March 20, 2008
Color Wars on Twitter
— with Ze Frank leading, picking teams marked the start of Twitter's first potential MMO #
Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps
— fiction written and designed for Google Maps, from the creators of Perplex City (via) #
RollTube Firefox extension turns every YouTube video into a RickRoll
— the opposite of RickrollDB, great for pranks (via) #
Six botnets responsible for 85% of all spam
— and 40% comes from a single source; good luck shutting it down, though (via) #
Urban exploration photos of Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch
— impressive shots taken at night; full set on Flickr (via) #
Chart of random color names provided by Mechanical Turkers
— from Dolores Labs, a Turk consultancy; also, their wonderful chart of race on Sports Illustrated covers (via) #
Questionaut
— from the Czech studio that made Samorost, a lovely game for kids commissioned by the BBC; walkthrough #
Carrie Brownstein's impressions on leaving SXSW Music
— don't miss the rest of NPR's coverage, too (via) #
Jay Is Games' Casual Games 5 entries up for voting and play
— a massive outpouring of creativity; AdBlock users will need to whitelist the page #
HarmoNESica, convert an NES cartridge to a harmonica
— finally, blowing in the cart will actually do something #
Google Docs' Clippy easter egg
— not an April 1 joke, as suspected; any idea how to enable cliply? #
Chart of organic food companies and their corporate owners
— consolidation's been happening for two years, but the result is impressive and sad (via) #
Jason Rohrer's Game Design Sketchbook
— the author of Passage and Gravitation's new Escapist column, prototyping a new game monthly (via) #
Scientology critics leak emails endorsing Florida mayoral candidate
— possible smoking gun, because IRS forbids tax-exempt organizations from campaigning #
Retro Sabotage
— silly and strange parodies of retro games; I just finished Tetris meets 2001 (via) #
Scientology escalates the battle with Anonymous
— they should've let it die, it's like responding to the world's biggest troll; account disabled, but mirrored by Gawker (via) #
"Lost Pig" cleans up at the XYZZY interactive fiction awards
— I beat the game on my flight home from SXSW; here's a good review (via) #
Eurogamer's review of Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden
— best explanation of the oddball freeware RPG I've seen (via) #
Waxweb, the first feature film online
— ambitious and sprawling 15-year project used VRML, Digicash, MOOs, and 25,000 hyperlinks; watch the 1995 demo (via) #
Jill Sobule reached her goal of $75,000 to fund next album
— in 53 days, 1,000 true fans in action #
Anil Dash on embeddable blog entries
— as Nelson points out in the comments, this is Xanadu's transclusion in widget form #
Demo of Melodyne's incredible polyphonic editing tools
— hard to explain, so just watch; if it works, this will become every mashup artist's new best friend (via) #
The Lost Features of Google
— long list of forgotten or abandoned Google experiments; also, Philipp's roundup of their intranet #
Paul Ford's six-word reviews of all 763 SXSW MP3s
— a fun read, but surprisingly great for finding new music #
Joystiq role-plays a text adventure with Double Fine's Tim Schafer
— best interview ever, shows the creativity behind his games better than any Q&A would (via) #
Beginner's guide to Find the Lost Ring, Jane McGonigal's new ARG
— backed by the Olympics Committee and sponsored by McDonald's, this is a biggie #
Review of fictional games in Star Trek
— with many screen captures; see also: Data plays poker with Einstein, Newton, and the real Stephen Hawking (via) #
Hyena, scripting language for audio-only one-button games
— beyond accessibility issues, this genre's ideal for playing while driving or running #
Financial Post on Google's death blow to search arbitrage
— focuses on the case study of the implosion of Geosign (via) #
Landon Dyer's story of working on Donkey Kong at Atari in the 1980s
— don't miss the rest of his blog, too (via) #