Waxy.org: Links Archives: July 2010

Auto-Tune the News' Bed Intruder Song (here's the original newscast-turned-meme, in case you missed it )

Craig Mod's incredible postmortem of raising money with Kickstarter (gorgeously designed article with plenty of solid data)

GET LAMP, the text adventure documentary, is done (five years in the making with incredible attention to detail; you can order the DVDs here)

FC64 Commodore 64 emulator in Javascript (a bit CPU-intensive, but it works!)

10k Apart (build a web app in less than 10k, though you can use jQuery/Prototype and Typekit)

TorrentFreak on the BitTorrent releasers vs. the Scene (insidery article covering an interesting shift in online movie releasing)

Google Alarm Firefox add-on (audio alerts when your personal info's sent to Google servers)

Bradley and Bethany (Dan Wineman's App Store review fanfic)

Michael Jackson's estate demands Popcap change Dancing Zombie character (they're retroactively changing him in all versions of the game)

Paul Graham on the acceleration of addictiveness (the iPhone and iPad is the Internet's equivalent of a hip flask)

GameStop buys Kongregate (this seems like a bad fit; has a retail chain ever acquired an online community?) [via]

Ron Livingston does Keyboard Cat (previously: Keyboard Kato) [via]

Andrew Plotkin reviews The Ultimate Alphabet for the iPad (based on Mike Wilks' insane picture book from 1986; here's the gameplay)

EFF wins DMCA exemptions for bypassing DRM, phone jailbreaking/unlocking (Ars Technica breaks down the changes)

8-bit color cycling with HTML 5 (how it works)

Guardian UK's report on the Wikileaks Afghanistan war logs (they call it the "biggest leak in intelligence history"; more from the NYT)

The No Twinkie Database (anti-patterns for game design)

Aza Raskin on Tab Candy, experimental tab management for Firefox (not an extension, the download is a Firefox build)

The Chipophone (8-bit synth in an electronic organ, don't miss the video) [via]

Philipp Lenssen's book on Graphic Adventure games (culled from Wikipedia entries, edited, and fleshed out with original interviews)

Cow Clicker (Ian Bogost's Facebook game about Facebook games)

Sledgehammer and Whore (a screenwriter deals with a very unusual break-in at his office, and how he might pitch it as a show) [via]

Adam Lisagor on Flipboard (free iPad app creates a personalized magazine of your friends' FB/Twitter links)

4chan trying to take down Gawker (in response to their critical Jessi Slaughter posts and a post yesterday taunting them)

Top Secret America (Washington Post's two-year investigation into federal use of private contractors after 9/11)

Xbox 360 developer recounts the history of their achievements system (how it was developed and how they work) [via]

Apple donates MacPaint/QuickDraw source to Computer History Museum (see Folklore.org's evolution of MacPaint and the long, great oral history)

GQ's rare interview with Bill Murray (Sofia Coppola tells the story of trying to track him down for Lost in Translation)

You've Either Shipped or You Haven't (from Tom Taylor, who ships; journalist Bobbie Johnson's response and Tom's followup)

Hacked Sonic the Hedgehog gains weight as he consumes fried rings (as he grows, he eventually becomes completely immobile)

Rigid-Body Fracture Sound (rendering sound effects from physics simulations, from this year's SIGGRAPH)

Aaron Cohen tests the "I Write Like" authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald writes like H.P. Lovecraft, who writes like Edgar Allen Poe)

AutoSummarize (top 100 free books summarized by Microsoft Word into 10 sentences)

Google acquires Metaweb (very happy they won't be shutting down Freebase) [via]

OK Cupid crunches the numbers on the biggest lies in online dating (for example, hotter photos were much more likely to be outdated according to EXIF tags) [via]

Drew Blas' analysis of GPL'ed code in Thesis (he found several blocks of Wordpress code)

Trailer for The Social Network released (but will it be better than The First $20 Million?)

Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress theme developer argue GPL licensing (the debate about the GPL and derivative works may finally go to court)

The Revolving Internet [via]

Old Spice Guy's video responses to individual tweets (brilliant marketing campaign; in a meta moment, the actor responds to himself) [via]

Yiying Lu's repositionable wall graphics (the Twitter Fail Whale was originally an elephant)

The Men Who Stare at Screens (going to the gym might not help long stretches of inactivity)

I Write Like (Dan Brown!? I'll take comfort in knowing Shakespeare writes like butt) [via]

Massachusetts newspaper to charge fee to comment (and no anonymity, they'll post with the name on their credit card) [via]

BLU's Big Bang Big Boom (months in the making, their new wall-painted animation is a brief history of the world)

pOnd (a five-minute zen game that takes an unexpected turn, or two) [via]

SuperMe (multiplayer game about resilience and positive thinking) [via]

Man Enough (I think I'm just a sucker for games with vocals by the developers)

Twirdie (golf game played by guessing the popularity of Twitter searches)

Ask Metafilter takes on men's bathroom etiquette (increasingly hilarious thread, everyone thinks their method's "right"; over or through the flap, sit or stand to wipe, fold or crumple)

Harvey Pekar, dead at 70 (illustrated by comic greats, American Splendor published for over 30 years)

Google's App Inventor for Android (Scratch-like programming for non-programmers)

Blizzard backs down on real names in their forums (Randy outlined some of the issues with losing anonymity)

Slate on the competitive eating industry (Kobayashi couldn't compete this year because he wouldn't sign an exclusivity contract)

Multiuser Sketchpad (how it was made, built with node.js and WebSockets)

Epic Win, to-do list game for the iPhone (by the visual designer behind Little Big Planet) [via]

Ask Metafilter on things you realized you were doing wrong (related: This American Life's A Little Bit of Knowledge) [via]

Super Mario Bros. speedrun visualized as one long projection (composited into a long tracking shot of a wall, incredibly well done) [via]

Auto-Tune the News' Double Rainbow Song (they all join in at the end)

Starcraft/World of Warcraft official forums to display real names (Blizzard's lifting anonymity to try to stem abusive behavior)

Andy Weir's "The Egg" (related: Greg Knauss's The Damnation of Richard Gillman)

Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life now available online for free (highly recommended reading; you can still buy the book at Amazon) [via]

Optical Illusion Illusions (Reddit user photoshops the illusions into popular optical illusions)

Higgs particle simulated as sound (I fully expect these to be sampled on the next Frontalot album)

Film the Blanks (ongoing project to abstract classic movie posters)

Yosemitebear's Giant Double Rainbow (I want to be in this guy's head for just one day)

Composer Jason Robert Brown's fight with a teen girl about copyright (hard to argue it's lost income, since she almost certainly wouldn't have bought the sheet music) [via]

Giant Bomb's extensive first look at Limbo gameplay (this game looks amazing, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness and Out of This World)

Rude Boy, compilation of reggae/dub/ska chiptunes (fun, but it's hard to top Mr. Spastic's "Lo-Fi Version")

Chase Goose (as Tom says, "You will hate this game.") [via]

Maciej Ceglowski on the great Legacy.com swindle (the company that manages death notices for many U.S. newspapers)

Marc Hedlund announces Wesabe shutdown (very sad; just found out Robot Co-op's shutting down 43 People, too)

Diaspora's first month progress report (with screenshots and video; seems like the Facebook protests have passed, even if concerns remain)

Foursquare adds map view (in an unfamiliar city, this should be incredibly useful)

8-bit Twilight: Eclipse (an interactive YouTube game) [via]

Darryl Cunningham's 19-page comic about homeopathy (following his earlier strip on the MMR vaccine controversy)

Luke W. on an elegant sliding alternative to CAPTCHA (faster and simpler, though would still need an accessible option for the blind)

Dan Telfer thinks your favorite dinosaur sucks (don't get him started on velociraptors) [via]

Roger Ebert follows up his controversial post on games as art (though his use of Jericho screenshots is like writing about art films with images from Scream 2)