Author: admin

I for one, have always preferred your average weblog. By “average” I mean those weblogs that cast some light into the inner clockwork of individuals. They usually make fun reading.

This however is not your average weblog. Upon entering, you’re greeted with the catch phrase “the journal that’s all about you”. Read it some more and you’ll discover the blog is written by a fortune teller/alien who calls himself Mystic Hooligan. This alien has somehow managed to merge his consciousness with ours and offers a “unique insight” (his words) into human life. The blog is a Question-Answer site. You pose questions, Mystic Hooligan gives answers.

The site is composed of a large top flash banner reading “Future Hootenanny Overload” (this was very funny) and several paragraphs that give background information on Mystic Hooligan and the different sections of the blog. There’s also a separate link where you can read more about his planet.

The blog sections include “Spot the Non Human”, where you can ask Mystic Hooligan whether the person you’re curious about is in fact, human; “Ask an Alien for Advice”, where Mystic Hooligan answers your questions, “Celebrity Death Request”, where you can learn how your favorite celebrity will die; “Igoroscopes” or the Alien Horoscope, “My Daily Life”, where Mystic Hooligan gives his readers some tasks (like interpret his dream or guessing games) or just speaks of issues regarding his alien lifestyle, etc.

The template is white with three images (that take a rather long download time) to greet you. The side bar is at the right, with few links (no clutter there) that include: The Best of…, Special Features and other browse material related to Mystic Hooligan. There’s also a subscribe option.

The questions posed by the readers may be serious (most aren’t) and Mystic Hooligan
answers them with some witty entries of a tongue-in-cheek nature. The other blog sections are of course, odd; yet Mystic Hooligan somehow manages to be creative.

Summing up, the site is an internet curiosity. The author even encourages you to look for “silly” ways to occupy yourself while on it. I don’t disagree with the silly part. While Future Hootenanny Overload makes for amusing reading, I could not really relate to the site’s humor or its author.

Perhaps the site’s main disadvantage is that after a couple of reads, the concept wears out. Which is why I’m curious to see how Mystic Hooligan will manage to keep his readers interested.

In any case, it is a novel idea and if you like odd (and I mean very odd) sites, this is definitely one place you’ll like to browse through. And the author is pretty creative (for an Alien).

Being objective to the best of my abilites, I give the site a 3.5
Future Hootenanny Overload

With a name like Future Hootenanny Overload I was sure this was going to be a “redneck” type website. Someone who just wun themselvs a knew comfuser thingamob and they were going to tell all of us what it was like being a redneck. Boy was I wrong.

Upon entering Future Hootenanny Overload I was greeted with what I thought was a splash page. But then I realized I could scroll down. This fake splash page has some rather large images, a brief bio about the author (how he lives on another planet, is an alien, etc), and then some more information about the site.

After scrolling down through the two pages of above stuff, I finally got to the blog. The blog is a Q and A type blog where people write into Mystic Hooligan (the author) and he answers them from an alien’s perspective. The site is broken down into categories: Spot a Human, Celebrity Deaths, Ask an Alien, Myth Busting, and more. My personal favorite was the Celebrity Death Requests as I thought these were very funny.

The design of the site could be improved. The two pages I have to scroll down no matter what page I am viewing, gets annoying quickly. The page is a two-column layout with all the links on the right. Normally I complain if I can’t see the archives in a date format and only in a category format, but this is the first site that it works for. It would still be nice however to get them in date format.

Overall I enjoyed my time at this blog. There are some things that the site could improve on (the design, getting rid of the two pages that I have to scroll down) but in general this site was worth visiting. I plan to come back to this site any time I need a good laugh.Future Hootenanny Overload

Ugh. Not another family blog. I admit that I have one of my own burried on the web, but that doesn’t mean I want to read them. After all, the point of a family blog is to write for your family and close friends, not for the general public. This is like pulling out your wallet and showing your children’s pictures to complete strangers.

Drooling over super stars, complaining about Martha Stewart, daughter goes through puberty, cats, rain, husband, neighbor stories, online quizzes, yadda yadda yadda. Boring. Boring. Boring.

Even after reading through three months of archives, I’ve yet to know anything about the author that doesn’t relate to one of her children, her husband, or some other person in her daily life. Even her About Me section is lacking and doesn’t really give you much depth into the author. There was little more than basic information presented. The blog content reads like the diary of “what I did today…”

Her attempts at humor fail, she never scratches below the surface of any subject, and her entries seem never ending. And I mean NEVER ENDING. Her lack of interesting subject matter is not helped by the general look or design of the site.

