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Websites: despair.com, burningman.com, metacritic.com and others

The 10 Best Sites of the Week

Ash Pro
Saturday 17 August 2002 00:00 BST
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www.despair.com

"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others" is the catchy byline to a print entitled Mistakes, which is just one of Despair Inc's entertaining, demotivational prints. There are loads of other products on sale, too, such as screensavers, and a Pessimist's Mug ("This glass is now half-empty"). An impressive antidote to the sort of corporate posturing that is becoming increasingly suspect in the light of various big business scandals.

www.explodingdog.com

"Hi, my name is Sam, and I draw pictures from your titles" is the cheery welcome to artist Sam Brown's site. His pictures are bright, bold line drawings, which offer amusing sideways glances at visitors' suggestions, among them "Ahh, my eye!" and "We come in peace". Although his style is simplistic and naive, it lends his stick figures genuine personality. And if you like what you see and want to wear some of his art, you can buy a T-shirt.

www.burningman.com

It's still not too late to go to the experimental artistic community that is the Burning Man Festival, which kicks off next weekend in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. This website chronicles events of previous years, and shows what a truly mammoth occasion it is; in its own words, it's dedicated to "radical self-expression and radical self-reliance". If you can't be there in person, look out for the live webcast of the festival's finale at the end of the month.

www.metacritic.com

A useful site, specialising in films, games and music, Metacritic's major selling point is the wide range of reviews on offer. Using critics' comments drawn from up to 30 publications, it computes a "metascore", or a weighted average of the various scores. Recent winner of a "Webby" award (the internet's version of the Oscars), it's clean and comprehensive, and an invaluable addition to any film- or music-buff's bookmarks.

www.typorganism.com

According to site creator, Gicheol Lee, Typorganism is "a series of communication experiments exploring computational interactive design". The colourful opening interface lets visitors play with various visual toys, including a DNA double-helix that morphs into letters, a wonderfully inventive "Ascii-o-matic" picture generator, plus a chance to test their aquatic reading skills in an unusual underwater section called "Motion Sickness".

www.pegball.com

Pegball is an amusing football game that faithfully recreates lego soccer (and other such tabletop football diversions) with excellent programming that accurately recreates the undulating movements of the ball on which the peg-shaped players stand. Play with a friend or against the computer – but be warned, it's maddeningly addictive, and before you know it, you'll be well and truly hooked. Perfect downtime action (but don't let your boss catch you).

www.robertlenkiewicz.co.uk

The eminent British painter, Robert O Lenkiewicz, died earlier this month, at the age of 60. Seeing his work as a sociological enquiry by visual means, the portrait specialist mounted large-scale exhibitions covering diverse subjects such as vagrancy, mental handicap and suicide.

www.this.is/pallit/isjs

The "isjs" part of this url stands for "Intercontinental Spontaneous Jam Session", and is another one of those great little Flash toys that allow you to tweak settings to create changes to notes and colours to make an intriguing audio-visual arrangement. With plenty of parameters to play with, it's endlessly satisfying.

www.tigermagazine.org

A trilingual (English, German and Japanese) online art journal with plenty of panache and no little style, Tiger Magazine has a glossy mag feel that translates well to the screen. The creator, Tokyo designer Takeshi Hamada, says: "My focus with the magazine has always been 'Is it interesting to me and am I happy now?'" He obviously asks himself the right questions, if this inspirational imagery is anything to go by.

www.blackmustache.com

Brooklyn Flash whiz Haik Hoisington has come up with a great piece of Flash animation in the "Ride the Fence" section of his site. His interpretation of the contemporary global economic and political scene employs cutout-style characters to produce an old-school satire that pits faceless sloganeers against equally faceless power-mongers, illustrating the difficulty of neutrality in these "us-versus-them" times to great effect.

netgains@independent.co.uk

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