Sodaplay

by Chad Van Wagner

Holy crap, how cool is this? Basically, it’s the Internet manifestation of, like, totally comprehending the universe and everything, man, and you can SO TOTALLY mess with reality and time and move stuff and SHIT, that looks JUST like some kind of weird Mars spider. No, I mean, seriously, check this out, if there were spiders on Mars, they might act like this thing does in the “no gravity” mode, and… oh shit dude. Spiders on Mars. I’m totally in a Bowie mood now.

OK, forgive me my brief (and admittedly contrived) lapse into stonerville, but Sodaplay is damn near impossible to describe accurately without bringing SOME kind of altered state into play. Basically, it’s a Java program that allows you to mess with geometric concepts in a perpetual motion/altered gravity format. It’s exactly the kind of thing people like us giggled at when we were watching reruns of NOVA on PBS in college.

If that description doesn’t quite do it, do you remember the Warner Brothers cartoon with the drunken musical notes? One got completely sloshed, and the head note had to chase him around the scales until he could hold him in place with a clothespin? Picture that as a website that you can screw around with. I can easily envision spending all kinds of time on this.
(www.sodaplay.com)