Mike Lacher is a writer and creative director

Over the past decade, I’ve made a bunch of stuff. Here are a few things from the past I still really like.

ShadyURL

I always thought URL shorteners made links look a little sketchy. So I thought it would be funny to make a shortener that made links look extraordinarily sketchy. In about a day (and without any knowledge of how to responsibly implement a database) I hacked ShadyURL together. Within a week it topped Reddit and I was frantically hiding in conference rooms at work trying to support the influx of traffic.

Sadly it became a frequent target for scammers, I guess who use it for reverse psychology? I’ve been booted from a number of hosts, so it’s offline for the moment.

Disappointing Gay Best Friend

A web series made with Mikala Bierma and friend Tyler Coates, all about his inability to be a sassy gay best friend.

The Cage Cage

I have a wholly unironic fascination with Nicolas Cage. I’ve made a number of increasingly stupid projects involving him.

So, when my friend Chris Baker and I came up with the idea of being locked inside a cage and forced to watching Nic Cage movies, I couldn’t resist.

In two hallucinatory nights while my one-month old son was sleeping, I made The Cage Cage, a VR experience in which you are trapped in a cage, surrounded by Cage clips. It actually works in VR. If you’re looking to really immerse yourself.

The Geocitiesizer

Back in 2010, as web design was becoming increasingly slick, I found myself missing the way the web used to look. So I hacked this together. You can enter a URL and it will show you what the page would look like if it was made on Geocities in the 90s, complete with dancing baby GIFs and MIDI verions of “Tubthumping.”

The site works by basically just downloading the target page, inserting GIFs, injecting a new stylesheet, and showing it to the user. After a few threatening legal notices, I found out that major banks without senses of humor see this a phishing attack. Whups.

Vicemo

A website that lets you see who’s buying drugs, booze, and sex on Venmo. We noticed our Venmo feeds were full of friends claiming to be paying each other back for drugs and sex. So we wondered if that was true for everybody. After a little digging, we found a little-known Venmo API to get almost every single public transaction. So naturally we started monitoring it for vice-related transactions.

After several years, Venmo finally realized this was maybe a bad idea and started limiting the API to only show a few transactions. So unfortunately, the firehose of sketchy transactions has dwindled to a trickle.

The World's Most Exclusive Website

A website that only let people with verified Twitter accounts inside. Once you got in, the site was a series of rooms, each requiring more followers than the last to get into. Unverified Twitter accounts got redirected to The Olive Garden.

Twitter API changes broke it. At its time of death, Kim Kardashian had gotten the farthest.

Wolfenstein 1D

Wolfenstein 3D revolutionized video games and created the first-person shooter genre. I took the game and smashed it down into a one-pixel line. It’s still fully playable and has all the original sound effects. It’s also surprisingly well-documented on Wikipedia.

Play it now (with Flash Player…)

Operation: Troll The NSA

Right after the first wave of Edward Snowden’s revalations about the NSA, we thought it would be funny if we could jam up their scanners by sending a ton of emails with suspicious words. We threw up a page in a couple hours, and then watched with glee/horror as Anonymous latched onto our hashtag #TrollTheNSA and launched a DDoS attack against the NSA. Reporters called us and asked if they could come see where all the hackers were gathering to send the emails. Our bosses at BuzzFeed got called for comment. The NSA got asked about the site and said “we are aware of it.”

Muppets With People Eyes

Great artists are often asked how they were inspired to create staggering works of beauty. Unfortunately, the true nature of inspiration remains elusive.

I thought it would be funny if Muppets had people eyes. So I made a site about it.

WBNS 10-TV Kids News Network

I was a child news anchor for the CBS affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. My hot scoops included roller coaster openings, dog parades, and exclusive interviews with the Ohio Pork Queen.