website of the week

Catatonic

A few years ago, Internet culture monolith www.yourethemannowdog.com hit the URL scene, immediately causing caustic debates over whether the Web page, whose sole function is to loop a Sean Connery sound bite from the film Finding Forrester, was enlighteningly hypnotic or ear-smashingly crass. After a litter of copycats, the original creator developed www.ytmnd.com. Its "About" page explains that along with providing a forum, it "allows users to create and view sites similar to yourethemannowdog.com." And they have. With 27,108 users, the domain's simple site formula, which "accepts all major image formats and the MP3 and WAV sound formats," has been churned out to the tune of 41,906 sites. As more are added each day, the world grows dangerously closer to the achievement of ytmnd.com's unlabeled mission statement: "With any luck this site should help ruin the Internet." When making that statement, the Webmaster was most likely hoping for the number of crudely constructed and utterly random Web pages to simply reach critical mass and drag average Internet quality down to a perilously low level (check www.ytmnd.com/list). But that's not how it's going to happen. Internet inanity has a messiah, and its name is http://kittys.ytmnd.com. Turn up your speakers, click the link, and watch as a rotating backdrop of 14 excruciatingly cute kittens and a toddler-narrated soundtrack melt your brain.

—Nick Norlen

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