Waxy.org: Links Archives: May 2009

Know Your Meme tracks the origins of the "God Kills a Kitten" meme (appears to have originated from Portland's BarFly magazine in 1999)

Windows Update quietly installs Firefox extension (which can't be easily uninstalled; karma, indeed)

Zoho CEO on Google Wave, Microsoft Silverlight, and technology karma (even though Google's their biggest competitor, they've aligned with them because of their history) [via]

PatchMatch, incredible video demo of interactive content-aware image editing (taking seam carving to the next level, I really could've used this last week)

Yahoo! 360 closing down in July (they're providing a migration option and export tools, though only six weeks to use them)

The Onion's report on tracking down an NYU dorm fire (the future of news) [via]

Normalware's Bebot, surprisingly deep synth for the iPhone (don't miss the demo song by Jordan Rudess, showing how it's a full instrument) [via]

Twitter, as viewed by everybody who's never used Twitter (finally, the cliche's going away) [via]

Invaders! Possibly From Space! (Futurama fan makes a game based on a sketch based on a game)

Google Wave's full hour-long demo at Google I/O (don't miss the stunning demo of Rosy, real-time character-by-character language translation)

EFF chairman Brad Templeton makes a Hitler Downfall parody (don't miss his explanation of how he finally made the clip without breaking any laws) [via]

Hulu launches Desktop client for Windows/Mac (also, they just released browsing by air date and recommendations)

How Google Wave's spellcheck uses natural language processing (context-sensitive, it can correct there/their/they're and its/it's errors; also: Arrington interviews the founders)

Tim O'Reilly on the newly-announced Google Wave (real-time collaboration tool with an open protocol, blurring the line between email, IM, and personal publishing)

Don Bluth's Space Ace ported to iPhone (cheaper than the laserdisc version, but apparently, just as frustrating) [via]

Jeff Veen announces Typekit, licensing and hosting for web font embedding (short on details, but glad someone clever's trying to bridge the gap between developers and foundries)

Kevin Fox on Nilla wafers (I found this strangely touching)

Cabel Sasser on Panic's 50% off sale (every software company needs a green screen)

The Legion of Rock Stars (band wears 30dB noise-canceling headphones and plays along to rock songs)

Phreakmonkey surfs the web with a 300 baud acoustic modem from 1964 (at 6:30, he loads Wikipedia in Lynx; amazing it works so well with modern hardware) [via]

Zero Punctuation reviews Duke Nuke Forever ("taht's targic") [via]

Dennis Knopf's Bootyclipse series (booty-shaking videos on YouTube with the booty removed; the angry comments are funny)

Play Him Off, Green Day (Colbert gets in on the keyboard cat action)

Highlights from the truly horrible Star Wars first draft script (constraints led Lucas to make one great film; without them, he turned out films like this draft) [via]

Pick One (don't miss the top 10 (Sex, The Internet, Cats) and bottom 10 (AIDS, 9/11, Lil' Wayne)) [via]

nasty nets' YouTube Monster (culled from unrelated videos, like the visual version of In Bb 2.0)

Néojaponisme on the culture of anonymity for Japanese Internet users (opinionated but interesting article, particularly Japan's public vs. private personas)

Text Adventure, typography in video games (remember to adjust your fart volume) [via]

J. Chris Anderson on Toast, his standalone CouchDB chat demo (in the process, he explains some of the overlooked benefits of CouchDB)

Apple changes its mind, allows Eucalyptus into App Store (until Apple sorts out their approval process, it helps to have noisy friends)

The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist ("Having your desk near the entrance to your office without visitors assuming you're the receptionist.") [via]

Techcrunch reports CBS secretly gave Last.fm data to RIAA (Arrington says CBS lied to Last.fm and gave it to the RIAA without their knowledge; Last.fm is vehemently denying it, implying a personal vendetta)

An Optical Illusion by Ze Frank (put on a finger cot first)

The Deck Readership Survey (best survey ever; an excellent example of why I love The Deck so much) [via]

Intel's nerd rockstar ad (the way it should be! sadly, Intel hired an actor to play Ajay Bhatt)

Davario's Draw Yourself As A Teen meme on Livejournal (over 500 submissions in a year, some highlights)

Scott Schiller's forensics on a nasty piece of JS malware (the most bizarre Javascript obfuscation I've ever seen)

Buzzfeed's top video reactions to American Idol's finale (some very upset Adam Lambert fans, #9 is my personal favorite)

John Gruber on the next-gen iPhone's specs (he has the best sources of anyone in the industry, I'll bet this is dead-on accurate)

Sorry I'm Late, a stop-motion short film (I loved seeing how it was made, from the first test animations to the final shoot) [via]

U.S. government launches Data.gov, national data repository (not much there yet, but centralized data is good)

Project Gutenberg iPhone app blocked by Apple because of the Kama Sutra (note that Stanza, eReader, and Amazon's Kindle app all allow the same book) [via]

Infinite Summer, read Infinite Jest this summer (only 75 pages a week, easy!)

