Mental Magma

We’ve got a problem here at Mental Magma.  Way back in Contest #13 Zabo wrote this entry:

Warning: This beverage may cause structural instability.
Below would be a picture of the Kool-Aid guy busting through a wall.

We thought it was swell and made this design:

The problem is that we can’t make this design into merch because of the inherent copyright issues.  Now we have a set of 11 shirts where we wanted a set of 12.  The solution to the problem: Slap Zabo a high five, say “sorry buddy, intellectual property snafu”, and choose another design to make into merch.  That’s where you step in.  We’ve decided to give you a voice in the decision.

I’ve made a poll for you to help us choose the 12th design.  It’s different from our other polls in that you can choose up to two options to vote for.  Vote for the top two designs that you’d like to see made into merch selections.  We’ll probably just make one, but choose two just in case we go wild and do a 13 for contest #13 thing.

Vote for the 2 designs you'd most like to see become the 12th merch selection from Contest #13

• Warning: I cross the streams.
• NOTICE: Today is not the first day of the rest of your life. WARNING: Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.
• Caution: Objects in reality may not exist
• Caution: Ugly person reading shirt
• Beware-May become aggressive in the presence of bacon.
• If you punch me, I will apply an equal force to your fist

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One of the interesting things about running a website is seeing the ways in which users find their way to it.  A few weeks ago Jakutz started a forum thread about this topic.  I didn’t mention it on the forum, but I can tell you the two primary ways people find their way to MM: Facebook advertising & word of mouth.  But there is an interesting minority that finds us through Google searches.

Being a unique website (well, I’m not aware of any other site like us), the traffic we receive from Google usually isn’t very useful.  Sure, there are some people searching for “creative contests” or some variation like that, but most of the Google traffic comes from people searching for bizarre words and phrases that just happened to be mentioned in our contests.  I always wonder why these people are searching for these terms and what they think when they find us.

When I was a lad, one of my favorite comic book series was the What if? series by Marvel.  In the series, writers would explore alternates to the primary comic book story lines.

Example issues included What if Iron Man Sold out?, What if Venom had possessed The Punisher?, and What if Peter Parker had been bitten by a radioactive sheep?.  It’s probably not surprising that the website I would go on to start would be dedicated to exploring inventive, bizarre, and occasionally irreverent questions.

This week’s game is simply to explore the question: What if Mental Magma and its users controlled the American government? Simply post what you think would happen in the comments section of this post.

We are cribbing a bit from one of our forum posts, but we only just broached this subject and didn’t really explore it.

For our new users, games like this don’t have a prize associated with them.  The reward for these is adulation from your peers and fear from your enemies.

With some of us at MM being trivia aficionados, we’ve wanted to do a game involving trivia for a while.  However, it’s a difficult idea to implement on a blog.

Fortunately, one of our very own users (Misha G) runs a quiz/trivia website called Kwizmaster and has worked out all the messy technical details.

It’s self explanatory, but you just go to the site, register with a user name (I suggest the same one you use here so we’ll be able to spot you), and start taking quizzes. The quizzes are timed, so users aren’t able to cheat and use the Internet for answers.

We’re making some last minute adjustments to the merch.  We should have the announcement up late tonight or tomorrow.  In the interim, let me show you just one of the merch selections.  This was from one of fooly cooly’s entries: (not available in the store at the time of this writing)

As we’ve hinted around on the forums, we’re going to host our first photo contest soon.  We’ve decided that our first contest is going to be a competition for the most creative Halloween costume.  We thought that this would be a good choice because many of you will already be making creative costumes and taking pictures.  This is not the kind of photo contest we imagine having in the future, but this is sort of a fun first attempt.

The prize for the photo contest will be a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate.  We’ll specify the full rule list soon.  Don’t start snapping the actual photos yet or submitting them because the rule list will specify the procedures you’ll need to follow for your picture to be eligible.  

The contest will run concurrent with our normal contests and you’ll have 2 weeks or so to submit and rate them.  So get started on your costume today.

photo by flickr user conor lamb

We haven’t had a game in a little while.  When I saw this picture and the follow video, it gave me an idea.  You don’t need to read about what happened in this nude-man vs Japanese-imperial-palace-guard showdown to play today’s game, but you can here.

