:02 AM on January 28, 2010

The Axis If Just As Evil might be the first Internet article I ever discovered because my parents were talking about. Fond memories of a friend's parents reading it out load from a copy they printed out.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:12 AM on January 28, 2010

WWJLS?
posted by tommasz at 7:21 AM on January 28, 2010

Oh man, printing out websites. Now I am feeling nostalgic.
posted by dunkadunc at 7:40 AM on January 28, 2010

Well if we're trotting out old faves. I still miss Suck.
posted by oddman at 7:42 AM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah! And whatever happened to The Spark?
posted by battlebison at 7:48 AM on January 28, 2010

These bring back fond memories. I loved the SatireWire author's explanation of why he was quitting: ideas used to fall from the sky, like confetti. He said the confetti stopped falling, so he stopped the site.
posted by Monochrome at 8:21 AM on January 28, 2010

I miss the Brunching Shuttlecocks and the Self Made Critic's movie reviews:

Supernova:

Apparently, according to this movie, in the future everybody is really, really dumb, and they've never seen a sci-fi movie in their lives. How dumb can the human race really be? How dumb could the writers have been? At one point, they specifically tell us that the ship only has 6 special 'jump pods', and then later, the computer tells us that evil bad guy has just destroyed Pod #7. Excuse me?

Rule #1: if you're ever out in deep space: Don't go rescue the weird guy who shouldn't be out there anyway. And definitely don't bring his mysterious cargo on board. I wanted to spend the movie bitch-slapping the characters.

Godzilla:

What's the matter, you boys tire of writing your movies so you hired some soap writers to fill in the blanks? Come on, this shouldn't be hard.

Godzilla. Stomps New York. For Two Hours.

Hell, it could've been a nature documentary for all we cared. A Love Story? A Career-minded Bimbo? A vague and confusing French Agent? No. No. No. Read my lips.

Godzilla. Stomps New York. For Two Hours.

posted by zarq at 9:09 AM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think you mean Metafilter's Own^TM Lore Sjöberg's Brunching Shuttlecocks
posted by blue_beetle at 9:12 AM on January 28, 2010

Well if we're trotting out old faves. I still miss Suck.

Ah, high school and early days of college. I still like the site for it's sparse layout, Terry Colon's art, and the snarky attitudes. Did you know it was one of the earliest ad-supported content sites on the Internet? I didn't until today. And I'm surprised the site is still up, now nearing a decade of archive-only status.

I remember changing the URL embedded in the Real Player program from real.com to suck.com, and I was mighty pleased with myself. (With my limited skills, I was limited to URLs of 4 characters.)
posted by filthy light thief at 9:29 AM on January 28, 2010

Have you seen the Filthy Critic? It's not so much witty as it is withering, but it's definitely refreshing.

Extraordinary Measures:
"It's like the makers of this movie think really nice, expensive shit trumps any sort of ethics or integrity."

Avatar:
"Avatar's plot is virtually identical to Ferngully, a shit-for-brains, message-heavy kids' cartoon about pixies who must stop loggers from destroying their rainforest. One human pretends to be a pixie and falls in love with the pixies and discovers how precious their world is. That is the plot of Avatar, except this new mega-production isn't handled as maturely as the kiddie movie, and it has a shitload more carnage."
posted by oddman at 9:38 AM on January 28, 2010

Yeah! And whatever happened to The Spark?

They grew up to become SparkNotes and OkCupid. Sometimes I wonder how it all worked out for that guy's sister.
posted by mhum at 11:17 AM on January 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you really want nostalgia: Denounce.com precedes both The Onion and SatireWire. (Denounce started online in 1980. Yes, you read that right.)
posted by brianstorms at 1:06 PM on January 28, 2010

Ohhhh, what're they gonna do next, the Flapping Dickie?!?
posted by bpm140 at 2:50 PM on January 28, 2010

For some reason SatireWire is connected in my memory with another humor news site, albeit a monumentally unfunny one. Some kind of sister site to Slashdot?

You must be thinking of BBspot.
posted by decagon at 3:42 PM on January 28, 2010

It's long gone from the Internet, but around 1998, the Canadian news-satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes ran a fake-news site of its own called 22online.com, and man, it was pretty good. At least, it entertained 19-year-old me pretty good. Anyone remember it? As I recall, it was mostly concerned with making vicious fun of Norwegians.
posted by bicyclefish at 7:58 PM on January 28, 2010

For some reason SatireWire is connected in my memory with another humor news site, albeit a monumentally unfunny one. Some kind of sister site to Slashdot?

segfault.org?
posted by sneakums at 5:09 AM on January 29, 2010