Mental Magma

With Michael Phelps on all media (including a venomous version coming in second place in last week’s contest), we’ve got the Olympics on our minds.  We here at Mental Magma are probably not going to be medaling any time soon in any real world events, so we started wondering what an Olympics of the Internet would look like.

Your assignment this week is to think up Internet-themed Olympic events and write news headlines for them. Let me give you an example: Americans take gold in pop-up event with 83 windows closed in 60 seconds. Your headline can be about anything as long as it looks like a newspaper headline and includes your made up event.  Leave your headline in the Contest Entries section.

Standard contest timeline and contest rules apply. By leaving an entry you are agreeing to those rules. The entry voted the favorite by MM users will earn its author a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate AND an Executive Desk Gong (Our favorite sound at Mental Magma is baaaajooooonnnnnnnnggggggg).

Contest Summary
Assignment: Invent an Internet-themed Olympic event and write a news headline about it.
How to enter: Write your entry in the Contest Entries section.
Deadline: Friday, August 22nd at 5pm EST
Prize: a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate AND an Executive Desk Gong.

The race for first place was decided by one vote this week.  It came down to a battle of MM newcomers; Benji led for most of the weekend but Jakutz had the most fans in the end.

In a way it’s unfortunate for Jakutz that he had to publicize his plans for the perfect minion.  His answer lets us all know what to choose.

My minions would be kittens with the poison glands of black widows. Kittens are really cute and they can melt your heart with one meow. When you see a kitten, you can’t fight your urge to pick it up and pet it and talk to it like it was your baby. That is why you will die.

Congratulations to Jakutz, he wins himself a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate and a 4-pack of Screaming Slingshot Flying Monkeys.

This week’s contest seemed to bring out the best in everyone.  You all sparred verbally over whose minion would best lead to world domination, but you did it with a sense of decorum.  That’s what is missing in the world - aspiring evil doers with a sense of civility.

Before revealing the finalists let me mention a few evil geniuses and their minions who, despite missing the finals, were beloved by the community or the MM admins.  There were Tiago’s hippopotami with kangaroo legs, Mrs Sara’s teddy bear hamsters with jaguar claws, Mrs Sanchez’s cheetah with a T-rex head, Ian Randal Strock’s flying elephants, Mannequin’s human Males with mule bodies, and Dlawhon’s tigers with scorpian tales.

Mental Magma Online Store

Inspired designs from the

Deity campaign trail!

Check out some of our favorite shirts from:

Contest #6: Poseidon for President.

Cyclops inspired by Bunny Slippers	Bacchus inspired by Mrs. Sara
Atlas inspired by Tyson22	Ares inspired by Brendan

I have another game for you guys this week.  The game’s real title should be Band Name Generator, but the title of this post is the result of the game.  Just go to BandNameMaker.com.  This site allows you to enter a word which it then uses to generate random band names that include your word.

For instance, you enter the word simian, and the site spits out (among other names) Super Simian and the Muffin.  If you enter the phrase sweater-fondler, it may respond with Chronicle of the Sweater-Fondler God.

I don’t know if it was the site malfunctioning or just messing with me, but it occasionally replied with one-word band names that didn’t use any word I’d entered (like when it suggested I simply name my band Octopus).

The goal is to end up with a band name that you’d be proud to have show up on a marquee; the key is to choose great starting words.  See what you can come up with and post your band names in the comments section of this post.  Rock on.

Photo by Flicrk user Stig Nygaard

We’ve all seen the part in The Wizard of Oz in which the wicked witch sends her flying monkeys to apprehend Dorothy and her companions (a similar scene is in the modern retelling of the story, Wicked). If you’re anything like me, you thought to yourself “Dang, an army of winged monkey minions would be super useful.” However, are monkeys with wings really the best option?

This week’s contest is to invent your own minion. You get to take one animal and imagine that you can add a body part from another animal. The goal is to end up with a hybrid that you think would make up a good army to do your bidding. The body part you add can be a substitute for the original animal’s parts or it can be just in addition to the animal’s regular parts.

Your answer, which should be left in our Contest Entries section, should describe your animal and detail why you think they’d be good minions for you.

For this contest, standard contest timeline and contest rules apply. By leaving an entry you are agreeing to those rules. The entry voted the favorite by MM users will earn its author a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate AND a 4-pack of Screaming Slingshot Flying Monkeys.

