Last month, an anonymous blogger popped up on WordPress and Twitter, aiming a giant flamethrower at Mac-friendly writers like John Gruber, Marco Arment and MG Siegler. As he unleashed wave after wave of spittle-flecked rage at “Apple puppets” and “Cupertino douchebags,” I was reminded again of John Gabriel’s theory about the effects of online anonymity.

Out of curiosity, I tried to see who the mystery blogger was.

He was using all the ordinary precautions for hiding his identity — hiding personal info in the domain record, using a different IP address from his other sites, and scrubbing any shared resources from his WordPress install.

Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute — a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.

I didn’t identify him publicly, but let him quietly know that he wasn’t as anonymous as he thought he was. He stopped blogging that evening, and deleted the blog a week later.

So, how did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics.

Reverse Lookups

Typically, Google will only reveal a user’s identity with a federal court order, as they did with a Blogger user who harassed a Vogue model in 2009.

But anonymous bloggers are at serious risk of outing themselves, simply by sharing their Google’s Analytics ID across the sites they own.

If you’re watching your pageviews, odds are you’re using Google to do it. Launched in 2005, Analytics is the most popular web statistics service online, in use by half of Alexa’s top million domains.

For the last few years, online SEO tools have published Analytics and AdSense IDs for the domains they crawl publicly, typically for competitive intelligence, such as ferreting out your competitor’s other websites.

But in the last year, several free services such as eWhois and Statsie have started offering reverse lookup of Analytics IDs. (Most also allow searching on the Google AdSense ID, though I wasn’t able to find an anonymous blogger sharing an AdSense ID across two sites.)

Finding anonymous bloggers from Analytics is less likely than other methods. It’s still more likely that someone would slip up and leave their personal info in their domain or share a server IP than to share a Google Analytics account. But it’s also more accurate. Hundreds or thousands of people can share an IP address on a single server and domain information can be faked, but a shared Google Analytics is solid evidence that both sites are run by the same person.

And unlike any other method, it can unmask people using hosted blogging services. Tumblr, Typepad and Blogger all have built-in support for Google Analytics, though reverse lookup services haven’t comprehensively indexed them. (Note that WordPress.com doesn’t support Analytics or custom Javascript, so their users aren’t affected.)

Just to be clear, this technique isn’t new. The first Google Analytics reverse lookup services started in 2009, so the technique’s been possible for at least two years. My concern is that it isn’t nearly well-known enough. It’s not mentioned in any guide to anonymous blogging I could find and several established bloggers, engineers, and entrepreneurs I spoke to were unaware of it.

Unmasking an anti-Mac blogger may not be life-changing, but if you’re an anonymous blogger writing about Chinese censorship or Mexican drug cartels, the consequences could be dire.

I decided to see how pervasive this problem is. Using a sample of 50 anonymous blogs pulled from discussion forums and Google news, only 14 were using Google Analytics, much less than the average. Half of those, about 15% of the total, were sharing an analytics ID with one or more other domains.

In about 30 minutes of searching, using only Google and eWhois, I was able to discover the identities of seven of the anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers, and in two cases, their employers. One blog about Anonymous’ hacking operations could easily be tracked to the founder’s consulting firm, while another tracking Mexican cartels was tied to a second domain with the name and address of a San Diego man.

I’ve contacted each to let them know their potential exposure.

Protecting Yourself

Some of the most important and vital voices online are anonymous, and it’s important to understand how you’re exposed. Forgetting any of these can lead to lawsuits, firings, or even death.

If you’re aware of the problem, it’s very easy to avoid getting discovered this way. Here are my recommendations for making sure you stay anonymous.

1. Don’t use Google Analytics or any other third-party embed system. If you have to, create a new account with an anonymous email. At the very least, create a separate Analytics account to track the new domain. (From the “My Analytics Accounts” dropdown, select “Create New Account.”)
2. Turn on domain privacy with your registrar. Better, use a hosted service to avoid domain payments entirely.
3. If you’re hosting your own blog, don’t share IP addresses with any of your existing websites. Ideally, use a completely different host; it’s easy to discover sites on neighboring IPs.
4. Watch your history. Sites like Whois Source track your history of domain and nameserver changes permanently, and Archive.org may archive old versions of your site. Being the first person to follow your anonymous Twitter account or promote the link could also be a giveaway.
5. Is your anonymity a life-or-death situation? Be aware that any service you use, including your own ISP, could be forced to reveal your IP address and account details under a court order. Use shared computers and an anonymous proxy or Tor when blogging to mask your IP address. Here’s a good guide.

Stay safe.

At the PAX East conference last year, a young man approached the microphone during the Q&A with Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, creators of the popular Penny Arcade webcomic.

Instead of asking a question, he bellowed, “Welcome to ACTION CASTLE! You are in a small cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out.”

