Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

Tina Fey's pinball past (she provided voices for the 1997 game Medieval Madness)

AOL to shut down Ficlets fiction-writing community (the small but dedicated community's shattered by the news) [via]

Music and the Market, academic paper compares average BPM to stock prices (he finds that the beat variance seems to predict future market volatility) [via]

Rob Reger responds to the Emily Strange controversy (this comment sums it up nicely)

Surfing for Seniors, instructional VHS video from 1997 (only the first 3.5 minutes, sadly) [via]

Prop 8: The Musical (starring John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black as Jesus)

Browse uploaded photos from Amazon's iPhone app on Mechanical Turk (150 current submissions, including pens, old sneakers, plants, and the inevitable naked guy reflected in a Macbook)

Amazon's Turk-powered app for the iPhone to identify product photos (a truly harebrained idea, since SnapTell does the same thing instantly using image similarity for all CDs, DVDs, books, and games)

Sony deleting user-created LittleBigPlanet levels without warning (the gaming world is about to revisit all the lessons Web 2.0 already learned, from Friendster to Facebook)

YouTube's new video thumbnails to be determined algorithmically (they'll be representative of video content instead of cleavage shots designed to drive click traffic)

David Recordon on building OpenID in the browser (the best way to drive mass adoption, since it's such a difficult concept to understand otherwise)

Image and video manipulation in Mathematica 7 (also, it supports built-in parallel processing on EC2)

Pirates of the Amazon, Firefox extension adds Pirate Bay links to Amazon listings (similar Greasemonkey scripts exist for Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB) [via]

Songbird hits 1.0 (very exciting release, though iPod touch/iPhone aren't supported just yet)

Whole Foods subpoenas New Seasons' financial and marketing records (the local Portland chain isn't even involved in the dispute)

Wired on how Dan Kaminsky and a set of DNS all-stars fixed a serious exploit (a dramatic retelling of "the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet")

The Guardian publishes six unreleased 999 emergency calls (insanely dramatic life-and-death scenarios, including a solo childbirth and near-death choking) [via]

Jason Nelson's "I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies." (an exploratory Flash game/poem with levels based on sites like Metafilter and Fark)

Design lessons from World of Goo ("show, don't tell")

Magic/Replace (spreadsheet manipulation built on the underrated DabbleDB; don't miss the demo) [via]

How Jeremy Keith's Flickr photo ended up in Iron Man (it was CC-licensed, but attribution in the credits costs money, so he signed a release instead)

Six Apart acquires Pownce, which will shut down in two weeks (unlike most acquirees, they thoughtfully built an exporter tool)

Lolcats postcard from 1905 (here's a completed auction for the same postcard)

Kottke on the "broken windows theory" applied to online communities (if graffiti can cause more crime, can the ugliness of a message board create more trolling?)

The Simpsons takes on Apple (a narwhal reference, too; full episode's on Hulu)

Give Me Something to Read (meatier articles bookmarked by Instapaper users; related: the toread tag on delicious)

Change.gov switches from copyright to Creative Commons (small decisions like these, made quickly in a time of transition, are inspiring)

Bio-Bak, the portfolio site of Dutch Flash artist Coen Grift (I've never seen anything remotely like it)

Emily the Strange character inspired by Nate the Great's Rosamond? (noticed before, but the phrasing on the sticker and book are virtually identical)

NYT on Mark Allen and Machine Project at LACMA (one of the most interesting people I know gets a writeup of his most recent project)

MIDI Hero, Guitar Hero hack with a drum kit (the author later wired up his Roland V-Drums kit) [via]

Danah Boyd on Lori Drew's conviction in the Megan Meier suicide case (the lawsuit centered on technology, when the fact it happened online was incidental) [via]

Rogue ported to iPhone (get your 1980s dungeon crawling on)

New York Times' visualization of one year of NYC parking tickets (they had to file a FOIA request to get the data for the 9.9 million tickets)

Helvetireader, minimal Google Reader redesign with Greasemonkey (very sexy, though maybe a bit too minimal)

The L.A. Times data desk (all their research projects collected in one place, though some raw data dumps would be nice too) [via]

Rick Astley rickrolls the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (quite possibly the widest instant exposure of an Internet meme ever)

