Mental Magma

For this week’s contest, you’re going to have to meditate and become one with the internet, the cosmos, and Mental Magma.

This week’s contest is to invent the best Mental Magma-esque contest. I know what you’re saying, “But Gabriel, you’ve just done that with Contest #9 here.”  Okay, point taken, but go ahead and give it a shot.

To create a MM-esque contest, you’re going to have to be familiar with our mindset.  If you’re relatively new to the site, you’ll probably benefit from giving a quick look to our previous contests.

If you’ve submitted a contest idea via email to us before, you may submit the same idea for this contest.

Congratulations to Garrett, winner of the second ever Mental Magma contest (scroll down or click here to see full voting results).  He showed great creativity as he gave us seventeen syllables to repeat should we ever need to make conversation with an Japanophile-English professor-futurist:

In the near future,
Prizes will be fifty bucks.
I’ll try harder then.

A $25 Amazon.com gift certificate (and 100 yen coin) is headed your way.

So, as we shed a wistful tear for Contest #2, we turn boldly to head for Contest #3.  Monday can’t come fast enough.

It’s Friday, so that means it’s finalist time.

This week we had an enormous response to the haiku contest with almost 50 entries.  We want to give a big thanks to everyone who participated this week.

Picking the finalists was especially difficult this week because so many poems had about the same thumbs-up rating.  Nevertheless, the MM selection committee had to pick some, so we did our best.

We do want recognize a few of the users who had highly rated poems that did not make the top 5.  Users smodaresi, Debra Devine, Ingshoe, and TD all had poems that were well received by the MM users.

If this is your first visit here, why don’t you check out this week’s contest.

Contest 2 is chugging along fabulously. The picture here is my unofficial entry into it (no, that’s not really the translation). If you haven’t rated the entries, go now and start clicking on the thumbs-up & thumbs-down buttons. The current leaders are names familiar from the last contest: users Garrett & Bren. But who knows, maybe a late entry will come in and sweep the votes like last week.

After 2 weeks in the website game, I thought it might be interesting for us to share what surprised us about running a website. So…

For last week’s contest (see the winner here) we looked to the past; this week we look to the future.  Contest #2 will require a willingness to play with language, some rudimentary poetry skills, and a dash of creativity.

For this week’s contest you have to write a haiku about the future. I know the title says “of the future”, but that’s just because it’s more catchy. We were thinking of calling this contest Futureku or even Haikuture, so I don’t think you have any room to complain. You can write about any aspect of the future. This includes technology, fashion, food, sports, language, Tony Danza, or whatever. Let your mind wander.