Waxy.org: Links Archives: June 2012

Salon lays off The Well staff, put it up for sale (I have an archive of every pre-2005 post, just in case)

Political Screaming Match (it's like Internet comments by phone!)

The Kleptones' Paths to Graceland mixtape (trying to track down and reconstruct the mythic tape that inspired Paul Simon)

Profile of Mike Merrill, publicly-traded person (full disclosure: I'm bidding on several shares in the public auction)

Evolution of the Web

Anil Dash on clouds for people and EC2 for poets (love this idea, something I spent lots of time on at Expert Labs)

Color Coordinates (tweets mentioning colors plotted on Stamen's lovely watercolor maps)

Google Compute Engine launches (like EC2, access to the virtual machines instead of App Engine alone)

Google Chrome and Drive launching on iPhone and iPad today (likely only using Apple's rendering engine, so not as significant as it seems)

Are We In the Future Yet? (before sending in a correction, note the date and time)

Google's Project Glass demo at I/O (live skydiving onto Moscone; attendees can preorder for $1500, ships next year)

Source Filmmaker (Valve is releasing their incredible animated filmmaking tool, should be huge)

Idea Channel on mashups and the shifting value of genre definitions (between Off Book and Idea Channel, PBS is doing interesting online work lately)

Rock-scissors-paper robot wins every time against human opponents (high-speed vision analyzes your move and responds before you finish throwing)

Jess & Russ's wedding invitation (it took six months and the help of 15 star illustrators and designers)

Ze Frank walks a mile in another man's shoes (a joke about empathy turns into something more)

Sorkinisms (incredibly well-researched and edited supercut)

Louis CK selling complete tour direct through his site (no ticket agencies, flat rate, no sales tax)

Symbolset (like Chartwell, a clever use of OpenType ligatures to turn words into icons)

Facebook switches all users to facebook.com email addresses (idiotic, especially since all emails from non-friends end up in the Other black hole)

Millefiori (ferrofluid mixed with water colors) [via]

Top IAmA (brilliant cruft-free view of Reddit's top AMA threads) [via]

Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror (shorter version of the plan)

Coins (try turning on "transcribe audio" for robots gone awry)

Daybreak, looped (a running gag on Community; reminds me of bad hold music)

Ars Technica feature on the rise and fall of Winamp (including interviews with members of the former Nullsoft team)

FuckItJS (jQuery plugin that blindly removes lines with errors and recompiles until it works)

Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity (a reaction to Emily the intern and the resulting kerfuffle)

Kickstarter releases detailed stats page, updated daily (finally, a feature every Kickstarter knockoff won't try to copy)

First Person Tutor (a proofreading FPS, part of the experimental 7dfps game challenge; some other highlights)

Trailer for Perspective, a crazy first-person puzzler (taking some of the Fez gameplay mechanic into a first-person shooter)

Robin Sloan's social experiment with choosing the lowest primes (love the strategies involved)

How Pogo makes an audio remix (more great stuff on his SoundCloud channel) [via]

Owning Your Own Words (good discussion with Anil Dash, Gina Trapani, Paul Ford, Mathew Ingram, and Winer by proxy)

Satellite Eyes (Mac freeware changes your desktop to the satellite imagery of your current location)

Joshua Topolsky on the Microsoft Surface tablet (a first step away from useless concept videos, and towards bringing R&D to the real world)

Origami artist sues over abstract paintings of unfolded designs (ongoing battles over the definition of transformative fair use)

Progression of an animated scene from Tangled (live-action reference shots, layout, lighting, and more)

Netflix neuters its API (no commercial use, no mashups with other video services)

Inventing a Problem (related: I Give Up)

FunnyJunk lawyer files suits against The Oatmeal, IndieGogo, National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society (the redacted complaint is up on Carreon's site; I love part 26)

PBS Off Book's tribute to the animated GIF (I recommend just playing this full screen all day today)

Jay Smooth on sexist gamer dudes (12 hours left to back Anita's project; in case you somehow missed it, the awful backlash and media response)

Artists celebrate the 25th anniversary of the animated GIF (I love the LZW/Nyan Cat remix)

Technology Review profile on Cameron Marlow and the Facebook Data Team (they're doing great work, I just wish they had an ~~RSS feed~~; here it is)

Ze Frank's FacePunch (on the potential positive and negative energy of online interactions)

Pattern analyzing the chord structures of 1,300 songs (I'd love to see an app that always suggests what chord to play next)

Reddit user's ten-year Civilization II war spawns a following (fanfic, comics, and attempts to resolve the war at the new subreddit)

The Complete Dan Harmon Channel 101 Canon (including the incredibly meta "Exposure" and "ChooseYourOwnSelectAVision.TV")

Readability ends contentious paid publisher model (lots of frustration in the comments)

Indie Game: The Movie available to stream or download (go buy it! essential viewing, perfectly captures the anguish from developing a long-term project)

Snakes on a Cartesian Plane (variations on Snake that are actually fun)

Robert Hodgin's Eyeo 2012 demos (all made with Cinder, source coming next week)

Pointer Pointer (photos that point to your mouse cursor)

NPR previews Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel (first album in seven years)

Jonathan Lethem's "My Internet" (I love the idea of a commerce-free private Internet; reminds me of invite-only communities I belong to)

Paul Ford's 10 Timeframes (we're asking people to spend their heartbeats on things we make)

Brother Brain (John McGregor's looping animations from 8-bit videogames) [via]

Cindy Au on the "Take My Money, HBO" campaign (want a revolution? don't give your money to HBO, give it to creators)

OK Cupid Enemies (my personal favorite)

Reddit users collaborate to make the Community 8-bit game real (the lead dev is taking submissions for assets from their sub-Reddit; download it)

Life After A Total Hack (speculative near-future fiction on Buzzfeed, of all places)

FM Towns Marty (NSFW Tumblr focused on strange Japanese game screenshots from the NEC PC-88/PC-98 and FM Towns Marty)

New trailer for Disney's Wreck-It Ralph (the top YouTube comment nailed it, it's like Who Framed Roger Rabbit for video games)

Airtime (Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's new ChatRoulette meets Facebook video chat toy)

Quora_ebooks (Markov-generated Quora questions)

The Ballad of the Psychotropic Robots (free procedurally-generated audio-visual thing for Windows)

Washington Post on the fall of CNET founder Halsey Minor (very sad; Halsey himself purged much of his Wikipedia entry in April)

Soundplay (from Pitchfork and Kill Screen, a collaboration between musicians and game designers)

NYT on a Parisian food truck (like here, the same complaints from local restaurants crying unfair competition) [via]

Emily Short's Bee, a story about work and spelling (built on Varytale, a new platform for interactive fiction)

A Brief History of Video Games (a three-minute video mashup from Polygon)

Kickstarter's Yancey Strickler on Amanda Palmer's $1M album project ("No one is happy with the current creative economy, and fans will support people who dare to challenge it.")

PBS short film on the culture of Reddit (covering its curiosity, sincerity, activism, and sexism)

Museum of Endangered Sounds (related: Alexis Madrigal's breakdown of the dialup modem sound)

Clippy.js (Microsoft's hated agents brought to the web, ready for embedding) [via]

Report confirms Stuxnet created by U.S., Israel (started by Bush, ordered by Obama, with unknown future repercussions)

Blockly, a graphical programming language by Google (try the simple maze; the full editor generates code in JS, Dart, and Python)