Brian & Eileen's Wedding Music Video (someone found a business model for lip dubs)

Tiny Art Director, little kids are difficult clients (I'm finding this very, very late, but every entry made me laugh) [via]

Mozilla Jetpack, extend Firefox with HTML, CSS, and jQuery (don't bother trying to grok it from the text, just watch the screencast)

Yahoo! Placemaker, extract world locations from unstructed content (also, Yahoo released the huge GeoPlanet/WOE placename database under a CC license)

Axono.me, isometric pixel art grid library for jQuery (check out the demos, including these racing cubes)

LEGO announces Frank Lloyd Wright sets (the Guggenheim and Fallingwater are first, continuing the LEGO Architecture series of landmarks)

Evan Roth's Intellectual Property Asshole Competition (he painted the HOPE poster and the AP photo it was based on; whoever C&Ds him first wins) [via]

Braid for Mac released (now there's no excuse not to buy it)

Fast Company on Taipei's innovative "zero landfill, total recycling" program (here's a first-person account of the system and video of the garbage trucks playing Fur Elise) [via]

Leaked video from Trico, new game by ICO/Shadow of the Colossus creators (their games seem to be weaving a larger narrative arc in the same fictional world)

Katy Hargrove's real-life molded Gummi Venus de Milos (life imitating art)

Fathom (tweaking the genre's cliches, it quickly shifts from 8-bit platformer to art game) [via]

Gmail Labs adds automatic language translation (getting closer to the Babel fish)

Tweeting Too Hard (dedicated to finding the most self-important, egotistical tweets)

ghstbstrsbstrs (clever, a digital collage without Photoshop) [via]

Joel Johnson on the divide between Wired Magazine vs. Wired.com (great comments from Wired employees past and present, including Chris Anderson, Leander Kahney, Steve Silberman, and Brian Lam)

Auto Tune The News #3 (last month, the New York Observer interviewed Michael Gregory about the series) [via]

Last Day Dream (a 42-second short film) [via]

Which of our beliefs will our grandchildren be appalled by? (Phil Dhingra highlights the best from a massive Reddit thread)

NYT's Maureen Dowd steals paragraph from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall (it would've been more fitting if she'd plagiarized from Twitter instead)

All Your Base dialogue, properly translated from Japanese to English (amazingly, I've never read the correct translation before)

Japanese trailer for "Muscle March" for WiiWare (defies description, the most intensely weird game I've ever seen)

Google's index of Wolfram|Alpha search results (they have no robots.txt at all; Google isn't parsing their Javascript, so Google can only see what's served statically from their results)

danah boyd's answers questions on Twitter about teen practices (I find this kind of thing absolutely fascinating)

WolframAlpha rendering text as images to prevent indexing (though they claim it's for "consistency," which is absurd; on second thought, I think Paul Ford's right, it's just Wolfram culture)

Hard Times with Ze Frank (Ze's second video for Buzzfeed, I'm hoping he'll keep making more)

Danger Mouse to release blank CD-ROM after legal fight with EMI (selling the packaging without the music; also, NPR's streaming the album) [via]

Updating the Web 2.0 logo collage for 2009 (tracking how many of the original sites are dead or acquired; or, in the case of WebJay, both) [via]

Wired's walkthrough of the May issue's hidden puzzles (reminds me of the golden era of Games Magazine) [via]

Stephen Wolfram demonstrates Wolfram|Alpha in detail (after watching the screencast, I'm much more excited about tonight's launch)

Us Now (one-hour free documentary about online collaboration and participatory government) [via]

Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation (Zen game released in two versions: the Atari 2600/Amiga Joyboard and the iPhone)

Vulture crunches the numbers on this season's SNL (charting cast member frequency, average appearances, and celebrity cameos) [via]

The Sound of Young America's Pledge Drive (a short film by Lonely Sandwich; donate to the best interview show around and get a Mustache TV)

Ubik's Voxel (absolutely stunning animated 3D pixel-ish art) [via]

F.A.T.'s KANYEFY bookmarklet, turn any site into Kanye West's blog (also on Kanye week: see the web through Kanye's eyes, Quotable Kanye (with API), and the Kanye rant detector)

