Cool News-ish Sites
Slashdot: "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters", your daily dose of geeky news, from Linux to Sci Fi.
Reddit: Users submit links or thread ideas to any one of hundreds of 'subreddits', other users contrubite and vote up links of individual comments as they see fit.
Joystiq: A decent video game news blog.
Kotaku: Another video game news blog.
Tor.com: Science fiction news, reviews, and whatnot.
io9: Science fiction news, reviews, and whatnot.
Engadget: Gadget news, reviews, and whatnot.
Worth Reading
Wikipedia: Naturally.
TVTropes: "Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations"--not really cliches, but close. This site catalogs tropes in television, movies, books, anime, video games, and anything else in a wiki-like format. This winds up being far more engrossing than you would think.
Badass of the Week: Pretty self-explanitory.
Not Always Right: User submitted stories of the horrors of working in retail.
H2G2: The Hitchhiker's Guide online. Basically the Wikipedia before Wikipedia, but it never caught on due to the fact that they still used editors to approve articles (and they didn't always do a spectacular job).
Computer Stupidities: A very large collection of computer-related idiocy, usually from the tech support guy's point of view.
Not My Desk: Very humorous stories about the horrors of working as a temp. Read the See Spot Run story, absolutely hilarious.
Bash.org: A famous IRC quote repository. Note, that these are IRC quotes, which implies the occasional lowest of the low-brow humor, which means you wouldn't necessarily want your boss looking over your shoulder while you're reading it. It can still keep you amused for ages, though, as it doesn't seem to have an end.
Paul Graham's Blog: Well, it's not really a blog, no daily posts on random crap nobody cares about, just occasional essays. Paul Graham is a fairly famous computer scientist who worked for Yahoo at some point. His essays are typically very interesting, I very much recommend What You Can't Say and Why Nerds are Unpopular.
The Best Page in the Universe: Run by a man known only as Maddox, the most opinionated jerk you'll ever have the misfortune of meeting. His site is a collection of articles he's written about varying topics, all of which go back to the point that Maddox is the greatest person ever. This page can either be hilarious or angering, but it's worth a read when you're really bored.
Project Gutenberg: The ultimate in online reading. A huge collection of free online novels, all from the pubic domain. Dracula, works from Shakespeare, they've got something for everyone, with over 10,000 works available.
Humorous
Brunching Shuttlecocks: Closed down now, but the archive is still there. Everything from amusing ratings, to humorous move reviews, to awesome flash animations. We were all very sad to see it go.
Slumbering Lungfish: The blog of Lore, formally of Brunching Shuttlecocks. Typically an amusing read, plus there's the links to all his other endeavors.
The Book of Ratings: A splinter of the, now defunct, Brunching Shuttlecocks, always good for a laugh.
The Darwin Awards: Awarding those who have 'heroically' removed themselves from the gene pool, thereby improving it.
Something Awful: Home of the Photoshop Phriday. Always there pushing the envelope and showing us all that is wrong with the web, not for the easily offended.
Home Star Runner: The online cartoon featuring the ever popular Strongbad E-mail, if you haven't been here yet, where have you been?
The Onion: America's Finest News Source, or so they say. The Onion is a weekly satirical news paper.
Superdickery.com: Galleries of humorous old comic book covers, the most popular of which features various examples of Superman being a dick to people. They've got some hilarious stuff in there, you won't believe that some of that stuff is real. Here's one to give you an idea of what you're in for.
WWWF Grudge Match: Take two fictional characters and argue about which would win in a fight to the death or other competition. This is an old one, it's earliest competitions date back to 1995, and they updated (sometimes sporadically) for nearly ten years, but their archive is still pretty hilarious. An excellent time-waster.
Cracked: Despite the fact that I never cared much for the magazine or television show, Cracked.com is solidly entertaining, from their near-daily lists to their videos.
