Waxy.org: Links Archives: March 2008

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)