The Brunching Shuttlecocks was (and is) a humor website that ran from 1997 to 2003. It was founded by David Neilsen and Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg. Neilsen, also known on the site as The Self-Made Critic (which was wonderful), was a funny guy in his own right. But the focus of this post is Lore... who is a Metafilter member btw... twice, in fact. Here's a taste:
Porn Star or My Little Pony? *
Ratings: Cat Toys ("Catnip Anything: Very entertaining.") *
I Ought to be a Law (Note: Sjöberg's Law of Lexical Drift.) *
Ad for PLACEBOTM ("It Works Because You Want It To.") *
Ratings: Star Wars Lego Figures *
An Open Letter From Metallica (Published after Metallica sparked controversy when they sued Napster.) *
The Björk Song (In RealAudio or MP3, with David Neilsen. Causes insanity.) *
Pikachewy ("'Twas Beedrill, and the Starmie Gloom/Did Grimer and Gengar in the Mew") *
Twelve AP Headlines Which Can Be Sung to 'Camptown Races' ("Man in Wheelchair Killed by Train, doo-dah, doo-dah") *
The Geek Hierarchy: Abridged But Managable - Unabridged but Large - For Printing (PDF) - Frequently Paraphrased Questions (Perhaps the Shuttlecocks' most enduring legacy, you might still find new links to this around the internet.) *
Roshambo Run (A Flash game. Read the intro, but in essence: lure the rocks, scissors and papers into each other, without getting eaten by them, and get to the coffee cup.)
Since the site closed, he wrote the Alt Text Column for Wired Magazine, and made 21 episodes of an Alt Text podcast. Some time back he made Little Fluffy Industries (defunct), a Flash game review site, and Slumbering Lungfish (defunct), a previous internet collection of his work. He collected some of his classic Ratings from Brunching, Alt Text and other places into the Book of Ratings(AMAZON). And then he made Bad Gods, an archive of comics like Bandwidth Theater, Capybera Brothers, Sean and Wormwood, and Monster Manual Comix/Speak With Monsters. But then unfortunately Bad Gods went down, depriving the world of... what's that you say?? BAD GODS IS BACK?
Lore's special bailiwick on brunching.com was the Ratings, where he took some number of things and passed suitably derisive judgment upon them over the course of about a page. Many have followed his footsteps there, but in my book he still did it best.
Lore Sjöberg is my very favorite web funnyguy of all time. Back in college we'd daily refresh Brunching Shuttlecocks in the hopes of finding some new bit of internet joy. Let's take a moment to examine the gigantic shipwrecking bulk that lies hidden, just beneath the surface, of the Sjöberg.... What follows is a massive celebration of his Brunching Shuttlecocks work. It's not everything he did for the site, but it's a good 80% at least, continuing features sorted out, highlights identified.
Note 1: most pages that have CGI scripting are broken, which resulted in several notable exclusions here.
Note 2: As said above, Lore was actually just half of Brunching Shuttlecocks, the other half being the just-as-talented David Neilsen, aka The Self-Made Critic. And they also took contributions, so less than half. But this is going to take long enough as it is, so I'm callously only including Lore's pieces. It's really a shame to leave Neilsen out, though....
*** LONG RUNNING & RECURRING ***
SUPERHERO RATINGS
Ratings: Superfriends The first of these is the earliest item in the archives. "Batman gets extra points for having the best line in the entire history of the Superfriends. The villain was named Dr. Noah Tall or something equally ludicrous, and he and his evil little sidekick were posed as street-corner food vendors with a cart and everything. As part of their plan, they were attempting to get Batman to buy some chicken soup. This REALLY HAPPENED, DAMMIT! Anyhow, Batman, the dark night detective, the scourge of the underworld, assessing the situation with his keen crime-fighting brain, asks, in his deep, stentorian voice, 'Is the chicken soup fresh?' It was a glorious moment." Over the years, Lore added onto this.
More Superfriends
Marvel Superheroes
The Legion of Doom
Ratings: Marvel Supervillains, Part One - Part Two
Ratings: Batman Villains "The Joker, depending on who's writing him, has two modes: the 'murderous clown genius' mode, where he's Batman's deadliest and most wily arch-foe, or the 'Rip Taylor unchained' mode, where he's basically a lawless prop comic."
