Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

Turning the New York Times into a beatbox (an application for Lily turns DOM elements into audio) [via]

Antville Quarterly, their favorite music videos so far this year (high quality videos in three torrents from the music video community)

Gore Verbinski to direct Bioshock film (I loved Bioshock's story but not the gameplay, so this should be a fun ride) [via]

Anil Dash's Paste to Win (random sampling of 150 people's clipboards, categorized)

John Resig ported Processing to Javascript, using the Canvas element (one of the most amazing hacks I've ever seen; don't miss the demos further down the page)

Chronotron (time-bending Flash game, reminiscent of P.B. Winterbottom)

Rock Band hates me (a multi-instrumentalist's reality meets fiction) [via]

Piet, a graphical programming language, with source code resembling abstract art (named after Piet Mondrian, here's how it works; also, a Javascript IDE) [via]

The Sewer Goblet, The Wu-Tang Clan and the Wu-Tang Baby (new RPG madness from the developers of Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden)

Interview with indie game creator Cactus (he just released a mega-sampler of 17 of his games; highly recommended)

Dino Run (surprisingly deep multiplayer 8-bit Flash game)

Kottke on the Yahoo! stock "plunge" (on the contrary, Yahoo! gained $7B in value while Microsoft lost $33B)

Interview with astronaut Peggy Whitson about her return to Earth (members of the Soyuz capsule were greeted by confused locals in a Kazakhstan field) [via]

SynPet's Newton, 1989 promo video for a personal robot (like R2D2 with a floppy drive and 20MB hard drive)

Why the Lucky Stiff's Unholy attempt to convert Ruby into Python (not there yet, but a fun first pass at getting Ruby code running Google App Engine)

Google's chart of character encoding adoption on the web (last December, Unicode beat out ASCII and Western European encodings for the first time)

Ben Goldacre debunks the recent "regrown finger" story (glad I wasn't the only one skeptical of "pixie dust" made of pig bladders) [via]

San Diego GOP chairman co-founded warez group Fairlight (funny, guys like that usually end up in tech, not politics) [via]

Soundamus (generate a feed of upcoming releases from your favorite artists on Last.fm)

XSketch, multiplayer Pictionary game (from the creators of Kdice, even more fast-paced than iSketch)

Ze Frank, Textism, Chip Kidd, and Aviary join The Deck (Jim Coudal knows how to pick 'em)

Schulze & Webb show off the Olinda prototype (their social radio for the BBC, modular hardware that adjust to your habits and social network)

Twitter typewriter in Second Life (hop around on the giant keyboard and it'll post here) [via]

College Humor's All-Nighter (live feed with thousands of chatters, and they're posting new videos all night)

Winners of Boing Boing Gadget's 1k contest (if you like that, try these popular 1k intros from the demoscene)

Homer Simpson in CSS, animated (taking typewriter art to the next level; from the same creator, a portrait of Bush)

Jonathan Coulton performs "First of May" (take that, Bee Gees; NSFW lyrics, for the sensitive folks) [via]

AT&T wi-fi hotspots now free for iPhone users (including Starbucks and Barnes & Noble; spoof the iPhone user-agent and it's free from your laptop too)

Mena Trott's Wasted on the Young (what if first-gen bloggers were vlogging in 1994? this is amazing, I want to see Kottke next)

Leonard's roundup of the best Web 2.0 presentations (most are now online and it looks like Web 2.0 was much better this year)

Grand Theft Auto IV mocks Flickr and tagging (there's a parallel-world Internet in the game with hundreds of pages, including parodies like Craplist)

Damien Jay's Opolis (comic built from photos of a 3D miniature office building)

Tresling, Tetris controlled by arm wrestling (the battling dynamic reminds me of the rare Panic Park gameplay)

Paulville, gated communities for Ron Paul supporters (no, really, the first one's in West Texas) [via]

Rocketboom's coverage of Before the LOL at ROFLCon (the history of online memes, back to the late 1800s; and yes, I'm a huge Jason Scott fanboy) [via]

