Locker

Lock your friend in a locker, put a lock on it and pretend that you just found the lock and don't know the combination to it.

Newsletter

Well, I am starting to run thin on ideas, I had hoped that I would have other people join the fray by now, but nobody likes my blog!

Well, I have at least one more for now -- start a newsletter.

In high school, my friends and I were really bored with the school newspaper. Who wouldn't be, high school newspapers are boring. Don't get me wrong, the kids doing it did a great job, its just that nobody cares about school news.

So we decided to make an alternative humor newspaper. Basically, it turned out to be a project for me and my friend Chris, cause everyone else wussed out. We started writing about the school and the world in an Onion-esque style. Whenever there we had an issue come out, we would sneak onto the school the night before and COVER the place in decorations pertaining to the theme of the issue. As kids came out of assembly the next day, we blared themed music out of huge speakers we brought (we were lucky to be friends with someone with a really nice soundsystem), and handed out our paper.

I would think it would be awesome to recreate this in the work place. It would be hilarious, and you wouldn't have to deal with the censorship that we had to. Make the hand out event as obnoxious and in your face as you possibly can. Roast people in the newsletter that you create. We liked adding an activities section in every issue -- with one of those mazes that has evil characters around every turn (obviously you can make them celebs or people in the work place -- come up with funny reasons why it would be bad to run into them in the maze), or a REALLY easy connect the dots, etc. Horoscopes work well and can be funny.

And again, like all of these projects, it helps to have some creativity, but if you don't and you are just throwing random crap on a piece of paper, it will still be worthwhile if you make a big production of it.

Freestyle Walking

Ok, so this one is specific to me and my friends, but it was fun as hell and maybe it will spark some sort of creativity?

Anyway, when we were in 8th and 9th grade, we bought Soap Shoes (shoes made for grinding rails, ledges, etc):

Let me tell you, we were bad at using them. Not only were we bad, we were EXTREMELY wussy. We would only grind ledges and benches that were level or at a very shallow slope. So naturally, we created a website to show off our "skillz." We created the site, got advertisers (illegally of course since we were too young to make money -- it was ok though, everything we signed up for had this kid jared's name on it -- we were safe), and then got listed on yahoo.

Naturally, "freestyle walking," being an interesting new fad at the time, and our website being the only one that actually had an intuitive layout and real pictures, we started getting hits. We decided to take down the advertisements after we all made enough money to cover the cost of our shoes.

Then, I decided to make a freestyle walking game. If you happen to have a mac running os 9 or earlier, you can probably still download the game by searching google for "Freestyle Walking 1.5" (1.5 being a TOTALLY arbitrary number of course). It was the worst game in the world. I made it in a program where you didn't have to have any programming skill, all of the code was automatically written as you chose your options for the game. The graphics were drawn in something similar to MS Paint. However, when it was all said and done, the website had almost 100,000 hits, and the game had been downloaded over 30,000 times. Unfortunately, hypermart.net decided to take away its free hosting, and with it went the website. After a while, download.com deleted freestyle walking 1.5 from its database, although, like I said, some mirrors picked it up and it can still be found.

Freshman year of college, before the site was deleted, we decided to resurrect it. We used all the traffic that the site was still generating and created the most inane freestyle walking video possible and then laughed at all the hate mail we received telling us how EXTREMELY gay we were (most went in to much more explicit detail). We figure that many people wanted to show their friends about freestyle walking, took the time to download the 10 meg video and then were embarrassed when they saw us running around in the snow in our underwear and aquasocks.

Music Video

Also, to any songs that you make, feel free to make music videos for them. Especially stereotype music videos (singing passionately in the rain, pimpin in da club, etc) -- also good to poorly choregraph a dance for it too.

Make Music!

A couple of years ago, at college, I decided to purchase a piece of software for my mac called "GarageBand." What a great purchase it was too. If you have a mac, I definitely recomend getting this software. There are many things you can do with it.