Webcomics
Penny Arcade: Possibly the most popular online comic there is. If you don't know of Penny Arcade, you probably aren't a gamer. Even the news posts are enjoyable (not to mention occasionally necessary to understand the comic).
xkcd: A series of very poorly drawn, mostly one panel comics; xkcd makes up for the art by being rather intelligent and obscenely nerdy. Great stuff.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: One of the best straight-up humor comics on the web, usually with a nerdy slant, but still very accessable.
Sam and Fuzzy: The exploits of Sam the Taxi driver and his friend Fuzzy, the sadistic teddy bear thing. Formally joke-a-day format, now more plot-oriented, but still funny. Great art style, too.
PvP: The exploits of the employees of a small video game magazine. Not as game-centric as it used to be, but still a classic.
Oglaf: Usually NSFW, but hilarious, even when it isn't.
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Pretty much self-explanitory.
Beartato and Reginald: Absurd humor at its finest.
Awkward Zombie: Yet another plotless gaming-oriented comic. Pretty hilarious at times--assuming you know the game.
Sluggy Freelance: One of the older webcomics, Sluggy is humorous, but also plot-oriented. At this point a long trip through the archives is pretty much manditory, but the quality has been pretty constant over the years.
Mac Hall: College humor with top-notch art, which has, sadly, ended.
Three Panel Soul: What the artist and writer of Mac Hall moved on to. Pretty different in tone, but still amusing.
Apple Geeks: Gaming/geek humor site, not necessarily about Apple computers. Very funny with an art style that is eerily similar to MacHall's.
Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman: a webcomic based on, and created in Half-Life 2. It probably won't do a whole lot for you if you haven't played the game, but if you have, it's hilarious.
VG Cats: A joke-a-day (well, joke-a-week) gaming comic, so much so that you probably won't be amused if you don't know much about whatever game a particular comic is based on. It's hilarious if you do, though.
8-Bit Theater: A sprite comic starring characters from the early Final Fantasy games. Don't let that fool you though, it has a tendency to be quite hilarious.
PartiallyClips: A very clever strip. Each strip is actually just a random bit of clip art pasted into three frames, all the writer does is make a story around it. I'd go so far as to call it more intellectual humor.
The Perry Bible Fellowship: Doesn't actually have anything at all to do with the Bible or religion. PBF is a series of random one shot strips that run the gamete from bizarre to hilarious to occasionally oddly disturbing. Here's a couple of my favorites.
Cutewendy: A bizarre little webcomic, expect the unexpected. It ended a while back, but the archives are still funny.
girly: The successor to Cutewendy, just as bizarre, but more of a plot.
Questionable Content: A bunch of indy-ish geeks hanging out at a coffee shop and having relationships. When I describe it like that, I wonder why I like it--my guess is the humor and generally quite good characters.
Rob and Elliot: Random humor with little-to-no on going stories. Reliably amusing.
Something Positive: Sardonic, dark, character-driven humor with an on-going story that actually goes places on occasion. It generally strikes a pretty solid mix of drama and humor.
Nerf Now!: A gaming comic typically with minimal dialoge, mostly aimed at Team Fortress 2 and Starcraft fans.
Sinfest: A very well drawn 'cartoon-y' strip, following the lives of a womanizer, a hot chick, and a pig, who frequently pal around with God, the Devil, Jesus, and Buddha, among others. Usually pretty light, but occasionally gets minorly political.
Online Videos
Rooster Teeth Productions: Machinima series producers, by which I mean people who use video games to act out stuff. These are the guys responsible for red vs. blue, the famous show based on Halo multiplayer. If you haven't already seen it, it's a must watch (even if you've never really played Halo). Oh, and they do a couple other shows, too.
How It Should Have Ended: A collection of videos detailing how certain movies should have ended. I recommend Star Wars Episode IV.
Mega64: A group of people that go out a perform video games in front of an unsuspecting populous. The Tetris video is probably my favorite.
GameTrailers.com: The best place to go for video game trailers. They update all the time, don't skimp on the quality and give you a choice between Quicktime or Windows Media formats (plus, they even let you download most videos, rather than locking you into streaming-only).
