So among the weirder things I'm involved with recently is a new website that me 'n' Alex designed for a photographer friend in trade for his services: www.passedoutwookies.com. It's a gallery website, basically, where people can contribute their photos of hairy hippies who have overindulged and then, for lack of a better term, passed out. Now, this is all sort of entertaining (I don't quite have the necessary levels of schadenfreude to properly appreciate the site, I think), but the thing I find more fascinating is how many hits the site has been getting. A feature of the gallery is that you can see how many times the various pictures have been looked at...and some of them are now up in the 3000 range. Which is strictly incredible to me. It's some sort of law of the internet (and humans, I guess) that the easer an idea is to grasp and "enjoy" (i.e. the dumber the idea) the more popular it's going to be. Alex and I toiled for 2 years on our sprawling, complicated X-Ball website – a site who's quirky pleasures would only get better if you read the million and a half (give or take) stories that we posted about our fictitious extreme sports-playing characters. Despite our best efforts, it never really took off, even though I'm quite proud of it to this day. We used to joke about how we should have just gone ahead and made runningintowalls.com, where we'd post nothing but pictures of people hurting themselves, and how that woulda been the most popular site ever. I realize now that we could very well not have been joking. Not that I condemn simple entertainment, but I guess I don't really feel like I need to be actively contributing to the din of moronic crap out there. Not that the passedoutwookies.com thing is moronic crap. I think I just prefer the achewood.com's of the world. All right, I'm getting back to work here. Enough shirking!