Jason Scott runs the stats on his Goatse hotlinking prank (he goatse'd 704,000 people last year, which must be some kind of record)

Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy) (edited by Dooce, a book of essays with several good friends (and excellent writers) contributing)

Clustarack's impressive Rube Goldberg contraption (behind the scenes, 180 hours to build the contraption, 98 takes, 30 minutes to restore to initial state) [via]

Antique children's book uses bellows and cones to make sounds (beats a tinny speaker playing the Dora the Explorer theme for 30 seconds) [via]

Google Maps adds Street View for driving directions (some clever tips in the video, like checking for toll roads and parking signs)

Robot reassembles itself after being broken apart (it uses a camera to seek out its missing parts) [via]

Penny Arcade, PVP launch live shows (streaming their desktop in real-time) [via]

Big Fan (Cabel Sasser's great story of fan noise on older Mac dev hardware)

WSJ on Miller Brewing's Brew Blog (a former reporter is scooping other brewers and the trade publications, and both are angry)

Analysis of malware that creates Blogger spam blogs (using remote CAPTCHA solvers run by the spammers) [via]

Falindrome (fake palindromes, updated daily) [via]

Mister Bookseller (scanlation of a wistful Croation comic about a bookstore with every book in the world, except one) [via]

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript of Clay Shirky's excellent keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo; watch it instead) [via]

John Resig on Orto, running Java apps in Javascript (also, John wrote about another project porting the Ruby virtual machine to JS)

Marc Andreessen's guide to the Microsoft-Yahoo hostile takeover (the best explanation I've seen) [via]

Howard Rheingold's footage of a WELL meetup from 1989 (everyone's identified in the Boing Boing comments)

Don Hodges fixed the kill screen bug in Pac-Man (he did the same for Ms. Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, and Donkey Kong, too)

ROFLCon Live Stream (hear the stories behind popular memes from their creators; see the Tweetscan for more)

Interview with the brains behind 419 Eater (I had no idea Shiver Metimbers unmasked himself last year)

TypeRacer, multiplayer typing game (I average about 90 wpm, even with my crazy nontraditional typing style) [via]

The history of NYC in video games (coming in October, Sierra's Prototype will also attempt to model NYC in exacting detail) [via]

Mixwit, mixtape maker from Y Combinator (like Muxtape, totally illegal fun; the embeddable players are great)

Pixel Pour (saw this a couple days ago, but now it's been tagged and removed) [via]

How Dave Cassel made $900 writing 300 reviews for Helium's Reward-a-Thon (he churned out at least 120,000 words in 100 days, most likely their biggest earner)

Pirate Bay hits 12 million simultaneous peers (the percentage of seeders is rising, despite Comcast's efforts)

Kyle Bean's The Future of Books (lovely art piece fashions a laptop out of an old book) [via]

How Hillary Can Still Win (anything's possible!) [via]

Superfan blogger visits the set of The Office (with detailed photos of every character's desk, among other details) [via]

Color Wars Street View Scavenger Hunt (I'm so impressed with the games they've invented using existing web services)

Penny Arcade on Twitter (it seems to have spawned a catchphrase) [via]

The Dinosaur Soothsayer (the Nostrasaurus knows all)

Chirrp, 8-second voicemail for Twitter (a silly little mashup from Why built in haXe)

Wesabe Tips (shows aggregate spending info culled from their user data)

Mighty God King's Atari 2600 games you might have missed (Gay French Mario Bros. was a great game) [via]

Human Giant picks the next web-to-TV comedy stars (sounds about right, but will they need TV, or will TV need them?) [via]

Disturbing video of the Golden Eagle throwing goats off cliffs (hide your kids! at the five-minute mark, it carries a goat back to its nest)

Doeo (RPS nailed it as "whack-a-mole with Katamari Damacy's aesthetics") [via]

A Message to Pennsylvanians from Bill Clinton (brilliant bit of found video courtesy of Josh Marshall)

Portishead's Third on Last.fm (nice exclusive, stream the full album for free) [via]

