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Stupid Hackathon celebrates terrible tech with eyeball pong, a robot porn addict, and more

Stupid Hackathon celebrates terrible tech with eyeball pong, a robot porn addict, and more

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Eyeball Pong
Eyeball Pong
Image: Brandon Liu

Stupid Hackathon (short for Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon) is a consistently brilliant one-day event in which people play around with technology, beer, and fast food to create gadgets and apps with absolutely no value whatsoever.

The whole thing has been running since 2013 and is a parody of the endless tide of gadgets and innovations that are sold to us as a balm to all our woes. Last year my favorite project from Stupid Hackathon was Soylent Dick: a dick made out of Soylent that ejaculates Soylent.

This year’s gathering was held on February 25th, and, as expected, featured a number of dumb, very dumb, and extremely dumb ideas. You can find all of them on the Stupid Hackathon site, but we’ve selected a few of our favorites below:

Outcognito Mode

Outcognito Mode.
Outcognito Mode.
Image: Harold Cooper

This is a browser extension for Chrome that tweets every site you visit and everything you type. Currently it only shares this information via the @outcognitomode Twitter account, but its creator, Harold Cooper, says in the future it’ll connect to an account of your choice.

Eyeball Pong

Eyeball Pong in action.
Eyeball Pong in action.
Image: Brandon Liu

Pong, but you control the paddles with your eyeballs. Made by Brandon Liu and available on GitHub here. It is, presumably, incredibly frustrating to play as any time you try to follow what’s happening in the game you’ll end up steering your paddle off course.

Beer Selfie Stick

A selfie stick that pours beer into your mouth from a height while you take a selfie. Genius, world-beating, and made by Jono Sanders. Expect to see a polished version of this on shelves before the year is out.

HTML Marquee De Sade

The Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary, and writer of incredibly pornographic and sadistic literature. The marquee tag is a bit of HTML that lets you create text that scrolls from left to right or right to left. The HTML Marquee De Sade, made by Seth Kranzler, combines the two, turning de Sade’s most famous work, 120 Days of Sodom, into a scrolling nightmare, complete with GIFs and Blingees. It sounds cute, but remember before you read it that 120 Days of Sodom is not just a historical curio, but a genuinely cruel and disgusting piece of writing.

@robotpornaddict

This one is a bit NSFW, so be careful if you choose to watch the full video here. This project connects Microsoft’s cloud-powered computer vision service to PornHub, and asks the bot to describe what it’s seeing. The bot, however, has never seen porn before (or so we assume), so comes up with nice, innocuous, and incredibly incorrect interpretations of what’s on-screen. Made by Brian Moore.

Shitty Sharpie Tattoo Gun

All of the fun of terrible tattoos with none of the danger of permanent terrible tattoos. This was made by Zac Bensing and is essentially an oversized, belt-driven tattoo gun with needle and ink replaced by a Sharpie pen. It barely works.

Hypochondriapp

Hypochondriapp
Hypochondriapp
Image: Emily Xie

A web app that diagnoses you with the most exotic and life-threatening diseases based on symptoms you input. I told it I had a headache and it told me I have CIPA or congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. You can also think of it as a plot generator for House. Made by Emily Xie.

You can find many more terrible examples of tech being used to add absolutely no value to our lives on the Stupid Hackathon website (and on theverge.com heyooo).