PSG Art tutorial
Phil Nelson My friend Eliza Gauger linked to this with the text “how to draw EVERYTHING,” and that’s all I need to know.
The Exterminator’s Want-Ad
Treat yourself to some good ‘ol speculative fiction from the one and only Bruce Sterling from a future where the economy tanked for good, the elites went MIA or to jail, and America has become one big favela:
And boy, do I ever miss them. No more billboards, no more chain stores, no big-box Chinese depots and no neon fried-food shacks. It’s become another world, as in “another world is possible,” and we’re stuck in there. It’s very possible, very real, and it’s very smelly. There are constant power blackouts.
Original Pac-Man Design Sketches Surface Online
The original notebook of Pac-Mac creator Toru Iwatani. From this seed a mighty oak was born.
“Scribd’s Decision To Dump Flash Pays Off, User Engagement Triples”
Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.
Anyone surprised? Make your content easier to read and interact with and more people will do so.
Launchlist
A pretty, usable, interface for managing a “launch list” that is, a list of tasks, tests, and functions that must be run/checked to launch a given project on the web or otherwise.
Metafilter’s Liblr Thread
I feel good about today already. For those asking in the comments, yes, the name is a pun. I wanted a name that described the Mad Libs-style word substitution, the Flickr/Tumblr style web 2.0 naming scheme, and sounded somewhat like a mumble when spoken.
Hidden posters of Notting Hill Gate Tube station
A photoset of beautiful posters from the 50s, located in an inccessible area of the station since your parents were young.
U.S. Tortures Innocent Canadian Man, Gets Away With It
This is the United States in 2010: They can abduct an innocent man on false charges, keep him imprisoned for 10 months in a kennel barely big enough for a dog, torture him, release him without admitting any wrongdoing on their part, and then have the highest court in the land refuse to hear his case. Due to National Security. Which are the same auspices under which they tortured an innocent man.
This is capital-fucking-W Wrong and there is nothing that can make it right.
THIS IS ORSON WELLES Audio
Drunken Welles is good Welles:
This here’s a group of autobiographical interviews Welles laid down sometime in the ’70s, issued as a companion to the Peter Bogdanovich book of the same name.
Narrated by Bogdanovich, who identifies the tapes as from 1968-70. Download at the link.
The “Immortal” Jellyfish
turritopsis nutricula, a species which can “cycle from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again,” may have no natural limit on it’s lifespan.
Granted, it can still get beaten to death or otherwise killed through violence or stupidity. Just not old age.
A* Search Algorithm in JavaScript
Looks like a good implementation, be sure to check out the demo. Brian’s example is great for people looking for a better understanding of A* in general, and it helped me out personally, but I recently came upon this version which in my tests is faster by a wide margin, and supports multiple modes of traversal in addition to Manhattan.
Apple Bans Adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses from App Store
Banned due to a scene which features a nude man diving into the ocean. It isn’t even well-rendered generalia, nor is it sexual in nature. It’s just a little lump below his belly. It’s just a penis, which takes up maybe 1/64th of one panel of a comic book.
I guess comic adaptations of James Joyce don’t fit Apple’s definition of “liberal arts.”
Steven Frank’s shutup.css Available As A Safari Extension
Bring a zen-like calm to the comments section of sites like YouTube.
MacUser on Safari 5’s extensions
A little detail into the workings of Safari 5’s biggest new feature.
How To Enable Extensions For Safari 5
If you, like me, have tried to install a Safari 5 extension such as Coda Notes, and were met with the following dialog:
and then spent 5 minutes looking through Safari’s Preferences window to no avail, this is how you enable Extensions on Safari 5:
- Open Preferences
- Click Advanced
- Click Show develop in menu bar
- Close and reopen Safari
- Click the Develop menu item
- Finally, click Enable Extensions
Viola.
Coda Notes: a Safari Extension
Unveiled by Cabel Sasser on stage at WWDC today, this is already hot shit:
When you install Coda Notes, you’ll get a new button in your toolbar. Click it to see all our annotation tools, built right into Safari. Draw some notes on your favorite website. Communicate changes, ideas, concepts, or problems. Then, when you’re done, hit the Send Notes button and the whole page flips over as a postcard.
Liblr, The Twitter Mad Lib Machine
Liblr is an Extra Future 6-hour Project which takes the public Twitter stream and lets your replace one phrase with another, in the name of fun. An example, taking the phrase ‘had sex’ and replacing with ‘played scrabble’ gives you gems like the following:
Is it normal for a 21 year old boy to have played scrabble with about 30 woman in his whole life..??? wow idk
I hope you enjoy it.
Adam Lisagor: iPad TV
The Sandwich has some thoughts on the iPad, TV, and the rumored new Apple TV. I like what he’s thinking:
Could it be that Apple has chosen to separate our video content and store it temporarily in this ghetto because there is something new and awesome on the horizon? Here’s what I think: Soon enough, that placeholder app called Videos will go away, to replaced by a new app called Apple TV.
The current iPad videos app is a real turd in the iPad’s otherwise beautiful punchbowl. This makes a lot of sense.
Apple – HTML5
An Apple-sanctioned HTML5 demo site. This is a good first step towards getting serious about HTML5, in the sense of actually building things.
Things of note: Most of these aren’t HTML5 per-se, and they won’t work in other browsers that don’t use webkit, due to Apple only using their vendor-prefixed CSS attributes (-webkit).