Category Archives: Top Ten Lists

by admin

10 Awesome Internet Time Sinks

When it comes to sucking up time, there’s nothing better than the internet. You can use it to do something productive, or in our case here on ‘Monday’ we like to use it to waste loads of time. Here are just a few places we like to go when we want to use up all of our free time, and by free time I mean all the time, since we here at ‘Monday’ tend to do as little work as possible.

I now present to you the 10 Awesome Internet Time Sinks:

Time Sink #1: Google. Yep you heard that right, Google, the vast World Wide Web search engine. Pick any subject you like and instantly you’ll have millions of links to your subject of choice. Want to know the mating habits of sperm whales? Whether that new ab-roller is worth paying 40 bucks for? What about how to build Minas Tirith out of match sticks? It’s all right at your finger tips. Like the old yellow pages ad used to say, “Let your fingers do the walking” or rather “Let your mouse do the clicking”.

Time Sink #2: Wikipedia. The all seeing all knowing, well at least until they find out that someone deliberately edited houses in ancient Greece to display frat-boy humor. Well nobody is perfect, and certainly not the editors at Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a sort of user edited encyclopedia. Since it is user edited it could very well be outright lies, however for the most part if you are looking for something specific it’s always a good place to start, and usually if the editors are honest enough they’ll link the specific info so you can read up more about the topic. One word of warning here though, at times you could be at risk for becoming productive because some of it is the truth. Wikipedia is one of those things that when you look up a topic, there’s usually tons more links to other topics in Wikipedia. I mean that think is a link-fest. You could spend forever searching there.

Time Sink #3: Youtube. Youtube is a video hosting site. You can make any video you care to upload (as long as it’s legal and doesn’t infringe on copyrights). It’s got a vast wealth of user created videos. My favorites are independent game developers’ game videos. I could just sit and watch people’s games forever. Want to see some music videos, or some cool special effects thing someone made in After Effects or a long play of your favorite console game, even old cartoons and instructional videos. This is the place to spend most of your time; I mean you could just spend hours and hours just clicking on different videos to watch.

Time Sink #4: Internet Archive. It’s an archive for old text files, computer programs, radio shows, old movies, public domain audio and even old websites. Is your favorite website gone? Then you can go to www.archive.org and look up and see if they have an old copy somewhere. Want to find some old public domain movies? The archive is the place to get them. If it’s old and legally obtainable it’s usually on the internet archive.

Time Sink #5: Stumbleupon. This is a bit different; it’s a ‘random’ website generator. Usually based on your interests. You sign up download a toolbar, and hit stumble whenever you want to go to a random website that has to do with some of the interests you marked down on your profile. If you like the site, you give it thumbs up by clicking the thumb pointing up. If you don’t like it you give it thumbs down by clicking the thumb point, you guessed it, down. There are a host of things you can do, you can be friends with people and see their interests, and you can favorite your favorite sites. The more a site is given thumbs up the more that site is put in front of people. This is a GREAT time waster.

Time Sink #6: Facebook. Facebook is a social networking site. Essentially you sign up add people as friends and then you can tell them what you’re doing via a status you update. You can also put photos to share with your friends, links, and best of all there are games. Since people compete with each other these are big time sinks for some people. Personally I don’t really use facebook all that much, but since people share lots of stuff on there and the games being social (many not in real-time but turn based so you can play with your Facebook friends), it’s considered an internet time sink. (I knew someone who played Mafia wars which is a mafia based game where you make hits on other gangsters and stuff, who when he went on vacation would have others play his game so he wouldn’t lose rank or stuff.)

Time Sink #7: Twitter. Another social networking site. Only this is more about status lines (like what you’re doing at the moment). It can be like a giant chat room even if it’s not strictly real-time (It is if you stay on it, however most people don’t necessarily do that, but some do and it makes it a time sink). People share links and photos there too. Basically you get other people to follow you which means when you say something the more followers you have the more hear you (sounds logical doesn’t it). It can be a great way to advertise your website or anything really provided people haven’t stopped following you.

Time Sink #8: Digg. This is what is known as a social book marking site. Basically you put up interesting links and get people to bookmark it through the Digg website (and/or toolbar). I don’t really know a lot about it because I don’t really use it. However I’ve heard great things about it (well not really but I mean I hear a lot of people use it and since it links to other articles it can be a time sink if one wants to use it as such).

Time Sink #9: Reddit. Another social book marking site. I don’t really know much about this either since I’ve only looked at it a few times, but every so often I get a link of a discussion on there. I know there are people that spend tons of time on it.

Time Sink #10: Online Comics. Personally I don’t read online comics but I have read a few in the past, let’s say Penny Arcade or Buttersafe. But on a day to day basis I don’t. Partly because it’s a time sink, and I’ve felt I’ve wasted my time. Of course that is the ‘Monday’ way, so I probably should do more of it.

Well there you have it 10 awesome internet time sinks.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

The top 5 reasons to blow your wad.

And by wad I mean money. You know. A wad of cash. Let’s say you just got your tax refund, or Grandma just sent you a check. Sure you could save it, or spend it on something you need like bills, or groceries or a car payment, but what fun is that? You want to spend your money as fast as you got it. It’s literally burning a hole through your pocket as we speak.

So what are the 5 reasons you want to drop all that cash?

1) You’re trying to impress a girl. Nothing says I love you more than flowers, or candy, or diamonds. Especially diamonds. You’re telling her that, yes this is a big stash of cash, and yes I want to buy your love.

