August 31, 2006
Video: Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House modeled in Half-Life 2
— deathmatches in famous architecture; download it here (via) #
Video: 49 Up trailer
— the ongoing UK documentary series interviews the same group of adults every 7 years since age 7 #
Comcast blacklists e-mail from The WELL
— at my last job, dealing with mistaken Comcast and Verizon blacklists were the norm #
Queen's Brian May slams Myspace for "pirated identity"
— he doesn't want to do the Myspace salute; won't somebody think of the children #
The Dial-Up BBS Revisited
— amazing story of calling ghost BBSes, and a great tip for using Vonage for dialup (via) #
Business Week on the LonelyGirl15 conspiracy
— here's a good overview;s is YouTube's biggest star a viral marketing effort or just kids havnig fun? (via) #
Jeremy Bogan irritates telemarketers with random recorded responses
— this is brilliant and cruel; what else can you tell me about this offer? (via) #
Evhead on why pageviews are an obsolete metric
— part of Myspace's big numbers are attributable to terrible site design (via) #
Flickr adds extensive geotagging and maps support
— and, surprise! two-way integration with Upcoming #
Upcoming.org adds Flickr and Yahoo! Local integration
— increasing the number of events by 3000% overnight, plus pretty pictures and nicer event pages #
NYT tracks down "Canon Rock" YouTube star
— the original video, and its many, many imitators (via) #
Video: Ricky Gervais at Microsoft UK
— shut down by Microsoft on Youtube, now living on Google Video for the moment #
Review of Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud
— create and destroy a virtual server farm in seconds with an API call; Amazon is doing the most innovative work in the entire industry #
L.A. Weekly on the gentrification of Los Angeles
— also, five warning signs; most interesting are gelato and the flight patterns of visual artists (via) #
Nintendo Wii to limit wifi for third party titles
— no non-Nintendo launch titles will have online play? #
Stephen Colbert rips off Ze Frank joke?
— hard to believe it's a coincidence; maybe a staff writer watches The Show (via) #
Dev-Scene Nintendo DS homebrew portal
— outstanding index of available homebrew apps and games for the NDS (via) #
Long New Yorker article on the recent Poincare Conjecture battle
— a fascinating story of two very different mathematic personalities; more from Kottke (via) #
The Evolution of Speech Balloons
— from scroll-like "labels" in 12th century paintings to modern comic strips; also: the Early Comics Archive (via) #
Weird Al's "Don't Download This Song"
— "We Are the World"-style commentary on music piracy; "even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong" #
Video: The Party Party's "God Made Me Do It"
— video mashup of Bush singing "Imagine," with a nod to Lou Reed #
Parallels plans to offer full Windows gaming support by end of year
— full speed OpenGL/DirectX running natively on the Mac would mean I'd never buy a PC again (via) #
Turner Broadcasting removing smoking scenes from Hanna-Barbara cartoons after UK complaint
— removing positive portrayal of cigs in Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, and The Flintstones #
Video: MTV's Game Makers Roundtable
— bad UI, but great conversation with Will Wright, David Jaffe, Cliffy B, and Harvey Smith #
Video: PES' "Game Over"
— stop-motion animation of retro arcade games played out with household objects #
Interview with Mike Frumin from Eyebeam
— people like Mike inspire me; Fundrace, OGLE, Pizza Party, VGMap, and reBlog are all wonderful #
Wired News on Jason Scott's text adventure documentary
— even more than Arcade, I'm eagerly awaiting Get Lamp #
RU Sirius show on Gettingit.com reunion, part one
— I'm interviewed along with the rest of the staff; follow along on the archives #
Video: Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown
— hyperviolent fun with copyright violations circa 1986; cameos by Mickey Mouse, Blondie, Nazis, and Richard Simmons (via) #
Dreamhost gets some angry voicemails
— I love that company; how many other businesses would write a public expose on payola review sites? #
Bruce Schneier Facts
— "Bruce Schneier can straighten out an elliptic curve with nothing but his teeth" #
Microsoft to enable homebrew content on Xbox 360
— sharing the games will be challenging, but it's a great move that other consoles should try to top #
Internet Soul Portraits
— famous websites without identifying text or graphics; how many can you name? #
AOL's Weblogs, Inc. gaming Digg
— AOL employees digging Weblogs, Inc. stories in a coordinated effort to get to the frontpage #
Barry Diller buys majority stake in Connected Ventures
— College Humor, yes, but also Vimeo, Busted Tees, and others (via) #
Apple making huge social software push?
— the Teams feature is the most interesting; social networks will eventually be built into the OS (via) #