An awkward pause, followed by some giggling from the audience. “Is it our turn to say something?” said Mike.

“I don’t understand ‘is it our turn to say something,'” said the young man.

Instantly, Mike and Jerry understood, along with everyone in the audience born before 1978.

“Go out!” said Jerry.

“You go out. You’re on the garden path. There is a rosebush here. There is a cottage here. Exits are north, south, and in.”

The game was afoot.

They were playing Action Castle, the first of a series of live-action games based on classic text adventures from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Game designer Jared Sorensen calls the series Parsely, named after the text parsers that convert player input into something a computer can understand.

In Parsely games, the computer is replaced entirely by a human armed with a simple map and loose outline of the adventure. No hardware and no code; just people talking to people.

It’s a clever solution to complex problems that have plagued game designers for decades. How do we understand the player’s intent? Can we make AI characters act human, instead of like idiot robots? Is it possible to handle every edge case the player thinks of without working on this game for the next 10 years?

Making computers think and react like us is hard. So instead of making software more human, some game developers are trying to make humans more like software.

It’s a similar approach used by Amazon for Mechanical Turk — their motto is “artificial artificial intelligence.” By layering an API over an anonymous human workforce, developers can solve problems that are best tackled by humans, but without the messiness of actual human communication.

Projects like Soylent add another layer of abstraction, invisibly embedding Mechanical Turk in Microsoft Word to crowdsource tedious tasks like proofreading and summarizing paragraphs of text. The effect feels weirdly magical, like technology that beamed in from the future.

In the gaming world, this substitution usually feels less like magic and more like robotic performance art. These performers are software-inspired actors — people pretending they’re videogames.

Nobody knows more about acting like a videogame than webcomic artist Andrew Hussie. Since 2006, he’s been running MS Paint Adventures, a series of increasingly insane reader-driven comics in the style of text-based graphical adventure games.

His first adventure, Jailbreak, started with a series of simple drawings posted on a discussion forum. With every new post, commenters would suggest new commands to further the gameplay, which he’d rapidly draw.

Hussie didn’t invent the genre — that honor likely goes to Ruby Quest and other denizens of 4chan’s gaming forums — but he certainly popularized it.

In the process, he became the world’s most prolific web cartoonist, sometimes updating up to 10 times a day.

To get a sense of the scale, Problem Sleuth, his second adventure, spanned over 1,600 pages in one year. Homestuck, his latest adventure, contains a staggering 4,100 pages so far, making it the longest webcomic of all time in a mere 2.5 years. And he still has a ways to go, with act five (out of seven) wrapping up just last week. (By comparison, the Guinness Book of World Records cites Mr. Boffo creator Joe Martin as the world’s most prolific cartoonist, with a mere 1,300 comics yearly.)

Over time, Hussie’s experimented with the amount of reader input. With Jailbreak, he drew the first command posted after every image, but as the adventures grew in popularity — it currently averages 600,000 unique visitors daily — this grew wildly impractical.

“When a story begins to get thousands of suggestions, paradoxically, it becomes much harder to call it truly ‘reader-driven,'” wrote Hussie on his website. “This is simply because there is so much available, the author can cherry-pick from what’s there to suit whatever he might have in mind, whether he’s deliberately planning ahead or not.”

With his newest adventure, Hussie leans on reader input less frequently and less directly, but involves the community in other ways. (For example, they just published their eighth soundtrack album of songs entirely created by fans. Don’t get me started on the cosplay.)

MS Paint Adventures goes where no videogame can possibly go, with insane storylines, shifting rules, and a ridiculous number of objects to interact with.

In any game, every object or action added to the game multiplies the number of possible interactions. Add a gun, and the programmer needs to deal with players shooting every single other object in the game. Add a lighter, and you’d better prepare for players burning everything in sight. Math geeks call this combinatorial explosion.

Homestuck’s bizarre alchemy system supports 280 trillion combinations. But Hussie doesn’t need to draw them all, only the ones readers actually try.

Reader-driven games give the illusion of limitless options, at the cost of scale. Even at 1,600 pages per year, player demand far outstrips the efforts of a single cartoonist.

Frustrated with emotional expression in computer games, game design veteran Chris Crawford set out to build Storytron, a storytelling engine intended to model the drama and emotional complexity with computer-generated actors. Eighteen years later, Crawford is still working on it and emotional AI seems just as far out of reach.

Jason Rohrer, creator of the critically acclaimed art-game Passage, tackled the problem of emotional depth in a different way — he replaced the computer AI with a human.

Last year, he released Sleep Is Death, a quirky storytelling environment that connects a single player to a single “controller” over the network. The player has 30 seconds to make any move they can think of, and the controller scrambles to manipulate the scene to respond using a set of drawing tools.

The world is completely open-ended. The only limitation is the imagination of the player and controller.

