Waxy.org: Links Archives: November 2008

Bio-Bak, the portfolio site of Dutch Flash artist Coen Grift (I've never seen anything remotely like it)

Emily the Strange character inspired by Nate the Great's Rosamond? (noticed before, but the phrasing on the sticker and book are virtually identical)

NYT on Mark Allen and Machine Project at LACMA (one of the most interesting people I know gets a writeup of his most recent project)

MIDI Hero, Guitar Hero hack with a drum kit (the author later wired up his Roland V-Drums kit) [via]

Danah Boyd on Lori Drew's conviction in the Megan Meier suicide case (the lawsuit centered on technology, when the fact it happened online was incidental) [via]

Rogue ported to iPhone (get your 1980s dungeon crawling on)

New York Times' visualization of one year of NYC parking tickets (they had to file a FOIA request to get the data for the 9.9 million tickets)

Helvetireader, minimal Google Reader redesign with Greasemonkey (very sexy, though maybe a bit too minimal)

The L.A. Times data desk (all their research projects collected in one place, though some raw data dumps would be nice too) [via]

Rick Astley rickrolls the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (quite possibly the widest instant exposure of an Internet meme ever)

Barack Obama's weekly address on YouTube (stylistic notes: his team's using the new widescreen format and comments are enabled)

Ed Piskor's Wizzywig #2 released (the perfect blend of autobiographical comics and geek subject matter; I bought both books, highly recommended)

The Time Machine, an interactive YouTube adventure (see also: Tube Adventures and its sequel, Samsung's Follow Your Instinct, and A Car's Life) [via]

Zoetrope, search and visualize the historical web (in-development tool creates a window into past versions of a page) [via]

Vinylscrobbler (packet sniffing Shazam to update Last.fm from analog sources) [via]

William Shatner responds to the new Star Trek film (funny, I thought it'd be more like this)

Fimoculous' List of Lists 2008 (as always, check back often; last year's had over 600 lists)

StateStats, find correlations between search queries and U.S. state characteristics (Myspace users are violent illiterates in warm climates, Gmail users are skinny and rich)

Fleet Foxes on La Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais)

Processing hits 1.0 (seven years in the making, the artsy programming language leaves beta) [via]

Bad Hacks, a repository of vulgar ROM hacks (including Super Nazi Bros., Naked Metroid, and Zelda as erotic fanfic) [via]

Kottke on Shaq's first week on Twitter (I like that Shaq is following Not Shaq)

John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://" (I'm a little surprised they didn't merge the search and location bar into a single field)

Twitter acquires Rael Dornfest (along with Values of n, which will be shutting down Sandy and Stikkit next month)

Autographed Zork first edition manual sells for $2,300 on eBay (from Brian Moriarty's personal collection, less than 100 copies were sold for the PDP-11) [via]

Disney World's Haunted Mansion map in Counter-Strike Source (from the creator of the Van Gogh Starry Night map)

Doom ported to Flash 10 (built with Alchemy, which could bring a flood of PC emulators and ports) [via]

Feedback Army, cheap and quick usability testing built on Mechanical Turk (get 10 random people's feedback for $7)

Esquire profile of Passage creator Jason Rohrer (touches on games-as-art and the lack of popular auteurs in gaming)

YouTube Live's archived highlights (some online were overthinking this, but I thought it was good fun; personal highlights: Julia Nunes, Bo Burnham, Mythbusters, Charlie the Unicorn, and DJ Mike Relm remixing memes)

Freddie Wong responds to the Bike Hero controversy ("What's up, viral marketing douchebags? I'm gonna show you punks how a real man plays Bike Hero on Expert!")