Barack Obama's weekly address on YouTube (stylistic notes: his team's using the new widescreen format and comments are enabled)

Ed Piskor's Wizzywig #2 released (the perfect blend of autobiographical comics and geek subject matter; I bought both books, highly recommended)

The Time Machine, an interactive YouTube adventure (see also: Tube Adventures and its sequel, Samsung's Follow Your Instinct, and A Car's Life) [via]

Zoetrope, search and visualize the historical web (in-development tool creates a window into past versions of a page) [via]

Vinylscrobbler (packet sniffing Shazam to update Last.fm from analog sources) [via]

William Shatner responds to the new Star Trek film (funny, I thought it'd be more like this)

Fimoculous' List of Lists 2008 (as always, check back often; last year's had over 600 lists)

StateStats, find correlations between search queries and U.S. state characteristics (Myspace users are violent illiterates in warm climates, Gmail users are skinny and rich)

Fleet Foxes on La Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais)

Processing hits 1.0 (seven years in the making, the artsy programming language leaves beta) [via]

Bad Hacks, a repository of vulgar ROM hacks (including Super Nazi Bros., Naked Metroid, and Zelda as erotic fanfic) [via]

Kottke on Shaq's first week on Twitter (I like that Shaq is following Not Shaq)

John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://" (I'm a little surprised they didn't merge the search and location bar into a single field)

Twitter acquires Rael Dornfest (along with Values of n, which will be shutting down Sandy and Stikkit next month)

Autographed Zork first edition manual sells for $2,300 on eBay (from Brian Moriarty's personal collection, less than 100 copies were sold for the PDP-11) [via]

Disney World's Haunted Mansion map in Counter-Strike Source (from the creator of the Van Gogh Starry Night map)

Doom ported to Flash 10 (built with Alchemy, which could bring a flood of PC emulators and ports) [via]

Feedback Army, cheap and quick usability testing built on Mechanical Turk (get 10 random people's feedback for $7)

Esquire profile of Passage creator Jason Rohrer (touches on games-as-art and the lack of popular auteurs in gaming)

YouTube Live's archived highlights (some online were overthinking this, but I thought it was good fun; personal highlights: Julia Nunes, Bo Burnham, Mythbusters, Charlie the Unicorn, and DJ Mike Relm remixing memes)

Freddie Wong responds to the Bike Hero controversy ("What's up, viral marketing douchebags? I'm gonna show you punks how a real man plays Bike Hero on Expert!")

Google's collaborative pixel art in Google Spreadsheets (they're even sharing the template and tips on making your own)

Perspectives, video interviews with all dialogue removed (um, uh, hmm)

Robbie Cooper's Immersion, heads-on video of kids playing video games (from the guy who made Alter Ego, the book of people with their online avatars)

Clive Thompson's long NYT feature on the the Netflix Prize and singular value decomposition (the same technique we used on Memeorandum Colors) [via]

Boston College to stop offering email accounts to new students (students come in with fully-formed online identities, so they'll just redirect to their existing email addresses) [via]

Pixel typography from the 16th century (from an Italian embroidery guide) [via]

19-year-old commits suicide live on Justin.tv (it should surprise nobody that he was egged on by 4chan, who always adore an hero)

"Bike Hero" video was Activision's viral marketing, as suspected (I still think it's great, but Derek disagrees; then again, I always assumed it was faked to some degree)

Kottke on Brian Battjer's I Keep A Diary (no joke, I just spent the last hour reading his photojournals of South Korea, Japan, Dubai, and NYC)

Star Trek theme played on a homebrew Wii theremin (here's how it works) [via]

Chicken Head Tracking (strangely hypnotic, other birds have the same ability) [via]

Torben Sko's experiments with camera-tracked head gestures in first-person games (he uses a simple webcam, FaceAPI, and the Half-Life 2 engine)

Cover Browser's collection of every TV Guide magazine cover (trivia: Macrovision sold TV Guide to an equity firm for $1.00 last month, less than the cost of a single issue)

Dr. Awesome game for iPhone lets you perform surgery on your friends (perfectly nailed as Qix meets Trauma Center, it imports names from your address book)

Metafilter on John Ziegler vs. Nate Silver (and David Foster Wallace) (great writeup of a perfectly terrible person's recent misadventures)