Unreleased Atari 2600, Coleco games found at Oakland flea market (a legendary haul) [via]

Project Gazelle open-source tracker debuts on What.cd (great tracker, but risks drawing too much attention to the site)

Kevin Kelly interviews musician Robert Rich on the economics of 1,000 True Fans (he shares his earnings and the implications of depending heavily on a small core base)

Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose on technology (Steve is not happy) [via]

Todd McHatton's Grass-Stained Twilight (my brother-in-law's been recording and posting a song a week since January; reminds me of Shel Silverstein meets XTC's Apple Venus)

1977 video explains how the computer graphics in Star Wars were created (reminds me of the the Star Wars arcade game from 1983) [via]

CNN started selling t-shirts with their headlines on it (look for the shirt icon on the homepage; also, it's fun to manipulate) [via]

David Heinemeier Hansson's Startup School talk on sustainable web startups (completely sane message, but it's not being told enough)

Ohshiit (great single-serving site listing search result counts for each permutation) [via]

Michael Pollan on climate change and carbon footprints (thoughtful piece addresses the seeming insignificance of lifestyle changes)

Google News adds quotation search (nicely extracting quotes from articles with proper attribution, similar to Daylife) [via]

Automating Firefox for Web App Integration (insane, you can telnet to Firefox and control it with any scripting language)

Talking Picture (The Road to Ruin) (removes all dialogue from a 1938 film; also, I just updated the list of supercuts)

South Park's new episode parodies our Internet dependence (the Internet is a giant Linksys router in the desert) [via]

Kevin Kelly lists his worst predictions (in 1995, I thought VR would be huge and Apple was in a death spiral) [via]

Let's Tell a Story Together: A History of Interactive Fiction (expertly-written history of the subject, from Eliza to Inform 7)

Brad Bird's tribute to Ollie Johnston (after Ollie retired, Brad took his desk the following Monday)

LOLGRUES (it is pitch black) [via]

Metafilter comment relays a conversation about the origins of man with a 5-year-old (some more great stories in this thread, like this story about a 5am walk in Vancouver)

Ben Heck's custom-made Apple IIgs laptop (it's like technology from a parallel world) [via]

Alpha Twitter (dead-simple meme tracker for popular links on Twitter) [via]

Oregon state sends cease-and-desists for republishing statutes (they claim copyright on the typesetting and numbering of the documents, not the text of the statutes themselves)

Defamer investigates the Marilyn Monroe sex tape, claims hoax (no real evidence supporting hoax theory, but undermines credibility of the seller) [via]

Michael Arrington loves the Twitter "block" button (though I'm pretty sure the New York Times doesn't killfile people who correct them) [via]

Youngme/Nowme (people reproduce their childhood photos and tagging each photo on Flickr)

Twilight of the Area Code Master (add it to the list of obsolete skills)

Heroes & Villains (portraits of artists in the graffiti, alt-comic, and underground art worlds) [via]

Photorealistic 3D buildings in the new Google Earth (very impressive, includes sunlight and shading)

Django-MMO, open-source clone of Game Neverending (is this the first open-source web-based MMO?) [via]

Winners of the Color Wars rap battle (judged by Jonathan Coulton and Doc Popular) [via]

Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's Nine Old Men, passes away at 95 (loving tributes in the updates and comments) [via]

Fring, a simple Skype/IM/Twitter client for the iPhone (Skype support appears to be wifi-only) [via]

Time-lapse security cam of Nick White, a man trapped 41 hours in a NYC elevator (from brilliant New Yorker article about the lives of elevators; the ordeal changed him forever) [via]

RC car plays Super Mario theme on long line of filled bottles (a thing of beauty)

I Hate Drake (animated rendition of an 11-year-old's diary; see also: 500 Miles to Hollywood) [via]

Jason Scott analyzes how an Atari Age thread devolves (for anyone interested in online group dynamics and/or the current Atari 2600 scene)

Excelsior 1968 (John Martz drew cartoon versions of every student from his mom's 1968 yearbook; see also: The Liner) [via]

Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 (a massive upgrade, allowing snapshots with a single API call)

Disney shutting down its Virtual Magic Kingdom MMO (read the comments to see players and parents absolutely devastated by its closure) [via]

Numbers Station Bingo (clever idea, builds a game using the mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts)

Download YouTube videos as MP4 files (higher quality and better sound than the FLV versions) [via]

Hands Free 3D (Mitch Kapor shows how to navigate Second Life with your full body) [via]

Cartoon Brew on the aborted Yoshifumi Kondo pilot for Little Nemo (Brad Bird responds in the comments! see also: longer version of the pilot and the 1992 feature film for comparison) [via]

Eric Schwartz' animated Amiga tribute (created on an Amiga 4000T to the tune of "Still Alive," it's very faithful to Amiga history)

The Droste Effect in Packaging (self-referential products) [via]

Martijn Hendriks' "Give Us Today Our Daily Terror" (Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" with every bird digitally removed) [via]

Ironic Sans' idea for tactile feedback while driving (Rumble Pak on the steering wheel to sense cars in your blind spot)

Celebrity Heights (determined by taking a photograph next to a person of known height) [via]

Chuck Jones' Isolation Studies (brilliant supercuts created by a Chicago artist; the Loveline montages are amazing)

TDD Rickroll (total abuse of the TRS, but still very funny)

Jerry Yang and David Filo play Faceball (spoiler: Filo wins!)

Sourcing the 1980s TV bumpers from Justice's DVNO video (the original video, if you missed it)

Yahoo! Pipes feed of YouTube channel subscriptions for a user (YouTube doesn't provide any subscription feeds, but this works perfectly) [via]

Freakonomics guys on the Metafilter vs. YouTube commenters (it's worth noting that the NYT is cultivating a high level of discourse in their own blog comments) [via]

Winners of Jay Is Games' Casual Gameplay Comp 5 (like always, incredible quality from the vibrant community) [via]

Defective Yeti researches the LOST screenplay profanity (I thought this was a joke, but I verified it; JJ Abrams has a potty mouth)

Flickr's buying donuts next Friday for every member in SF who shows up (mroth, you're a crazy bastard)

IFC/Nerve's Top 50 Comedy Sketches (there goes my afternoon; strange how it switches between IFC and Nerve on every page) [via]

RSS 2.0 guid is broken by default (or: why my links were still pointing to Waxy.org until this morning; sorry!)

Hulu posts all three seasons of Arrested Development (I've really been enjoying Hulu lately; popular episodes today and newly-added feature films) [via]

No Photos on Flickr! (perfect response to the crybabies, with confused comments from some of them)

Can singing death metal ruin your voice? (bizarre endoscope footage of people singing, screaming, grunting, and talking like Barry White)

Black & Blue, Quicktime 1.0 sample video from 1992 (the Quicktime development team gets silly, in a decision that still haunts them 15 years later)

Seeing some weirdness in the Waxy.org RSS feed? (I fixed the bug causing links to point to Waxy.org, but your feedreader needs to refresh the feed first)

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently (Sadness can be eaten.) [via]

Huddle Chat taken offline after cries of plagiarism (people complained the UI ripped off 37 Signals' Campfire; here's an official response)

Flickr Video's live! (this group includes some examples, including my son's testimonial and thud!)

Flickr's cheeky acknowledgement of Video support (Techcrunch jumped the gun, it goes live any minute; it's very different from YouTube and very, very Flickr)

Rock Paper Shotgun's roundup of Yoshio Ishii games (I feel the same way about DOFI)

Multiple SIDosis (innovative split-screen techniques and multitrack recording from the late '60s; high-quality video and backstory) [via]

Twubble, search for people you might know on Twitter (exceedingly easy to use, but must be hammering the Twitter API)

Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards (Wilson Miner explains how EveryBlock does it; also, Paul Smith on how/why they rolled their own maps)

