Midori-san, the blogging houseplant — if you think that plant's really blogging, then I have a bridge to sell you #

Frotzophone, making music with interactive fiction — the Z-Machine object tree as musical instrument; don't miss the MP3 of him playing Zork (via) #

New York Magazine's long profile of FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver — if you haven't, spend a little time reading about his methodology to understand how he's totally changed the game #

New York Times releases Campaign Finance API — totals for each candidate by state or ZIP code and lookup by donor name, with JSON, XML, or serialized PHP output (via) #

New York and the Panic of 1873 — the NYT digs into their archives to find some striking parallels to today's credit crisis #

Splatter art exhibit depicts Looney Tunes character murder — uncensored images from James Cauty's show are now online and prints are for sale (via) #

Doodlebuzz, typographic news explorer — draw a line to explore the news, branch lines to see related stories and excerpts (via) #

Jeremy Freese's Violet, entry for the IF Comp 2008 — best entry I've tried so far from the competition; hit enter a couple times to start playing #

Colleen Venable's connect-the-dots giraffe tattoo — culmination of three-year project trying to find a toy giraffe from her childhood #

MoneyTalks, listen to stock prices rise and fall — requires Flash 10 beta, or you can watch the sample videos instead #

iminlikewithyou launches open API for multiplayer games — the site's changed radically in the last year, from casual flirting to almost pure gaming #

Roundup of 84 knockoffs of Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama poster — and I'm fairly sure that's still a fraction of them (via) #

World of Goo is released to the public — the best game I've played this year; coming to Steam and WiiWare later today #

Simon Carless on Why LittleBigPlanet Is Web 2.0 For Games, Fulfilled — it's almost, almost worth buying a PS3 for #

Academic paper studying knowledge sharing in Yahoo! Answers (PDF) — the community's split between answer people and discussion people, and the categories can be clustered accordingly #

Halfbakery suggests naming recessions after people, like hurricanes — Recession George #

Ultima creator Richard Garriott launched into space — Lord British spending 10 days on the International Space Station for a cool $30 million #

Moral psychology testing on Amazon Mechanical Turk — Brendan O'Connor's blog is one of my new favorites; he works at Dolores Labs #

Conplot, a commandline plotter with ASCII art — for use with piping from sort|uniq -c and the like #

Preview of Gomibako, like Tetris with garbage — every object has physical properties, so trash can be crushed, burned, or toppled #

Drew on the financial crisis — see also: Woot's Google ads (via) #

Gary Vaynerchuk on recession-proof marketing and dumb advertising — don't miss the part where he queries his UStream followers in real-time #

You Fell Asleep Watching A DVD (via) #

Content-aware scaling in Photoshop CS4 — from SIGGRAPH demo to product in a year (via) #

Unicode Snowman for You — ☃ #

Tuttuki Bako, poke virtual characters in a little box — like Tamagotchi meets Levelhead #

Kevin Mitnick on the indictment of Sarah Palin's email hacker — he also touches on his own recent encounter with U.S. customs #

Portal: Prelude, extensive fan-made Portal mod, released a day early — Gamespy loved it, but warns that it's very hard #

Inspired by xkcd comic, YouTube adds audio previews for comments — this works nicely for quick speech synthesis with simple URL hacking #

NYT to close International Herald Tribune website — I remember when their 2000 redesign blew away everyone with impressive DHTML features #

Steven Levy visits Jay Walker's insane personal library — funny, I keep all my priceless artifacts in cardboard boxes in the basement #

Yahoo! Calendar finally, finally launches redesign — ten years in the making #

Chuck Klosterman's Brief History of the 21st Century — like Kottke said, there's too much in here to like; related: Phone Sex AI (via) #

YouTube in Super HD! — after it buffers, try clicking "Restart" to get it in sync (via) #

Little Big Computer, a virtual electronic 8-bit calculator built in Little Big Planet — see also: Mechanical 5-bit Calculator in the Half-Life engine #

Mail Goggles, Gmail tries to prevent late-night drunk emails — this could also be used to keep you from answering personal email during work hours #

DJ Z-Trip's Obama Mix — very listenable pastiche of rock and hip-hop from Pink Floyd to Saul Williams with a strong political undercurrent #

This American Life's Another Frightening Show About the Economy — followup to The Giant Pool of Money episode from May #

Take on Me: The Literal Version — if songs sang what was happening in the music video (via) #

TIGSource's Bootleg Demake competition winners — best game competition ever #

Sarah Palin's evening gown entry to the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — "In Alaska, we have mosquitoes." #

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banksta — Banksta 4 Life #

The Big Picture on Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from Above photographs — with convenient Google Maps links for each #

Keith Loutit's tilt-shifted time-lapse videos — reminds me of an ant colony (via) #

The VP Debate on Auto-Tune — it's got a beat and you can dance to it (via) #

Flickr adds rainbow-vomiting panda feature to Explore — finally, some innovation in the photo sharing space (via) #

Fring, make Skype calls for the iPhone — Truphone was the first VoIP app, but didn't support Skype calling (via) #

Sippey's idea for restaurants to help diners split the bill — very useful, though it'd require servers to enter the number in each group #

One Metafilter user's personal anecdote about Paul Newman — there are several other good stories in that thread; related: a Hole in the Wall camp counselor's tribute #

Weird Al to release songs on iTunes as soon as he's recorded them — he talks about how digital distribution makes topical parodies much easier (via) #