Epic Rap Battles of History: Dr. Seuss vs. Shakespeare
— featuring George Watsky; also: Einstein vs. Hawking, Darth Vader vs. Hitler #Leonard Richardson's board game data experiments
— now’s the time to launch a farming wargame, but not another Operation clone via twitter.com #Skrekkøgle's sculpture of the Windows Solitaire win screen
— while you’re there, don’t miss their oversized Euro coin project via Tom Armitage #Envisioning the tablet newspaper in 1994
— an iPad-like experience at the 4:30 mark; related: AT&T’s You Will ads from 1993 #Warren Buffett's NYT op-ed asks government to tax the super-rich
— “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.” #Hide, an atmospheric indie game for Mac/PC
— conveys a tense atmosphere in a short time with lo-fi graphics and audio #Lil Wayne samples the Sword & Sworcery soundtrack
— apparently without permission from Jim Guthrie; get the soundtrack on Bandcamp #Tech entrepreneur drains $625 from Jonathan's Card, sells on eBay
— I don’t care what his intentions are, this is extremely uncool; reminds me of the Chain World hijacker #Winnebago Man, full-length film now available for free streaming
— great biopic about the man behind one of the earliest viral videos via Ze Frank #Aled Lewis's mashups of historical paintings with '80s adventure games
— for Super I Am 8-Bit starting this week in Los Angeles via GameSetWatch #KinectFusion, real-time 3D reconstruction using the Kinect
— this is the holy grail of FPS mappers, turning a room into a playable level in minutes #Craig Thompson's process sketches for Habibi
— six years in the making, his first full-length graphic novel since Blankets, due out next month via John Martz #Rabble on Blackberry's shift from executives to the urban poor
— Obama started his presidency obsessed with the Blackberry #Muon Baryon, 4k PC graphics demo ported to Javascript/WebGL
— this page brought my laptop to its knees #Nilay Patel on the subtle complexities of patent system reform
— insightful essay from a former copyright attorney; worth reading Lukas Mathis’ response #Fark settles lawsuit from a patent troll for zero dollars
— Drew says Reddit settled this week and Techcrunch is still fighting it #Heello is Twitter for Pretending
It’s easy to write off Heello as a Twitter clone. Created by the founder of Twitpic, the shameless knockoff looks and behaves like a stripped-down version of Twitter, down to the tweets pings, followers listeners, and retweets echos.
But it’s shaping up to be more than that. Creative fakesters are using the blank slate to turn Heello into the parallel-universe version of Twitter.
A world in which Heello was cofounded by Ev Williams (@ev), who acts as CEO and gives away free iPads to Heello users.
Where CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) reports all the news in ALL CAPS, including breaking news reports like “JUSTIN BIEBER” and “I JUST UNLOCKED THE ‘I’M ON A BOAT’ BADGE ON FOURSQUARE.”
A world where Mark Zuckerberg (@MarkZuckerberg) is a profane, sexist womanizer.
And where major web services (past and present) flirt and snark at each other, like @Tumblr, @Color, @4chan, and @Pownce.
Of course, Heello wouldn’t be complete without its own Social Media Experts. “Please Check Out My Blogpost ‘How To Drive Qualified Traffic To Your Blog Via Heello.'”
Heello is like a blank-slate Twitter with no moderation or verification. I doubt the Heello team wanted or expected this behavior, but they inadvertently created a perfect playground for parody and meta-commentary, like Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica‘s parallel world versions of Wikipedia.
It should be fun to see how they respond.
Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead writer of ReadWriteWeb, comments, “They told me they were going to remove any of these that weren’t clearly satires. That’s a real shame and shows a lack of sense of humor.” The first casualty was @ev, which was deleted shortly after this post was published.