Thursday, August 22, 2013

Worth1000 closure wreaks devastation on the snowboarding penguin Photoshopping industry

 
What would the Internet be like without an endless stream of penguins Photoshopped onto snowboards? We're about to find out...

Sad news gang, Worth1000, the endless Photoshop competition site that seemingly fuelled most of Boing Boing and BuzzFeed's content, is shutting down.

"But what is Worth1000?" I hear you say.

'Worth1000 is a collection of online arenas where the worlds best artists compete daily in creative competitions.' Worlds best artists. Really? I guess that might explain why the infinitely talentless Tracey Emin managed to hack out a career in art if all the competition was busy Photoshopping clothes onto monkeys.

'Borrowing its name from the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words", it opened to the public on January 1, 2002.'  Due to the artistic depreciation that ensued, a picture is now only worth 386 words on the open market.

"But Illicit, why are they shutting down?"

According to the founder's letter about the change it's because it's broken, the traffic is falling and he doesn't know how to fix it. A more likely explanation is that when you find that you've run the fifth edition of the competition 'Where Are My Pants', you've pretty much exhausted the format.

The internet will sadly now be devoid of all this...

The obligatory Shaun White appearance, White Wins, came in 27th place in the competition Where Are My Pants 5 (which was an actual competition).

I can't help thinking they could have done a whole load better if they'd named the work tighty Whities. 


43rd in One Letter Off.

It took me a while to realise it wasn't and entry some sort of masturbation themed contest.


These next three are actually the best ones I could find, which is surprising for the combined efforts of the worlds best artists.
76th in Miniature City 8

Also only achieved the heady height of 76th place, this time in Miniature City 2

34th in Subtle Changes 4

Now to the crappy ones. 

This next one spawned endless irritating text memes, adorned a thousand Facebook profiles and messed up every single snowboard Google image search since it was produced in 2006.
It came 2nd in the ill-conceived competition Wing Nutz. 
I hate both this picture and the word Nutz with a seething passion. 


11th in Super Stunts - the shotgun approach to Photoshoppery


This half-hearted blurring together of two images reached a rightfully disdainful 66th in Surreal Sports


45th in Snowy Mountain (no explanation for the ladies in the hats given, or needed).

When your snowboard Photoshop can't get beyond 45th in a competition where you start off with a bloody snowy mountain, it's time to realise you're mum was lying to you  - you're not creative and you should start preparing yourself for a career in shelf stacking.


26th in Coolio

Holy mother of God! What the hell came 27th?


Of course where things really got serious on Worth1000 was animal Photoshopping. They couldn't get enough of it...
21st in Bear Contest 3

This entry did not perform any better in the competition because of the perplexing way the bear was riding the snowboard side-saddle.


Slolum - 24th in Planet of The Apes 5

It's not even the right kind of snowboarding slalom gate! Mental.


4th Animal Olympics 4

Useless fact: There's been the same number of Animal Olympics as there has been Olympics which included snowboarding.


And when it come snowboarding animals, there's been no animal more visually abused than the unsuspecting penguin. Quite what the fixation the artists of Worth1000 had with penguins on snowboards was I guess we'll never now know, but they bloody loved them. 




There's ten times more snowboarding penguin entries than any other snowboarding animal or topic. And the pick of the bunch was this one.

It came in 2nd in Surreal Sports 3 - which by my reckoning also makes it the most successful snowboard-themed Photoshop that ever appeared on Worth1000.

11 years of Worthless1000 and a snowboarding entry never won a single competition, not even one of the seemingly endless penguin inspired ones. It a shameful historical legacy for snowboarding, but thankfully we'll be able to deny everything now that the site is officially dead. It's a brave new world from here on out guys, a life without reams of snowboarding penguins, only time will tell how that will affect the snowboarding world.


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