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I wish I knew about this. I wrote a file server that serves your webroot directory over League of Legends chat. Any time you request a file that is more than a few bytes, your chat gets flooded with base64 strings... The extraslow web.
All the projects there were so beautiful because they were liberated from the whole motif in tech of products constantly "revolutionizing field-xyz and solving 1000 major world problems".
If we are going to enter into a truly tech-literate, post-internet phase of humanity, we gotta be making dumb, hilarious junk like this.
A very similar hackathon I went to a few months back is http://www.comedyhackday.org/ They matchup comedians and hackers to create beauty.
Easily the most fun hackathon i've ever been to/
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Well, I organized the hackathon. Does that count?
You should do one in SF next. I found this 2.74 times more amusing than most hackathon post mortems.
How is this different from every other Hackathon?
1) these "terrible idea" hackathon projects were so much more _sexual_ than your typical hackathon. This goes with the indications that the sex-tech space is anathema more for market reasons (VCs want to stay family friendly) than because sex-tech isn't fun or interesting to people. With the chance of funding not on the table, a healthy mix of projects veered toward sex. Maybe humor can actually be a way for a few sex-tech startups to take off. :)
2) the funniest projects all involved hardware. There's something extra-ridiculous about juxtaposing our own bodies into these stupid projects. I recommend anyone interested in a solid philosophical grounding in humor to read Henri Bergson's early 20th century treatise on laughter (http://www.templeofearth.com/books/laughter.pdf). He writes that we find use laughter as a way to draw attention to the rigid, mortal, and physical in all of us. That is why impersonating someone's habits is funny-- because the rigidity of their personality is made super clear. I wonder what it says about us that strapping ipads onto people's faces makes me laugh out loud.
That "Focus Tools" chrome extension looks like it could potentially help me from getting distracted. Disqualified!
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You should do one in SF next. I found this 2.74 times more amusing than most hackathon post mortems.
If someone wants to do something like this in the SF Bay Area, I will happily help organize space at the Hacker Dojo in MV.