Cockeyed: One Man's Lifelong Archive of Pointless, Rigorous Experiments

Cockeyed is a website where a man has spent more than twenty years answering questions nobody asked, in far more detail than anybody needed. How much toothpaste is in a tube, actually? What happens if you build a wearable Wheel of Fortune? Can you convince a room full of strangers that you are a photographer for a magazine that does not exist? Rob Cockerham has an answer, and roughly forty photographs of himself getting to it.

What is Cockeyed?

The site’s subtitle is “a life of experiments,” and that is close to literal. Cockerham has been publishing since the late 1990s, and the archive has the geological layering you would expect: eras of web design stacked on top of each other, dead links to defunct forums, photos of a much younger man holding a measuring cup with great seriousness.

The flagship is How Much Is Inside?, in which he buys a normal consumer product and empties it out. A tube of toothpaste. A can of shaving cream. A packet of hot chocolate. The results are photographed step by step and reported with a straight face. It sounds trivial and it is genuinely useful, because it turns out almost nobody has an accurate mental model of what a bottle of anything contains until they see it in a pile on a kitchen counter.

Alongside that sit the other departments: Pranks, which includes some of the most elaborate and gentlest social experiments on the web; Making Stuff, where the costume builds live; Science Club, for the ones that involve actual measurement; plus how-to guides, travel documentation and a Citizen section that leans toward consumer skepticism. There is an extraordinary quantity of Disneyland material, documented with the thoroughness of a man mapping a country.

What holds it together is the method. Cockerham does not editorialize much. He states a question, does the work, photographs it exhaustively, and reports what happened. It is the tone of a lab notebook kept by someone with a very good sense of humor, and it is much rarer online than it should be.

He is still going. The projects have expanded into video and into the maker-event circuit, but the site remains what it always was: a personal domain, updated by one person, with no obvious business model attached.

What can you do on Cockeyed?

• Dig through How Much Is Inside? Start with something you buy regularly. The tube of toothpaste entry will change how you shop, mildly and permanently.
• Read the prank archive. These are elaborate, meticulously documented and almost never cruel, which is a hard combination to land.
• Study the costume builds. Enormous, structurally ambitious homemade costumes with build photos, mistakes included.
• Browse the how-to guides. Practical stuff sits right next to the absurd stuff, with no change in tone.
• Fall into the Disneyland documentation. Hundreds of photos cataloging details of the park that nobody else thought to record.
• Compare the fast food menus. Long-running documentation of drive-thru menus and prices, which has quietly become a historical record.
• Follow the video work. Newer projects get filmed as well as written up, so the archive now spans formats as well as decades.

Tips to get the most out of it

Start with the index, not the front page. The homepage shows recent work. The site’s real value is twenty-five years deep, and the section indexes are how you get to it.

Read one How Much Is Inside entry all the way through. The photo-by-photo format looks repetitive until you actually follow one to the end and realize how much work went into a question you would have guessed at in two seconds.

Do not skim the captions. Most of the jokes are in the photo captions rather than the body text. The body text is playing it deliberately straight.

Treat the old pages as a time capsule. Pages from the early 2000s have not been redesigned or “refreshed.” Prices, products and web conventions are all preserved exactly as they were, which makes parts of the site accidental history.

Take the safety notes seriously. Some of the Science Club material involves things that get hot, sharp or pressurized. He is candid about what went wrong; that is not an invitation to repeat it in a garage.

Budget more time than you planned. There is no algorithmic feed here, but the internal linking is dense and every page ends up pointing at three more.

If you like Cockeyed, also try…

• Neal.fun: the modern equivalent, one person building interactive answers to strange questions.
• Futility Closet: a deep archive of curiosities, puzzles and historical oddities, collected with the same patience.
• United Nuclear: a shop that sells the sort of materials Science Club experiments tend to require.
• Acts of Gord: another one-man archive with a very specific voice and no interest in being polished.

More single-obsession websites in Weird & Wonderful, and the practically-minded ones in Tools & Utilities.