NESVideos: Time attack videos for an extremely wide assortment of old video games (not limited to the NES, despite the name). There's some really impressive stuff in there.
YouTube: Naturally.
Apple Movie Trailers: For completion's sake.
Computer Stuff
Ars Technica: A computer hardware enthusiast site, Ars focuses on the technology itself less than the product, in a more digestible form than white pages. Still can get pretty dry if you're not enthusiastic about new computer technology.
[H]ard|OCP: A hardware review site, quite even-handed and well-written. Gets more in depth then some more commercial sites.
Tom's Hardware Guide: Benchmarks and charts all over the place.
Overclockers.com: A great overclocking online resource, has a huge database of various overclocking attempts.
DShield: For the cyber security-minded. If nothing else it has interesting graphs concerning what ports are being hit the hardest in different parts of the world.
SourceForge.net: Largest depository of open-source projects online. If you have need of an application, chances are there's something here that'll be useful to you.
The 46 Best-ever Freeware: Just like the title says, some of the best freeware available is listed here.
NewEgg.com: The best online computer hardware dealer.
Price Watch: When you absolutely must have the cheapest price for computer hardware.
Web Games
Little Fluffy Industries: A listing of web games, with a review/paragraph on what to expect in each one. Run by Lore of Brunching fame.
Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure originally released in 1984, now in Java form! This is one of the hardest and most evil games ever. Not to mention addictive. It was co-written by Douglas Adams himself, so if you're a Hitchhiker's fan (which you should be) this is a must-play. This is an updated version with illustrations, but you can still find the more classic version here.
EyeMaze: Home of the Grow puzzle, easily one of the most original and puzzling webgames on the web. Just drop stuff onto the sphere and see what happens, apparently there are multiple ways to win, but it's difficult enough to just find one of them.
Popcap.com: Some of the best web games around. My personal favorites are Diamond Mine (Bejeweled) and Rocket Mania. Insanaquarium is a lot of fun as well.
Motherload: Take control of a mining robot cart and drill deep into the planet. Sell the minerals you collect to upgrade your cart to allow it to reach deeper depths and more expensive loot. This had myself and all of my coworkers addicted for a week or two at one point. Make use of the save feature if you ever want to see what lies at the bottom.
Yeti Sports: A Yeti smacks a penguin through the air with a baseball bat, try to get the best distance! It swept across the net like wildfire once and it's still a lot of fun.
Zombie3: Nuke (point and click) the zombies before they convert the humans! Simple and addictive.
De-Animator: Blast the zombies before they get to you! Simply point and click or hit Shift to switch to the shotgun when you get it. This one is very nice, it's art sets the tone very well and the gameplay is slightly addicting. I've made it as far as level 13.
Fly the Copter: A very addictive Java game, click to go up.
Orisinal: Wow, a large collection of very beautiful games. Some are almost surreal. Very simply designed games, too, the vast majority are controlled by the mouse only.
Pointless Flash Sites
Industrious Clock: A cool clock.
Killer Japanese Seizure Robots!: The name says it all, don't go there in a dark room while sitting too close to the monitor. I've got to find out what that song is.
Perpetual Bubblewrap: Because you know you want too.
Yugop.com: Now this one is a bit different. Trying to figure out the interface is half the fun!
Zombo.com: You can do anything at Zombo.com, anything at all.
Xaio Xaio No.3: Probably the best stick-figure action flash on the 'net.
Mario Brothers: A very dark look at the world of Super Mario. This one is a must see.
Door Buster: Actually, this is just a black and white, animated gif, but it still rocks as hard as (if not more than) Xaio Xaio. Basically, this guy wants to open this door, but it won't budge, so he starts wailing on it. Spectacular stuff.
Holiday Snowglobe: An extremely amusing Flash snowglobe. Either shake it up, or just watch the people run around.
Insanity Test: Stare at the picture, make sure your speakers are on (no, it's not one of those scary face pop up things) and if you laugh you may very well be insane.