1. Make songs about your friends. I started doing this in college and made a few songs about my friends. One of whom goes by Neil but his real name is George. I made another about my Southern/German friend, Nina. Of course, Garageband is not necessary to make songs for your friends -- if you can record yourself either playing instruments, or beating on household objects (cups with water make nice tones, etc, be creative). You can either mix in vocals if you have any mixing software or you can record the instrumental track, play it back, and then on another computer, record both the music being played back and your vocals. Getting the levels right might be tricky, but it could be worth it.

Also, I found some company that makes personalized songs for you if you really can't get the tech right on this one. You fill out a form and they create a witty song for you. It's called FluidTunes

2. Make a soundtrack for the movie I already told you to make.

3. Record all of the funny voicemails you get and then e-mail them out to whoever would find it funny (works best if you have speakerphone on your cell, but still works as long as you hold the phone right up to the receiver). You don't really need GarageBand for this one, just anything that will record.

4. Sing along to a song in your headphones, then import the real song (I had my friends do this to a backstreet boys song) and have your vocals mix in with the song. Also, along these lines, once, I took an mp3 of a song that my friend listened to a lot, and then added comments throughout the song about him -- be creative -- whatever you want to say, the more shocking the better. Then I replaced the mp3 of this song on his computer with the new version. He was quite surprised to hear the remix.

5. I am sure there are MANY more possibilities for this one -- GarageBand is a GREAT piece of software. Go nuts.

Call to Arms

If you think you have good ideas on fun projects, I am more than willing to add people as posters on this blog -- just e-mail me at randmfx@gmail.com.

Comics

I was looking around my house today when I found a binder that I used to have way back in middle school. Inside, I found a comic strip that my friends and I had made about each other, about teachers, and about kids we hated at the time. It was hilarious to look back at these things.

I suggest that you and your friends get together and create a comic strip of your fellow students, teachers, coworkers, what-have-you. You can either each do a few panels, or each have a whole scene. Make sure to give your characters new and exciting personalities and characteristics. Play off of people's nicknames. For instance, we gave the nickname "Mr. Mittens" to our tennis coach and so his character had a large mitten hat and had super baking powers. Another fun thing to include is catch phrases, the more wacky you make them, while still based on reality, the better!

This way, years down the road, you will have an entertaining way not only to see what you created in the past, but also to remember, in a hilarious way, the idiosyncrasies of the people you used to know. This one is VERY easy and very worthwhile.

Movie

This is a really fun one that I have done. Make your own movie. Feature length. The crappier and more wacky the script the better. Add elements that make NO sense but would be fun. In high school, my friends and I made a movie called "Game Day" about an ultimate frisbee team that comes together to win the championship. We had some great frisbee action shots and for the "evil" team we were playing we stuck stockings over our heads and ran around shirtless. Meanwhile, there were many totally unrelated scenese throughout the movie involving supersoakers, 2 year old kids giving us condescending looks, etc. I am sure we could come up with even more crazy/fun stuff nowadays, but still, it is a GREAT thing to be able to watch now and look back fondly upon.

Things you will need:


Camcorder (Or a digital camera that takes short video clips)

Way to edit the movie -- In high school, my friend edited using two VCRs and recording back and forth, but I think a computer would be better nowadays -- iMovie is REALLY easy -- after you are done transfering the movie to the computer, edit it, transfer it back to the camera, hook the camera up to the TV and record VHS copies to give to all of your friends that were in it!

As many random props as you can come up with -- you can literally use your surroundings to dictate the direction the script takes. If you see something that would be funny to use, write in an extra scene.


As a final note, you can obviously spend as much time writing as you want, but I would suggest pumping something out really quickly (working from NOTHING is possible, but it is good to have some direction), and then spending most of the time filming it, because that is the fun part. Be sure to write scenes that will be FUN to shoot.

Keywords

Ok, I am gonna take this opportunity to put a few keywords in this post so people searching for certain things can find this blog:

Read this blog if you are: bored
Come here if you want: stuff to do
This is the place for finding out about: projects
As previously stated, we are interested in sharing ideas on: fun things to do

Ok, that should be good enough for now

theSTART

This is the beginning of Project Useless. Hopefully you will find inspiration here to go out and do useless things. I hope to find inspiration from the comments people have. Feel free to post fun projects that you have undertaken in the comments.