Google's collaborative pixel art in Google Spreadsheets (they're even sharing the template and tips on making your own)

Perspectives, video interviews with all dialogue removed (um, uh, hmm)

Robbie Cooper's Immersion, heads-on video of kids playing video games (from the guy who made Alter Ego, the book of people with their online avatars)

Clive Thompson's long NYT feature on the the Netflix Prize and singular value decomposition (the same technique we used on Memeorandum Colors) [via]

Boston College to stop offering email accounts to new students (students come in with fully-formed online identities, so they'll just redirect to their existing email addresses) [via]

Pixel typography from the 16th century (from an Italian embroidery guide) [via]

19-year-old commits suicide live on Justin.tv (it should surprise nobody that he was egged on by 4chan, who always adore an hero)

"Bike Hero" video was Activision's viral marketing, as suspected (I still think it's great, but Derek disagrees; then again, I always assumed it was faked to some degree)

Kottke on Brian Battjer's I Keep A Diary (no joke, I just spent the last hour reading his photojournals of South Korea, Japan, Dubai, and NYC)

Star Trek theme played on a homebrew Wii theremin (here's how it works) [via]

Chicken Head Tracking (strangely hypnotic, other birds have the same ability) [via]

Torben Sko's experiments with camera-tracked head gestures in first-person games (he uses a simple webcam, FaceAPI, and the Half-Life 2 engine)

Cover Browser's collection of every TV Guide magazine cover (trivia: Macrovision sold TV Guide to an equity firm for $1.00 last month, less than the cost of a single issue)

Dr. Awesome game for iPhone lets you perform surgery on your friends (perfectly nailed as Qix meets Trauma Center, it imports names from your address book)

Metafilter on John Ziegler vs. Nate Silver (and David Foster Wallace) (great writeup of a perfectly terrible person's recent misadventures)

Google to shut down Lively next month (the most baffling of all Google products, this one is closing after less than six months)

Jack Handey's The Plan (it's foolproof) [via]

Snaptell, product lookup for the iPhone (like Shazam for product packaging, price comparison's coming soon)

Interactive augmented reality demo in Flash with Papervision (very quick with my iSight, I get much higher FPS than in the video) [via]

Very lucky kid on The Price is Right (still, nothing beats Daniel)

Space Invaders anime video produced for 30th anniversary ("All this time we've been... and all they wanted to do was... We're horrible people!") [via]

Derek Powazek revives Kvetch! a decade later (appropriately backed by Twitter, a primary outlet for kvetching)

Bike Hero, biking a Guitar Hero level in the real world (most likely a commercial viral, and maybe even fake, but does it matter? beyond awesome)

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy (mostly posting this just to beat Rex to it)

The A.V. Club's 27 popular websites that became books (though they missed Belle de Jour, The Washingtonienne, Fucked Company, Fark, and ZUG)

Speed Guitar goes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (every hour, on the hour, for one solid minute of metal complete with gothic arch and smoke machine)

MGMT's "Kids" on the iPhone Ocarina ("the iPhone Ocarina officially replaces the recorder as the nerdiest instrument I can play")

Mena Trott responds to Valleywag article about their Disneyland vacation (my favorite was Space Mountain Snob)

LIFE Magazine photo archive hosted by Google (millions of high-res photos, most never published)

Amazon launches CloudFront, their pay-as-you-go CDN (very complementary with S3)

John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, and the Long Winters perform "Tonight You Belong to Me" ("Thank you, normal-sized man.")

Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo's CEO post (it never really fit him well, though I'll miss his e.e. cummings memos)

Woman asks Apple community about an unusual iPhone glitch (no, raunchy photos don't accidentally attach themselves to outbound email)

Greasemonkey script to pull WikiDashboard visualization into Wikipedia (I made a LazyWeb plea for this last week, and Paul Irish came through)

Lee Byron's Fireflies, anaglyph 3D game for Mac (part of Kokoromi's Gamma 3D showcase of anaglyph games)

Flickr Boundaries, tool to explore Flickr's shapefiles (read Tom Taylor's entry for more information)

Cooking Mama, the Unauthorized PETA Edition (a strangely obscure target for their attention, with a petition to write to the game's publisher) [via]

Boing Boing launches gaming blog, Offworld (good writing in a nice design from Brandon Boyer, former news editor of Gamasutra)

"Violet" wins the Interactive Fiction Comp 2008 (play it online; glancing at the charts, it looks like Buried in Shoes was the most divisive)

Trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel (looks surprisingly good, but I'm a sucker for origin stories; I even liked Enterprise)

What would Depression 2009 look like? (Tim sums up the thought-provoking Boston Globe article)

The Pirate Bay hits 25 million simultaneous peers (that's not unique people, but concurrent connections; Napster peaked at 26M users)

Peter Hirschberg releases Adventure as a free iPhone app (related: Chasing Ghosts will finally be released on ~~BitTorrent~~ Showtime in December) [via]

