clue free

This portfolio gets me in the mood for a football game. The mimes, especially.

Reality check! Have a nice tea party.

Happy CSS Naked Day!

Some time ago, Nintendo set up an awesome YouTube page to promote their new Wario game, “Shake It!” As a total freaking nerd, my first reaction upon completion was to View Source and see how they’d managed to do that with JavaScript. Alas, it was just Flash.

Several months later, Google has announced the Chrome Experiments site, and someone has been kind enough to actually make that effect happen for real. It even works when you search (though it did not work well in Firefox 3.)

William Gibson’s blog today features a guest post by Jack Womack on The Blacklist, published during the Red Scare to prevent “communist sympathizers” from furthering their pinko ways.
One line by this “old” writer stood out in particular:

When I was young my mother told me to never sign a petition, because you could never know where your name would wind up.

Petitions: the original social networking websites!

Tonight, on a very special finding-the-thread edition of Webspotting:

• Books That Make You Dumb correlates and does not causate favorite books with SAT scores (via Facebook, which is the only way to do anything worthy of media attention these days if you’re not using Twitter.)
• Mastodon – Leviathan is a metal record based on Moby Dick. They fill the void in my life — for nerdy-topic thrash — created when Voivod took a dive in their later years. You have to give props to a drummer who will admit on camera that he was the one who approached a bunch of sweaty headbangers and used the phrase, “we should do an album based on Moby Dick.” Also, they do a practically note-for-note version of “The Call of Ktulu” which is not actually “The Call of Ktulu”.
• Connecting the “dumb” and “drummer” themes nicely: Metallica Shreds. Well, they used to.
• Finally, tonight: Moby Dick is my favorite book, and, by delightful co-incidence, is likewise Barack Obama’s favorite book. However, no one has yet done a bad painting of me, and many people have made bad paintings of Barack Obama.

The fantasy:

The reality:

This one goes out to my buddy Stewart, who suffers from a perfectly-rational-I’m-sure fear of the bridge at the end of the clip:

As is typical of friendship with Stewart, you almost immediately start noticing eerie coincidences. Such as: noticing for the first time that the SWF container that Flickr uses to embed video files is called… stewart.swf (no relation.)

I promise to leave this topic soon(ish)…

Pearl Jam: “Ten” was released 18 years ago.

WHAT.