As you’d expect, the results vary wildly, often depending on the relationship between the participants, but it’s always surprising in a way that many traditional videogames aren’t. Try browsing through SIDTube, the community-contributed gallery of Sleep Is Death playthroughs, and you’ll find everything from a child’s eye view of Hiroshima to meditations on growing old with friends.

Every playthrough is completely unique, a singular experience improvised by two people. Is that a game or performance art?

Earlier this year, a German theater group named Machina eX began staging live performances based on “point-and-click” adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island and Machinarium.

On the surface, Machina eX resembles other immersive performances like Tamara or Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, with audience members following oblivious actors around elaborately-designed rooms.

In Machina eX’s performances, actors periodically get stuck in a loop, like a game paused. The audience must step in to solve the puzzle by manipulating objects in the room before the story can continue.

Each of these projects pull together elements of improvisational theater, performance art, and role-playing games.

But it’s the lens of videogames that separates them from Dungeons & Dragons, TheatreSports, and countless other collaborative games.

Each game borrows the conventions of a familiar game genre, preparing anyone who plays it with a set of expectations — the fundamental rules, terminology, constraints, and affordances are all well-known. Even better, storytellers can subvert any of those expectations at any time.

And unlike a game engine, human storytellers can go off-script. In the case of MS Paint Adventures, they can even switch game genres entirely, as Andrew Hussie’s done with Homestuck’s evolution from adventure game to Sims-style simulation to traditional RPG to whatever the hell this is.

Using live, real-time human ingenuity as the engine for videogames creates completely new, unexpected experiences unlike anything you can code.

In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagines a world where AI is extremely powerful, but still not convincing enough to convincingly simulate human behavior. Instead, AI characters are replaced by “ractors” — paid human actors who perform in virtual worlds for entertainment and education.

Even the all-powerful Wizard 0.2, the most powerful Turing machine in the land, is actually only used for data collection and processing — the real decisions are made by the man behind the curtain.

Chris Crawford and Peter Molyneux spent years trying to find Milo, but I think we’ll be waiting for a while yet.

In the meantime, I’m going to go pretend a game or two.

I spent last weekend revisiting the “supercut” meme, with a talk at WFMU’s Radiovision conference in New York and my new Wired column, which you can read below.

To cap it off, I spent a night revamping Supercut.org into a comprehensive, browsable database of supercut videos, with the help of Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS toolkit.

I’m very happy with how the site came out, so let me know if you have any suggestions and please submit any videos I missed. I also just added RSS and you can now follow @supercutorg for updates. Thanks!

For the last few years, I’ve tracked a particular flavor of remix culture that I called “supercuts” — fast-paced video montages that assemble dozens or hundreds of short clips on a common theme.

Many supercuts isolate a word or phrase from a film or TV series — think every “dude” in The Big Lebowski or every profanity from The Sopranos — while others point out tired cliches, like those ridiculous zoom-and-enhance scenes from crime shows.

Since 2008, I’ve added every supercut I could find to a sprawling blog post. With nearly 150 of these videos, and more being added weekly, it’s turned from a blog post into a minor obsession.

Earlier this year, I collaborated with NYC-based artist Michael Bell-Smith on Supercut.org, a 24-hour hack to make a supercut composed entirely out of other supercuts, along with a randomized supercut browser.

Today, I’m happy to announce that I’ve relaunched the site to let you browse the entire collection in different ways, subscribe to updates, or submit your own to the growing list. I’m also releasing the entire dataset publicly, which you can download at the end of this post.

To understand the rise of this new genre, let’s take a look back at how it began and how it’s evolved in the last three years.

The Proto-Cuts

While the web popularized the genre, the art world was experimenting with similar film cut-ups for years before YouTube was a gleam in Chad & Steve’s eyes.

Brooklyn-based critic Tom McCormack wrote the definitive history of the supercut, tracing its origins back to found-footage cinema, like Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE from 1958.

But it wasn’t until the 1990s that clear descendants of the genre emerged. Matthias Müller’s Home Stories (1990) reused scenes from 1950s- and 1960s-era Hollywood melodramas, filmed directly from the TV set, to show actresses in near-identical states of distress.

Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995) showed famous actors answering ringing telephones in a string of surreal, disjointed conversations throughout Hollywood history. Edited together, the cadence and rhythm of nonstop clips feels very reminiscent of modern supercuts.

Apple tried to license Marclay’s film for the launch of the iPhone in 2007, but he refused. Instead, they made their own, borrowing the idea wholesale. (Marclay decided not to sue.)

As far as I can tell, the earliest supercut native to the web was Chuck Jones’ Buffies from 2002, which isolated every mention of “Buffy” from the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While there were rare exceptions, supercuts really didn’t start proliferating online until around 2006. Why then? The likely cause: YouTube.