Superman's Powers "Invulnerability:
Not much of a downside to this, as long as you're also invulnerable to things you might want to get a shot for. And your hair and fingernails aren't invulnerable. And you're not planning on getting into the piercing and tattooing scene."
Ratings: Spider-Man Powers
BREAKFAST CEREAL RATINGS
Ratings: Breakfast Cereals "Cookie Crisp: Lame. It was a good concept, it could have gone somewhere, but the fact is that the cereal bits bear no closer resemblance to chocolate chip cookies than Fruity Pebbles do to actual rocks. Also, this Cookie Crook character is shamelessly derivative of the whole Trix Rabbit Cereal Theft genre, only instead of the kids looking after their own damn cereal they have an animated figure of authority to protect it for them. I am, however, an advocate of pouring milk on Chips Ahoy and eating that for breakfast."
More Breakfast Cereals
Still More Breakfast Cereals
Yet More Breakfast Cereals
Are You There God? It's More Breakfast Cereals!
Gödel, Escher, Breakfast Cereals!
I Don't Want to be Elfstar Any More. I Want to be More Breakfast Cereals
SNACK FOOD RATINGS
Ratings: Hostess Products "Twinkies:
The quintessential Hostess food, similar to foods you might create in your own kitchen, but profoundly different. Yes, the outer coating bears a passing resemblance to sponge cake, and the "creamy filling" might have once read a book about a dairy product, but overall it has that quality of taste and texture that can only be found on the snack food aisle."
Ratings: Halloween Treats
Ratings: Japanese Snack Foods
Ratings: More Hostess Products
Ratings: Australian Snack Food
Ratings: Korean Snack Foods
Ratings: More Korean Snacks "A Pico Boy, presumably, is one one-trillionth of a boy, just as pico de gallo is one one-trillionth of a de gallo. Well, one one-trillionth of a boy tastes a lot like a stale cream puff. Also, a Pico Boy according to the box is a flower-eating, unicycle-riding, sweating gnome with pastry on his head. That darned metric system."
Ratings: Jelly Belly Flavors "Watermelon: The outside is green, the inside is red. Clever! These days the effect is ruined somewhat by the little 'Jelly Belly' they stamp on the darned things, but you can just turn that side away from you when you play "Gojira Visits The Melon Patch." If only you could infuse them with vodka like real watermelons we'd be set."
Ratings: Swedish Candy
Ratings: Israeli Snack Foods "Ego Trip
Good name! Much better than 'Humility Bar' or 'Reasonable Self-Assessment Bites.'"
Ratings: Crackers "Chicken In A Biskit: My two contradictory questions about this cracker are 'Why?' and 'Why stop there?' The whole idea of a chicken-flavored cracker is so revolting that I wonder why there's a market for that and not, say, Pork in a Biskit. The more flesh-flavored crackers we create, the closer we get to admitting to ourselves that we are, culturally speaking, batshit insane."
Ratings: Canadian Snack Foods "Ketchup Potato Chips: Good god! ('Mon dieu!') These are actually good! Really good. So good that I was able to get past the unnerving phrase 'simulated ketchup flavour.'"
Ratings: Cookies
More Cookies
Ratings: Inanimate Object Candy
More Inanimate Object Candy
Ratings: Ice Cream Novelties "You know, there are always people who have a damp and subdued sense of fun. These are the people who sit on the stationary horses on the carousel. The people who consider pear halves to be dessert. The people who always eat pizza with a fork and knife. These are also the people who, when given a choice from the ice cream novelties bin at the local nacho-dispensing convenience chain store, pick the little bitty tubs of ice cream with strawberry stripes and a flat wooden spoon. I don't get them."
Ratings: Czech and Romanian Snack Foods "Krupky Arasídové: Or something like that. There are diacritics on some of the letters that could drive a mellow man mad. Anyhow, Krupky. There's no English on the package to provide hints here, but it appears to be a peanut-flavored salty crunchy snack puff, the kind of thing George Washington Carver might have come up with if he were courting the youth market. And in fact there's a youth on the package, very excited by his massive peanut snack in spite of the fact that he's clearly dressed in a Burger King uniform."
GAME RATINGS
Ratings: Classic Video Games "Pac-Man:
The real tragedy of Pac-Man, aside from a sequel addiction that made the Friday the Thirteenth movies seem restrained, was that the key to the game was not skill, reflexes, or even intelligence, but rather memorization. The video games section of Waldenbooks was filled with books that told you the exact moves to make at the exact time, making mastery of Pac-Man only faintly more impressive than memorizing the first hundred digits of pi."