Magical Trevor: Everyone loves Magical Trevor, he's got a very catching theme song. Also be sure to check out the sequels.
Dr. Tran: He's America's number one action hero and star of over thirty thousand major motion pictures. And he's a real doctor!
Amusing Shirts
ThinkGeek: The greatest online geek store out there. From awesome T-shirts, to cool toys, ThinkGeek has everything a geek could ask for.
Errorwear: T-shirts of your favorite computer errors!
Syswear: Yet more geeky shirts.
80's Tees.com: A webshop that sells tee shirts from the 1980's. Everything from cartoons to movies to video games.
Music
Rhyme Torrents: A great, free collection of some of Nerdcore hiphop's best.
Overclocked Remixes: A website of remixes inspired by video game theme music. They have over one thousand remixes, and many are extremely well done. I get a lot of music off their site. I highly recommend anything done by djpretzel, McVaffe, Protricity or analoq. Plenty of stuff for your listening pleasure.
The Video Game Pianist: Also known as the blindfolded pianist, he plays video game music on his piano (if you hadn't already figured that out). He's pretty spectacular at it, too. Definitely worth a listen.
minibosses: A band that plays nothing but old 8-bit video game tunes. Extremely well done.
MC Frontalot: The self-proclaimed home of Nerdcore Hiphop. Without question (or indeed, competition) my favorite rapper. I highly recommend Message No. 419.
Other Random Stuff
One Red Paperclip: This guy started out with one red paperclip and traded it for something of slightly greater value. His goal is to eventually trade his way up to a house. You won't believe how far he's actually gotten.
The Apollo Image Archive: Pictures from the Apollo program, many of which are at surprisingly high resolutions.
Worst Case Scenarios: Popular Mechanics has put together a series of articles regarding what to do in worst case scenarios such as airplane crashes, volcanic eruptions, and plunging over a waterfall.
DeGraeve.com: A site of random amusing programs, such as a GIF to TXT translator. Also has an image of the day link, which is typically quite amusing.
Wikiquote: Wikipedia for quotes.
Niles Monorail Tour: Pictures of a monorail track. It doesn't sound interesting at all until you find out that this is a monorail that somebody built to run around their backyard.
explodingdog: A very odd collection of drawings. Basically, you send him a title and he draws a crudely drawn image from it. Yet somehow what he comes up with is very appealing.
I Think: "Freakish musings on the way life should be". A collection of amusing one liners.
MoonShop: The Lunar Embassy. Supposedly, this guy owns the land rights to the Moon and will sell you an acre for $20.
Mecha Headquarters: For all your mecha needs, especially (but not limited too) Gundam.
Hobby Links Japan: For all your Gunpla needs; as well as an unparalleled selection of other Japanese model kits, action figures and character statues.
The Citizens' Association to Blow Up the Moon: Because, seriously, that thing has got to go.
The Zombie Anti-Defamation League: "Inside every Living person is a Dead one waiting to get out."
Gravity and Chaos Club: The website of a college club that likes to drop large amounts of bouncy balls and film the results. Man, I wish we had one of these at my college.
The No-Case Case Mod: A tutorial on how a bunch of guys made a complete computer case out of nothing but spray on insulation. Check out the pictures.
Rubik's Cube Solver: Input your cube's layout and this site will give you all the necessary steps to solve that damn thing.
A Salute to the Atari 2600: A tribute to that which the video game industry was made of back in the pre-Nintendo days. Great for anyone with fond memories of Missile Command or that horrible rendition of Pac Man.
The Encyclopedia of Arda: An encyclopedia for the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Middle Earth. If you have any interest at all in The Lord of the Rings you can waste a lot of time here. It's astounding how much detail Tolkien put into his mythology.
Eeggs.com: A huge online database of Easter Eggs discovered in Movies, Computer Software, DVDs, Books and Music. The coolest Easter Egg I ever saw was the 3D area you could fly around in if you did a few specific steps in Excel 97. Made me real popular in my BCIS class back in the day.