Giant net-enabled Etch-A-Sketch hacked out of a 52" HD TV (related: giant collaborative Etch-A-Sketch from Siggraph 2006, projected on a giant screen) [via]

Greg Borenstein explains Why the Lucky Stiff's Bloopsaphone, with examples (write chiptunes in C or Ruby with a surprisingly readable syntax)

Buster Benson leaving Robot Co-op to do Enjoymentland full-time (one of my favorite people, always doing interesting things)

Gamasutra's Community Manager interview series (social network and gaming community managers could learn from one another)

Cracked's Most Baffling Pairings from Erotic Slash-Fiction (some gems in the comments, including this site dedicated to Radiohead slashfic)

Pixel City, Shamus Young's procedurally-generated city (his ten-part series of blog posts breaks down how it's made)

SNL's Casey Wilson Reads Internet Comments About Her (shenanigans! the Patton Oswalt comment was written by a Funny or Die employee) [via]

God gave me cookies (I think I'd be inclined to listen to salesmen and missionaries if they brought snacks)

LOST-inspired Doomsday Terminal for the iPhone (more interesting than the "gameplay" is that it allows anonymous messages between users)

Amazon Kindling (Rob Cockerham made a laser-engraved wooden Kindle)

Gizmodo's untold story of how three interns stole NASA's moon rocks (this 2004 LA Times article explains the background, but skipped details of the theft) [via]

Nick Montfort on extremely minimalist games (you just lost The Game)

Making old Trek look like new Trek (everything's better with lens flare) [via]

Google launches Search Options, date ordering for everyone (a nice companion to Twitter Search, looking forward to seeing how it evolves)

Times Wire, like Digg Spy for the New York Times (built on the Newswire API, it could use some analytics to gauge importance, like word count or clickthroughs) [via]

Suzanne Ciani composes the electronic soundtrack for Xenon pinball in 1979 (also: Suzanne demonstrating sound synthesis on 3-2-1 Contact) [via]

Pogo's Wonderland, free album of Alice in Wonderland mashups (I never knew the creator of the famous Alice video made more Alice songs)

Clap Your Hands Say Mario (hilarious hack controls Super Mario Bros. with a guitar, singing, clapping, and drums)

Phil Gyford's list of Ask Metafilter's introductory books (painstakingly compiled from this massive, wonderful thread) [via]

Judging programming language contentment using Twitter and Mechanical Turk (using humans to gauge sentiment, something it's hard for computers to do correctly)

Twitter meme could reveal answers to security questions (new meme: #robotname is your mother's maiden name and last 4 digits of your SSN)

Current interviews Mark "Afro Ninja" Hicks (hard to believe it's been five years since I first identified him) [via]

MonaTweeta II, encoding the Mona Lisa in 140 characters (using Chinese characters to send 210 bytes in 140 UTF-8 characters) [via]

Bad Astronomy reviews the science of the new Star Trek film (overall, it did better than most sci-fi; the comments reminded me of The Onion's take on the film) [via]

Jer Thorp's animated 3D visualization of take-offs and landings from Twitter (he grabbed every "just landed in..." query, extracted locations, and mapped the results with Processing)

Nintendo's documentary-style ad for Punch-Out (featuring The Wire's Sen. Clay "Sheeeiiiit" Davis as Little Mac's trainer, Doc)

Today Is A... (algorithmic guess of good/bad days based on news, stocks, and UK weather)

Globe and Mail's interview with Canadian cartoonist Seth (the wonderful video offers a revealing glimpse into his home and collections) [via]

Steven Spielberg reunites the Goonies cast (Goonies never say die!)

Mud Tub, using a pile of mud as a user interface (skip to 2:20 of the video to see them play Tetris by squishing mud around) [via]

The Sound of Young America's unaired pilot for Current TV (interviews with Patton Oswalt and Daily Show/Colbert Report writer/producer Ben Karlin)

Ze Frank as Jonah Peretti on Ashton Kutcher on BuzzFeed on Ashton (falling down a rabbit hole of celebrity and sincerity) [via]

The Stranger's 2009 Sex Survey (entertaining and mildly-NSFW charts and graphs, including this purity test)

The Anonymous Hugging Wall (like a platonic glory hole) [via]

Mike Frumin's sparkline map of NYC subway activity from 1905 to 2006 (don't miss his interactive version using OpenStreetMap)

10 Zen Monkey's exclusive with the "John Doe" and lawyer who sued Jason Fortuny (I hate to say it, but I agree with Fortuny that it was stretching copyright law)