Before YouTube, it was incredibly difficult to both find and share video. After YouTube’s launch in 2005, searching through big chunks of film and TV’s recorded history became simple. Perhaps more importantly, sharing the video with others didn’t require server space, a huge amount of bandwidth, and a deep knowledge of video codecs. It just worked.

The result was that clips were easy to find and even easier to distribute. Combined with the rise of BitTorrent and the availability of affordable, easy-to-use video editing software like iMovie, it was the perfect environment for video remixing. The only missing ingredient is the time and passion to make it happen.

Supercut as Criticism

When I first started tracking the trend in 2008, almost every example was created by a superfan. Creating videos with hundreds of edits takes a staggering amount of time, and the only people willing to do it were those who were in love with the source material.

In the last three years, the form seems to have evolved from fan culture to criticism.

Rich Juzwiak may have started the trend by calling out reality TV contestants for their overused “I’m not here to make friends” trope. That directly led to supercuts criticizing lazy screenwriting, from “We’ve got company” to “It’s gonna blow!”

But recently, it’s being used for more serious criticism: calling out politicians and the news media. The Daily Show pioneered the reuse of archival news footage and quick edits to point out the absurdity of the news media and political figures, but online video remixers are taking it much further.

Video remixing group Wreck & Salvage took Sarah Palin’s speech about the Arizona shootings and removed everything but the sound of her breathing. The result, Sarah’s Breath, was a creepy example of supercut as political speech.

In March, artist Diran Lyons released one of the most epic supercuts ever — chronicling every time President Obama says “spending” in the complete video archive posted to the White House website. The result is six minutes long with over 600 edits.

The results are effective. Just as it was used to point out film cliches, a supercut sends a message about a public figure’s speech in a very short period of time. For that reason, I wouldn’t be surprised to see supercuts make their way into 2012 campaign ads.

Breaking It Down

I wanted to learn more about the structure of these videos, so I enlisted the help of the anonymous workforce at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to analyze the videos for me.

Using the database of 146 videos, I asked them to count the number of clips in each video, along with some qualitative questions about their contents. Their results were interesting.

When looking at the source of the videos, nearly half come from film with a little over one-third sourced from TV shows. The rest are a mix of real-life events, videogames, or a combination of multiple types, as you can see below.

According to the turker estimates, the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!

I asked the turkers whether each supercut was comprehensive, collecting every possible example, or if they were just a representative sample. For example, collecting every one of Kramer’s entrances from Seinfeld vs. a selection of explosions from action films. The results were split, with about 60% comprehensive. This could be attributed to film cliche supercuts, which don’t attempt to be thorough.

Finally, I was wondering whether each video’s creator was a fan or critic of the source material. The workers surveyed said that most supercuts were created by fans, about 73% of the time. This style of video remixing may be useful for criticism, but for now, it seems to mostly be a labor of love.

The Data Dump

Want to do your own analysis, or do some video remixing of your own?

You can view the full supercut database below or on Google Docs, or download the data as a comma-separated text file or Excel spreadsheet.

And, of course, let me know if you find any that I missed!

News! This week, I started writing Codeword, a new weekly column for Wired.com. I’m covering a mix of data journalism, Internet culture, indie gaming, or whatever else I find interesting — the same kind of thing I’ve written here for almost a decade.

As part of the arrangement, I retain joint copyright and can republish my columns here after 24 hours, which I’m very happy about.

My first column went up on Wired yesterday, a thinly-disguised rant on Google’s removal of the + operator from search, which I noticed last Wednesday.

Obviously, this change isn’t the end of the world, but it got me thinking about how the importance of alpha users changes as services grow in popularity. I hope you enjoy it.

Google+ is the fastest-growing social network in history, with 40 million users since its June launch. To help them focus, Google’s quietly shuttered a number of products, removing iGoogle and Google Reader’s social features and closing Google Labs, Buzz, Jaiku and Code Search in the last two weeks alone.

But in doing so, they also killed off one of its oldest and most useful tools, from its most popular product.

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.

Unlike their other recent closures, the removal of + was made without any public announcement. It could only be found by doing a search, which advised the user to double-quote the string from now on, making “searches” look like “awkward” “Zagat” “reviews.”

Google wouldn’t disclose exactly why they phased it out, though it seems obvious that they’re paving the way for Google+ profile searches. When Google+ launched, instead of adopting Twitter’s @reply syntax, they coined their own format for mentioning people — adding a plus to the beginning of a name — triggering the future conflict with the + operator.

The fate of the “+” symbol was clear: protect a 12-year-old convention loved by power users, or bring Google+ profile searching to the mainstream? It was doomed from the start.

Geeks from Reddit and Hacker News were quick to condemn the move.

To understand why they’re upset about a single character, let’s step back to Google’s launch in 1997.

Why It Matters

For the first 12 years of its life, from its launch until early 2009, Google worked like this: every term you searched for appeared on every web page in its results. Nerds call this an “and” search — a search for “cherry pie” becomes “cherry AND pie.”