The Big Picture on the California wildfires (also: first-person coverage on Twitter and YouTube, like this freeway on fire and aftermath)

Tim-Tams available at Target until March, first time available in the U.S. (best chocolate cookies ever, the Tim Tam Slam is a chocolaty revelation) [via]

JS-909, a Javascript drum machine without Flash (through a hack, it even works in IE 6)

Esquire's hosting Between, the new two-player networked game by Jason Rohrer (from the creator of Passage)

"What's that buzzing noise from my BBQ?" (he thought he was killing a few bees, but ends up annihilating an entire colony) [via]

Kottke explains how to embed high-quality YouTube videos (I knew how to save, link, and change the default, but the embedding hack was new to me)

Web 2.0 Origami (lazyweb, please build a converter that creates folding patterns from an uploaded image)

Pixar's Burn-E short on YouTube (here's an interview with the director)

Valleywag folded into Gawker, all but Owen Thomas laid off (I won't miss it; they hurt a lot of good people and interesting projects in the quest for pageviews) [via]

YouTube engineer adds "Actually Good" tab when viewing Onion video (here's a screenshot in case it goes away)

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow wears pajamas on-air in solidarity with bloggers (maybe Palin was too busy reading every newspaper to actually read a blog)

Jimi Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell, dead at 61 (I wish more newspapers would link to YouTube videos)

Brandon Hardesty reenacts Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross monologue (I first linked to Brandon way back in March 2006)

Videos of CNN's election-night countdown globally (the collective response was spontaneous and virtually identical around the world) [via]

Washington Post blogger shuts down company sending out two-thirds of all spam (in his investigative report, he turned over four months of data-gathering to the colo, who sut them down)

Michael Lewis revisits "Liar's Poker" and writes about the current Wall Street meltdown (a gripping look at who foresaw and acted on the mess) [via]

Japanese isometric PSA about the future of food (lovely design, this could easily be adapted to the US) [via]

QWOP Olympics, ragdoll physics running game (hard to believe, but with practice, it's possible to sprint) [via]

Sluggo ponders the fundamental question of existence

LittleBigPlanet's TV commercials, built entirely with the in-game tools (the first one seems inspired by You Suck at Photoshop, no?) [via]

What We Own and Where It's Made (Dorothy's slowly been categorizing all her possessions)

Slate on aXXo, the most popular movie distributor on BitTorrent (this comment explains the drama between aXXo and other competing groups)

The Yes Men pranksters distribute fake New York Times issue across NYC (100,000 copies with the headline "Iraq War Ends" post-dated July 4, 2009)

where the things in Cloverfield happen ("this is where things in Cloverfield happen okay") [via]

Google.org tracking flu spread using search queries (brilliant use of search data; get a flu shot before it gets to your state!) [via]

Google Groups expands to search web-based message boards (if "Sort by Date" appears to be missing, check your ad blocker)

"Dark Days" director explains how the Pentagon cancelled his followup film on the Iraq war (after two years of filming, he sold all his equipment on the same forum)

Dark Days, 2000 documentary about NYC homeless living in abandoned train tunnels (classic documentary with music by DJ Shadow)

Interview with the NASA writer behind the MarsPhoenix Twitter account (written in the first person, more than 38,000 people have followed its adventure) [via]

Touching story of Eugene Allen, a butler who served 34 years in the White House (a must-read with a sad ending) [via]

Super Mario for Busy People (You Have to Find the Princess) [via]

Google Reader adds automatic feed translation (I'm testing it out by throwing some Japanese blogs into a special non-English group)

Worst. Bug. Ever. (the Android phone executes all typed text, so don't text "rm -rf /" to a friend)

CaptionX, multiplayer photo captioning game (built on App Engine with CC-licensed photos on Flickr, with clever YouTube interstitials) [via]

WikiDashboard, Wikipedia mirror with real-time infoviz of edit history (for example, see Barack Obama or Star Wars Kid; I need a Greasemonkey script to pull this into Wikipedia proper)

How many guys in Spider-Man suits can fit inside Jamba Juice? (one customer in the store recorded the madness) [via]

Tetris recreated in LittleBigPlanet (a jetpack-powered sackboy readjusts all the falling pieces) [via]