Friendfeed's Bret Taylor builds a blog CMS on Google App Engine (it's amazing how easy it is to get started; Nelson went from zero to app in 30 minutes)

Gamasutra catches GamePro (and others) cribbing data without credit (entertaining, if only for the spot-the-fake games)

Official Charlton Heston Postmortem Joke (using Tweetscan as Clichewatch)

Improv Anywhere's Best Little League Game Ever (hopefully, they managed to avoid post-gig bitterness)

Google App Engine (Google dives into the cloud; Python-only and free for limited use)

How OK Go Benefited from Net Neutrality (NYT op-ed by their lead singer) [via]

Pitchfork.tv goes live (still beta and an awkward UI, but some great exclusive video including the full-length Pixies reunion documentary) [via]

Ten Thousand Cents (Mechanical Turkers reconstruct a $100 bill using custom drawing tools for 1 cent per drawing) [via]

Imageshack launches free BitTorrent downloading service (for people who can't run BT or limited by their ISP, this sounds great)

Magic Pen (complete clone of Crayon Physics, but still worth trying) [via]

You Have to Burn the Rope (walkthrough available, if you need it)

The Making of the Flagpole Sitta lip dub (Jakob made it look effortless, with quite a bit of planning)

fruit mystery, a flash game (from the fine people at BrettCorp)

Infochimps, insane collection of open datasets (subscribe to their blog, which tracks new data as its added)

Charles Manson's 2005 album released under Creative Commons license (how does a 73-year-old man who's never used a computer hear about CC?) [via]

Adrian Holovaty's jazz acoustic remix of Radiohead's "Nude" (current ranked #35 out of 423 remixes)

South Park meets the Internet Stars (takes on Tay Zonday, Tron guy, Chris Crocker, Afro-Ninja, SWK, Dramatic Chipmunk, Numa Numa, and more)

Akon Calls T-Pain (butternut reduction) [via]

Mike Gravel's cover of Helter Skelter (he should run for the President of YouTube)

Quest for the Crown (old but good, I still can't get past level 12) [via]

Metafilter roundup of Paul Green's School of Rock videos (these videos of kids rocking out brings joy into my heart)

straightest freehand horizontal one pixel black line contest

Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Estupido Espezial, a joke version of OCR-A with swashes (even their joke typefaces get them paid) [via]

Guncho, a multiplayer IF system based on Inform 7 (upload Inform code to create realms browsable by multiple people at once)

Porn for the Blind (a free public service)

Dropclock, Mac/Windows screensaver (lovely slow-motion Helvetica dunking; also: animate movement based on wind activity in your town) [via]

Blogoscoped has my favorite April 1 joke, so far (understated and unexpected, it fooled me)

NYT's interactive tribute to the Mad Magazine fold-in (the full article details Al Jaffee's illustration process)

home.mcom.com is back! (a perfect snapshot of the Mosaic homepage from October 1994, thanks to JWZ)

Lower back tattoos available at Toys R Us (look just like mommy, and grandma!)

YouTube adds metrics for video uploaders (one note: they're all relative instead of absolute numbers)

TED just posted Clifford Stoll's hypermanic 2006 talk (amazing that he can stand still long enough to blow glass)

FriendFeed releases their API (one of my favorite new sites just got better; looks robust)

Oliver Laric's ↓ ↑ (hypnotic video of immersion baptisms) [via]

Smoking Gun reveals LA Times duped by federal inmate's forged FBI documents (great journalism, completely debunks last week's Puffy/Tupac expose)

Google removes alleged Chicago drug deal photos from Google Maps (this Gawker article captured all the photos before they were pulled)

Tetroid 2012, electronic album of 21 musicians packaged as a Tetris clone (some clever twists on Tetris gameplay, too)

First demo of Jim Leonard's Monotone (from the creator of 8088 Corruption, the first tracker for the original IBM PC speaker) [via]

LA Times interviews Rick Astley about the rickroll phenomenon (finally! I tried for six weeks to get a quote, but I'm not the LA Times)

Jason Scott on the Tyranny of the Ratio (a programming solution to a human problem)

