Closing Tabs 5/27/09

• Super Mario 64 longplay, grabbing all 120 stars. If you were under the age of 30 when this came out, goodbye afternoon. It’s such an astoundingly well put together game. At every stage, care was taken to make sure it “felt” right. Jason Scott’s talk about Platform Studies has me rekindling my love affair with it.

• The Metroid Prime entry on Wikitroid. ’nuff said. Exploring the 3D transition of one of Nintendo’s other major franchises, which skipped the N64 and went straight to the GameCube. With Mario 64, everyone expected it to be mind-blowing. With Prime, everyone expected it to be shit. Sometimes everyone is wrong. Disclosure: I have stock options in Wikia.

• ANTHEM Platform. A platform for piping Social Networks, IM, email, OEMs, etc, to cell phone applications. Recently acquired by Good Technology.

• Imified. A service which runs IM bots for you, and acts as a go-between for you and the IM network. You can code up applications that the bot queries with what is said to it, by whom. They provide examples in PHP, which makes me happy.

• Google is “betting big on HTML5″. Speed of web development accelerating, canvas, video, client-side databases, web workers, etc. See also: YouTube using the HTML5 video tag.

• Sleeping with the NME: how the British music press picked up a dose of the crap, which is about the sorry state of the British music press. From Velvet Coalmine, which has become a favorite blog of mine.

• Remote-controlled sperm, or more precisely: remote-controller sperm-like nanodevices.

• CSS-only gradients using CSS3 and no images. Whatsoever. Uses the -webkit-gradient property. Hot shit.