So the game we’re going to play is collaborative storytelling. You’ve probably seen this before.  We’ll all contribute to the story one line at a time (in the comments section). You can contribute two sentences if they’re each short.

The story we’re going to tell concerns this nude man.  Let’s weave the tale of this man’s day, starting before he arrived at the imperial palace. You’re welcome to contribute to the story more than once, but never two times in a row.  Also, at your discretion, you may end your contribution in mid sentence (to allow the next person to finish off your thought).  It probably goes without saying, but this will be an entirely fictional account.

So this is still a work in progress, but I felt it was better to go public now and make good on my promise than delay.  I’ve just added the topics that came to me most readily.  Why don’t you tell me what other topics you think would be good categories of discussion.  The forum is located at www.mentalmagma/forum.  You can also click on the forum tab on the top of the page.  Again, I expect the forum will change in look and structure a bit in the coming weeks (much like the main site did early on), but it should be fully functional.

One note, while anyone can read the forum, you’ll need to be logged in to post. Your username and password will be the same as it is on the main site. Eventually we’ll arrange it so if you’re logged into the main site you won’t have to log into the forum, but for now you must log in separately.  I’d like to thank everyone for their patience in us bringing this to you.  Now you better go and forum it up!

This is a big week for change here at MM.  Effective immediately, we’re announcing our new participation reward system.  We decided we needed to also reward users for forms of participation other than contest entries.

Starting with contest #14, we will randomly select one user per week who had good participation on the site and reward that person.  The rewards may change, but this week it’s going to be a $10 gift certificate to the Mental Magma online store.

“Participation” is basically everything you can do on the site besides enter the contest.  That includes rating contest entries, providing feedback to other users’ entries (including simple messages of appreciation like “That was so funny I threw up”), voting on the finalists, participating in games, and posting in the forum (which will be announced tomorrow).  We’re not going to spell out exactly how participation influences your chances of winning (to prevent gaming the system), but I will say that in order to be eligible to win, you must, at minimum, make one non-entry comment and vote in the finalist poll.

Although lots of issues were broached in last week’s finalist-selection discussion, I’ve broken down the elements into what I see as the 2 most relevent issues (and the ones we’re most likely to be willing to change).

Issue 1: Should we have a rating system that simply accumulates votes (such as our thumbs up system) or should we have a system that averages ratings (like a 5 star system).  A hybrid system is also possible (e.g. a 5 star rating system that also includes an option to mark an entry as “favorite”).

Issue 2: Should we, the MM staff, choose the finalists using our own subjective criteria, or should the finalists be chosen strictly by objective methods?  Again, a hybrid system is possible (e.g. the top 4 are chosen objectively and 1 spot is chosen by us or by a guest judge).

Sometimes when I describe MM to people, I say it’s like Woot.com, Digg.com, and Threadless.com had a menage and had a chimera lovechild (maybe with HotOrNot.com filming it).  I was thinking about that today and started thinking about what other websites it would be fun to breed.

Ebay.com + KellyBlueBook.com = a resource for knowing the real dollar value of everything. Priceline.com + Match.com = name your price for a trip to a brothel (but the brothel chooses the girl).  Twitter.com + Random.org = a service that texts you a steady stream of randomly generated numbers (only marginally less interesting than twitter.com by itself).

Actually, I really like those ideas.  I’m off to turn those into new web empires; why don’t you do some website breeding and post the results in our comments section?

It’s an idea we’ve been kicking around for a while…changing the contest voting system.  Jakutz broached the subject last week in the comments section of the finalists post.  Before I give you my opinion on the subject, let me say we will always encourage this sort of thing.  If there’s something you don’t like or have a better idea for, let us know.

From my perspective there are two primary things flawed about the rating system.  One is that, as Jakutz mentioned, the earlier entries are viewed more and thus receive more votes.  We could counteract this by reversing the comment order (most recent on top) or by putting the comments in random order.  My problem with this is that in some weeks the contest entries have a very nice flow to them.  This week there is an epic limerick war going on between several members.  Altering the comment order would disrupt that natural sequence.  On a side note, I think MM’s 2nd movie project (after Elves) should be a sequel to 8-mile featuring limerick battles in the ghetto.