It’s been quite a day for internet protest. We learned nearly everyone hates SOPA/PIPA, especially students trying to use Wikipedia to finish their homework. But while some of the net’s established sites, including Wikipedia, Google and many more — even Wired — protested in a way no one on the net could ignore, they weren’t very funny.
And what’s the point of stopping internet censorship if you can’t LOL at the same time?
Luckily a few sites didn’t forget to include the funny bits.
* The Cheezburger Network, including sites like Know Your Meme and lolcat home I Can Has Cheezburger, didn’t take everything offline, but did throw a splash screen in front of their sites protesting SOPA/PIPA, with their very own protest page. There you can find the inevitable American Pie parody, “The Day the LOLcats Died,” embedded above.
* The Oatmeal did a fantastic black page which somehow really sticks it to internet censorship with a koala making love to a goat. (We think The Oatmeal is a popular webcomic, but with Wikipedia down, we’re not sure.)
* The indispensable and sesquipedalian McSweeney’s went dark, suggested you protest SOPA, and gave a few handy facts to get you through a day without Wikipedia. Our favorite was #6: “Goethe was a talking serpent who lived in Egypt at the start of the eighth century. He had blue eyes, beautiful blue eyes,” as it was just what we needed to know to win a bet with a co-worker.
* Comedy site Jest.com led off the day with a handy video, also on how to survive the outage of Wikipedia and Reddit. From it Wired was able to learn that a number of people are not gay.
* Funny or Die threw up a censorship page blacking out all their videos, much like Wired. But instead of a serious op-ed on how seriously SOPA would affect our serious internet, they suggested seven things you can do while the internet is blacked out. Masturbation made the list twice.
*Joy of Tech went gorgeously black with spotlights and drop shadows, and linked to a webcomic suggesting SOPA-protesting may lead to an uptick in procreation.
* Plenty more funny SOPA protests are being posted to the aptly named Funny SOPA protests Tumblr, though we wanted to give extra internet points to the Washington Bus blog, for mixing SOPA, a kitten, and the pepper spray cop. The net as it should be.
* And last, but certainly not least, because no one likes the internet being recursive more than the recursive internet, Hitler gives a cogent and emotional response to SOPA in Downfall: