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[Link] Leisure Town [Date] 6/6/02 [Comments] 
How do insanely great works like this go on for years before I find out about them? "Liesure Town" is probably the most amazing thing I've seen on the Internet since exploding dog. It's visually incredible, thematicly disturbing, and utterly funny. The author constructs stories using photography of some kind of plastic toys set in astounding real-world sets. The sequence of panels is often occompanied by text containing the innner dialog of one of the characters. Those familiar with the work will notice that there are a couple different themes to be found in the huge archive. The first is the stories of pathetic losers, specifically the kind found associated with the internet. In fact, the web site is currently organized as a fake "webzine", with "articles" and "message boards" each of which is really a not-very-disguised story. The characters' delusions are broken down bit by bit throughout their internal rambling dialogs until even they cannot avoid facing terrible reality. Earlier stories focused on a more straightforward chaos, in which these same adorable creatures (there seems to be only about 20, reused and reused for each story) undergo extremely physical misadventures of building hilarity. Examples of the latter type of story are "Extreme Cyclist Lexiconology", in which the relatively triumphant terms such as "sparkler" and "whirligig" give way to the more unfortunate illustrations for "balance blackout" and "wang chung", and "Umbrella Patrol", in which a character asked to watch a friend's umbrella instead takes it on a series of ever more irresponsible adventures. Sterling examples of the former story are the "Manage Your Web Dollars!" article, in which the "successful" .com consultant simply wanders around town searching for his lost ATM card, oscillating wildly between self importance and the realization of what a joke his life is, and "Nobody Came To My Winter Solstice Party, a message board rant in which a thoughly adorable character pleads for any response to his description of the great but snubbed party he threw and sent out e-vites for, and then concludes with an excited invitation to his next shindig. The LiesureTown archive is unbelivably huge, dating back to 1997, and with some stories exceeding 100 pages! I'll be reading this one for a while. Update 1/8/04 So sad! It appears that LT is no longer. The site is up, but shows only a goodbye message Update 2/1/06It's back! No new material, but it looks like the whole archive has been reposted.
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