Google to shut down Lively next month (the most baffling of all Google products, this one is closing after less than six months)

Jack Handey's The Plan (it's foolproof) [via]

Snaptell, product lookup for the iPhone (like Shazam for product packaging, price comparison's coming soon)

Interactive augmented reality demo in Flash with Papervision (very quick with my iSight, I get much higher FPS than in the video) [via]

Very lucky kid on The Price is Right (still, nothing beats Daniel)

Space Invaders anime video produced for 30th anniversary ("All this time we've been... and all they wanted to do was... We're horrible people!") [via]

Derek Powazek revives Kvetch! a decade later (appropriately backed by Twitter, a primary outlet for kvetching)

Bike Hero, biking a Guitar Hero level in the real world (most likely a commercial viral, and maybe even fake, but does it matter? beyond awesome)

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy (mostly posting this just to beat Rex to it)

The A.V. Club's 27 popular websites that became books (though they missed Belle de Jour, The Washingtonienne, Fucked Company, Fark, and ZUG)

Speed Guitar goes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (every hour, on the hour, for one solid minute of metal complete with gothic arch and smoke machine)

MGMT's "Kids" on the iPhone Ocarina ("the iPhone Ocarina officially replaces the recorder as the nerdiest instrument I can play")

Mena Trott responds to Valleywag article about their Disneyland vacation (my favorite was Space Mountain Snob)

LIFE Magazine photo archive hosted by Google (millions of high-res photos, most never published)

Amazon launches CloudFront, their pay-as-you-go CDN (very complementary with S3)

John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, and the Long Winters perform "Tonight You Belong to Me" ("Thank you, normal-sized man.")

Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo's CEO post (it never really fit him well, though I'll miss his e.e. cummings memos)

Woman asks Apple community about an unusual iPhone glitch (no, raunchy photos don't accidentally attach themselves to outbound email)

Greasemonkey script to pull WikiDashboard visualization into Wikipedia (I made a LazyWeb plea for this last week, and Paul Irish came through)

Lee Byron's Fireflies, anaglyph 3D game for Mac (part of Kokoromi's Gamma 3D showcase of anaglyph games)

Flickr Boundaries, tool to explore Flickr's shapefiles (read Tom Taylor's entry for more information)

Cooking Mama, the Unauthorized PETA Edition (a strangely obscure target for their attention, with a petition to write to the game's publisher) [via]

Boing Boing launches gaming blog, Offworld (good writing in a nice design from Brandon Boyer, former news editor of Gamasutra)

"Violet" wins the Interactive Fiction Comp 2008 (play it online; glancing at the charts, it looks like Buried in Shoes was the most divisive)

Trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel (looks surprisingly good, but I'm a sucker for origin stories; I even liked Enterprise)

What would Depression 2009 look like? (Tim sums up the thought-provoking Boston Globe article)

The Pirate Bay hits 25 million simultaneous peers (that's not unique people, but concurrent connections; Napster peaked at 26M users)

Peter Hirschberg releases Adventure as a free iPhone app (related: Chasing Ghosts will finally be released on ~~BitTorrent~~ Showtime in December) [via]

The Big Picture on the California wildfires (also: first-person coverage on Twitter and YouTube, like this freeway on fire and aftermath)

Tim-Tams available at Target until March, first time available in the U.S. (best chocolate cookies ever, the Tim Tam Slam is a chocolaty revelation) [via]

JS-909, a Javascript drum machine without Flash (through a hack, it even works in IE 6)

Esquire's hosting Between, the new two-player networked game by Jason Rohrer (from the creator of Passage)

"What's that buzzing noise from my BBQ?" (he thought he was killing a few bees, but ends up annihilating an entire colony) [via]

Kottke explains how to embed high-quality YouTube videos (I knew how to save, link, and change the default, but the embedding hack was new to me)

Web 2.0 Origami (lazyweb, please build a converter that creates folding patterns from an uploaded image)

Pixar's Burn-E short on YouTube (here's an interview with the director)

Valleywag folded into Gawker, all but Owen Thomas laid off (I won't miss it; they hurt a lot of good people and interesting projects in the quest for pageviews) [via]

YouTube engineer adds "Actually Good" tab when viewing Onion video (here's a screenshot in case it goes away)

