“This Exists: SoulPancake.com Turns Internet Into Smoke-Filled Dorm Room,” Jon Bershad writes for MEDIAite.com.
A bit from the piece:
Good news! The Internet now provides us all with yet another new way to shout our half-baked opinions into the vacuum of space.
SoulPancake, a site devised by Office actor Rainn Wilson and two friends, is, like Formspring, a way for users to post and answer questions anonymously. However, unlike many of these opinion type websites, SoulPancake doesn’t want you to ask questions about your friends’ favorite bands or sex lives. It wants you to ask questions about…well, everything, man.
That’s right, Soul Pancake is here to provide a safe place for users to ask big questions and answer (or at least mull) life’s big mysteries. You know, the mysteries that keep college freshmen up late at night after watching Donnie Darko.
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Probably best to let the site describes itself:
SoulPancake is “a MOVEMENT to wrestle with and chew on LIFE’S BIG QUESTIONS. It’s a way to EXPLORE why we believe the things that we believe. It’s a place for you to TALK about your soul and the existence of God. It’s a space to ENGAGE in art, philosophy, creativity, truth, and beauty.”—————-
Whoa, dude. Of course, this could all easily dissolve into a puddle of pretentiousness but it doesn’t, fortunately, because the site designers seem to have instilled everything with a light spirit and subtle sense of humor. The clever text on the sign up form and the cute drawings in the margins of every page keep it all feeling fun instead of suffocating. Still though, the more cynical of users will quickly be turned off by many of the questions posted in what the site calls “The Question Collective”. A sample query currently heating up discussion reads, “Had you known what life would be like, its ups and downs, would you wanna live it?”
Double whoa, dude.
Personally, we think it’s a bit early in the day to be tackling questions like that, but for all of you out there eating your lunch and wondering if there are tiny universes inside your bagel where tiny people are eating their own little bagels which have their own universes with even smaller bagels, I’d say give the site a shot. The popularity of Wilson’s Twitter feed should give it some solid traffic and, really, who wouldn’t love to live in a world where people with silly user names solve all the world’s problems on a site named after a delicious breakfast food.
filed in Design
Soul Pancake is here to provide a safe place for users to ask big questions and answer (or at least mull) life’s big mysteries. You know, the mysteries that keep college freshmen up late at night after watching Donnie Darko.
