Waxy.org: Links Archives: March 2010

A real person, a lot like you (great writing from Derek Sivers)

MOON8 (8-bit cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon)

Snopes debunks the Scarface school play (the YouTube user's profile and favorites were a nice touch)

I Can Hold My Breath Forever (from the Daniel Benmergui school of poetic art games with long names)

Tim O'Reilly on the state of the Internet operating system (like his first Web 2.0 essay, a loose collection of thoughts defining a movement)

Colorbind for the iPhone (my new iPhone game obsession; amazingly, the whole game is playable with red-green colorblindness)

Chat Roulette Piano Improv #2 (Merton returns)

Run, Jesus Run! (blasphemous 10-second game for the Experimental Game Project; I made a speedrun)

First images of Scott Pilgrim game, with music by Anamanaguchi and pixel art by Paul Robertson (insanely awesome; don't miss the teaser trailer)

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt get coffee (Gizmodo asked a body language expert to analyze their poses)

SimpleGeo's visualization of SXSW checkin activity (related: Check.in, location-aware web app in private beta to check into multiple services at once) [via]

Auto Smiley (computer vision watches you smile, then pastes a smiley into the topmost application) [via]

I'm Here, A Love Story (short film by Spike Jonze about robots in love) [via]

Future Sounds shuts down WOXY one year after Lala sale (it's easy to blame management, but the root cause is obscene streaming royalties)

Specter Spelunker Shrinks (clever game mechanic, growing and shrinking with time dilation) [via]

Less Talk, More Rock (it's worth reading, though I'm mostly linking this for the gorgeous Superbrothers art)

Paris Smaragdis' demo video of user-assisted audio selection (mind-blowing demo; sing along with vocals or instruments to magically isolate them from the background music)

Preview of Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill feature (from SIGGRAPH to product in about a year)

Nintendo's mini-feature on Cave Story's elusive creator Pixel (his first public appearance; the game came out on WiiWare yesterday, go buy it!)

How a gaming community flamewar spawned a real game (titled "Dudebro, My Shit is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time")

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (Patton Oswalt as Dr. Demento is inspired casting)

Slate's experiments with running Google TV Ads (54 airings, 1.4 million viewers for $1,300)

Come On Paint Me White Again (a conversation between UK street artist mobstr and the Newcastle City Council)

Google stops censoring Chinese search results (they're now redirecting google.cn to the uncensored google.hk)

MC Frontalot released Zero Day for digital download (it has quite possibly the most insane secret track ever committed to disc, spoilers ahoy)

Ben Folds' live piano improv on Chat Roulette (a tribute to his doppelganger during last night's concert in Charlotte, NC)

Brandon Boyer plays with Jason Rohrer's Sleep Is Death (collaborative game, where one person manipulates the world for another)

Soren Johnson's "Fear and Loathing in Farmville," notes from GDC 2010 (best summary of the turmoil social gaming's causing in the gaming industry) [via]

Fredrik Larsson's TV Theme Song Medley (I'm a sucker for people accompanying themselves) [via]

Jane McGonigal's TED talk on using games to save the world (games can motivate you to do mundane tasks or something meaningful, choose wisely)

C-SPAN opens massive video archives (160,000 hours of video dating to 1987)

Joel Johnson, "Raiding Eternity" (more tech writing like this, please)

xkcd's Google phrase frequency charts ("I got $x problems")

Newspaper Club designs, prints, distributes overnight newspaper at SXSW (I was lucky enough to grab one of the hand-numbered issues)

Crowdsourced demographic study of Chatroulette (the info was gathered by Hacker News users)

Progress Wars (countless hours of fun)

Piano Improvisation on Chat Roulette (amazing how much creativity the site's inspiring) [via]

8-Bit Austin (I think I'll use this map to get to Datapop 2010)

Spritely, jQuery plugin for sprite and background animation (see also: gameQuery)

Trololololololo Shreds (some context) [via]

Preview of Sword & Sworcery EP for the iPhone (looks unlike anything I've ever seen)

Sitby.us (essential iPhone-optimized site for SXSWi session planning)

Danc on the release of Ribbon Hero (turning Microsoft Office into a game, with competition against your friends) [via]

"Play" by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman (avatars as Russian nested dolls) [via]

Chatroulette Map (I think I'd rather not know, thanks) [via]

Steamshovel Harry (not sure how I missed this one last year, metagaming with music by Brad Sucks)

El Fin Del Mundo by Alberto González Vázquez (there's so much I love about this, I can't quantify it all) [via]

Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired (also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books)

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer (related: McSweeney's categories for the meta-awards) [via]

Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live (for the first time, backed by The Roots)

Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica (related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton)

The Panic Status Board (the instant feedback made work more game-like)

Valve ports game library and Steam service to Mac (Portal 2 will be released for Mac simultaneously with PC, along with "all of our future games")

Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy (fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information)

8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York (he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide)

Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game (watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead)

Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency ("Maybe I'll learn something.")

PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania (I love how expressive they are)

Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music (very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine)

GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story (scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen)

Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft (he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts)

LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes (looks like the regex was a bit greedy)

NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines" (very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year)

YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos (a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now)

OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" (Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles)

Roger Ebert starts subscription service ($4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1)

Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation (nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories)

Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead (radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots)

Unit Testing Achievements (I'm still waiting for a ticket tracker with game mechanics) [via]

The Skull of Regret (even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great)

NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line (hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second) [via]

Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project (even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license) [via]

Bioshock's lead level designer remakes Arcadia in Doom 2 (don't miss his companion article about Doom as Robotron)