Wheel of Weirdos at Chat Roulette

I'm not about to say that Chat Roulette is some huge craze that's taking the Internet by storm, but I am going to say that a lot of people are writing about it and/or talking about it. I'm also going to say that while it's incredibly odd, it's also incredibly entertaining.

Picture this: You're in your house, hovel, tepee, whatever, and you're bored and you'd like to talk to someone. Now picture that you want to talk to someone that you don't know. Personally, I'm not sure what the appeal is in that. I'm not a big fan of "the stranger", but I guess that for a lot of people, that's appealing. (If you know what the appeal is, please let me know. I'm stumped.)

The solution to your dilemma above is Chat Roulette. The concept is simple. You allow the camera and/or the microphone on your computer to be activated. You sit in front of your computer and you click "Chat" or "Start" or whatever it says. The image of you streams onto the screen and then the site hooks you up with the video stream of a "random stranger" that is also on the site. Then you see the image of them. At that point, you can decide to click "Next" and go onto the next "random stranger" or you can chat with whoever you have there. That's all there is to it.

The thing is that this site seems to be like the dungeon of the human soul. There are a lot of people sitting in very dark rooms, as if they are doing something sinister. In a few cases, there was plenty of sinister going on (ie, crank yankers). No one looked particularly happy. The men outnumbered the women on probably an undercalculated average of 10 to 1 (it's probably closer to 15 to 1, but I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, something I'm getting good at these days). I come to those conclusions having spent about ten minutes on the site with my camera and my microphone off, so I could see into the dungeon of the human soul, but it couldn't see into mine. Seemed safest that way. How about some examples? All rightee then!

Here we have some of the aforementioned (and censored) crank yankers. Behold!

You thought I was kidding, didn't you? I was NOT. Let's see, what else? The sunglasses look was fairly popular (though if they were worried about being seen, they just could have turned off their camera, so I don't get it.

I like the Unabomber look that the one dude is sporting there. Sure. That's normal. Who else? We have perplexed guy...

Hooded guy amidst one heck of a mess...

Cousin of perplexed guy...

And pot smoking guy...

I did really enjoy puppet guy...

But you know what I really enjoyed? This could make the site something other than an anonymous outlet for public masturbaters. I really liked the hats and masks. Yes. The hats. And the masks. Behold!

I really admire the guy in the furry hat there for not covering up his face. Way to go, anonymous chat dude! Way to go.

And finally, we have the signs. I appreciate the signs. I don't know how successful they are going to be in their quest for breasts, but if they were only trying to amuse, they succeeded on several different levels. Behold!