Rescue Princess 2.0, ways to make web apps more game-like — exploratory learning with levels, items, inventory, quests, and scores #

Trailer for Touchgrind, multitouch skateboarding game for the iPhone — let your fingers do the grinding #

Google's Halloween robots.txt — User-agent: zombies; Disallow: /brains (via) #

Shoot the Player — musicians filmed live in Australia, inspired by La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows #

Heart made of gears — easy, I'll just whip one of these up in Ponoko (via) #

Polifics, the Election '08 Fanfiction community — Obama/Clinton, Obama/Clinton/Biden, and even Obama/McCain slashfic (via) #

A funny thing happens when you copy/paste this character… (via) #

Banksy's Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill — very creepy NYC storefront with animatronic hot dogs, squirming chicken nuggets, and monkey porn #

Flickr now offering shape boundaries for 150,000 places — also, new user-created OpenStreetMap tiles for Baghdad and Kabul #

The Amazing True Story of Disaster Girl — even more remixes here, including meeting Tourist Guy #

You Can Vote However You Like — there should be one kid in the back singing about Ron Paul (via) #

CNN asks voters to say something nice about the other guy — like Greene, I find this really refreshing #

James Kochalka hits 10 years of drawing American Elf — I highly recommend the first two collections, and the third's out next month (via) #

JSSpeccy, a ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript — double-click a game to run it (via) #

Larry Lessig on California's Proposition 8 — defend marriage by voting no, please #

Errol Morris on the history of real-people political ads — the McCain campaign also used this approach in their Joe the Plumber testimonials #

WTF, Broccoli: Part Two — more photos of little food people, though Cascadian Farms is removing them on their packaging redesign #

Free Candy!  #

West Virginia vote flipping caught on tape — if the interface is this flaky, can you imagine what the data store and security look like? #

Errol Morris launches People in the Middle for Obama — the individual stories are just brilliant #

Mega Man 9 stop-motion with paper — the real game even reproduces NES flaws like flickering and framerate issues (via) #

Christian Science Monitor to go web-only in April 2009 — the first national newspaper to drop the "paper," and not the last #

The Presidential Debates, Synchronized — this is masterfully done (via) #

NYT launches Movie Reviews API — 22,000 reviews back to 1924; they're on a tear lately #

The Unfinished Swan, beautiful indie game in an all-white world — oddly, announced at the same time as the Whitewash tech demo in Unity #

Cursebird — people swearing on Twitter (via) #

Anil Dash on Palin's use of folksy language to subvert criticism — smoke 'em out, Anil #

Google strikes deal with book publishers, creates Book Rights Registry — reading the terms, I still don't think publishers should be able to stop people previewing their books; here's their side (via) #

François Macré's Thriller, an a cappella rendition in 64 parts — it's the season for over-the-top Thriller remakes #

Flaming Lips' Guitar Hero double-necked guitar mod — "because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar" (via) #

MTV Music, huge music video collection with a Hulu-like interface — 22,000 videos, embeddable and streaming; someone should mash the API with the 120 Minutes Playlists archive (via) #

Gunman Kills 15 Potential Voters In Crucial Swing State — it seems like all news is political these days #

Flickr's Rev. Dan Catt on RjDj for the iPhone as augmented reality — if you haven't tried it, you're really missing out #

Epic "Thriller" lipdub by French college students — 140 participants, one take (via) #

Gentrify, help San Francisco urban elite find places to live — I love the individual apartment listings; another great Rails Rumble entry #

Meet Inbetween Us — handy microsite, entry in the Rails Rumble 2008 #

Kevin Kelly on the evidence of a global superorganism — some great comments, though the reverse-chronological order drives me insane #

Prince of Persia creator posts first video shoot from 1985 — if you've played the game, you'll recognize the movements immediately; Jordan's posting his old development diary online (via) #

NYT writer invites 700 Facebook "friends" to a party, one shows up — rethinking the meanings of "friend," "attending," and "maybe" (via) #

Using the NYT Campaign Finance Data API with Google Spreadsheets — taking advantage of Google Spreadsheets' XML import methods; related: web service to normalize candidate names #

GreenDot Project, identifying humans with body language — Obama moves vertically, McCain horizontally, and Bush a mix of both (via) #

Flight404's Processing flocking experiment turned into $235 Paul Smith shirt — Robert finds it flattering, but it's bad form to turn this into this without credit #

Generating domain names with Markov chains — test it out on Suggestly #

China Channel, Firefox extension let users browse behind China's firewall — built on top of SwitchProxy #

Fred Armisen shows off Weekend Update's new megapixel giant touch map — art imitates life; the display was created by Perceptive Pixel (via) #

CNN's Anderson Cooper experiments with "virtual pie chart" — extremely silly use of augmented reality gone mainstream (via) #

AC/DC releases ASCII music video in Microsoft Excel — created by fans to "subvert the corporate firewalls"; Windows only, sadly #

Google Earth for the iPhone — free download, adorable; also, Street View's coming any day now (via) #

Typeface.js, rendering Truetype fonts with Javascript, Canvas, and VML — awesome hack lets you deliver custom fonts on the web without Flash; works on the iPhone, too (via) #

YouTube adds linking to video timecodes — in YouTube comments, just list any time and it's automatically linked #