Category: Random Links

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any urban exploration links, but today I found a new goldmine: Opacity.us. Initially I found it through a Fark link on the Staten Island Boat Graveyard, but soon discovered the vast, mind-boggling stores of photo galleries from asylums, hospitals, power plants and more. Grab a beverage and some chips and prepare to devote a few hours to it.

Because clearly the glossy, elfin, totally-not-gay Tom Cruise is going to eat America’s Sweetheart. Free Katie!

I honestly have no idea what this is about. Yet I am strangely fascinated.

Once every year or so, a new site comes to my attention that brings me such joy and revives my interest in the Internet. I find a place I can spend hours exploring. For reference, previous contenders are Engrish.com, SecretFunSpot.com, Lightningfield.com, and GhostTownGallery.com.

Today’s new find: Lileks.com. This site features, among other things, pictorial histories of 70’s Ozark travel destinations, the Gallery of Regrettable Food, and a personal favorite of mine, Matchbook-o-Rama.

The site in general covers a lot of things I’ve found a fondness for in the last few years: old advertising and graphic design. It’s a warehouse of oddities and curiosities. Enjoy.

A couple more treats from the Nevada wastes:

Burning Man

To the north, joyriding on the playa.

And, via Heath, detonation craters near Area 51.

Suddenly Nevada seems like the most interesting state in the union.

Here are some interesting places to see from the sky:

Hamer, Idaho

Somewhere south of Las Vegas

Somewhere north of Las Vegas

Not that this is a big surprise, but I found it amusing that the area near Los Alamos National Laboratory is pretty blurry. Here’s a well-carved housing development outside Albuquerque, though.

More obviously, the US Capitol Building has been pixelated out.

Here’s the massive strip mine at scenic Butte, Montana.

In a similar vein, here is the near-surreal ugliness of Gary, Indiana.

Some colorful fields near the appropriately named Happy, Texas.

And of couse, the Statue of Liberty

Myspace.com is now offering users their own directory names. I had erroneously assumed that I would be a lock for myspace.com/colter. Oh how wrong I was. Turns out there are dozens of Colters on myspace.

For those who haven’t seen it, Google Maps now not only contains clickable, scrollable maps of the entire US, but also satellite image composites. Years ago when I was impressed by a similar feature at MSN’s Terraserver, I linked to The Boneyard outside Tucson, Arizona.

Fark.com has been delivering prank versions of itself all day. They appear to happen at random, but if you Refresh often you’ll see one eventually.

Here are some versions I’ve seen:

1999 Version
Maker’s Mark Hack
Guinea Pigs
Boobies
Beer
Drew’s Admin
Storm’s Fark (Drew’s baby)
UltraFark Contract
Bunghole Meadow?

As if I hadn’t had enough surreality this week after yesterday’s fearsome link discovery, I found another link delving deeply into the murk of yet another weird world I never knew existed. It started, as these things always do, with an innocent search. Like Alice, I followed a peculiar creature down a very dark hole into another plane of existence. It all began with a Google image search on “remoras.” Fascinated by the apparent irrelevance of the #1 return, I had to click on it. It led me here.

Visiting that site I feel like the speaker in Colerdige’s “Kubla Khan.” Beware.