Muxtape (S3-hosted service for 12-song virtual mix tapes, like this one) [via]

La Pequeña Hillary Clinton (don't miss the followup; take that, Will.i.am)

Metafilter comments vs. YouTube comments (a random sampling) [via]

Mail Trends, IMAP-based email analysis and visualization (works great with Gmail; for a sample dataset, Mihai used the Enron email archive) [via]

Rom Check Fail (crazy mashup of retro gaming graphics and gameplay into a new game)

Search terms replacing URLs in Japanese advertising (I'd love to hear more about Japanese search spam)

Bat population dying from mysterious "White Nose Syndrome" (I'm surprised the writer doesn't mention Colony Collapse Disorder)

Paul Robertson releases new film, Kings of Power 4 Billion % (like Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight, an epic hand-drawn animation in the style of 16-bit brawlers) [via]

Pathetic Geek Stories (returning after a three-year hiatus) [via]

NYT Mag on PatientsLikeMe, community and research guide for the sick (the treatment and symptom charts are incredibly empowering)

Rock Band for Xbox 360 now selling new songs in-game (they've already sold 6 million songs in three months through the clunky Xbox Live Marketplace)

MyMiniCity, SimCity-ish game that grows with passive referral traffic (each unique referral is a new inhabitant; compare Barbelith to GoonTown) [via]

PownceFS (fakes a local directory for your friends with the files they've uploaded in each)

Kotaku's Brian Crescente reviews Super Smash Bros. Brawl (a little weekend dose of insane for you) [via]

This Is My Jam (uses the Echonest audio API for beat matching to blend mixes automatically) [via]

Simon Willison's Wikinear, Wikipedia pages near your current location (demonstrates Fire Eagle and OAuth, mixed with Wikipedia, GeoNames, and the new Google Maps Static API)

Clifford Stoll's "The Internet? Bah!" from 1995 (Andrew Keen is the new Stoll, getting press for contrarian, but short-sighted, views) [via]

Paul Graham says You Weren't Meant to Have A Boss (big companies and junk food both scale, but they're unhealthy in similar ways)

Experimental Gameplay Project shirts and games sold at Target!? (that's incredibly awesome; take that, Urban Outfitters) [via]

McCain aide fired for linking Obama video on Twitter (the first person to be fired because of tweets?)

A Bumper Sticker View into Somebody's Soul (Alf is my co-pilot; I love that Mena's back) [via]

Fake's You Are Not Dead, A Guide to Modern Living (free filmic album and book, both interesting and worth experiencing) [via]

Interview with Paul Ford on his 763 six-word SXSW reviews (organ is spackle for the music world) [via]

Saul Griffith's Wattzon, redefining climate change as an engineering challenge (the most powerful and important document I've read in a very long time) [via]

Miranda July demonstrates how buttons are made (more complicated than I thought) [via]

Ze Frank on Colorwar 2008 (as suspected, games are currently being worked on around it)

Video: I Guess You'll Do (now let's go camping!) [via]

Real-life Portal art in Toronto (and the other side)

Color Wars on Twitter (with Ze Frank leading, picking teams marked the start of Twitter's first potential MMO)

Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps (fiction written and designed for Google Maps, from the creators of Perplex City) [via]

RollTube Firefox extension turns every YouTube video into a RickRoll (the opposite of RickrollDB, great for pranks) [via]

Dave Eggers' 826 Project talk at TED (help with his wish at Once Upon a School)

Six botnets responsible for 85% of all spam (and 40% comes from a single source; good luck shutting it down, though) [via]

Ambient Skype (telenapping with your loved one)

Video of the BigDog quadruped robot (like a drunken goat-bot funded by DARPA) [via]

Urban exploration photos of Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch (impressive shots taken at night; full set on Flickr) [via]

Chart of random color names provided by Mechanical Turkers (from Dolores Labs, a Turk consultancy; also, their wonderful chart of race on Sports Illustrated covers) [via]

Questionaut (from the Czech studio that made Samorost, a lovely game for kids commissioned by the BBC; walkthrough)

Carrie Brownstein's impressions on leaving SXSW Music (don't miss the rest of NPR's coverage, too) [via]

Jay Is Games' Casual Games 5 entries up for voting and play (a massive outpouring of creativity; AdBlock users will need to whitelist the page)

Kate Beaton's History Comics (even more here and here) [via]

HarmoNESica, convert an NES cartridge to a harmonica (finally, blowing in the cart will actually do something)

Google Docs' Clippy easter egg (not an April 1 joke, as suspected; any idea how to enable cliply?)

