January 01, 2003

Idiot-O-Rama

Norwegian Blogger gives his own unique treatment to a supremely moronic anti-American website, one that is, in Vegard's words:

[...]a piece of Primeval Idiotarianism, a chunk of Pure Stupidity left behind from the world was young.
Do visit "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Growing Up in the War Machine" to get the full flavor of the conspiratoid nonsense, the self-pity, and worst of all, the sub-par circa-1996 web "design" of the place, which is complete with huge headers, zillions of animated gifs and ads, nonsensical bulleted lists, ugly background images, scrolling "marquee" text (the "blink" tag of Internet Explorer) and badly-placed giant jpegs. Then read Vegard's post.

Update: According to Combustible Boy, this website was favorably cited by the Iraqi Ministry of Information's official Iraq Daily publication. That ought to tell you something.

Posted by Andrea Harris at January 1, 2003 08:16 PM
Comments

Even apart from its goofy premise, it's farging ugly. (Anyone with a custom cursor, for Jeebus' sake, should be forced to use Blogger templates for the rest of his unnatural life.)

I think Vegard let this guy off easy.

Posted by: CGHill at January 1, 2003 at 10:23 PM

The only thing missing from that site is a cheesy MIDI file that automatically plays.

Posted by: susan b. at January 1, 2003 at 11:18 PM

Yeah, the Iraq Daily site appears to have excerpted the "In the Shadow of the Bomb" essay in multiple parts; I linked to part 2, but it seems that the Iraq Daily deletes its online files after a couple of days, so my link is dead now. (Good thing I linked to the original as well.) I'm gonna have to start caching some of the wackier stuff that I find on that Iraqi site.

The horrendously designed MetaMagic news page (metamagic.org/worldnews) that published "In the Shadow of the Bomb" also has a bunch of weird space-alien stuff in addition to the usual left-conspiracy claptrap. It also links to the less wacko, but still sublimely idiotarian, Guerrilla News Network site (gnn.tv).

By the way, if you think the design on the "In the Shadow of the Bomb" page was bad, you might not want to check out MetaMagic's News of the Strange and Supernatural page (metamagic.org/strangezone), which has an eye-burning smiley-face background as well as automatically loaded sound files.

Posted by: Combustible Boy at January 1, 2003 at 11:25 PM

Maybe the hideous design is their way of keeping sane people away from their website.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 1, 2003 at 11:39 PM

All this site needs (apart from the above suggestions) is a lengthy and heavily-illustrated exposé of contrails (or 'chemtrails') and all its HTML in 16 colours, and its cheesy retroid cred would be assured. What it reminds me of most is the old Aryan Nations and also David Icke's reptilian conspiracy theory site.

Posted by: Steven Chapman at January 2, 2003 at 10:55 AM