AIGAlink virtual gallery Wonderful. The American Institute of Graphic Arts has developed a beautiful, well-constructed Web site that walks you through a graphics arts exhibition in Philadelphia. Click your way through three rooms (more are expected soon) of outstanding projects, from interior signage to advertisement posters. And fear not: high-resolution graphics won't clog your bandwidth. The images are appropriately compressed to load quickly and maintain high quality.

A

DCIP Home Page Have you ever wondered who pulls the world's puppet strings? How can a hopeless drone like yourself ever hope to identify one of the "hidden masters"? The DCIP Home page was created to unveil conspiracy with a set of pointers to the masters' "official" web pages. While the concept and tone of this site is intriguing, there just isn't much material here. The Conspiracy must have deleted it. The people responsible for this page do a much better job with their Illuminati and Trilateral Commission Homepages. Wait... Do I smell a conspiracy? -MP

C+

Internet in a Baby Internet in a Baby is revolution in interface design. You are presented with a photo of a baby boy on the phone. Clicking on different parts of the baby send you to different spots on the web. Click on the hair, and you go to Chewies Hair Cream page. Click on the right hand, and you go to the Skywalker-worshipping Order of the Right Hand. You get the idea. My biggest gripe about the site is that the title is misleading. The picture isn't of a baby at all, but a five year-old child. I guess Internet in a Pre-Schooler wasn't a catchy enough title.-MP

A-

looking I looked and I looked, and I clicked on what I thought were tomatoes. The more I clicked, the smaller they got. Wow. When I finally got to the main page, I found a site organized by color - don't ask - filled with artsy poetry, and essays on music theory, modernism, and the Greeks. The site's aesthetic is clean and well-crafted like a Mondrian painting. And, like the artist's work, is just a little more exciting than brushing my teeth. But, hey, if you're into black turtlenecks and clove cigarettes, c'mon down!-MP

B-

Mad Hatter Mary Holiday, the Mad Hatter, runs a fan club for himself. And why not? While the site is mostly a collection of previous weird posts to various newsgroups, he fills the balance with FAQs and figures about his life and philosophy. Though the place lacks whiz-bang web stuff (or even graphics), it's a monument to net-ego. Any net-god wannabe should visit and take careful notes: Chastise anyone who asks you a question, and talk about how cool you are. Incessantly. If you've got a smidgen of personality, people might eventually believe it.-MP

B

Matthew and Jake's Adventures Matthew and Jake are two MIT students who first posted their collection of hypertext stories way back in 1994 and haven't updated the site since. The illustrated romps are told in a children's book style that gets old quickly and makes me glad I didn't attend MIT. The web is a bit different now in 1996, but if you feel nostalgia for a time when Mosaic was the hot thing, it might be worth a visit.-MP

C

PavePage A site devoted to the advancement of the Holy Cause of Paving the Earth. The Holy Order of Asphalt wishes to flatten mountains, fill oceans, and eliminate all animals except Blind White Cave Cows, which will be used for hamburger in the Beer and Burger communion. The Plan purportedly teaches knowledge of the twin pleasures, speed and convenience. Help this cause, and you will be rewarded; defy it and risk the wrath. This example of tongue-in-cheek ranting is a cut above most.-RK

B

Punchy Advice Humans, mostly college students, submit questions about love and roommates, which are answered by a gaggle of quasi-muppets. Characters include a nerd, a babe, and some creatures of indistinguishable ethnic origin that are probably offending someone. Pictures of the characters mean excessive download times for paltry laughs. Questions are sometimes amusing; the answers usually less so. If you're interested in having these things appear at your party or corporate training video, you can contact Leo Brodie, who has thoughtfully supplied abundant marketing materials for his puppet company, Punch and Brodie. -RK

B-

SpinnWebe SpinnWebe brims with greatness. It's the home of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, in which you replace Bil Keane's normally rollicking cartoon captions with some of your own. Then there's this weird Magic 8-Ball thing that responds to your queries by sending you to a carefully chosen URL somewhere on the Web. Then there's the Nipple Server. Forget watching some boring coffee pot, dorm room, or fish bowl - this site has a new nipple posted everyday! View it, love it, and vote on its nippleness. -MP

A

The Illuminati The Bavarian Illuminati are hell-bent on covertly taking over the world - and maybe they've already succeeded. Here, on their alleged "Homepage,"they document their clandestine activities with video footage, pictures, links to "controlled" sites, and even secret text documents only available by e-mail. Don't cross them, though. A video of their dreaded Dropped Wooden Rabbit Torture made me rethink trashing their otherwise content-anemic site. It doesn't make them look that all-powerful. Their all-seeing pyramid on your dollar bill may just be the beginning. -MP

B

The Mars Earth Connection Did little men construct a tower five miles high on the moon? Is that really George C. Scott's face staring up from Mars? Richard Hogland seems to think so, and this site provides the photographs to make you a believer. These images are freaky. The Mars-Earth Connection is a jumping off point for those interested in these and other interplanetary enigmas that NASA refuses to acknowledge. The site itself is organized like a research paper. Long documentation is stuffed onto one page, and many of the odd resources it cites aren't even on the Internet. Do they think I'm going to visit the library?-MP

B+

The Neoist Path The Neoist way encourages plagiarism as it saves time and shows initiative. Had I known this sooner, I would have lifted whole segments for this review. Links are often confusing, as is a lot of the babble about the Seven by Nine Squares. Maybe basking in this disharmonious flux of gibberish is the point. If so, we all need to ask ourselves whether we have better things to do with our time than frequenting this site. If we *don't* have more pressing pursuits, we should hand over the planet to the dolphins right now.-RK

C

The Night Gallery This elaborate and visually first-rate homepage is devoted to horror, true love, and body noise. By his own admission, the proprietor spends four hours a day maintaining his site. An extensive audio gallery is devoted to burps and farts. Other wonders include pictures of frightening food discovered in the back of his fridge. I get the impression site master Kevin is the Sara Winchester of the Web, driven by some odd demon to ceaseless construction of his page. I'd be truly worried - except he's fallen in love, which is another subject documented with meticulous detail.-RK

A

Welcome to Spatula City A wide variety of fictitious spatulas are on display, including the Five Spatulas of Fury, and the 12 Gauge Spatula Attachment, which is effective for cleaning even the most encrusted food off of any surface.You are encouraged to submit ideas for spatulas, but if managers Stefan and Jenny Gagne don't get back to you, it's because they don't like your idea - or are busy with their real lives. The site isn't limited to spatula fun; you'll also find odd links to such things as an online staring contest, where you go mano-a-mano with a large eyeball. -RK

A

You Have Found Us Alien invasion paranoia as conceptual art. The site features products for defense against extraterrestrials, though, as you will soon learn, no place is safe. There's an abundance of striking black-and-white graphics, plus subtle and well-conceived humor free of the literary sledgehammers most web-site jokesters feel they must wield to get a laugh. A favorite was the fine print disclaimer that degenerates into a rant by the company's disgruntled lawyer. The site looks good and is easy to navigate.-RK

A