The irRegularGame of Life (includes a history of Conway's Game of Life) [via]

Sugar Cubes (lovely Flash animation by the creator of Cursor*10) [via]

MS Paint Adventures (interactive games where the artist acts as parser, drawing the results of the community's actions) [via]

Girl Talk's "I'm A PC" testimonial for Microsoft (no mention of Apple, but still a refreshing approach) [via]

Photoshop in Real-Life (this behind-the-scenes photo gives you a sense of the scale) [via]

Get Your War On: New World Order (the earnestness of this comment made me giggle) [via]

2009 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest (science grad students do interpretive dances on their obscure thesis topics)

Stairway to Heaven played on the iPhone Ocarina app (also, the Zelda theme; surprisingly deep for a $1 app)

Spit DNA evidence leads to arrest in Craigslist/inner-tube robbery (the story keeps getting stranger)

Investigative report into the "Single?" lawn signs across America (completely OCD net research, tracing them all back to a huge Texas dating franchise) [via]

Ze Frank's From 52 to 48 With Love (help repair the damage from the election cycle with a small gesture)

Howard Stern rants on blogs, Facebook, and Myspace (Gary V. responds to the King of All Dead Media)

Factory Balls 2 (I promise to stop posting about politics soon, really) [via]

Salon rounds up the worst election predictions from political pundits (also, Nate Silver's electoral predictions were dead-on across the board; go math!)

Colbert and Stewart talk about Twitter (some people use Twitter like Colbert's SimulTube)

Jim Ray's collection of election night homepages (automated screengrabs every half-hour from 3pm-10pm Tuesday night) [via]

Channel 101's Sony commercials (unfortunately, Sony didn't bite; more product ads here) [via]

United Features' website goes free, including every Peanuts strip (and, finally, full comics in RSS feeds)

Mark Newman's 2008 election maps and cartograms (weighted by population, fun to compare to the 2004 election)

South Park's "About Last Night..." (absurd reimagining of the election as an Ocean's Eleven-like diamond heist)

Tim Schafer releases Grim Fandango's 70-page design document (tons of unreleased information; character sketches, layout, cutscenes, and every puzzle)

Newsweek's exclusive Election 2008 report, embargoed behind-the-scenes story from both campaigns (they were given major access on the condition nothing would be released until today)

Giraffes! (rare cameo by Akiva from the Lonely Island)

The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress (this feels the 2008 counterpart to their unbelievably prescient 2001 article)

Sean Tevis, the xkcd candidate for Kansas state rep, discusses last night's loss (his opponent used deceptive robocalls and direct mail borrowing photos from Sean's Facebook and Flickr accounts)

Kottke's collection of election maps (interesting to see how each designer tackled the same problem so differently)

xkcd on the end of the election (don't miss the alt-text)

Video of CNN's first hologram interview (a bit glitchy, definitely different from Cisco's Telepresence)

99 Bricks, like Tetris meets World of Goo (build the tallest stable structure with 99 Tetris bricks) [via]

Voting machines elect voting machine as President (DRE 700 IS LEADER) [via]

CNN to interview 3D hologram guests on tonight's election coverage (guests will be interviewed from remote locations, Star Wars-style)

ABC News streaming raw video feed on Ustream.tv (including reporters applying their own makeup and chatting with cameramen)

Philipp rounds up every YouTube video I've ever linked to (about 20% are no longer online, proving linkrot is alive and well in YouTube)

How Nate Phelps escaped the Most Hated Family in America (inside story of living with the Phelps family, with comments from Shirley Phelps-Roper herself)

Nate Silver's guide to what to watch for on election night (a handy guide to tonight's events)

NYT's Choosing A President: A Look Back (concise video sums it up)

LittleBigPlanet as a Shmup (or: why 2009 will be the year of social, user-generated gaming) [via]

Yahoo! Live to go offline (disappointing)

Rob Manuel's I-Spot Internet Humour (illustrated Internet memes in the style of vintage I-Spy children's books)

Spot.us, crowdfunded journalism (pay journalists to dig deeper into stories; their blog's doing original reporting funded with the site)

Ras Trent, the complete lyrics (glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to find this Samberg sketch funny)

10 Years of Textfiles (Jason Scott reflects on the anniversary of one of the digital age's most important and vital archives)