Streeter's Best Hate Mail Ever (don't miss the Victorian hate mail at the end)

Mr. Show, The Fairsley Difference (keep this in mind during the 2008 election) [via]

Chart of organic food companies and their corporate owners (consolidation's been happening for two years, but the result is impressive and sad) [via]

Jason Rohrer's Game Design Sketchbook (the author of Passage and Gravitation's new Escapist column, prototyping a new game monthly) [via]

Scientology critics leak emails endorsing Florida mayoral candidate (possible smoking gun, because IRS forbids tax-exempt organizations from campaigning)

Video: Spy Hunter meets Pontiac commercial (I never get tired of the 2D-to-3D trick)

Retro Sabotage (silly and strange parodies of retro games; I just finished Tetris meets 2001) [via]

Scientology escalates the battle with Anonymous (they should've let it die, it's like responding to the world's biggest troll; account disabled, but mirrored by Gawker) [via]

"Lost Pig" cleans up at the XYZZY interactive fiction awards (I beat the game on my flight home from SXSW; here's a good review) [via]

Eurogamer's review of Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden (best explanation of the oddball freeware RPG I've seen) [via]

Kottke.org turns ten (with a look back at every old design)

Waxweb, the first feature film online (ambitious and sprawling 15-year project used VRML, Digicash, MOOs, and 25,000 hyperlinks; watch the 1995 demo) [via]

Jill Sobule reached her goal of $75,000 to fund next album (in 53 days, 1,000 true fans in action)

Anil Dash on embeddable blog entries (as Nelson points out in the comments, this is Xanadu's transclusion in widget form)

Interview with a fansubber (nice little glimpse into the subculture and the scene)

Demo of Melodyne's incredible polyphonic editing tools (hard to explain, so just watch; if it works, this will become every mashup artist's new best friend) [via]

Frauenfelder's lovely eulogy for Eliza creator, Joseph Weizenbaum (he passed away on March 5)

Google Sky, now on the web (coded by an intern in three months)

Nice roundup of Twitter visualizations (including some academic projects I hadn't seen) [via]

The Lost Features of Google (long list of forgotten or abandoned Google experiments; also, Philipp's roundup of their intranet)

Paul Ford's six-word reviews of all 763 SXSW MP3s (a fun read, but surprisingly great for finding new music)

Joystiq role-plays a text adventure with Double Fine's Tim Schafer (best interview ever, shows the creativity behind his games better than any Q&A would) [via]

Oil paintings inspired by Internet memes (my new desktop wallpaper) [via]

Bob Ostertag's w00t (experimental music composed entirely of fragments from video games) [via]

glTrail (real-time visualization of connections and activity from your log files) [via]

Beginner's guide to Find the Lost Ring, Jane McGonigal's new ARG (backed by the Olympics Committee and sponsored by McDonald's, this is a biggie)

Review of fictional games in Star Trek (with many screen captures; see also: Data plays poker with Einstein, Newton, and the real Stephen Hawking) [via]

Hyena, scripting language for audio-only one-button games (beyond accessibility issues, this genre's ideal for playing while driving or running)

Financial Post on Google's death blow to search arbitrage (focuses on the case study of the implosion of Geosign) [via]

Landon Dyer's story of working on Donkey Kong at Atari in the 1980s (don't miss the rest of his blog, too) [via]

Korg announces synth tools for Nintendo DS (full music creation package based on the Korg MS-10)

