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

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

View Results

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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

This week’s poll was a close 3-party race.  Alex, Greg, and Fuzz on the concept all had a chance to win, but at the closing bell Fuzz O.T.C. had the most votes.

We shan’t be surprised if Hallmark contacts Mr On The Concept and offers him a job.  The quip that earned him the win was:

Hoping all your hallucinations are harmless this Holiday Season!

F. on the C. will receive a $35 gift certificate to the MM online store.  Our MM Participation Rewards winner this week was Dana, who wins a $20 MM online store gift certificate (We doubled the amount to $20 in honor of contest 20).

This was a merch contest, so we’ll be making real cards out of some of these card ideas and selling them in our store.  We’ll try to have that done and announced in the next week so you can send them out as holiday cards.  Let us know if you have a favorite you’d really like to see make the cut (merch selections can be chosen from any entries, not just the finalists).

Jakutz is still on top, but Zabo is closing in on him.  The big movers this week were Lalaith and jupchu who both went from unranked to 7th & 8th respectively.  Alex also deserves some props for jumping 7 spots to take the #3 position.

1	Jakutz	45.5
2	Zabo	36.5
3	Alex	31.75
4	Greg	30.5
5	R.E.D.	23.25
6	SomeGuyNamedDoug	22
7	Lalaith	21.5
8	jupchu	18.75
9	Brendan	18.25
10	Mach3	17.5
11	fooly cooly	17.25
12	Bunny slippers	17
13	nmrboy	15.75
14	Iaoai	15.5
15	etmoose	15.25
16	Ian Randal Strock	14.5
17	Garrett	14.25
18	dlawhon	13.5
19	Tiago	13.25
20	Arkansas	12.5

Hallmark Shmallmark is right.  You guys rocked this week.  What can’t MM’ers do?  Compose classical music?  Beethoven Shmeethoven.

Given that we limit the finalists to the top five entries, each week we like to take the time to recognize some of the other outstanding submissions.  The following entries were either staff or crowd favorites: Etmoose’s terrifying traditions, Pennydreadful’s magic finger, Gig661’s birth control admonishment, pjmomof3boys Aunt Agnes, Etmoose‘s holiday car, Lisa‘s winter wonderland, R.E.D.’s drunken sot, Beverly‘s Goodwill jester, jupchu’s they’ll behave, SomeGuyNamedDoug’s unspeakable name, Arkansas‘ handkerchief boob job, cgomez‘s nativity scene, erumpleton‘s Hasslehoff cover, Taylor‘s chloroform,

Mental Magma Online Store

Introducing the 2nd set of six designs from:

Contest #13: Alternative Hazards.

Telescope by fooly cooly	Molten by Jakutz

Fist by Ella Minnow Pea	Format by Zabo

Yield by Zabo	Kangaroo by nmrboy

We’re also announcing a total redesign of our store. The new store has been upgraded, enhanced, and then sprinkled with bits of unicorn horn.

The new store sports:

• More merchandise options (like hoodies and $12 value tees)
• Larger display images
• New Designs & Top Designs sections
• Better organization
• Less dark matter

Feedback is appreciated. Let us and the users who came up with the ideas know what you think of the new designs and the new store. Post your thoughts in the comments section (of this post) or in the forum.

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.

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.

As we close another chapter in the saga of the Mischievous Time Traveler, I wonder what the story behind the mischief is.  Is she working for a shadow organization or is she operating solo?  What’s her obsession with pantsing?  And where (and when) will we see her again?  We’ll have to content ourselves with her latest chaos-inducing operation, authored by Soleil, the change to the bill of rights:

Second Amendment – Right to keep and arm bears.

A grizzly (ha!) alteration to American history indeed.  Soleil takes home a $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate.  In a moment of prescience, Soleil predicted his own win last week after winning last week’s participation reward.  What’s next for Soleil, the title of first 2x MM champion?

The randomly chosen winner of this week’s MM participation reward is Stevel Knievel.  Stevel earned eligibility by voting while logged in on this week’s contest and making a comment (which was quite useful) on the Contest #19 post.

This week the MM Mob showed that they only need a single word change to able to cause mayhem, mischief, high jinks, and last but not least, tomfoolery.

We have several extra entries to mention this week.  These were all entries that, despite missing the finals, were either crowd or staff favorites.  These included Silent Tuba’s right to keep bear arms, fuzz on the concept’s right to keep koala bears, Lalaith’s civil trial by fire, pennydreadful’s due process for zombies, erumpeltin’s right to bear Chuck Norris, and Alex’s powers reserved to the Fonz.

Whatever you do in life, do not mess with either Amueth or Snoconegrl.  They each have enormous posses, and they will mess you up.  I infer this from the fact that they each received more votes than the average of total votes in a normal poll.

Maybe it’s just that people were already in vote mode as this week was historic, not simply because of MM’s first photo contest but also because America elected its darkest-skinned president yet (Bill Clinton was, of course, our first black president).

When the voting deadline passed, the chads stopped hanging, and the Diebold guy finished monkeying with the voting machine, user Ameuth came out on top by a single vote.

Ameuth wins a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com and will be remembered forever in songs of Mental Magma as Lord of the Photo Contests.

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.

We’ve moved into a new world now that we’ve started hosting photo contests.  Despite my love for our writing-based contests, the web is really made for photos. Plus, it’s fun to get to see our users.  We’ve worked some bugs out and are ready to go for future photo-based competitions.

There won’t be any special mentions for this week, so let’s go straight to your five finalists.  The five most creative costumes were Snoconegrl’s Bob Ross, amueth’s Rorschach (from The Watchmen), Lalaith’s flying purple people eater, Jakutz‘ high tide, and Mach3’s Alex Trebek.

The polls will be open until 5pm EST on Thursday.  Remember, there’s a sweet $50 Amazon.com gift certificate riding on this as well as the title: winner of the first MM photo contest.

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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).

This week I will begin the winner announcement post with no preamble (other than this no-preamble announcement).

The winner of contest #18 and the person whose cup of fakelore runneth over with creativity is Alex. Soon the Internet will be filled be people chiding each other for not knowing the real story behind Hansel and Gretel.  See the full text of Alex’s answer here.

The winner of the the MM participation reward this week is Soleil. We’re giving him a $10 credit for the MM Online Store.  Remember, you can be eligible for the participation reward just by voting in the finalist poll (while logged in) and participating one other way on MM (see the above link for details on MM participation rewards eligibility).

We hope to see every back here soon for a political filled week.