Ratings: More Classic Video Games and Ratings: References From Last Week's Ratings
Ratings: Still More Classic Video Games
Ratings: Atari 2600 Games "You're a dot. You have an arrow, which is actually a sword, which you use to kill what appear to be giant ducks. Giant, at least, compared to you, but you're a dot, so it's hard to figure scale. This is what passed for epic on the 2600."
Ratings: Card Games
Ratings: Board Games (Not cool ones, but things like Sorry, Mouse Trap and Pictionary.)
Ratings: Schoolyard Games
Ratings: Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes "There are so many good names for magicians -- Wizard, Mage, The Amazing Zappo -- that it's a pity that the designers of D&D didn't come up with something less stilted. 'Magic-User' has so little flair that they may as well have called them 'Paranormal Effects Administrators.'"
More Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes "The odd thing to me is that this involved the same detailed level system as the rest of the classes. There's something odd about having a 'third level Barbarian,' as if he had to pass some sort of Barbaric bar exam to prove his competence to practice barbarism in the state of New Jersey."
Ratings: Tomy Pocket Games (You know, these things. Someone should make a post about 'em.)
GOOD OR BAD
A series of polls where the site asked readers to rank things on a plus/minus basis. The polls are long over, but the results are a good measure of what site readers thought of things at the time. Unfortunately, polls after #22 are broken CGI scripts.
Good or Bad: 1 - 2 - James Bond Edition - 3 - Red, Red Whatever - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 (dated events) - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21
STATE QUARTER RATINGS
Ratings: State Quarters
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
BANNER AD NAUSEAM
Animated fake banner ads people can use on their websites.
Ad Nauseam 2
READER MAIL
Lore responds to people writing in. A short-lived long running feature, it began August 2002, near the end of the site's run.
August 5, 2002
August 12, 2002
August 19, 2002
January 13, 2003
February 3, 2003
Februay 10, 2003
March 10, 2003
March 24, 2003
BANDWIDTH THEATER
All of these require Flash.
Bandwidth Theater: Kevin Smith and his Magic Feather
Bandwidth Theater: Homonculi
Bandwidth Theater: Ninja Massage Therapist
Bandwidth Theater: Gaydar
Bandwidth Theater: The Adventures of Evil Overmom
Bandwidth Theater: Wedding Vows to Avoid
Bandwidth Theater: Predictions
Bandwidth Theater: Hitman
Bandwidth Theater: More Than Meets The Eye
LORE BRAND COMICS
Lore comics: dear lore
Lore comics: the only
Lore comics: unholy union
Lore comics: any kind
Lore comic: thank you
Lore comic: all music
Lore comic: kuala lumpur
Lore comic: number 37
Lore Comic: never heard
Lore Comic: tribute film
Lore Comic: the courage
Lore Comic: have fun
Lore Comic: I need
Lore Comic: see clearly
AND THE REST...
*** 1997 ***
The Future of the Internet "Netscape announces that it will no longer allow people to download and use its browser for free. Market share drops 80% in two minutes."
Ratings: Sesame Street Characters "Cookie is the MAN! Cookie's got it ALL going on! Cookie is a huge terry-cloth mass of greed, gluttony, and astonishing lack of self-restraint, and this is on EDUCATIONAL TV! And Cookie Monster, in his Zen-like wisdom, provided my generation with perhaps the only clear moral message we'll ever know, a beacon for our scattered lives: 'C is for cookie, and that's good enough for me.' It's good enough for all of us, Cookie."
Ratings: Rock Stars with One Name "Hammer: Started out as M.C. Hammer, he changed his name to Hammer just about the time no one cared. It just goes to show you how fickle fame can be. For a while there he was as hot as hot can be, and then a couple years later he's doing Grad Night at Disney with L.L. Cool J and Run-DMC. Lesson to be learned? Rappers need a strong investment portfolio."
Elvis Movie or Cocktail?
Ratings: Pizza Toppings "Let's give fish particles their due, shall we? They're not really very good tasting, but they serve the dual purposes of being a funny topping and being the topping nobody orders. Say you're telling a joke, and the guy in the joke orders a pizza. Just put anchovies on the pizza and it doubles the comedy, if it's a pretty pathetic joke in the first place."
