Daily Newsie

Why, you may ask, does DailyNewsie always wait until the last second to post and then struggle to come up with a topic when she could very well have spent the whole day thinking about it but instead played The Sims?

Because I’m lazy, children, and I made the difficult decision earlier today to let my Sim age and eventually die. I’d been keeping her alive and young with magic age potion, but I believe it’s time to let her go. So I adopted a dog — a golden-red one named Betsy, just like I used to have when I was little — and a child to help me spend my vast fortunes (seriously, I’m loaded), and now shall spend the rest of my digital life tending to them both. I also have an amazing greenhouse full of all manner of vegetables, and will soon attain my gold talent badge in gardening, which means I can talk to plants. Awesome.

Anyway, before I go off to bed because I’m old and tired all the time, I thought I’d share some of my favorite websites and ask you to do the same. I’m always looking for new content to surf, so hopefully we can share and share alike and all keep each other happy.

Fark is one of the first places I go every day to find out what’s happening around the world. User-submitted headlines are tagged with the appropriate adjective — asinine, sappy, scary, Florida — and every now and then a headline comes along that makes me snork my Diet Pepsi. The comments on each article are, more often than not, hilarious, although it’s worth reading the FArQ before venturing into that barren wasteland. I very rarely pop up on the comment boards, but I’m always lurking.

Next on the list is The Consumerist, which unfortunately has slowed down a bit thanks to the laying-off of two of their staff. Recession and all that, you know. Its tagline is “shoppers bite back,” and it’s full of handy money-saving tips, tales of customer service idiocy, and plain-language breakdowns of the bailout plan and what it means for the average Joe.

I forget how I stumbled upon Left-Handed Toons, but I’ve been reading it for quite some time now. Justin and Drew, proprietors and doodlers extraordinaire, are right-handed, yet (as the title suggests) draw with their left hands. The result is somewhat-wobbly comics about a suburban dad who turns into Instant Gator when needed, as well as random irrelevant topics. As far as ‘toons go, I also like My Life in a Cube, but its cartoonist just quit his job so it remains to be seen whether his life outside a cube is amusing.

Finally, Cake Wrecks revolves around ooh-ing and aah-ing over pictures of the amazingly horrible cakes Wreckporters find. It’s gained enough notoriety now that bakery employees are cautious of people taking pictures of their cakes because they know that someone is about to send it to Jen. The Sunday Sweets feature offers a respite from terrible cakes, and it’s pretty cool to see what some people can come up with. Another Sunday favorite is PostSecret, the longtime pet project of Frank Warren. People send in their deepest secrets on a postcard, and Frank scans them and puts them online, in books, or on display at his various shows around the nation. I have all of his books and saw him in person in Cincinnati last year, but have yet to send in a secret … mostly because I can’t keep secrets from anyone, and the one criteria is that it has to be something that no one else knows.

Your turn!