Matt Webb's Tour of a Fictional Solar System (we should resist forming huge, boring planets)

Mat Honan pretending to twitter SXSW (doing a convincing job of it, too)

Typographica's Favorite Typefaces of 2007 (as always, some great picks; Restraint is interesting) [via]

Evil Gmail backup software charged $30 to steal your password (the SEO scumbag's app sent every user's credentials to his own hardcoded Gmail account)

Developing 3D games in Microsoft Excel (beats WordArt)

Apple announces iPhone SDK and App Store with Spore and Monkey Ball (SDK out now, iPhone 2.0 software due in June; I wonder how application approval will work)

Video: Blueberry Garden sneak peek (the blog of the game's developer) [via]

You're Not My Father (inexplicable recreations of a scene from Full House) [via]

Per-capita maps of Starbucks vs. Wal-Mart in the US (watch as Wal-Mart spreads like a virus infecting the eastern half of the US)

Cultural history of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" (incredible essay, with clips of how it's been rediscovered and used by TV, film, and other artists)

New gameplay videos for Braid released (don't miss the second clip of Jonathan Blow's lovely time-bending platformer)

I Am Legend alternate ending (much better)

Rickroll Database (thwart rickrolls using this blacklist for Adblock Plus) [via]

Tom Coates explains Fire Eagle (I played with it today and it's very cool; developers only for now, but someone missed that part)

Solving CAPTCHAs for cash (in the year since the entry was posted, the comments became a global marketplace for human captcha solvers) [via]

Kevin Kelly on 1,000 true fans (this model for indie creators is a natural use of the Internet, but still rare)

1975 unboxing ceremony for an FR80 microfilm recorder (from a massive collection of historical computer photos; don't miss Tomorrow's World and Alien) [via]

MegaPhone, phone-controlled multiplayer gaming (tried an early version at Foo, had a blast) [via]

Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, dead at 69 (a good game can change the world)

Gordon Luk on IE8 and how people perceive big companies (decisions aren't made by a giant golem named Microsoft, but by the interactions of thousands of individuals)

Neil Gaiman on giving work away for free (he responds to an independent bookseller arguing that it cuts them out of the process) [via]

The Other Art of Courtroom Sketch Artists (David Friedman asked seven of the most popular artists about their other work)

Possessed, documentary short about obsessive hoarders (in streaming HD through Vimeo)

Video: Justice's DVNO, homage to 1980s CG bumpers (full-size Quicktimes, username/password: justice/dvno)

Nine Inch Nails' new album released under Creative Commons (the site's slammed right now, but it comes in a variety of options) [via]

Games imitating war imitating games (that game-like AC-130 gunship video from Afghanistan was turned into a Call of Duty level)

Scene.org 2008 Awards nominees announced (the best of the demoscene)

Haxed by Megahurtz (extremely strange Flash game; level 3 plays over a landscape of scrolling spam emails) [via]

Gravitation, an experimental game about balancing work and family (from the creator of Passage, the pixel game that made people cry) [via]

Daily WTF's very funny story about truly awful web security (they changed the username, but it's still in plaintext in the source!)

Sched.org, the SXSW 2008 scheduler (elegantly designed, with the simplest signup process I've ever seen)

Heaven's Database transcript from Saturday Night Live (no video online that I can find, but the audio sounds like the sketch fell flat) [via]

iPhone stopwatch hits 1,000 hours (41.666 days later...) [via]

Editor fired for strangled-kitty joke slipping into production (regret the error, indeed)

FriendFeed publishes a blog of code check-ins (common for open-source projects, but I've never seen this done for a web startup)

One Page Magazine (I'd seen the Wired one, but not the rest) [via]

The Internet circa 1997 featured on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the entire episode is viewable via Hulu on various sites) [via]

Project Riff, insane dataset compiled by MST3k fans (read more about the project) [via]

826 Valencia opens time travel mart in Los Angeles (like their other stores, it's a front for their non-profit writing center) [via]

Roy Gould presents Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope (lovely, it's like Photosynth for the universe) [via]