The Weirdest Surf Thing on the Internet

Junior Scientist Program

Project: A study of surf related oddities (Vista Del Mar Elementary School, Grade 6)

So there’s this website called lecarta.com and I don’t really know how to explain it but I’m going to try to be very comprehensive and analytical about it.

When you go there, you don’t see a normal website. You see an old cartigraphical map of the ocean with little pins stuck in it, which is basically a metaphor. You click a pin and it takes you somewhere weird.

Like one pin takes you to a surf movie from 1958 called Assholes I’ve Surfed With, which is a crazy title, and the movie never came out because there was a fire at the studio and all the film burned up, which is what scientists call a catastrophe.

The guy who wrote it was named Del Kahananui and nobody knows if he was even a real person, so his existence is hypocritical. All that’s left is the script and some old reviews where critics said mean stuff about him. One said the ocean deserves better. That’s a pretty enigmatic and also philosophical thing to say about someone.

The movie has episodes and each one is about a different surfer who is kind of a jerk, which is the central thesis. One guy thinks he was abducted by aliens in 1948 and he’s mad that the aliens didn’t pay him, which is an economic issue.

One guy talks about being a wereyeti and another woman has a plot to get rid of men, which is called feminism.

You click another pin and now it’s the 1930s and there’s a lady FBI agent named Isabel Díaz who investigates weird ocean crimes. A surfer named Danny got mangled TWICE which seems like it should only happen once statistically. There are four suspects. You get to look at her case files like you’re the detective, so that is an out-of-your-body experience.

There’s also one that’s like a Dr. Seuss book except it’s about terrible parents at sports games, which if you’ve ever been to a soccer tournament you know exactly what I mean because parents are notifiably insane.

There are like a hundred stories. And they all connect to two other websites, one that pretends to be a science institute and one that pretends to be a surf store, which together form an ecosystem, like a reef or the floor of a school cafeteria.

Also there’s a secret game hidden in it, a total subgenre. If you know about this thing called robots.txt (my friend told me about it, it’s for computers and is technological), you’ll find a bunch of codes. Most of them are fake. One is real. If you find the real one, a robot lady named Cleo talks to you in all lowercase letters and basically says good job but also don’t do it again.

The craziest part, in conclusion, is that one guy made all of this. Just one guy. He lives on the Outer Banks which is where my family went one summer and there were a lot of non-benevolent mosquitos.

Most websites are boring. This one is not boring. It’s the weirdest surf thing on the internet and I think that’s why it’s good, which is my hypothesis.

You can’t find it by searching. You kind of just have to stumble into it, which is part of the whole point I think, in summary.

Archie Croft, age 12
Mrs. Colapinto’s Homeroom