Why Pippi Longstocking is a Great Book
Ratings: Monopoly Tokens "The Doggie:
Ah, yes. The Gleaming Terrier of Finance. As a kid, the selling point of the dog was that you could tilt him and pretend to make him piddle on your opponents' hotels. Not exactly evolved comedy, but once you've chuckled over the 'Beauty Contest' card you have to take your laughs where you can get them in Monopoly."
Homes For Sale
Ratings: Star Trek Alien Makeup "Ferengi Teeth:
I know the ears and foreheads are supposed to be the attraction here -- how novel for a Star Trek alien -- but I'm always fascinated by the Ferengi's teeth. All other races in the galaxy seem to have discovered corrective orthodontia and no-copayment dental plans; the Ferengi alone dare to keep their teeth looking like Stonehenge on mescaline. Considering even the warrior-class Klingons must be flossing, this is an admirable resistance to inter-species peer pressure."
Ratings: Pet Rodents "Rats are the primo rodents to have around. Points to support this thesis: 1) They don't run away, even if you leave their cage open, because they know where The Big Hand puts the food. 2) When you take them out they want to explore, instead of finding a hole and going to sleep. 3) They can be trained to come when you call. When was the last time you saw a guinea pig do that trick? 4) Their scaly tails drive away insecure milksops who can't stand to have a manifestation of their own id explore their hair."
Best of Hell "Best Movie Theater: Showing everything from 'Cops and Robbersons' to a Mel Brooks retrospective (post-1980 only), the cramped seats and sticky floors of the Venial Cinema were voted best. In praising this establishment, respondents cited air conditioning that occasionally works, and dried maggot snacks that 'taste pretty okay in butter.' We'll be fixing both of these in the future to provide a more miserable movie-going experience."
Ratings: Crayola Colors "White: Useless. Invisible on white paper, not at all white on colored paper, and not as effective for creating light colors as just not pressing as hard."
Scary Theatre
The World According to AltaVista (Curator's note: The Brunching Shuttlecocks got started in 1997, which explains the Web 0.1 site design. Back then AltaVista, along with other now-deceased sites like Excite, Lycos and Infoseek, was a hugely popular search engine. While names I will remember to my dying day, they are practically known today, destroyed by Google, which incorporated in 1998. The web is a harsh place. This page ranks phrases by their AltaVista rankings, eons before "Google rankings" became a thing. To get some idea of how the World Wide Web has grown, these scores are all scaled in the hundreds-to-thousands, not the multi-billions that would be now.)
The Personals
Ratings: Winnie-The-Pooh Characters "'Small?' I can hear many people saying. 'What's a Small? I don't remember any T-shirts, thermoses, videos, jammies, plastic infant juice cups, porcelain bookends, stamps from the Virgin Islands, throw pillows, nightlights, or latex marital aids with this `Small` on them.'"
Beanie Baby or G.I. Joe?
True Love Waits "You may or may not have heard of 'True Love Waits,' which, contrary to what you might expect, is not a Portland-based acoustic alternative band, but is rather a Christian movement to get teenagers to stop having sex. The idea, near as I can figure out, is that the reason teenagers so often end up having sex is because we haven't made them sign anything."
Ratings: Alien Invaders
Tina the Troubled Teen "At times the Web seems merely pointless and lame, but at other times it leaps across the dotted line into downright pathetic. A few months ago the hot intellectual property was 'Ate My Balls' pages, a shining example of the former. Now the big homepage trend appears to be 'Virtual Adoption Centers' with names like "Cute Cuddly Kittens" and 'Sheriberry DinoLand.'"
The Phantom Menace Revealed (Note: This page dates from before the release of Star Wars: Episode One. Imagine a world in which the possibility of Ewoks was the thing people were worried about. We were all more innocent then.)
Fashion for a Higher Cause
Do You Yahoo, You Yahoo?" (A quiz: pick out the fake Yahoo! directory category, circa November 1997. Fun fact: did you know there was once a time when Yahoo was mostly known for their sprawling and extensive web directory?)
Ratings: Scooby-Doo Characters (Scrappy-Doo gets the first F in Ratings history.)
Ratings: Kool-Aid Flavors (Including Purplesaurus Rex, Great Bluedini and [this existed, I swear] Sharkleberry Fin.)
Shopping Trip
Cancel Jams
Ratings: Three's Company Characters
Christian Metal Band or Star Trek Episode?
