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Gaze into Infinity (and a Soylent-Spewing Penis) at the Stupid Hackathon

Stupid Hackathon co-founder Sam Lavigne guides us through the festival for people who hate hackathons.
Nicole HeKatherine Pan, and Chino Kim'sSoylent Dick,' a dildo made from Soylent that ejects Soylent into a cup. Images courtesy Sam Lavigne

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Each year, makers and breakers from all over New York City meet up to roast hackathon culture with a series of creative-yet-ridiculous "hacks" even more useless than projects scraped from the bottom of the Kickstarter barrel. This weekend Sam Lavigne and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, founders of the Stupid Hackathon, gathered a group of inventors who created such gadgets as a Soylent-spewing dildo, a VR headset aimed at babies, and a browser plugin that blocks everything but ads. In a vaccuum, all of these ideas are useless, but together they're a biting critique of the notion that we can just hack away at life's problems with code and Mountain Dew alone.

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Lavigne gave us a peek at a few selected entries to the hackathon that haven't been publicized yet, satirizing everything from political machine hacks to the endless search for the "Uber of everything."

Slowder by Sylvia Naples and Jason Sigal

Slowder is a slow image loader. The image loads using the fractal space-filling Hilbert curve. The image will continue to load forever. Loading the image in it's entirety takes infinite time. They are also slowly working on a slowder browser extension.

Check out Slowder here.

Debate Camp by Caroline Sinders and Greg Borenstein

Debate Camp is a sexy/horrifying/romantic comedy game about debates, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio.

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Check out Debate Camp here.

OptIn® by Matthias Elliott and Sam Kaufman

OptIn® logs all of your keystrokes and posts them to Twitter, tagging @NSAGov. You know, in case they weren't already spying on you.

Download OptIn® here.

Uber for Segways by Trevor Frese

It’s like Uber, but for Segways. From the site, "The segway combines the safety of a motorcycle with the sex appeal of a smartcar. Our segway drivers come directly to you and you simply climb aboard their backs and zoom to your destination at 5 - 7 mph. Segways aren't build for two, but that won't stop us. It's time to DISRUPT transportation. Piggyback rides were reported as 'The most underrated form of transporation in 2016.' We're here to change that."

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Check out Uber for Segways here.

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A Million Random Digits by Pat Shiu and Pierre Depaz

A twelve-day reading of a million verifiably arbitrary digits. The plot is based loosely on the landmark 1955 publication of the same title by RAND corporation. A complimentary download of Chapter 1 is available here.

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Learn more about A Million Random Digits here.

The Organization for the Proliferation of Social Networking Messages (OPSNM) by Alex Wiles

OPSNM is a Twitter-like social network that uses a series of pdf forms, the United States Postal Service, and a single overwhelmed clerk in place of computers and the internet.

Learn more about OPSNM here.

Check out more projects from the 2016 Stupid Hackathon, including a 3Cheese printer, a device that tells you when you need to pee, and a digital box full of naked 3D scans of artist Matt Romein, on the official website.

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