By comparison, the popular convention at the time was to return pages with any of the search terms present — an “or” search. The results were noisy and unhelpful.

Google’s own help page, archived in February 1999, explained it:

Google only supports “and” queries. That is, it only returns pages that include all the query terms. The + operator, which enforces “and” behavior on some search engines, is unnecessary on Google.

At the time, this new feature was a godsend for savvy users. Because every term appeared in results, you could continue to refine your queries by simply adding new words to the search bar until you found what you were looking for.

As Google grew in popularity, this didn’t scale. Non-technical users don’t know what search terms to use or how to use search modifiers, and they shouldn’t have to.

Instead, Google needed to read minds to find what their mainstream audience was looking for, even if it meant ignoring what they actually wrote.

They started with the introduction of spelling suggestions, with “do you mean?” prompts introduced in 2003. By 2009, these were so successful that Google replaced the user’s search with the corrected words by default, though they always explicitly explained the change.

In January 2009, however, Google began experimenting with silently ignoring search terms completely.

For anyone deep-diving Google for the dark corners of the Internet, this change was hard to swallow. For the first time, searches were unreliable — an “or” search instead of an “and” search.

Journalists and software engineers, two classes of people who commonly search for obscure terms, objected to the change most.

“It’s incredibly annoying,” wrote Peter Rojas, gdgt founder and co-founder of Engadget and Gizmodo. “I hate how they don’t want you to do searches for exactly the words you’ve entered and nothing else.”

“I also use + constantly. It’s such a long-standing convention,” wrote Mat Honan, senior reporter for Gizmodo and former contributing editor to Wired.

Even Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, personally agreed. “My fingers are crossed for coming up with a better approach to this,” he said on Twitter. “As a power user, I want my escape hatch/safety valve for ‘Yup, I want exactly that weird word’ too.”

So, should we just “search” “like” “this” forever? Naturally, enterprising hackers are already routing around the perceived damage.

The Alternatives

As Google marginalizes its core base, it’s opened the door for smaller, more nimble startups, such as DuckDuckGo, a one-man project that’s quickly becoming the go-to search engine for discriminating nerds.

With a corpus of powerful search modifiers and a hard-line stance against tracking and personalization, it was created and maintained for the last four years by a single engineer, Gabriel Weinberg. This month, Weinberg announced DuckDuckGo accepted funding from Union Square Ventures and hired his first full-time employee.

For those unwilling to leave Google’s deep index, there are other solutions. One pseudonymous hacker made FindErr, a simple proxy that adds quotes to every search before shuttling the user off to Google.

My personal favorite is this simple userscript created by electrotype for Hacker News, which instantly adds quote marks to every submitted search. It works in Chrome natively and Firefox with the Greasemonkey plugin.

Too Hardcore

As a service grows in popularity, alpha users outlive their usefulness. The core users that helped build a service by word-of-mouth often find themselves dwarfed in numbers by people with very different needs.

Take the recently-announced changes to Google Reader, for instance. Reader is the most widely-used and deeply-loved feed reader ever made, steamrolling over several startups in the mid-2000s in the process. Any startup would be thrilled to have their devoted audience; within Google, Reader seems like a distraction.

Last week, the Reader team announced the removal of all of its social features, used by a relatively small but rabid fanbase.

Courtney Stanton, a Boston-based product manager, called Google Reader “the best social network created so far” in a passionate rant on her blog. “For me, this is the destruction of the only online space I truly give a shit about.”

There’s no easy solution. Should a company be expected to maintain features indefinitely because a tiny fraction of their base loves them? There are tangible costs to maintaining old code, and fringe features can clutter an interface, making user experience worse for those that don’t use them.

For those people, removing features is more than an inconvenience. It shatters an entire community. But, ultimately, their usage is a rounding error in the overall product activity.

With Google Search and the + operator, the consequences are far less dire. I asked Google what inspired the + removal, and how they balance the needs of power users with those of their mainstream base. “We’re sensitive to the needs of both newer users and ‘power users’ alike, and we’re always looking for ways to improve search for both groups,” a Google spokesperson said. “We make changes to search after rigorous testing shows that they improve the user experience.”

At Google’s scale, user testing can hide the behaviors and passions of entire subcommunities. The long-term implications of small changes like these are very hard to predict, especially with early adopters.

Who knows? If Google’s search engine dominance started with an “and,” it might just end with a “+”.

In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer.

Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006 paper written “about five years ago,” setting the year as 2011.

And this morning, at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S.

So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

(Thanks to Hugh Dubberly for the video, who helped create it for ex-CEO John Sculley’s EDUCOM 1987 keynote in six weeks on a $60,000 budget.)

I have a bunch of friends coming into town for ROFLCon Summit on Saturday, and rather than email them my suggestions of stuff to do in Portland, I thought I’d make it public.