Today we get to announce a winner that has been a perennial source of high quality entries. It was a close race between Padma and Bebemiqui with Padma bringing in the win. She revealed her pantheistic deity public-relations skill with this clever slogan:

You will vote for Hypnos…You will vote for Hypnos.

Congratulations to Padma, she’s has earned herself a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate and a $15 gift certificate to the Mental Magma Online Store.

We’ll have an announcement next week for the merch entries we selected. Thanks to all who participated this week.

Man, you people are good.  This was the first week I laughed out loud at a few answers.  There were some really smart slogans.

Like usual, I want to feature a few of the entries that didn’t make the finals but were nonetheless oh-so-good.  They were: Dlawhon’s Vishnu, Tiago’s Prometheus, Smodaresi’s Hermes, Ian Randal Strock’s Eos, Paula’s Artemis, and Tyson22’s Atlas.

The finalists are well decorated in MM flair; they are made up of two returning champions, Brendan and Mrs. Sara (Mrs. Sara has a shot at an inconceivable back-to-back win), two users who both have had previous merch selections, Padma (whose merch we haven’t officially announced yet) and Bunny Slippers (who made the “Go Green…Do it on a leaf” design), and a first time finalist, Bebemiqui.

The polls will be up until 5pm EST on Sunday.

Photo by Flickr user: ShadowViking

We thought it was time to release the list of the current top 20 MM users; everyone you see here has been actively engaged in MM competitions and has been successful enough to show they’ve got imagination, creativity, and a nimble mind.  The exact algorithm we’re using to determine your MM points is a closely guarded secret (to prevent gaming the system).  However, we can tell you that it incorporates all sorts of things: number of times making the finals, honorable mentions, winning contests, how many contests you’ve entered recently, entries made into merch, etc.

If you’re not on this list, maybe you need to take a few breathes, do some self reflection, and start planning your rise to the top.

This week at MM we want to get political.  We could get involved with the whole McCain vs Obama shebang, but it seemed a little pedestrian for us.  We like to take an ordinary idea and perform our patented idea-alchemy on it.  We started thinking; why restrict ourselves to mortal candidates?

This week’s contest is to imagine the deity of your choice running for office and invent their campaign slogan. We were mainly thinking of presidential campaigns when we thought up this contest, but if you want to write a slogan involving Poseidon running for County Sheriff, so be it; any publicly elected office will do.

The voting this week was tighter than a Japanese commuter train (please watch that link).  Your winner this week is Mrs. Sara.  If we had offered a prize for Circumtranslations, she probably would have won that too.  Let’s give a hearty congratulations to our most victorious winner.

If a real Dark Knight emerges and the press is furiously trying to figure out the man behind the bat, we can scratch one name off our lists:

Ron Jeremy. There’s no way he’d fit in that tight rubber suit.

Mrs. Sara will receive a $25 Amazom.com gift certificate for her winning entry.  Stayed tuned tomorrow when we announce our 2nd merch contest. I wonder what it will be.

Our first week having a guest judge went smashingly.  I guess everyone enjoyed Brendan’s contest, since we received nearly 250 entries.  It took some time, but we’ve narrowed the field down to 5.

Like usual, I’d like to to acknowledge some of the stupendous entries that didn’t make the final five.  The following people’s answers were clever (as judged by us), highly rated (as judged by MM users), or both.

Garrett’s George Clooney, Dan’s Heath Ledger, James’ Dave Chappelle, Padma’s Woody Allen, Emily’s Wilford Brimley, Kurosh’s Bruce Willis, Tiago’s George Bush, Jay Bryan’s Mike Tyson, and Matt’s OJ Simpson.

The 5 finalists this week are made up of 4 we at MM chose and one that guest judge Brendan picked.  Brendan’s pick was user Keely.  Our four picks were answers by Han5nah T., Mrs Sara, R.E.D., & Spazdreamer.

Let me first say that this post isn’t for a contest or a prize.  This is just a fun diversion that a few of us at Mental Magma came up with.  We’ve dubbed the game Circumtranslation.  It involves using online translators.  As you can see from the picture, online translators are sometimes less than perfect. The Circumtranslation game capitalizes on these linguistic blunders by making the online translator go in a loop.  The results are often funny.

Here’s how it works:

1.  Come up with a sentence in English.  This should be easy as you probably know dozens of them.  Any sentence will do, but I find that sentences with lots of nouns are the most fun.

2.  Go to an online translation site; I recommend Babel Fish, but any free service will do.