2) Pizzas don’t eat themselves. That’s right, in the U.S. there are hundreds of pizzas being made, and you could be eating as many as you can stuff into that fat face of yours. They’re there to be eaten. Yummy pizza crust (I don’t understand why some people won’t finish their pizza crust, arguably the best part of the pizza), melty mozzarella, enough garlic to kill an elephant if you were to breathe on it. It’s one of the most versatile foods on the planet. If you spend money on a lot of pizzas then you can have a party, and that brings us to reason 3.

3) You want to party. It’s especially great because you can incorporate the first two reasons pizza and girls with partying. But with parties comes the bucks. The music, the location, the beer, the hotties, the bare-knuckle brawls, and the illegal street racing!

4) Travel. Pure and simple, you want to see the world. Paris, Rome, The Alps (of many countries). Of course this gets dangerously close to spending money on something that’s worthwhile, as you can make new friends, learn new languages, and have new experiences, but may be still qualified as blowing your money.

5) Toys. Since I’m a man that writes this, as males we never seem to outgrow toys. They just get a bit more sophisticated. Home theatre systems, gaming computers, game consoles, remote control cars. Gotta love the toys. Even Legos are still fun and you can waste a lot of money playing with Legos as adults.

I could probably think of more, but maybe I’ll leave those for another day, and I don’t want to do too much work. Since “I’ll do it on Monday” is more about getting worse and worse, not better and better.

Until ‘Monday’

by admin

Ten reasons why top-ten lists are great!

I was going to write the top ten pros and cons of top ten lists as it applies to “I’ll do it on Monday”. I was googling information about top ten lists, and coming up with, you guessed it, top ten lists, procrastinating contently by reading said lists, when I came across an article on ContactMusic named “10 reasons Why Top 10 Lists Suck” and I thought, “This is why Top Tens are great.” So even though it’s only my second post I’m going to take this list apart one by one. Another great tenet of “I’ll do it on Monday” is to take the path of least resistance, which in this case means basing my article off another article. (You’ll learn about this in a future article called ‘Copy your way to the top, or why it pays to plagiarize’). Please note, I’m not so much contradicting the original article on ContactMusic as I am agreeing with the author but toward an eye on being lazy and apathetic, the creed of “I’ll Do It On Monday!”

“1. They NEVER, EVER, EVER, correlate with the truth.”

The author’s assertion is that it’s actually opinion of the person who made the top ten list. This is for the most part true, and it’s why we like it here. We don’t have to have facts to back up our opinions here at “Monday”. We’ll just call it “the truth”.

“2. If you buy that last magazine of the year, filled with retrospectives and top 10 lists, all you are doing is telling the guys at the top that it is OK to be lazy.”

The author says you send a message that you stopped caring about new music and movies and fashion and that the people at the top are laughing at you while they essentially cut and paste stuff they did during the year for knowing you’ll be paying for it. To that I say that’s the way we like it, get as much as you can for as little work as possible.

“3. Top 10 lists are simply an opportunity to spread apathy.”

The author says top ten lists makes people follow other people blindly by telling us exactly who to like and who not to like. Well apathy is our middle name here at ‘I’ll do it on Monday!’ We want to be apathetic; we don’t want to do for ourselves. Following the crowd is easier and thus the way we like to do it here.

“4. Generally speaking, there are never 10 things decent enough to legitimately populate a Top 10 list.”

This is another thing we agree on. But that’s the great thing about top ten lists you don’t have to legitimately populate it. You can populate it with whatever you want and instantly it’s spread over the internet like wildfire.

“5. Top Ten lists are patronizing. They tell us that we cannot think for ourselves.”

Here at ‘Monday’ we don’t WANT to think for ourselves. We want these top ten lists to tell us what to think and who to listen to and how to be. It’s what it’s all about.

“6. People that write Top Ten lists are simply trying to usher us to an early grave. Because essentially, the majority of Top 10 lists are ‘things to do / buy before you die’.”

While I agree that’s probably the case, I don’t tend to like to think that they might be trying to get us to get things done, even if it is before we die. We don’t really want to do anything here, so really this is one of the things that are not so good about top ten lists.

“7. You already know the answers before you even read them. We know what the Number one album of the year is, because it already won all the awards and spent all the weeks of the year at number one.”

This supposes you have paid attention to the awards shows or radio charts. Which if you follow our philosophy here at ‘Monday’ you probably haven’t. But this too is a great thing about top ten lists; it TELLS you what’s in the top ten, so you don’t HAVE to pay attention to who won what awards. Need to study the greatest music over the last few years? (Note that we aren’t advocating study, which is, actual work) See what movies were nominated for the Oscars for that film school course? Top Ten lists to the rescue!

“8. The innate subjectivity of the creation of most Top 10 lists is enough to send your average fan of music / film / whatever into a schizophrenic rage”

Actually that wouldn’t be a description of your ‘average’ fan, now would it? But we’re not even average fans; we’re half-hearted fans here at ‘Monday’.

“9. Hands up if you can remember who released the Top 10 albums of 2010? Or the Top 10 movies? Who topped the polls for Sexiest man of the Year?”

That’s also what makes top ten lists great. It helps us to forget, because really we don’t care about the top ten movies of 2010 (or in this case 2011?) or the sexiest man of the year (who the heck comes up with these things?)

“10. See point 4.”

This also makes our point. See that wasn’t so hard. The author didn’t have to make a number 10 as they were probably too lazy to do so. If you take offense at this remember we applaud such things; however I will take it back if it offends you. So to the author of this article on ContactMusic.com we applaud you!

If you would like to read the original article go here –
http://www.contactmusic.com/news/10-reasons-why-top-10-lists-suck_1279177

Until ‘Monday’