Fun with a Purpose (The moral lessons provided by a variety of newspaper comics.)
Bullish on Babylon - Results 1 - Results 2 - Final results (As explained in the first link, there used to be a site run by a Christian Fundamentalist, called the Rapture Index, which gave a frequently-updated list of things he believed heralded the Second Coming of Great Cthulhu Jesus Christ. Brunching Shuttlecocks took advantage of this by running a fake stock portfolio game with site patrons, where people "invested" in different causes of the end of the world, with the top ranked players getting T-shirts. These pages are the description and the results of that contest.)
Ratings: Christmas Songs
*** 1998 ***
Ratings: McDonalds Entrees "McD.L.T.: Remember this? The hot side stays hot, and the cool side stays cool? Lies! The hot side stays hot through the same cutting-edge heat lamp technology they use on everything, and the cool side stays, at best, room temperature, thanks to a thin layer of seagull-choking Styrofoam." "McNuggets: My God, these are eerie. Look at them. Go, order some, and look at them. They come in, like, four distinct shapes! They're like anti-snowflakes."
The Luke Side of the Force "I have a better explanation. The fact is that, throughout the three films, everyone Luke meets is completely bullshitting him about the Force. They make up all this crap about Dark and Light and Good and Evil to disguise that there's only one rule to the Force: die in front of Luke." (Makes a damn good point, and contains the term smarm rays.)
Ratings: Popeye and Entourage "Did you see the movie version of Popeye? Wasn't the resemblance between Olive Oyl and Shelly Duvall amazing? Duvall is obviously a woman who's willing to play on her strengths no matter what they are." [...] "in the end I wouldn't be at all surprised if Wimpy were to snap like a store-brand pretzel and mow down the entire Popeye cast, shouting 'It's Tuesday, people! Payback time!'"
A picture of Amy Grant making the Devil Sign which I found on the Web and linked back to the page I got it from, which just goes to show that everything associated with Christian Rock is completely hilarious (The linkback still works! Internet entropy is defeated this day!)
Blank of the Union, a State of the Union address MadLib
Ratings: Mythical Creatures "Vampires: I could make a crack about 'Vampire: The Masquerade' being D&D for people who own 'The Downward Spiral,' but I have a copy of both, so I'll limit myself to observing that with the increasing popularity of vampires, we're on the verge of the unicorn syndrome all over again."
Untitled #2
The Empowering Oracle
A Brief Guide to British English
The Pompitous of Love Personality Test (Are you a Smoker, a Joker, or a Midnight Toker?)
It's Spelled "Orgasm." (For a while the Brunching Shuttlecocks registered with a search site to redirect people who had misspelled the word 'Orgasm' to this page as a public service.)
The Inbedded Text Generator (A scripted feature that still works! Enter text into the box and the page will add "in bed" to it. We amused easily back then.)
Ratings: Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream Flavors
Smartass Answers to the 80's Quiz "7. What did people desperately tried to avoid getting on 'Press Your Luck?' Herpes."
Ratings: Swiss Army Knife Items
Star Chart (What if Star Trek characters changed jobs?)
Ratings: Alice's (of Wonderland fame) Adventures Characters
Measurements
Test Marketing
Ratings: He-Man Characters "An incredibly muscular blond guy in a breechcloth and a page boy. On this planet he'd be stripping for tips in North Beach, but on Eternia he fights deformed animal guys and delivers homilies on the value of cooperation. Location, location, location."
Toon Style "Near as I can tell, there's a veritable cadre of people -- I'm imagining 13-year-old 'Magic the Gathering' players, but you never know -- who take it upon themselves to answer such weighty questions as 'What would it look like if Spritle got it on with Chim-Chim?'" The mention of My Little Pony here is disturbingly prescient.
Ratings: Office Supplies
Grrilla
Ratings: Speed Racer Characters
Ratings: Dog Tricks
The Goth Quote Generator
Harp on Godzilla (By Lore, David Neilsen and others - this has to do with the 90s Godzilla, the reboot before the reboot that isn't the Japanese reboot or either cartoon show)
The Associate Degrees of Kevin Bacon (A working CGI toy.)
Ratings: Coke Slogans
Misheard Lyrics
The Spiritual Growth Bookshelf
Italian Sports Car or Impotence Drug?
Ratings: More Pizza Toppings
Pool Toys
Either/Or