This is my guide to PDX for people like me: people who geek out about good food, beer, comics, and computers. It’s for people who want to experience the best of Portland in a short period of time, with a heavy focus on new stuff: many of the places listed here have opened in the last year.

One thing you’ll notice is that most of the best stuff isn’t in the downtown area. To really experience Portland, you’ll need to cross the bridge to the east side. But don’t worry, PDX is tiny and nothing will take you more than a few minutes by bus, bike, or taxi.

If you want any other suggestions, or have suggestions of your own, let me know!

View Waxy.org’s Essential Guide to Portland 2011 in a larger map

Restaurants

Tasty n Sons / Tasty n Alder (NE/SW)

If you have to choose one place to eat breakfast in Portland, go here. Imagine tapas-style small plates, but focused only on breakfast staples. A new downtown location brings a slightly different menu throughout the day and evening, both are great but get busy. Brunch daily from 9am.

Meat Cheese Bread and Bunk Sandwiches (SE/SW)

These two restaurants are focused on making the best sandwiches in Portland. If it’s late, try Bunk Bar in inner SE, which brings Bunk’s sandwiches to a bar-like setting.

Salt & Straw (NE/NW)

Tyler Malek’s creative flavors and farm-to-cone ingredients make this the best ice cream around. Try the pear w/blue cheese, honey-strawberry-balsamic with black pepper, or special flavors made with local microbrewed beers. Now with a second location on NW 23rd.

Pine State Biscuits (NE)

Heart-stopping, delicious biscuit sandwiches. I don’t think there’s a bad thing on the menu, but the Reggie and Moneyball are particularly great. If you skip breakfast, their Alberta location stays open until 1am on Fridays and Saturdays. (Their SE Belmont location closed in early 2013, soon to reopen on Division.)

Screen Door (SE)

Portland meets the South, with farm-to-table comfort food. Surprisingly great for vegans, with a menu of local organic sides and salads that changes weekly. Best fried chicken I’ve ever had. Get there before brunch (9am) or dinner (5:30pm), or be prepared to wait.

Apizza Scholls (SE)

Slice ranked it as one of the top five pizzerias in America, and the #2 pizza on the West coast in their March Madness bracket. Just get there when they open, or be ready to saddle up with a couple beers and wait.

Pok Pok (SE)

2011 James Beard-winning chef Andy Ricker kicked off a culinary renaissance in Portland with his frontyard grill-turned-restaurant empire. Inspired by Thai street food, you won’t find chicken panang anywhere near Pok Pok’s eclectic, face-melting menu. While you wait, grab a drink at the Pok Pok-owned Whiskey Soda Lounge across the street. And try a drinking vinegar, you won’t regret it.

Grüner (SW)

Delicious Alpine cuisine, my favorite new restaurant in the downtown area. They also just opened Kask, their newly-opened casual bar adjacent to the restaurant.

Boke Bowl (SE)

My favorite ramen in Portland. Not traditional, but excellent, Boke Bowl started as a series of pop-up ramen events around town before establishing their own location. I highly recommend the steamed buns and the pork ramen w/fried chicken. Vegan and gluten-free ramen options are available and delicious.

Tanuki (SE)

The motto of this quirky Japanese/Korean-influenced izakaya is “No kids, no sushi,” but I’d also add “no groups larger than three, no vegetarians, no picky eaters, no prudes, no prima donnas.” Just get the omakase for $20/person, order some drinks, play some pinball, and enjoy. My favorite restaurant in Portland, and some of the best meals I’ve ever had. Just be willing to go with the flow, or you’ll get your ass banned for life.

Food Carts and Late-Night Dining

The food cart scene in Portland is ridiculously amazing, a food culture revolution with over 670 carts in 25 “pods” (groups of carts), some spanning full city blocks. They can be a little hit-or-miss, but there are some amazing gems to be found. New this year: carts serving beer.

Note: Voodoo Doughnuts is for tourists. Like Le Bistro Montage, Whiffies Fried Pies and Potato Champion, these late-night staples became famous with locals by being open when bars let out. They should only be consumed drunk. (And even then, you can do better.) Any other time, they’re just mediocre. Want great donuts? Try the new Blue Star Donuts, a 10-minute walk from Voodoo.

Pyro Pizza, Whiffies fried pie, and Potato Champion poutine, photo by Stacy Clinton

Nong’s Khao Man Gai (SW)

Bangkok-born Nong Poonsukwattana offers only one item on her menu — khao man gai, a uniquely Thai street dish made from poached chicken and rice and sauce. Arguably the best cart in Portland, located at the sprawling SW 9th and Alder cart pod, the largest in town spanning two blocks. Closed Sundays. (Too busy? Try the to-go shop in SE.)

