Video: Trailer for Valve's Portal game — holy cow; like the gravity gun, it's amazing how one weapon can revolutionize gameplay #

Video: The Big Lebowski – F_cking Short Version — incredible editing work (via) #

AOL's customer retention manual revealed — "You gotta love it!" ...or else (via) #

Boing Boing Analysis — don't miss the acronym use by author; related: my BB stats (via) #

Wal-Mart Tries to be Myspace, Seriously — sorry, not nearly ugly enough #

Comcast censors critical Nightline story — stupidity by obscurity #

Video: The Hotwired Archive from 1998 — internally produced video of Hotwired's design and redesign; a must see #

Happy iCal Day! — celebrating the default day on the static iCal icon (via) #

Five TV pilots "leaked" to torrent sites from new fall season — is it piracy or pseudo grassroots promotion? #

Video: Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders — so very awesome (via) #

Video: Bike Thief — NYC bicyclist steals own bike four times on video in broad daylight, and nobody flinches (via) #

CouchSurfing, back from the dead — an incredible story of community participation #

Wired cover story on Myspace — the article certainly makes it sound like they don't have a clue what to do with it #

Video: Stanford Prison Experiment — "What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" #

Video: Mac OS 7.5 running on Sony PSP — also: System 6 running on the Nintendo DS (via) #

QSL Card Museum — ham radios exchanged QSL Cards to confirm two-way contacts; I love the antique and interesting cards #

Gamespot interviews Klosterman about his Esquire article on game journalism — if you missed it, The Lester Bangs of Video Games (via) #

Ugly Myspace Contest Winners — democracy isn't pretty #

Janek Simon's Carpet Invaders — playable art inspired by Space Invaders and woven Oriental rugs (via) #

Last.fm redesigns — the design is nice, but they're forcing bidirectional friend connections; the new Last.fm client handles all the plugins automagically #

Google Visualizations — chess boards, keyboards and Go #

Video: Zefrank on Myspace and the democratization of design — wonderfully coherent, prescient, and distinctly Ze (via) #

A Slice of the Blogosphere — pb breaks down blog tool usage for ORblogs #

Lycos to shutter Webmonkey — combined with the Hotwired closure, this is too much to take; I hate you, Lycos #

Caleb's How-To Hottub an Email List — harsh, but there's a certain beauty and elegance to this #

Apple Switch ad's Ellen Feiss starring in French film — star de la campagne publicitaire Switch de Macintosh #

Veen discovers Hotwired is now a junk search portal — when was it sold? this is a sad end to one of the first great websites #

Dandelife, social biography network — create your own personal timeline of stories, photos and video, like this one (via) #

Video: Super Galdelic Hour for the PS2 — absolutely insane Japanese game; gameplay footage starts at the 2:05 mark #

Video: 8 1/2 Mile — Fellini meets Eminem; Youtube Mirror #

What's the best time and day to submit Digg stories? — short answer is Friday and Saturday, but the rest of the stats are just as interesting #

Video: Unflinching Triumph — documentary of the National Staredown Competition #

Hot Captcha, a Hot or Not mashup — pick the three hot people to prove you're human #

Weather Bonk — winner of this year's Mashup Pit best mashup contest #

Bakuten Domino — more insane domino object stacking from the Japanese show devoted to it #

Quantum Link Reloaded — unbelievable; a Commodore online service from the '80s, reverse engineered and put online for use with C64 emulators! (via) #

Video: House of Dominoes — random household objects and media stacked into one long line of dominoes #

Jeff Veen's history of the Hotwired homepage — maybe he's getting nostalgic because Wired magazine and Wired News are in love again #

SMS shorthand using server response codes — except that "200" is longer than "ok" #

Population One — I feel insignificant; a good companion piece to this #

Multiplayer Asteroids — even without the asteroids, it's addictive (via) #

Solve sudoku without thinking — killjoy (via) #

Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival — Anil collects every Zidane remixed animated GIF into a single video; funny! #

Daniel Raeburn's harrowing story of the stillbirth of his first daughter, Irene — after reading that, don't miss the happier ending; thanks for making me cry at work, Jason (via) #

Hitwise claims Myspace now #1 most popular website — though Stewart's case study for Flickr shows that Hitwise has some accuracy issues #

Syd Barrett, dead at 60 — shine on, you crazy diamond (via) #

Bradlands SXSW 2000 recollections — stumbled on this from the comments on Matt Haughey's classic photo #

Video: Weird Al interviews Eminem — I missed this ballsy cut-up interview from 2003, y'know what I'm saying? #

Pixhell — Waferbaby's oddball animated series, now CC licensed #

Cody's Books in Berkeley closes today after 50 years — so sad, but almost inevitable; will Amoeba and Rasputin's be around by the end of this decade? #