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow wears pajamas on-air in solidarity with bloggers (maybe Palin was too busy reading every newspaper to actually read a blog)

Jimi Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell, dead at 61 (I wish more newspapers would link to YouTube videos)

Brandon Hardesty reenacts Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross monologue (I first linked to Brandon way back in March 2006)

Videos of CNN's election-night countdown globally (the collective response was spontaneous and virtually identical around the world) [via]

Washington Post blogger shuts down company sending out two-thirds of all spam (in his investigative report, he turned over four months of data-gathering to the colo, who sut them down)

Michael Lewis revisits "Liar's Poker" and writes about the current Wall Street meltdown (a gripping look at who foresaw and acted on the mess) [via]

Japanese isometric PSA about the future of food (lovely design, this could easily be adapted to the US) [via]

QWOP Olympics, ragdoll physics running game (hard to believe, but with practice, it's possible to sprint) [via]

Sluggo ponders the fundamental question of existence

LittleBigPlanet's TV commercials, built entirely with the in-game tools (the first one seems inspired by You Suck at Photoshop, no?) [via]

What We Own and Where It's Made (Dorothy's slowly been categorizing all her possessions)

Slate on aXXo, the most popular movie distributor on BitTorrent (this comment explains the drama between aXXo and other competing groups)

The Yes Men pranksters distribute fake New York Times issue across NYC (100,000 copies with the headline "Iraq War Ends" post-dated July 4, 2009)

where the things in Cloverfield happen ("this is where things in Cloverfield happen okay") [via]

Google.org tracking flu spread using search queries (brilliant use of search data; get a flu shot before it gets to your state!) [via]

Google Groups expands to search web-based message boards (if "Sort by Date" appears to be missing, check your ad blocker)

"Dark Days" director explains how the Pentagon cancelled his followup film on the Iraq war (after two years of filming, he sold all his equipment on the same forum)

Dark Days, 2000 documentary about NYC homeless living in abandoned train tunnels (classic documentary with music by DJ Shadow)

Interview with the NASA writer behind the MarsPhoenix Twitter account (written in the first person, more than 38,000 people have followed its adventure) [via]

Touching story of Eugene Allen, a butler who served 34 years in the White House (a must-read with a sad ending) [via]

Super Mario for Busy People (You Have to Find the Princess) [via]

Google Reader adds automatic feed translation (I'm testing it out by throwing some Japanese blogs into a special non-English group)

Worst. Bug. Ever. (the Android phone executes all typed text, so don't text "rm -rf /" to a friend)

CaptionX, multiplayer photo captioning game (built on App Engine with CC-licensed photos on Flickr, with clever YouTube interstitials) [via]

WikiDashboard, Wikipedia mirror with real-time infoviz of edit history (for example, see Barack Obama or Star Wars Kid; I need a Greasemonkey script to pull this into Wikipedia proper)

How many guys in Spider-Man suits can fit inside Jamba Juice? (one customer in the store recorded the madness) [via]

Tetris recreated in LittleBigPlanet (a jetpack-powered sackboy readjusts all the falling pieces) [via]

The irRegularGame of Life (includes a history of Conway's Game of Life) [via]

Sugar Cubes (lovely Flash animation by the creator of Cursor*10) [via]

MS Paint Adventures (interactive games where the artist acts as parser, drawing the results of the community's actions) [via]

Girl Talk's "I'm A PC" testimonial for Microsoft (no mention of Apple, but still a refreshing approach) [via]

Photoshop in Real-Life (this behind-the-scenes photo gives you a sense of the scale) [via]

Get Your War On: New World Order (the earnestness of this comment made me giggle) [via]

2009 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest (science grad students do interpretive dances on their obscure thesis topics)

Stairway to Heaven played on the iPhone Ocarina app (also, the Zelda theme; surprisingly deep for a $1 app)

Spit DNA evidence leads to arrest in Craigslist/inner-tube robbery (the story keeps getting stranger)

Investigative report into the "Single?" lawn signs across America (completely OCD net research, tracing them all back to a huge Texas dating franchise) [via]

Ze Frank's From 52 to 48 With Love (help repair the damage from the election cycle with a small gesture)

Howard Stern rants on blogs, Facebook, and Myspace (Gary V. responds to the King of All Dead Media)

Factory Balls 2 (I promise to stop posting about politics soon, really) [via]

Salon rounds up the worst election predictions from political pundits (also, Nate Silver's electoral predictions were dead-on across the board; go math!)

