A personal favorite “quick laugh” web site of recent has been awkwardfamilyphotos.com. Not all of the photos are awkward per se – some are ridiculous, others are just ugly. However, they are all highly entertaining.

I enjoy the site mostly because it is so relateable; a great equalizer. No one is so cool that they don’t have a family story in which they did something like scream and cry during visiting a mall Santa Claus. Photos taken with your middle school girlfriend/boyfriend can make you wince in years of more advanced sexual maturity. Years from now, children will see pictures of you in your fashionable scarf or up-to-date haircut and they will laugh unreservedly. Those brazen monsters have Awkward Family Photos put these memories on display for the world.

It was only a matter of time, really. Everyone with a family that kept any sort of photographic evidence of their past has some terribly embarrassing photos, which we all enjoy seeing. This universal truth was going to be exploited, and this web site isn’t the first instance I can think of. Victoria artist Tim Gardner started producing photo realistic paintings of painfully uncool family portraits years ago. AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com isn’t giving us anything new, it’s just making the old accessible world wide.