Cartopia (SE, weekends until 3am)

This collection of carts on SE Hawthorne at 12th is more known for its late-night hours and raucous vibe than the quality of its food. But if you’re hungry after a late night of drinking, it’s definitely worth trying Pyro Pizza’s wood-fired oven-in-a-cart and the crepes from Perierra Creperie.

Mississippi Marketplace (SE)

Since the closure of SE Division’s D Street Noshery, this is probably the best-curated cart pod in the city. Highlights include Minizo (ramen), Miss Kate’s Southern Kitchen, The Big Egg (breakfast until 2pm), Koi Fusion (Korean-Mexican fusion), and Prickly Ash (Chinese flatbread sandwiches). On a nice day, grab your food and sit on Prost’s deck with some oversized Belgian beers.

Drinking

Portland’s a big beer town, home to more microbreweries than any city in the world, though the distillery and cocktail scene’s grown in recent years. Here are my picks for the absolute best.

Hair of the Dog Brewing, Photo by throgers

Hair of the Dog (SE)

This microbrewery is beer geek heaven, capturing five out of RateBeer’s top six Oregon beers. A perfect place to try some of Portland’s best beer, though their tasting room has quirky hours, open only from 2-8pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

APEX (SE)

50 great beers on tap and a massive patio. Grab some excellent Portland-style banh mi from Double Dragon across the street, and settle in. Cash only, but if you use their ATM and show the receipt, they’ll give you $1 off.

Bye & Bye/Sweet Hereafter (NE/SE)

The Bye & Bye on NE Alberta and the Sweet Hereafter, its newly-opened sister on SE Belmont, are distinctly Portland institutions — vegan bars with food that’s shockingly tasty even for die-hard omnivores like me (try the chili pie!). Great beer list, delicious and strong cocktails served in Mason jars, comfortable vibe, and plenty of seating make this a great meeting place.

Bailey’s Taproom (SW)

There isn’t much atmosphere here, but Bailey’s makes up for it with the most interesting taplist in Portland — 20 beers rotating daily, selected by mega-beer geeks.

Green Dragon (SE)

With 50 beers on tap and huge indoor/outdoor spaces, this place is great for meeting large groups of people. The food menu and taplist can be hit-or-miss, but there’s always a handful of great beers in the mix. If you’re feeling experimental, try Cascade Brewing across the street, one of the few breweries in the U.S. focused on sour ales.

Distillery Row (SE)

If you’re here on a weekend, take an hour to sample Portland’s craft distillery movement on foot, doing tastings from House Spirits and Eastside Distilling to New Deal and Vinn. If you can only choose one, New Deal’s the best deal, with eight excellent liquors for $5.

Townshend’s Tea House (NE)

There’s no shortage of phenomenal coffee in Portland. (Coava is my personal pick.) But I’m not a big coffee drinker so I tend to head to Townshend’s, the best tea in Portland. Their bubble tea is best in town, with a wide range of flavors and your pick of tapioca, aloe or fruit jellies.

Attractions

Ground Kontrol at night, photo by Incredible Ape

Ground Kontrol (NW)

World-class ’80s video arcade and pinball gallery that turns into a 21+ bar after 5pm. Absolutely essential geek visit.

Powell’s Technical Books (NW)

Everyone knows about Powell’s Books, but geeks may be more interested in Powell’s Technical, an essential resource for modern and vintage books on science, math, computers, and engineering. It recently relocated directly across the street from the flagship store.

Floating World Comics (NW)

Portland has some great comic shops, but for art/indie/experimental comic lovers, Floating World can’t be missed.

Counter Media (SW)

On the other side of Burnside from Powell’s, Counter Media is a wonderful bookstore carrying a carefully-curated collection of indie comics and graphic novels, with crazy fetish stuff in the back.

Billy Galaxy (SW)

Though often wildly overpriced, this is nostalgia heaven. Go buy that Burgertime lunchbox you’ve always wanted.

Want more?

Looking for late-night options? I did a big roundup of the city’s best, as of May 2013.

The recommendations from Eater’s Top Restaurants and Heatmaps are consistently solid.

Have a great time!

People deal with tragedy in different ways using the tools they have at their disposal. Painters paint, writers write, and gamers mod.

Lately, I’ve been interested in seeing how game modders and mappers have recreated the World Trade Center, the events of September 11, and the WTC Memorial in various game engines. Some of these are profane and offensive, quite likely made by teens that have no first-hand memory of the disaster, but most are intended as tributes. Here’s the best of what I was able to find.

Continue reading “Gamer Recreations of the World Trade Center” →

It’s easy to write off Heello as a Twitter clone. Created by the founder of Twitpic, the shameless knockoff looks and behaves like a stripped-down version of Twitter, down to the tweets pings, followers listeners, and retweets echos.

But it’s shaping up to be more than that. Creative fakesters are using the blank slate to turn Heello into the parallel-universe version of Twitter.