Tabulating original vs. repurposed content on major gaming blogs (surprisingly, 21% of all posts were original reporting; see also: churnalism in British papers)

Gawker's Ryan Tate on citizen journalism and civic reporting (some local bloggers are digging far deeper than newspaper journalists) [via]

The Lonely Island's "For Your Consideration" promos for the MTV Movie Awards (my money's on Slaughter Shack, starring Will Arnett as "Eagleheart")

Daniel Benmergui's Today I Die (manipulate the words and characters to progress the story; from the creator of I Wish I Were the Moon)

Sean Tevis raising money for open government and his 2010 campaign (I just gave $40; he narrowly lost last year because of dirty tricks and a huge influx of GOP money)

Duke Nukem developer 3D Realms closes down (hopefully, marking the end of one of the longest vaporware projects of all-time)

The Dragnet Fugue aka "Fugue for Friday" (1975 composition from the creator of the Music Animation Machine)

Alice on YooouuuTuuube (like YouCube, half the fun is making your own)

Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat (more on the meme's origins; make your own) [via]

In Bb 2.0, a collaborative music and spoken word project (each person submitted a video performing in B flat major, which can be mixed at whim)

New Amazon Kindle supports native PDF reading (uses Adobe Reader Mobile, so no more conversion by email or $0.15/MB delivery fees)

Spewer (fun with liquid physics, designed by the artist behind Gish and Coil)

Tracing the real-world history of Jughead's crown-like hat (the dot and dash were just a shorthand for suggesting badges and pins) [via]

Metafilter's global 10th Anniversary Party (it's a testament to the team that the community's still so active and vibrant)

Chris Ware's animated Quimby the Mouse for This American Life (new animation with music by Andrew Bird) [via]

Refresh Cannon, multiplayer game played with a single avatar image (insanely clever, refresh to change angle and distance; also check out Refresh Hero, Refresh War, and just Refresh)

Time interviews Louis CK about consumer cynicism (his anecdotes on Conan about complaining passengers were all about himself)

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters (exploring the physiology of shrinking men, giant bugs, and E.T.; from 2003, but new to me) [via]

Jim Munroe's GDC: The Game (the Game Developers Conference organizers commissioned a playable text adventure about the show)

AUTO-MEME (there's an API, too)

Nieman Journalism Lab on @NPRBackstory (automated Twitter bot searches NPR's news archives for context for current news stories)

"You're," a printed portrait mashing up identity on various social sites (each portrait pulls in data from Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, and Last.fm) [via]

LA Times tracks the origin of SMS's 160 character limit ("This is perfectly sufficient.")

Jack Schulze discusses his influences for the Here & There maps (he has some interesting ideas about shifting perspective in first-person and God games)

Jay Leno's new ad slogan for Facebook (maybe this is his way of keeping up with Fallon)

Where Are You in the Movie? (if The Wizard of Oz spanned my lifetime, then Dorothy just met the Tin Man) [via]

MMMMound ("If it piles up, we post it.")

Fire alarm jam session (see also: car alarm and living room rave)

Danny Sullivan's preview of the Wolfram Alpha search engine (best explanation of what it does, and doesn't do, along with a good roundup of links)

Nedroid's Party Cat (party? party!)

Adblock Plus on their war with NoScript (you can read NoScript's deceptive rebuttal; cheating ad blockers only makes users angry) [via]

Paper Moon, monochrome Unity-based platformer inspired by pop-up books (the developers were featured in this week's great WSJ article on new business models for gaming)

Screenshots from Zen Bound's upcoming Nostalgia level pack (free update for all existing users)

High-res NASA moon landing photos restored by private fans in an abandoned McDonald's (amazing story about obsolete media preservation; start with the AP report and LA Times article, and work your way back) [via]

Jonathan Coulton's "First of May" performed in sign language (in case you need to know how to say "in flagrante delicto" in ASL) [via]

MP3: Cliffs of Nintendover (SLiVeR's jaw-dropping Eric Johnson cover recorded on a real NES)

Jack Schulze's incredible 3D horizonless map of Manhattan (currently running as a huge gatefold in Wired UK, prints are available with both directions) [via]

Pew study says churchgoers more likely to support torture (J-Walk notes that the threat of torture is a fundamental concept of hell)

Chris Messina on Comixology and the future of connected commerce (his local comic shop's iPhone integration lets you build a pull list waiting for you in the store)

79 versions of Popcorn, remixed into a single song (a hot mess, algorithmically beat-matched into a 12-minute collage with the Echo Nest remix API)