Colbert and Stewart talk about Twitter (some people use Twitter like Colbert's SimulTube)

Jim Ray's collection of election night homepages (automated screengrabs every half-hour from 3pm-10pm Tuesday night) [via]

Channel 101's Sony commercials (unfortunately, Sony didn't bite; more product ads here) [via]

United Features' website goes free, including every Peanuts strip (and, finally, full comics in RSS feeds)

Mark Newman's 2008 election maps and cartograms (weighted by population, fun to compare to the 2004 election)

South Park's "About Last Night..." (absurd reimagining of the election as an Ocean's Eleven-like diamond heist)

Tim Schafer releases Grim Fandango's 70-page design document (tons of unreleased information; character sketches, layout, cutscenes, and every puzzle)

Newsweek's exclusive Election 2008 report, embargoed behind-the-scenes story from both campaigns (they were given major access on the condition nothing would be released until today)

Giraffes! (rare cameo by Akiva from the Lonely Island)

The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress (this feels the 2008 counterpart to their unbelievably prescient 2001 article)

Sean Tevis, the xkcd candidate for Kansas state rep, discusses last night's loss (his opponent used deceptive robocalls and direct mail borrowing photos from Sean's Facebook and Flickr accounts)

Kottke's collection of election maps (interesting to see how each designer tackled the same problem so differently)

xkcd on the end of the election (don't miss the alt-text)

Video of CNN's first hologram interview (a bit glitchy, definitely different from Cisco's Telepresence)

99 Bricks, like Tetris meets World of Goo (build the tallest stable structure with 99 Tetris bricks) [via]

Voting machines elect voting machine as President (DRE 700 IS LEADER) [via]

CNN to interview 3D hologram guests on tonight's election coverage (guests will be interviewed from remote locations, Star Wars-style)

ABC News streaming raw video feed on Ustream.tv (including reporters applying their own makeup and chatting with cameramen)

Philipp rounds up every YouTube video I've ever linked to (about 20% are no longer online, proving linkrot is alive and well in YouTube)

How Nate Phelps escaped the Most Hated Family in America (inside story of living with the Phelps family, with comments from Shirley Phelps-Roper herself)

Nate Silver's guide to what to watch for on election night (a handy guide to tonight's events)

NYT's Choosing A President: A Look Back (concise video sums it up)

LittleBigPlanet as a Shmup (or: why 2009 will be the year of social, user-generated gaming) [via]

Yahoo! Live to go offline (disappointing)

Rob Manuel's I-Spot Internet Humour (illustrated Internet memes in the style of vintage I-Spy children's books)

Spot.us, crowdfunded journalism (pay journalists to dig deeper into stories; their blog's doing original reporting funded with the site)

Ras Trent, the complete lyrics (glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to find this Samberg sketch funny)

10 Years of Textfiles (Jason Scott reflects on the anniversary of one of the digital age's most important and vital archives)

The Turker's Gospel (the Bible rewritten by Mechanical Turk workers)

MTV censors names of P2P apps from Weird Al video (could be old news, and only recently noticed with the launch of MTV Music)

Lorna Mills' class on outsider net.art from 4chan to Nasty Nets (a mess of interesting links, just start from the first class and work forward)

YouTube Meta-Art (these are all great, but I think I like Moonwalk best) [via]

ReConstitution 2008, live infoviz remix of the 2008 presidential debates (three MIT grads used custom C++ code to remix the closed captioning in real-time)

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)

Tasha's Impossible Ransom of Rage (silly little Flash game from Double Fine, creators of Psychonauts) [via]

NYT on the Hitler "Downfall" remixes (I love when the Gray Lady comments on Internet memes) [via]

Ill Doctrine's "A Poem for the Youth Voter" (turning "Yes, We Can" into "Yes, We Did")

Wikipedia DVD available for free by BitTorrent (2.4GB partial snapshot reviewed for offline use by schools) [via]

Nerdy Robot Playing A Vectrex (my $2 was well-spent; be warned he's a bit backed up)

Geography of newspaper endorsements for the 2008 election (beautiful work from the Infochimps guys) [via]

