Site of the Week -- October 16, 2000
ell hath no fury like an engineer scorned. Mars fanatics furious at NASA for canning the almost-ready-to-fly Mars 2001 Surveyor Lander are rallying to save the mothballed craft with a site chronicling every aspect of its development.
The space agency scrapped the $150 million Mars Lander mission after back-to-back foul-ups with Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander. The first allegedly failed because of faulty measurement conversions; the second apparently crashed because of buggy software. Not eager to lose yet another spacecraft, NASA grounded the Lander and intends to fly two rovers instead. The rovers will use airbag systems to cushion their landing on the Red Planet, the same technique used by the wildly successful Mars Pathfinder mission.
Not so fast, the Save the Mars Lander organizers shout. In summaries filled with equal parts jargon and passion, they argue that Mars Lander is a fundamentally different spacecraft from the earlier Polar Lander, that any problems the two spacecraft shared have been fixed, and that not launching the remaining lander would be a near-criminal waste of taxpayer dollars. The site's petition urges NASA to reconsider the mission, and it has already been signed by dozens, if not hundreds, of NASA employees, industry workers and regular fans.
-- Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week -- Oct. 9, 2000
on't have time to read an entire series? There's always CliffsNotes.
Don't even have time for the CliffsNotes? Try Book-a-Minute, which ironically "ultra-condenses" over a hundred novels, series and even entire lifetime bodies of work down to their core content--sometimes no more than a sentence or two of wry dialogue or description. For instance, the entire collected writing of Raymond E. Feist is summed up thus: "Character #1:: I'm goodhearted and honest. Character #2: I'm goodhearted and sneaky. (They save the world six times.)" Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune is reduced even further: "Leto II: Infinity.
Reader: Ouch, my head just exploded."
The page design is as simple as the sardonic humor--no images, no animation, no bells and whistles, just a list of titles organized by author and links to other rinkworks.com sites. The whole family of sites (including Classics, Bedtime Stories, and Movies as well as SF/F) are cynical, snide and often right on target. They mercilessly skewer authors' pretensions and obfuscations by cutting to the heart of each work and exposing its barest bones. It's cruel and sometimes juvenile satire, but it's still strikingly effective and remarkably funny.
-- Tasha Robinson
Site of the Week -- Oct. 2, 2000
ust as they did with The Blair Witch Project, Haxan Films once again blurs the line between fact and fiction, this time with the official Web site for the television series Freakylinks. The storyline features the adventures of Derek Barnes as he compiles information on the paranormal for his underground Web site. Supposedly, viewers will be able to follow the series simultaneously on the Web once the show premieres on October 6, 2000.
Freakylinks (the site) is dedicated to "the weird, the unusual, the occult, the paranormal and the just plain silly." Its vast compendium of information is well organized, thoroughly researched and painstakingly detailed. The depth of the site is amazing, considering that its creator is a fictitious character.
The "Diary" section features almost daily entries by Derek, going back to 1998. There are three live "freak-cams," which seek to capture mythical creatures like the "Okeechobee Ogre" on film. A section called "Friend or Foe" offers free screen savers and desktop themes as well as a discussion board where visitors can share their stories of the unexplained. Other features include an FAQ, which introduces Derek and some of the other characters from the show, an online store and the "Freak-A-Dential," an email newsletter that notifies subscribers when the site has been updated.
If the ratings for Freakylinks aren't stellar in the first few weeks, both the show and the Web site could become a mere footnote in cultural history. That would be a shame, considering the effort that has been poured into the site, which shows the promise of becoming more interesting as the series progresses.
-- Cindy White
