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The Biggest Time Sink Thread EverMay 20th, 2005 by Kevin Cheng :: see related comic |
I’m sure most readers have experienced something akin to this: you open your browser to do something productive, then something like My! Yahoo opens up with some news or perhaps RSS updates of blogs. “Hm, that looks interesting,” you say, and proceed to read up on that article, which then leads you to three others you opened in tabs, and one of them is a Flash game where you suddenly feel it is your duty to prove your score is higher than anyone else who’s commented on that blog.
Before you know it, the entire day has passed you by. The web is not only like TV with unlimited number of channels, it’s TV with relationships between channels such that you can’t stop watching at the end of the episode. Imagine watching an episode of CSI and every forensic detail, or every character, could lead to another TV show - some documentaries about the evidence analysis techniques, others perhaps dramas about those characters. That’s what the web is like.
I always feel like I’m jumping down a rabbit hole.
In honour of these rabbit holes, we’d like everyone to post their three favourite time wasting sites. Try to be original, we don’t want everyone posting slashdot.
Depending on how good a job you guys do, next week there may or may not be a comic.
Hm… I’m thinking mine would be:
http://slashdot.org
http://plastic.com
and http://npr.org
Whoops KC said to be original… well when I want to think a bit harder while procrastinating, I’ll read
http://dyske.com
and http://paulgraham.com
Great. Now nobody gets to say those.
Btw, anchors tags are permitted to link your urls, or just include http.
My recent blog time suck is We Make Money Not Art. Some great stuff there, especially the codependent stuffed toys.
Most recent game score time suck: Squares to Sheep. Current record: 9178, 94 squares.
Another big time suck is of course, Flickr.
http://AmigaWorld.net
http://Singletrackworld.com
http://Stylegala.com
http://Hedonistica.com
http://DaveZilla.com
(notice how all of these places have forums and/or flash games?)
and of course that huge list of RSS feeds in Sage…
here are my time-sucking feeds:
Wired News
Digital Web Magazine
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Mac OS X Hints
Mac Rumors
xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
http://infosthetics.com/
InfoDesign: Understanding by Design
Ask E.T
OK/Cancel (yes baby, big time 
beyond bullets
Boxes and Arrows
Interactive Narratives
Gizmodo
well, well - lots of stuff to read… guess how much time is left for the “real” work
Havoc Pennington’s page, including of course his weblog: http://ometer.com/
Eric S. Raymond’s page: http://www.catb.org/~esr/ (thank god he doesn’t add new content too often, but it’s all sooo interesting… you’ve been warned).
And of course ok-cancel page 
Everything2 has to be the biggest time-waster ever! It comes number one, number two and number 3 for me
Evian snowball in the House of Parliament game. Made the recent UK general election bearable.
The Register - home of BOFH
This is my killer : http://www.bloglines.com. It contains my 300 RSS feeds…
http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/
http://www.scionlife.com/ (substitute message board for your favorite car make/model if desired)
http://thedailywtf.com/
http://www.slate.com/
http://www.satanslaundromat.com/ (not a big time sink, but as addictive as crack)
http://www.wikipedia.org/ (another one for the “that should be obvious” pile, but no one has posted it yet so here it is)
http://www.ubersite.com/
http://www.workorspoon.com/
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/
and a local favorite…
http://www.twodorks.com/
http://www.sfcave.com/snake.php
An incredible game called Snake Jump, it will keep you playing for hours.
Single pages are nice, but if you want to waste a serious amount of time on the internet you need StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/
StumbleUpon is a plugin for FireFox that lets you rate pages (on a two point scale, like it or don’t) and uses the pages you like to suggest new pages. This brings surfing the web to a whole new level, you will waste hours using it.
