Mental Magma

For this contest you must imagine you are living in a post apocalyptic world.  In this world, the apocalypse was caused by a zombie outbreak that spanned the globe but was eventually quelled…mostly.  Our story involves you discovering that there are still some zombies in the wilderness surrounding your town.

The contest this week is to write a classifieds ad that will find someone who will help you eradicate the zombie infestation.  The trick is that you can’t be obvious about what you need.  If the government goons spot your ad and think there’s an outbreak, they’ll nuke the whole region.  You must get the right person for the job without revealing your predicament.

Limitations: Imagine you are posting this ad in the surviving regional newspaper.  It can be any kind of classified ad (garage sale, personals, help wanted, etc) as long as it has the goals described above.  You must be succinct.  You are allowed no more than 3 lines, each with no more than 10 words per line.

Standard contest timeline and contest rules apply this week. By leaving an entry you are agreeing to those rules. The entry voted the favorite by MM users will earn its author Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide & their choice of a $15 Amazon.com gift certificate OR a $20 gift certificate to the MM Online Store.

Contest Summary
Assignment: Write a classifieds ad covertly seeking help with zombie eradication
How to enter: Post your ad in the Contest Entries section 
Deadline: Friday, November 21st at 5pm EST
Prize: choice of gift certificate and Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide.

Photo by Flickr user Dr_Doom

We’ve been doing this for 20 weeks now and we’re proud to be out of our teenage contests.  I know some of that new website smell is wearing off, but we’re just getting started.  We’re focusing our ingenuity beam on a new topic this week: the holiday greeting card.

The contest this week is to write the inside text for a holiday greeting card. You’ll be writing these captions for your choice of the images below.  This is going to be a merch contest so we will be choosing some of the entries and making them into actual holiday cards available in our online store.  Who wants to send their relatives bland and banal cards when you can introduce your loved ones to the output of Mental Magma minds?

Standard timeline and contest rules apply this week. By leaving an entry you are agreeing to those rules. The entry voted the favorite by MM users will earn its author a $35 gift certificate to the MM Online Store.

First off let me remind everyone that we’ve also got Photo Contest #1 going on right now.  Go and see the creative costumes.  If you haven’t uploaded your Halloween costume photo yet, the deadline is Tuesday @ 9pm EST.

With this week being America-gets-a-new-president week, we thought we’d get into the political spirit with a contest concerning government and legislation.  As the title of this contest suggests, the M.T.T. has another mission.  For those of you unfamiliar with the M.T.T.’s work, see Contest #1.  This week she’s got the itch to travel back in time and alter some historic documents.

Your assignment this week is to modify the American Bill of Rights by one word. Your goal is to maximize the creative mischief of the one word change.  You can insert one word, delete one word, or change one word into another.  After you modify your one word, you can fix the sentence to be grammatically correct (by adding an “s” to another word or inserting an extra preposition or something).

Sometimes in life, you read a word on Wikipedia and you just know that you’re going to make a blog contest about it.  This week I came across the word fakelore.  Fakelore is manufactured folklore that is presented as if it is genuinely traditional.

Your assignment this week is to whip up some Halloween fakelore. This can take many forms.  You could come up with a fictitious origin for the holiday.  You could create a fake tradition and describe it.  You could even invent a faux-historical Halloween mascot.

Something very central to this contest is the idea that fakelore must be intentionally deceptive.  This means that we must never speak of this contest again.  The fakelore generated herein must, after the contests ends, be spoken of only with the hushed and reverent tones of true believers.  We must make other people believe it is real in order for it to qualify as fakelore.  Maybe we can even have some games later involving spreading our new Internet memes.

One thing all historians of the middle ages agree on is that there was a scarcity of bumper stickers. Sure, a knight would occasionally slap one on his horse’s rump. However, if you had a clever quip you wanted everyone to know about, you probably just had to yell it in the town square.

The contest this week is to write a bumper sticker that would have been appropriate for the middle ages.  Whether you want to choose a historically accurate view of the period or a more fantasy-novel view is up to you.

