Tilveran

Iceland. Some love it. Some loathe it. But no matter how you feel about this lithe little lump of volcanic rock, you've got to admit it produces a lot of interesting stuff per capita. Take Björk, for example. Or Gus Gus. Or Sigur Ros. Or... well, considering that Iceland has 277,906 people at last count, that seems to be plenty.

Good for them.

And now, just when you thought the Web was getting dull...

It's Tilveran!

For those who speak Icelandic, Tilveran is very much like the American weblog of the weird, Fark.com.

For the rest of us, the site is the intellectual and aesthetic equivelent of playing Russian roulette.

Visitors to the site are presented with a wall of postings, presumably updated by the cream of Iceland's hip technological elite. But rather than helpfully walking you through the posting's content with an or button, Tilveran presents you with this:

No matter what the link is.

More usefully, you can also select entire pages sorted by flokkar. Looking for flass? You got it. A whole page full. How about nörd? Sure thing. And in a world that seems to be getting more impersonal — and increasingly computer-driven — who couldn't use a little more brandarar?

If this isn't disconcerting enough, the site boasts some links to some of the truly coolest — and/or most repulsive — Web content available. Want to play an excellent game that involves cliff-diving monkeys? Hit it. Feel like looking at a guy standing in a pool of orange liquid, wearing a woman's bathing suit and salvaging a couch? It's yours. Want to watch a kick-fucking video? Too bad, because you're just clicking on stuff blindly.

Sure, Fark has weird stuff. But, somehow, Tilveran has tapped into a whole new brand of Euro-weirdness that we can only begin to comprehend. Did you know someone, possibly the Japanese, has developed a vibrating electronic box that attaches to your earlobes — with a special gel — and gets you high? It's totally true*!

And holy-moly! They've got icons for all the sex positions now!

What does it all mean? That even on the Web, there's still a bit of cultural diversity out there. Even though we all visited the Mahir site on the same afternoon, and it was peanut butter jelly time for America at around 3:15, June 15, 2002, there is still some uncharted territory out there.

Iceland: The online gateway to Europe and beyond. Tilveran: The online gateway to Europe.

Hit it.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)