Weird is the new cool thing. At least it is if you are an inhabitant cyberspace, where the esoteric and the bizarre clutter the pavement like Snickers wrappers outside a Chocoholic’s Anonymous meeting.
Those who believe the internet has shrugged off its origins as an object of geek adoration to become a mainstream medium clearly are spouting claptrap. The net, frankly, remains as bonkers as ever, for which we should be enormously grateful.
For instance, you may participate in the search for the Loch Ness monster by keeping a beady eyeball fixed on lochness.co.uk, where a webcam gazes over a placid, oddly menacing, Scottish lake.
This would be a fantastic idea were it not for the fact that the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist, being the creation of some pissed-up locals who spied a strangely shaped log bobbing in the mist 25 years ago. Prove me wrong, guys. Prove me wrong!
Almost as peculiar as a fictional Highlands plesiosaur but, thankfully, rather more real is writer Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman comics proved the graphic novel could be deep. literary and scary as heck. You can share his inner musings at neilgaiman.com, a website/blog that reveals him to be self-deprecating and something of a geezer.
Gaiman’s work often suggests a feverish mind-state, obsessed with the dark crevices of modernity. His site, however, is breezy and refreshingly flippant. In addition to blogging upcoming projects, he offers some extracts from new novel, Anansi Boys, about a loser who discovers his father was a west African voodoo god. Which can really ruin the weekend, if you’re not expecting it.
HP Lovecraft is another cult author whose writings explore the bleaker implications of the human condition. Sixty years dead, he today lives on in the internet. Recently, a bunch of fans, trading at the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, pooled their saving and shot a silent-movie tribute to the original King Of Odd. At www.cthulhulives.org, you can download a trailer for the film, an adaptation of the short story ‘The Call Of Cthulhu’ – in its own right, a masterpiece of surreal outsider-art.
Newcomers to Lovecraft – oh, we pity you – should start at www.chaosium.com, which keeps alive the flame with a huge range of books, games, t-shirts, mugs and ‘Cthulhu For President’ badges. We wish!
Those in search of lighter distractions must visit the best weblog in the world, ever: defectiveyeti.com.
The work of Matthew Baldwin, a Seattle IT professional, who, quite obviously, has far too much time on his hands, Defective Yeti sprinkles its sub-Onion humour with the occasional startling insight. Regular features: the bad movie review (all the worst put -downs from the US press collated for you pleasure) and informed rants about the detritus of popular culture. This week, charity wristbands get it in ear. We can only applaud.