[READ | Coming soon: NEWS, FUNCTIONAL, ESSAYS]

FILLER
Essay / Cartoon: Funny | Wise | Angry

Every Wednesday Suck, the longest running Web-Zine, has the greatest goddamned thing ever: Filler. Filler is a well-balanced mix of text, cartoons, charts and graphs on a wide range of topics usually centered on the never-ending wretchedness of The Human Condition, written by Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther aka Tiny Little Penis), illustrated by Terry Colon.

HELL YEAH, HEATHER'S WORKING AGAIN! (kinda): Rabbit Blog

Related
Dear Tiny Little Penis
Heather Havrilesky's excellent advice column ("coming soon" as of 16 AUG 01)

Fillerama
Currently a link to the Filler archive and a Fillerama mailing list -- but you never know! There could be some fresh Filler one of these days!

Heather Havrilesky Interview: How Angry is Heather Havrilesky?

My Fave Filler
especially insightful
Chart: Adaptive Traits vs. Non-Adaptive Traits
Are you a Loser?
Are your problems chemical or emotional?
Do you have a Bad Head?
College vs. Post-College
Dialog on Conciousness (Polly & Squirrel)
On the Dignity of Man
Distractions
Expectations
About to have a nervous breakdown?
Friendship
Getting Older
How to be a writer (not)
Meet T Jay
Questioning Everything
Relationships
Everyone-else-is-a-lemming Syndrome
Thanksgiving Poem
Things standing in the way of your happiness
un-American
Unemployment
What's wrong with us?
You are irrelevant!

less or not insightful
Job Stereotypes & The Mystery of Restaurants
Third World Paradise

THE ONION
Zine: Funny | Fake Newspaper

[excessively lengthy description]

My Fave Onion Stories

Doctors Find New Way To Prolong Meaningless Existence
"Once the substance wins FDA approval and is made available to the general public, the hellish emptiness of our spiritually blank lives should be that much more inescapable."

New Crispy Snack Cracker To Ease Crushing Pain Of Modern Life
"Our tasty new snack cracker will, if only for a few lovely moments, significantly lessen the aching, gnawing angst that haunts your very soul."

Fast-Food Purchase Seething With Unspoken Class Conflict
As an irritated Lalley repeated his order, Hesketh made an effort to suppress his anger over being forced by economic circumstance into a life of blue-collar servility and mindless, soul-sapping repetition. He expressed this resentment by acting as if he'd failed to hear Lalley's order, asking three times, "Did you say fries with that?"

PLASTIC
Weblog | Messageboard

All the news interesting enough to talk about...all on one page (+ a good messageboard).

WORLD NEW YORK
Weblog: Essays

What Worst Log Ever would be if Worst Log Ever didn't suck. It's an Essay Log (that points to some really good, obscure essays) with strange statistics and vocabulary on the side.

YOUR AD HERE!
Writer: Essays | Funny | Clever | DEAD

Amusing (often funny) essays on random topics all vaguely related to the Advertising Industry theme.

My fave entry

Related
Tremble: Journal/essay/music-review thing by Your Ad Here guy Todd Levin.

SUCK
WebZine: Funny | Clever | DEAD

Okay, so maybe Suck.com's dead or shut down or whatever, but the archives are still up, and maybe it'll be back someday or something. Anyway, Suck.com is the fucking pimp shit of cleverness and insight. It consists of a weekdaily top-notch essay on whatever topic the Sucksters feel like writing about.

Related
BOOK: Suck : Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet

TED RALL
Writer / Cartoonist: Funny | Political | Left

Very funny, insightful political cartoonist and columnist.

UPDATE 18 OCT 01: Rall has, since Sept 11, become significantly less insightful and not very funny. I'm hoping this is temporary.