The design is a typical Typepad layout, with the three column layout everyone is always complaining about. The main entry information tends to look squashed in between the two side columns, as if that material is nothing but an after-thought. The text is easy to read (dark green on beige) and the header is unique, but that’s it.

The lacking content could be made more readable if the author were to focus inward and share with us who she is behind who she presents to us. She needs to cut more to the point and not drag the reader through endless unimportant information while getting her point across. There is nothing that makes this blog stand out. This is your typical Mom Blog and even I (a mother who blogs) didn’t care for it.

The author is a bit older than the “typical” blog author and I admire that she has undertaken this task. The world needs more experienced bloggers to help us fill the corners of the Internet left vacant by the teen drama blogs that we encounter all too often. However, she needs to work on what she says and how she says it. This is not a site I would be interested in revisiting any time soon.
This Full House

The design of This Full House is weak simply because the left and right sidebars are so prominent that I found it difficult to keep my focus on the actual content. The color scheme, fonts, and font size all seemed a little archaic, and the fonts were generally too large, giving the blog a poor aesthetic quality. Within a few lines of reading, I figured out that the author is a mother and wife and that most of her content is related, if sometimes loosely, to these two topics.

I think you’ll have to be a parent, or at least female, to really appreciate the authors insights and talent. The posts are well-written, but they often relate the mundane aspects of her everyday life, from her dislike of brown rice to nighttime skinny-dipping with her husband. The writing itself is clear and sometimes clever as well. It’s written in an off-the-cuff manner, as if the author is just recording a conversation with a close friend, but the content of the posts is somewhat generic, tired out. It seemed to be the same old parental blog – an outlet for expressing the frustrations and joys of modern family life. However, the author is prolific enough that the reader gets an intimately voyeuristic look into her life and the lives of those in her family.

The layout needs to be tweaked a bit to bring a hierarchy to the content. The sidebars and the main entry column are almost battling for the readers’ attention. Also, the headers above her different groups of links are ambiguous – ‘enjoyed with a strong cup of coffee…’, ‘tossed with a nice crispy salad…,’ and so on. This might just be a pet peeve of mine, but I like to know why the author includes certain links on his or her page and cute ambiguity tells me nothing. The ‘about’ page is a list of 101 things about her. I read about 50 and the items did help describe the author, but I didn’t want to have to read 101 sentences just to find out a little information about her. Another pet peeve: a long list that doesn’t tell me much about you instead of a brief ‘about’ paragraph from which I can decide whether or not we share the same interests. Save the list for a post. Also, the links to The Philosophica Mother, an outside site, didn’t work.

I think you’ll like this site if you’re a parent (the author does get a bit racy at times to spice things up) and the author is a good writer, but I felt the content to be generic and it seemed like a lot of effort went into making the blog cute rather than clever. The rating of 2.5 could get bumped up to 3.5 with a design that focuses the reader on the content better.This Full House

American Blogger opens to a very pleasant, atmospheric picture of the prairie. The railroad tracks and stop sign are an amusing way to tell us he thinks he lives in the middle of nowhere. I followed the link to his blog which has been in existence since April of this year. I was impressed by the opening page here too. The color scheme is eye pleasing and the header is a complex, if subtle montage. I started to get excited. This is a really great looking site. Very professional.

But then I started to read the posts. Mercifully, they are short. They consist of terse comments about movies, with very little in the way of commentary. Some entries contain a photo of an actress or model and some salacious comment on same. One link that I regrettably clicked on named “what can brown do for you” took me to a vulgar photo. I did not appreciate the ambiguity of the link. There are other posts on various short subjects such as sports or some odd bit of news that captured the author’s attention that day.

In the sidebar are links to several photo galleries that include family members, “babes”, goofy news photos of improbable events, and scenic views. Some of the pictures in the “Whacky and Funny” folder are pretty fun. But that’s about as much fun that you are going to find on this blog. The author describes his blog in one post thusly: “So you ask what is the purpose of my blog, must there always be a purpose? I know it’s not much, and it certainly won’t make u smarter for reading it, I hope it doesn’t make u stupid either. I just hope that you leave here with a smile.”

I suppose one could argue that blogs don’t have to have a purpose. We could debate that. But I must say, I did not leave with a smile. Perhaps it had something to do with the entry that opened with these words: “So wassup sluts…”

This blog is listed under the “Movie” category. I can’t say that it belongs there except that the author does watch movies, but he certainly doesn’t spend much energy critiquing them.

I won’t be coming back any time soon. The one point I am giving is for the design, which is undeniably quite good. American Blogger