April 20, 2009
History of Rainn Wilson's Twitter feud with Sockington
— unfortunately, it's led to over 100 threats; Rainn's toned it down recently #
Casual Profanity's liquid sculpture made from plastic tubing
— see also: the Superfluid Skirt (via) #
Kara Swisher announces changes to AllThingsD's Voices section
— in response to my article, they removed the comments/Share links and changed the wording; compare then and now #
Adam Berg's Carousel, short film capturing a frozen moment in time
— you can scrub through it on the official site #
Bohemian Rhapsody played by vintage computer hardware
— Atari 800XL, TI-99/4a, 8" floppy, 3.5" hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C as Freddie Mercury (via) #
MailChimp used Mechanical Turk to rank 25,960 templates
— interesting approach, combining algorithmic design with human filtering #
Jason Fortuny ordered to pay $74k for Craigslist sex baiting prank
— he never showed up in court; I wonder if any of the hundreds of others affected will bother #
Little Big Cremaster 1
— Little Big Planet levels inspired by Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle; also: Little Big Cremaster 4 (via) #
Scene.org Awards 2009 winners announced
— the best of the demoscene; you can view or download every entry on Pouet (via) #
Covered, a blog with modern artists covering classic comic books
— I love the realistic Donald Duck, Richard Sala's Batman, and Gustavo Deveze's frenetic Action Comics 1 (via) #
The Pac-Man Dossier
— an exhaustively researched and well-written guide, with gameplay details I've never seen before (via) #
CMU's ClueWeb09, 1 billion website crawl available for researchers
— massive 25 terabyte dataset shipped on four 1.5 terabyte drives; get this up on AWS! (via) #
Hacklab's laser engraver plays the Super Mario Bros. theme
— here's the Ruby code and homegrown ASCII tablature that makes it work (via) #
Super Mario 3 "Rainbow Riding" LUA hack for FCEUX emulator
— you only control Mario indirectly, skip to 1:00 to see how fundamentally it changes gameplay (via) #
Dash Shaw's Bodyworld
— serialized in 12 chapters, surreal online comic from the creator of Bottomless Belly Button (via) #
Spreadtweet, Twitter disguised as an Excel spreadsheet
— I love his other work, including a playable Snake on his homepage #
Chino Otsuka's digitally adding her modern self to her childhood photos
— time travel with Photoshop (via) #
Kottke digs up The Wire's original pitch, draft outline, and three scripts
— a must-read for any fan of the show #
Track 4chan's Twitter race to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to 1M followers
— their @basementdad account, created yesterday, is gaining 700-900 followers per minute #
4chan users discover Twitter, mass-following a new account
— the NSFW thread on /b/ (cache) is interesting, they've shared code for fake account creation #
Ken Jennings took H&R Block up on their offer
— they did his taxes for free, because of the "unpleasantness" #
Paul Lamere interviews a 4chan hacker about the TIME poll manipulation
— custom Windows apps, Perl scripts, and proxies to submit thousands of votes per minute #
Sweet Juniper's photos of an abandoned Detroit block
— every entry on his site is magic, including his TIME tour, abandoned zoo, stealing books, and thoughts on scrappers (via) #
Digg drops the DiggBar for all non-Digg users
— which, really, they should've done in the first place (via) #
American expat shows Saudi government's hand-censored version of Katy Perry CD cover
— though the last photo looks Photoshopped; maybe they're printing new booklets instead? #
Canvas visualizations of sorting algorithms
— absolutely beautiful, based on Aldo Cortesi's original visualizations #
Nancy Cartwright is your insufferable crazy aunt
— except that my crazy aunt never donated $10 million to Scientology #
Clay Shirky on the failure of #amazonfail
— outrage has its own momentum, even when circumstances change #
Rocketboom spins Know Your Meme off into new site, community
— their meme database is like a safe for work alternative to Encyclopedia Dramatica (via) #
Amazon employee blames French office for AmazonFail glitch
— they say it's strictly internal, debunking Weev's claims #
4chan manipulates all 21 top results on the TIME 100 Poll
— not content to just push Moot to the top, they rearranged the results to spell a message #
Birdhouse, a Twitter notepad for the iPhone
— for people who take Twitter way too seriously; don't miss the intro video (via) #
Elevated, winning 4k PC intro at Breakpoint 2009
— mind-blowing real-time terrain generation in 4,096 bytes; download it (via) #
Valleywag on Weev taking credit for #amazonfail controversy
— remember him? this guy's skeptical, but it still seems plausible to me #
Michael Buffington asks Mechanical Turk to write his personal bio
— the results weren't great, but inspired him to make it better #
Know Your Meme on the Yo Dawg/Sup Dawg image macro
— including Xzibit's response to the meme on Twitter #
Boing Boing tracks "lololol" variations on Google
— including the loolol, a lol with 100 o's (via) #
Adam Curtis on the modern rise of "Oh Dear"-ism in TV news
— from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, a BBC show about the news media; full episodes here (via) #
Comparing word frequency in TV/movie scripts to Craigslist's M4M personal ads
— NSFW language; the jargon's interesting, from HWP to DDF #