fark

Amaze and amuse with the following miscellaneous farkage...

The medical term infarction is pronounced in-FARK-shun.

FARK is an acronym for Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosova.

The Hungarian word farkas (wolf) is derived from the word fark, which means "tail."

The game company Cavedog Entertainment released a unit for their game Total Annihilation called the FARK. In this case, FARK stood for Fast Assist Repair Kbot and it had the power to "heal" other units.

The Kabalarians believe having the first name of Fark causes one (in a addition to a lot of other things) to have an intense personal nature and a tendency to dominate people.

A website (http://www.fark.com/).

If Seinfeld was the "show about nothing," then Fark.com is the website about nothing. Basically, it's a daily list of humorous or interesting links (usually news articles) from across the web. Anyone can submit an article (or "farcticle" as they are sometimes called), but most of them are found by creator and president-for-life Drew Curtis.

In an interview with Brassknuckles Webzine, Drew describes the site's beginning: "I've been reading news every morning since at least 1993. I used to send out articles to all my friends in email, but over time I was afraid that they'd get annoyed with it. So around 1999 I decided I'd go ahead and post them to a webpage instead. And told them all to look there. Apparently they told other people."

In 2000, Fark started giving out accounts, and then put comment threads next to the articles. Thus, the Fark community was born. Over the past two years, this community has grown into the tens of thousands.

Besides the links, Fark has also become known for its photoshop contests in which Farkers are challenged to alter photos or other images (usually with Adobe Photoshop).

There are no real guidelines on what gets posted on the site. There is the occasional porn link (carefully labelled NSFW -- not safe for work), and since September 11, 2001 there have been a lot more straight news stories and news flashes. Fark is about anything, or nothing, or possibly even everything, but mostly it's about finding more and more ways to waste time on the Internet.

Fark.com was originally a community created and primarily operated by Drew Curtis as a mere mailing list sent out to friends and family, and has evolved into a giant community website with influence in all corners of the internet. Fark lists links to funny or cool (well, subjectively) news stories, about 50 a day, and some of the more important serious ones. It's basically a digest for, let's say, the type of audience that watches The Man Show. Users can submit new stories to the queue to be evaluated for addition to today's links, and discuss links in the comments section provisioned for each link. Generally 50-200 comments are posted eventually for each story by various users, and the banter can be pretty amusing. Fark is so popular it's one of the few sites that has its own, mild version of the crushing "Slashdot effect" - a site is said to be "farked" when all the traffic has brought it down.

Fark also holds Photoshop contests, where an image is posted (sometimes from previously posted story) and users post doctored versions of those images in the comments to be voted on by other users. The now-insipid "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten" picture that has so quickly become nearly an internet phenomenon originated in a PS contest.

Each story or other item has a tag next to the headline, indicating something of the category of the story. "Photoshop" for Photoshop contests, "boobies" or "weeners" for porn (yes, the site is more than a bit juvenile, if you haven't guessed already), "Weird" for stories like "Man robs pharmacy, serves time, robs it again 20 years later, same clerk still on duty", "Obvious" for stories like "Thai government warns against cockroaches as pets," and on and on and on and on.

Fark even has a celebrity in its ranks - Wil Wheaton. He joined Fark after a convoluted series of events involving (among other things) FHM magazine, the online comic Superosity, and a multi-million dollar jewel heist. Well, okay, maybe not that last one. Anyway, he even has his own Fark tag, "Wheaton" (Christopher Walken has one too, for less overt reasons).

A subscription service, TotalFark, is also available for $5 a month, or $50 a year for a six month or year subscription. In addition to Fark's ordinary links, you get the many extra ones that don't make the cut (about a 10-1 ratio).

Drew occasionally goes on TechTV's The Screen Savers to go over some of the latest links.