This contest may be a merch contest.  We’re not really sure.  Time-traveling-medieval-peasants aren’t exactly a huge market, but some of your entries may be so clever that we have to print them up for present-day folks.  We’re leaving our options open.

I’m sure I’ll have a hard time convincing you, but sometimes governments make mistakes.  Let’s imagine a world in which the US government makes a huge mistake.  Let’s say they misunderestimate the severity of governmental personnel issues and somehow cut YOU the check for $700 billion that’s intended for the bailout. Of course, you head down to your local bank to cash that bad boy.

The contest this week is to answer this question: What do you say to the banker when you present your endorsed 700 billion dollar check to him and he, ever so slightly, raises one suspicious eyebrow?

Standard contest timeline and contest rules apply this week. 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.

This week’s contest is another first for MM.  We’re going to actually film one or more of your entries and make them into Youtube videos.  I have to give some credit for this idea.  User Sherry Baker gave us a link to a website that uses user ideas to guide their web show.  Also, user Jakutz is the one that came up with the actual contest idea (as an entry to Contest #9).

The challenge this week is to write a Star Wars PSA (public service announcement). If you’re not familiar with PSAs, don’t worry, wikipedia knows.  We want your entries to be short.  You don’t have to write the entire script, just give us the gist of what your idea is and maybe a line or two.

Our apologies to triskaidekaphobes everywhere, but we decided to plunge ahead with contest #13 despite the potential bad luck.  This contest is about alternative warnings, hazards, and dangers.  Sometimes there are threats in our environment that have nothing to do with falling rocks or electric fences.  This week we plan on exposing those threats.

This week’s contest is to come up with a novel danger, hazard, or warning sign. You could go with science-related (Warning: The Sun is going to explode…in 4 to 5 billion years), go with absurd humor (Danger: Open pickle jar), go with something self-referential (Notice: I no longer have an appendix), or whatever you think of (you guys are better at this than me).  This is going to be a merch contest, so we’ll be putting some of the entries in our online store.

We at MM love villains, just love ‘em.  They’re more fun to watch than heroes, usually more complex, and throw better parties.  You’ve never seen anybody do the worm on a dance-floor until you’ve seen Vader use the force to make someone do it against their will.  It is for these reasons we wish you compose an ode to these megalomaniacs.

This week’s challenge is to write a limerick about a villain of your choice. If you’re unfamiliar with how to write a limerick, ehow.com has a nice primer on the subject.  In short, a limerick is a poem in which the 1st and 2nds lines rhyme with each other, the 3rd and 4th lines rhyme with each other, and the 5th line rhymes with the 1st and 2nd lines.

pic by flickr user tirrell

If  television & movies have taught us anything it’s that Aliens hate Predators, werewolves hate vampires, and Springfield hates Shelbyville.  The internet also is a great teacher on this subject.  I had no idea about the vicious emnity between pirates and ninjas until an application on facebook alerted me.  We decided Mental Magma needed to get in on this game.

This contest is to pitch a movie about a fictional rivalry between two factions of your choice. There are two guidelines.  The first is that you must remember this is a pitch; you have to sell your movie and what would be interesting about it.  You can mention who would star in it, what the plotlines would be, or whatever you want.  The second guideline is that it must be a FICTIONAL rivalry, we’re not interested in a Shia versus Sunni movie this week.  We are interested in a Bowlers vs Badmintoners.

We made it to double-digit contests! (Keep in mind, I ration myself to one exclamation point per month, so that gives you an idea of how excited I am).  We decided to use the winning entry from last week’s contest as this week’s competition.  This week, user Bunny Slippers will be a guest judge (meaning she’ll get to choose one of the finalists).

This week’s contest is to create a portmanteau word.  You can click on the link for a full description, but a brief definition is that a portmanteau is a word created from two other words. Sexpert (sex + expert), and Barrack-tober (what Barrack Obama wants to rename the 10th month) are portmanteaus. This is going to be a merch contest, so we’ll put the most clever, funny, or inventive entries on t-shirts and other products in our online store.

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.

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.

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.