What Are You Looking At?

I have a happy fantasy where somebody trips over the Internet's cord and plunges us all into a state of unpluggedness. This year especially, I felt like a hamster in a wheel trying to keep up with all the blogs, newspaper sites, and Twitter feeds that were relevant to my work, not to mention whatever latest video meme I needed to know about for bar chatter. But more often than not, every Web destination just regurgitated the same headlines as the next.

So the pop culture pastimes I enjoyed this year were sites that didn't just repeat content from another source but rather repurposed it in nifty new ways. Twaggies, self-described as "a crowdsourced comic," plucks random tweets ("Every time I see a Rent-a-Center, I imagine how much cooler it would be if it were a Rent-a-Centaur. Who wouldn't want to rent a centaur?") and literalizes them with David Barneda's sweetly dorky illustrations. But my absolute favorite mash-up was the short-lived but insanely awesome www.kanyenewyorkertweets.com, which replaced the captions of New Yorker cartoons with the rapper's giddy, bizarro, 140-character musings. Now hanging above my bed is a photocopy of Alex Gregory's illo of two Viking marauders on a beach with the Kanye'd cutline: "This is gonna be a dope ass day." Word. – Kimberley Jones

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Huh. It seems that my most reliable 2010 media habits were, quite unconsciously, driven by difficult women – Courtney Love, for instance, whose picture is practically in the dictionary next to the term. The vitriol that Ms. Love has inspired is in large part due to her problematic appearance and her insistence on having a loud conversation about it; whatcourtneyworetoday.com is the coda to that conversation. Documenting her morph into high-fashion mascot, it's almost contextless, unabashedly superficial, and probably the weirdest thing she's ever done. Sandra Bernhard's talent for mixing pop-cultural observation, righteous politics, and jokes makes her Twitter feed a less complicated delight. @SandraBernhard, @roseannecash, and @Kathy_Valentine have also formed a tweety power trio (twio?), which means a bumper crop of badass women on my feed.

DVR-marathonedProject Runway spin-off On the Road With Austin & Santino found our heroes traveling the country, outfitting women who by design-world standards are too fat, too poor, and too child-encumbered – another way of being difficult. It's sweet, funny, and the most womanist makeover show I've seen. In December, I veered in a more macho direction, transfixed by Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco (@ochocinco) and the droll-or-dumb conundra his tweets pose, my favorite being when he calls his Mercury Marauder "the Rolls Royce of cars." – Cindy Widner

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Remember the episode of Duckman where everyone in the world thinks that this one really unfunny comedian is hilarious, and Duckman doesn't get the joke, and it drives him to the edge of madness and social alienation? That's my relationship with www.hipsterrunoff.com. It's either the most po-faced, pomo, poorly written website tribute to skinny-jeans-wearing douche baggery ever to hit the Web, or it's an incredibly sophisticated satire at the expense of an entire music and fashion subculture. Is this the sublime and long-overdue alternative to the ultimate bastions of alt-culture at Pitchfork, or is it just some guy in a knock-off American Apparel shirt feuding with the singer of Best Coast because she tweets about her cat? And would I have even heard of Best Coast if it wasn't for the Twitter bitchfest with Hipster Runoff? Frankly, I'm expecting HR founder/author Carles to rip his ironic mustache off and reveal himself to be grand British satirist Chris Morris. Otherwise, what has happened is that I have looked into the cultural abyss, and it has stared back, wearing Kanye-style shutter shades and a lime-green bandana. – Richard Whittaker

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I would not want to see a pie chart of the websites that sucked my time this year, but I was easily sucked into Google's Books Ngram Viewer – it houses 500 billion words from 5 million digitized books, which you can search to see how frequently certain words and phrases appeared from 1800 to 2008 (www.ngrams.googlelabs.com). Hours later, you'll realize how many combinations exist. (Between "fudge" and "miracle," the latter fared fairly well until about 1920, while the former did poorly across the century, up until recently.) Radiolab, the syndicated radio show/podcast based out of WNYC, had my ear this year, broadcasting segments like "Famous Tumors" and the totally engrossing "Words" piece a few months ago.

The dark side: ABC's Cougar Town. The name drove me far away from this show starring Courteney Cox as a fortysomething divorcée, but once I found out it is supposed to take place in Florida, I had to watch at least one episode. The dialogue between Cox and her boozy clutch of gated-community friends is often hilarious, especially the I-love-you-bitch quips between the women. I was pleased to find out the writing staff is almost equally composed of men and women and that the show prominently features a wine glass that holds an entire bottle of wine. – Audra Schroeder

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Following video-game developers on Twitter gets you lots of shoptalk, a dash of criticism, the standard mixture of high-caliber and lowbrow links, and just the right amount of inside jokes. I wondered all year why 2010 wasn't the year when indie games made headlines, finally putting to rest the idea that "gamers" are space-Marine-controlling basement-dwellers. No headlines yet, but Independent Games Festival Chair Brandon Boyer (@brandonnn) kept us abreast of his whereabouts with Noby Noby Boy, Wiley Wiggins (@wileywiggins) shared his insights (e.g., "Dear 4square mayor of Pad Thai Mueller- put your shirt on, dude."), and Schell Games programmer Bryan Cash (@Bryan_Cash) made sure the world knows that gay gamers are out there and out. The requisite nonessential Twitter posts aside, most of the local game devs explored the gaming world as creators and consumers and shared their too-good-for-Twitter insights with the Twitterverse. They also never use the word "Twitterverse." And, if you have more than a thousand followers, aren't Tweets the 2011 equivalent of headlines anyway? – James Renovitch @renovitch

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I've been lurking on MetaFilter, the community-driven weblog dedicated to highlighting and discussing "the best of the Web," since I stumbled onto it a decade ago. And while "the blue" – the front-page of the site, which nicely captures the zeitgeist of the Web with user-submitted links – is highly trafficked, lately I've been spending more time on www.ask.metafilter.com, its well-regarded subsite, where MeFi members can submit questions and answers. It's proven indispensable this holiday season, as the "Popular Favorites" posts (ranked by users) have featured some great gift suggestions: Ask MeFi's "Gift for an old school manly man?" thread is responsible for my current obsession with vintage-reproduction field watches. And as a holiday respite, it doesn't get any better than "relationship filter," a 21st century agony column where people query for personal advice. But be sure you have an actual question and answer in mind, lest it be deleted by MeFi's light but discerning moderators as "chatfilter." – Wells Dunbar

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If you've never explored the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), don't start now; your life is short enough as it is already. Then again, why not spend a full 24 hours listening to a full 24 hours of actual Allied (and Axis!) news organizations breathlessly play-by-playing the Normandy invasion? From a complete run of Orson Welles as The Shadow to hours upon hours of Edward R. Murrow speaking to you from London during the Blitz (and from beyond the grave), this self-described "digital library of free books, movies, music & wayback machine" contains all the history you'll ever have time to listen to. And yes, they've also got that goddamn Orson Welles frozen peas blooper reel. –Marc Savlov