A world in which Heello was cofounded by Ev Williams (@ev), who acts as CEO and gives away free iPads to Heello users.

Where CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) reports all the news in ALL CAPS, including breaking news reports like “JUSTIN BIEBER” and “I JUST UNLOCKED THE ‘I’M ON A BOAT’ BADGE ON FOURSQUARE.”

A world where Mark Zuckerberg (@MarkZuckerberg) is a profane, sexist womanizer.

And where major web services (past and present) flirt and snark at each other, like @Tumblr, @Color, @4chan, and @Pownce.

Of course, Heello wouldn’t be complete without its own Social Media Experts. “Please Check Out My Blogpost ‘How To Drive Qualified Traffic To Your Blog Via Heello.'”

Heello is like a blank-slate Twitter with no moderation or verification. I doubt the Heello team wanted or expected this behavior, but they inadvertently created a perfect playground for parody and meta-commentary, like Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica‘s parallel world versions of Wikipedia.

It should be fun to see how they respond.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead writer of ReadWriteWeb, comments, “They told me they were going to remove any of these that weren’t clearly satires. That’s a real shame and shows a lack of sense of humor.” The first casualty was @ev, which was deleted shortly after this post was published.

Marco Arment just linked to this great article about how everyone plays Monopoly wrong. If you read the actual rules, it’s a completely different game than the one you likely grew up with — one that moves much, much quicker.

Five things I never knew about Monopoly’s official rules:

1. If a player decides not to buy a property, it immediately goes up for auction by the bank and is sold to the highest bidder. This blew my mind.

2. Houses must be built, and sold, evenly across a color-group. For example, you can’t build three houses on Park Place without having two houses on Boardwalk first.

3. It’s the property owner’s responsibility to ask for rent. If you forget to ask for rent before the end of the next player’s turn, you’re out of luck.

4. Rent is doubled on properties without houses in a monopoly.

5. Income tax is calculated from your total net worth, including all properties and buildings, not just your cash. And you have to decide whether to pay 10% or $200 before you add it up.

While these official rules gradually disappeared from common play, other unofficial “house rules” came to take their place. We always put funds collected from Chance/Community Chest cards into a “kitty” that was given to whoever landed on Free Parking. Many others gave $400 when landed on “Go,” or didn’t allow rent to be collected while in jail.

Many of us learned Monopoly like we learned the rules of dodgeball or rock-scissors-paper — spread by word-of-mouth from family and friends.

It’s interesting to see a commercial game see the same sort of cultural variation as other children’s folk games.

But maybe that’s appropriate for a game that was itself derived from another board game. Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly in 1933 from scratch. It was heavily based on The Landlord’s Game, an innovative board game patented in 1904 by Lizzie Magie, to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.”

The Landlord’s Game and its variations like “Auction Monopoly” and “The Fascinating Game of Finance” spread by word of mouth throughout the early-20th century with evolving rules and hand-drawn boards, popular among the Quakers and used as a teaching aid for university students.

In 1933, Charles Darrow played a homemade version of The Landlord’s Game printed on oil cloth, saw the market potential, and tried to patent the new “Monopoly” as his own. After finding great success selling handmade versions, he sold the rights to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers bought Magie’s patent for $500 to have an undisputed claim to the board game, but was threatened by other popular competitors and homemade variations. Through a process of litigation, acquisition, and quiet settlements during the late-1930s, Parker Brothers wiped all the other derivative versions of The Landlord’s Game off the map.

By the 1970s, Parker Brothers’ revisionist history was canon — the official Monopoly rules and a 1974 book on the history of the game stated that the game was created solely by Charles Darrow.

So, when someone says you’re playing Monopoly wrong, tell them you’re playing your own version… just like Darrow did.

Because everything is a remix.

I’m a regular at Meat Cheese Bread, my favorite sandwich shop in Portland. Even though I’m sick and feel like hell, I ventured out to pick up a to-go order today, because their egg salad sandwich makes everything better. John, the owner, was working the counter.

Me: Can I make a suggestion?

John: Sure.

Me: You guys should make a sweet tea.

John (emphatically): No.

Me: Why?

John: Because it’s disgusting. I make all the iced tea myself. Simple syrup’s over there. If you want to ruin it, go ahead.

Some people would get turned off by this, others would be downright pissed. But this is exactly what I like in a business, and it’s why I eat there at least once a week.

John’s singular, uncompromising vision is why the food is so damned great. He’s not trying to make a restaurant that makes everyone happy; he built a place that he’d want to eat at, and if you don’t like it, piss off.

The same goes for the web. I’d rather use a service that has a strong, single-minded vision, even if some of the decisions aren’t exactly how I’d want them, than a washed-out, milquetoast service created by committee, designed to meet market demand, that tries to make everybody happy.

Another way to put it: if someone out there doesn’t hate your product, it’s probably not worth using.