Visualizing bias on political blogs linking to the Ashley Todd hoax story (left-leaning blogs only found it newsworthy when discredited)

rlax, Flash game to remove the top piece (Friday procrastination fodder)

Remote Impact, multiplayer distance shadowboxing (the sensors recognize and give extra points for "intense brute force") [via]

Wassup 2008 (reuniting the friends that created the short film that launched a nationwide catchphrase)

Little Boots' Tenori-On cover of Hot Chip's "Ready for the Floor" (the rest of her Tenori-On covers are great, too) [via]

Turn Your Name Into A Face (generates a unique avatar from your name; Philipp Lennsen's entry in the 24-Hour Application Challenge)

Jason Scott on Blu-Ray's mandatory DRM for indie filmmakers (exorbitant AACS fees make small runs impossible, doubling budgets for broken copy protection)

Garamond Powerline (gorgeous type experiment made from photos of electrical cable lines)

Trailer for "RiP: A Remix Manifesto," documentary on remix culture (the film's finally done, and much of the raw footage is available for remixing)

Matt Haughey explains how to get the nerd vote (some good suggestions in the comments, along with some idiotic strawmen)

ZIP File Quine (just keep unzipping) [via]

Derek Powazek shuts down Pixish (a promising startup killed, at least partly, by bowing to the no spec crowd)

DOTS Gloves (mittens with metal dots for use with iPhone touchscreens) [via]

Woman gets fastest time at Nike Women's Marathon, loses race (also, why are four of the top five finishers at a women's marathon male?)

WTF, Broccoli? (my sister found tiny people living in her broccoli)

Macs vs. PCs, the Musical (bonus points for gratuitous violence, points off for technical inaccuracy)

Penelope Trott's Best Baby Halloween Costume Ever (one-year-olds make surprisingly good balding comedians)

Domai.nr, find domains with wac.ky TLDs beyond .com and .net (you know, like del.icio.us and burri.to)

Interviewing the anonymous Twitterers behind FakeJohnMcCain, FakeSarahPalin and FakeJoeBiden (the parodists love Twitter because it's quick, concise, and you can grow a network quicky)

LittleBigPlanet delayed because of Qur'an verses in background music (I believe in religious tolerance, until it affects video game release schedules)

Mygazines shuts down after publisher lawsuits (as fun as these sites are, trying to build a business on copyright infringement is just dumb)

Qwitter, get alerts when people unfollow you on Twitter (software that enables hurt feelings and awkwardness) [via]

McCain and Obama do standup comedy at the Al Smith dinner (both are very, very funny; Obama starts at 11:00)

Vimeo launches paid option ($60/year removes ads, increases limits, priority uploading, and limited HD embeds)

Slate Magazine on the rise of FAIL (the writer asked me on Tuesday about the meme's origins, so I'm a little bummed I didn't get credit) [via]

Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" ("for all the intense gloom surrounding the newspaper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism") [via]

The New Yorker challenges xkcd to a Cartoon-Off (Randall Munroe wins handily) [via]

Forumwarz Episode 2 is live! (the intro's interminable, but it picks up from there; and if you never played the first one, get to it!)

Barack Obama meets Joe the Plumber (I think it's worth watching the original encounter that inspired McCain's "spread the wealth" line of attack) [via]

First episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from January 1999 (amazing how fully-formed it launched, with the same voice that would make it so successful) [via]

Lexical analysis of the 2008 presidential and VP debates (word usage statistics and clouds, with parts of speech and word pairs; Atom feeds available for the whole dataset) [via]

Batman debates The Penguin (no mudslinging in this campaign)

Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels": Literal Video Version (from the same people the Take On Me video)

Newzbin preparing for litigation (if media companies attack Usenet indexing services that host no files, Usenet servers can't be far behind)

Bluegrass musician plays banjo during his brain surgery (his ability to play was used as a measure of the surgery's success) [via]

Kongregate Labs tutorial for creating a side-scrolling shooter in Flash (helping convert gamers to creators is good for everybody) [via]

Scraping Wikipedia data with Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo! Pipes (solid tutorial; for this kind of thing, I'd also consider Freebase)

RjDj, reactive generative music app for the iPhone (reacts to sensory input from the microphone and accelerometer)

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]