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 weblog.vedana.net #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 #Fathom
— tweaking the genre’s cliches, it quickly shifts from 8-bit platformer to art game via tigsource.com #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 buzzfeed.com #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 #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 Boing Boing #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 O'Reilly Radar #Wired's walkthrough of the May issue's hidden puzzles
— reminds me of the golden era of Games Magazine via Magnetbox #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 Boing Boing #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 buzzfeed.com #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 #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 Hackaday #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 Maximum Fun #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 #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 jwz #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 Delicious #Suzanne Ciani composes the electronic soundtrack for Xenon pinball in 1979
— also: Suzanne demonstrating sound synthesis on 3-2-1 Contact via @cabel #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 #Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis
Update: Kind of Bloop is done!
Ever since Kickstarter launched, I’ve been trying to come up with a great project for it that plays to its strengths… I like to describe it as a site that lets other people pre-order your dreams — an easy way to get the people you know to fund your ideas into reality.
With that in mind, I just launched a project I’ve been dreaming about for years. The idea is Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, one of my favorite albums of all-time. I’ve always wondered what chiptune jazz covers would sound like. What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?
I’ve researched the topic quite a bit, and was only able to find four jazz covers ever released — ast0r’s version of Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, Sergeeo’s own Giant Steps cover, and Bun’s version of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. (If you know more, please let me know!)
So I asked ast0r and sergeeo, along with three incredible chiptune artists (Virt, Shnabubula, and Disasterpeace), to collaborate on a track-by-track remake of the album. I’m raising the money to legally release the album, pay the royalties1, print a very limited run of CDs for Kickstarter backers only, and pay the artists for their hard work on these very challenging songs.
Read more about the project, and back it if you want to make it real.2
Update: We hit our $2,000 goal in four hours, so this project’s definitely on! That doesn’t mean it’s over, though… Anyone can still give money for the download or limited-edition CD. But I’m not planning on selling the album after the August 1 deadline, so pledge now if you want a copy.
Footnotes
1. This is my first time licensing music, and I’m frustrated that there’s no free, legal way to release this album for free download when it’s done. By law, you’re legally required to pay royalties for every download, whether or not you charge for it. Wouldn’t a percentage of revenue make more sense?
2. Some people seem to misunderstand what Kickstarter’s for, expecting it to work like Kiva, where there’s a pool of investors waiting for neat projects to throw their money into. In reality, I’d expect very, very few projects to be backed by random people stumbling on it from the Kickstarter website. It hinges on your own social network, your ability to promote your project, and the demand for what you’re offering. So if your project fails, it’s most likely because there wasn’t enough interest from the people you know.