I’ve only recently installed the StumbleUpon toolbar in Firefox. I’ve known about it for a long time, but because I’ve been so busy with my freelance writing and all, I haven’t given myself too much of a chance to just enjoy myself and my time on the web. Well, I’ve made it a point to find a better life-work balance, and a big part of that is just finding random junk on the internet that makes me smile, laugh, or think just a little. Here are a few sites that I Stumbled Upon in the past week.

1. Someone sent me a link to Angry Alien Productions a long while back and I took in some of the videos and had a good chuckle. In case you’re not familiar, they re-create popular movies so that they are only 30 seconds long and they are acted by bunnies. I watched their renditions of The Exorcist, Pulp Fiction, and The Shining before, but since Stumbling Upon it again, I’ve also watched a few new additions to the collection, like Borat and Spiderman. Good stuff.

2. Although I use PhotoShop to edit some images for Mobile Magazine, I’m far from being an expert in what the powerful software package has to offer. The Photoshop tutorials on Photoshopcontest.com look like they’d be some great reading for anyone looking for some extra expression. Peel a light bulb, anyone?

3. Here’s some perfect poster placement at a Galaxy movie theatre. Nope, there’s no subliminal message at all!

4. I like movies. I also like movie mistakes. I’m talking about seeing Nike shoes in Ancient Rome, a sudden change in lighting in the middle of the day, or windows that miraculously repair themselves. They’ve got a list of some of the best mishaps in movie-making.

5. Do you like puzzles? Then you might enjoy Quest for the Rest, a website designed to promote an album by some musicians named the The Polyphonic Spree (the “upcoming” disc was released in 2004). You have three characters that have to make their Lemming-like way across a landscape and you manipulate this environment by clicking on various portions of it. Click on a frog and he’ll lash out at a dragonfly, for example. Piece together the right sequence of moves and your Beatles-like avatars will walk across and find the exit.