McSWEENEY'S
Zine: Essays | (Sometimes) Funny

[excessively lengthy description]

My Fave McSweeney's
32 1-2 Things I Learned on a Blind Date With a Pretty Girl Named Heather
Anecdotes About the Authors I've Met
Ann Landers' Parallel Universe
As If Hell Were a Real Place
Crack House Correspondence File
Diary Of a Student at Patrick Henry College, the Nation's First College for Home-School Students
Exclamations from The Boy Scout Handbook
Fun With Names
Humor Beginning With an Excerpt From a Newspaper
Kids Say the Darnedest Things
Memoirs of a Guy Who Cannot Tolerate Instances of Slightly Insincere Cheeriness in His Everyday Activities
Mother's Day Special Brunch With Mother
Prank Calling My Mother, Four Transcripts
Proposed Indian Names for Certain White People
Serves One
Some Little Fables To Help You in Your Life
Static Personal Growth in 23 Days
This Week's School Lunches
Three Thought Experiments (With Study Questions)
TV Eye
Why I'm No Longer Invited to Write Dust-Jacket Blurbs

KEN LAYNE
Writer: Weblog | Essays | Angry

Ken Layne knows how to tell a story (and he knows it). He could make attending an irrelevant trade conference, a weekend barbecue or even sleeping all day sound like an exciting fucking adventure. His weblog is updated frequently and includes links to bizarre news, stories about social nonevents in his life (again: he actually makes it interesting) and the occasion photo of his really hot fiancee. He also semi-frequently writes excellent columns for Online Journalism Review (and at one point edited a much-talked-about-in-certain-circles "news" site called Tabloid.net).

Related
INTERVIEW: Tabloid's Ken Layne, In His Own Words (About.com, 23 AUG 98)

LAYNE'S NEW BOOK: DOT.CON (description, links to reviews and links to retailers @ KenLayne.com)

Tabloid.Net: Layne's dead yet worth-a-read News site.

SHORT STORY (unfinished): Vodka City
A cool little story. Layne descibes (from his "blog", 24 JAN 01):

The other day I found this old story, a comedy written in weekly installments for an Internet thing called Tabloid.net.
...
What's it about? A city, a city collapsed. It's a happy punch in the mouth to anybody who thinks anything is getting better, that people are smarter or more "sensitive." Nobody's smarter. Not me, not you, and certainly not them. But smart never counted for much, now did it?
...
[lengthy rant about how shitty San Francisco is/was]
...

Mostly, though, "Vodka City" was about having a little fun with the typewriter. Rare enough. And it was about riffing, on deadline, on some wonderful writers, primarily Dashiell Hammett and William Burroughs, who had died a few weeks before VC's first installment

And here's a random excerpt (spoiler-free)

The bar was called Pumpkin's Party Pit. You got in through a long hall full of piss and needles. Some prankster painted little happy faces on all the broken security camera lenses.

Burned Bob was at a table in the corner; the only other customers were a couple of war gimps all bandaged up like the Mummy. Bob could've used some bandages, but he liked being the ugliest man alive.

Layne's less edgy, more productive friend Matt Welch

Fave Layne Quote:

I don't read Tabloid very often. Not much point when I spend 15 hours a day writing and editing the news and columns. And when I do, I don't chuckle. I wish we'd done something better, I go back and correct clumsy sentences I missed the night previous, and I take it very goddamned seriously. The reason that it's a lively, exciting thing to read is because we kill ourselves to get it that way.
--Ken Layne, About.com interview

Least Fave Layne Quote:

But the people who take online polls and "vote" on the Innernut aren't the kind of people who actually take part in the world. They sit in their pajamas, eating Fritos and typing depressed nonsense to seven people they've never met, because none of those people go outside.
--Ken Layne, from weblog

What a bastard.

OTHER

Tim Cavanaugh : Good essays.

Maureen Dowd : You know.

Matt Welch : Good essay-writer, friend of Ken Layne and Tony Pierce (who does excellent photo-essays - which I find through Ken Layne - and would be on this list if I could navigate his goddamn site) and excellent Warblogger.

Acid Logic : Webzine with occasionally good content.