The usual suspects (as noted above)
-delicious
-bloglines (for all my crazy RSS feed needs)
-wikipedia
-something awful
-stumbleupon (which can be used independent of Firefox - but is even more addictive with the plugin)
A few more for the pile:
-Flickr, akin to delicious, only this time you can peak at people’s photos, not their bookmarks
-visualthesaurus.com or other info vis applications, to explore words you think you know the meaning of
-tribe.net, to explore how people classify themselves into groups, and to see what insane subgroupings exist online
-Newsmap, at http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/index.cfm - one of the way to keep up with what’s occuring right now (in real life, online, whatever)
Google Sight seeing, am yet to finish this one
http://www.googlesightseeing.com/2005/05/18/ufo-update/
Other than the above, rest all the usual
http://del.icio.us/popular/
http://www.ok-cancel.com/
http://www.digital-web.com/
http://www.ihatemycubicle.com/
http://hedonistica.com/
Firefox has ruined my life.
Since switching to it last summer … tabs that are persistent across browser sessions, organized bookmarks, and all sorts of extensions that have ostensibly improved my browsing productivity but have disturbed the precious equilibrium that kept me browsing too much or for too long.
Oh god, wait: what am I doing here? It’s happening again! oh no!
customerssuck.com
portalofevil.com (for news)
http://www.techcomedy.com/
and #4 (sorry, gotta do one last one) thelostlinks.com
Lots of my break time goes to the 4D rubiks cube (although be warned, it takes some time to really understand the interface). It lets you randomly scramble a number of moves and then try to fix it. I can pretty consistently solve 6 moves.
http://www.ok-cancel.com/
http://www.stuff.co.nz/
http://www.elvis.ac.nz/brain?RecentChanges
Mine are:
http://www.kotaku.com
http://www.bt3a.com
and of course, http://www.greatwriting.co.uk
Great idea…
now, everybody knows another N places to go and happily waste time. Like a junkie troop (no harm intended) sharing places to go for another crack dose…
sorry for no posting more places, i’m very busy looking at yours! ;-P
Unquestionably for me, it’s been The Kill Everyone Project. Two and a half million dead, and I’m still clicking strong.
I’ll also plug Norm And Cory, a perennial favorite webcomic. Very different than OK/Cancel, but no one I’ve introduced it to hasn’t enjoyed it.
Finally, BandToBand.com Is the most rockin’ site in existence. It’s like Six Degrees of Seperation, only with rock bands and their members. Where else can you link together They Might Be Giants and Guns n’ Roses?
–Mongoose
All my time sinks are listed here (Slashdot, Wikipedia, and paulgraham). Should we now wrap this article up and burn it forever? 
Lately I’ve been starting at John Maeda’s Simplicity blog and wandering from there, following links until I’m so saturated with tech culture that I have to go play Penguin Baseball for an hour.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/penguinswing.html
Searching Flickr tags and watching my own slideshows has become my new trick for procrastinating.
http://www.cockeyed.com/
Especially the How Much Is Inside? area
http://homestarrunner.com/
Actually, I don’t waste much time here these days, but there are still some classic moments.
http://www.toxiccustard.com/ is a great time sink. Daniel (the guy who runs the site) even promotes his site with “waste your time here” ads. And there’s some very funny stuff on his site…
What, no one just chills at www.alistapart.com and gets excited about the latest and greatest web design tricks?
Flash Games: Orisinal, very cute, very addictive
News: Fark
Toys: , latest mobile phones from Hong Kong
Oops, my bad HTML
Toys: 3G Mobile, latest mobile phones from Hong Kong
http://www.popbitch.com
http://www.liquidgeneration.com
http://www.comics.com
http://www.iwantoneofthose.com
http://www.hotornot.com
My big timesinks are “deal” sites — it’s somewhat amazing how online forums can completely change your shopping patterns:
Congratulations folks. I’ve wasted more time than I thought possible and somehow still managed to get our comics out.
You’ll be happy to know that searching for “time sink” brings up this page within the first page.
So I’m challenging readers who haven’t submitted time wasting sites to do so and get us to the top.
Speaking of:
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com is really what its name says, but it’s damn funny for gamers.
The Art of Nelson de la Nuez
Yes, in the past I have lost a lot of time to Homestar Runner.
OK my second submisson (cause i wanna keep it going)
http://www.squizzle.com/picmain.asp?page=1&sort=
ive lost myself there lots
gotta have your intake of http://www.milkandcookies.com/
and lastly, for now, (not ALWAYS safe for work)
http://memepool.com/
OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc. (Who Links Here) ?