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Tom Driveimpossiblyquicklyer
Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.
i've heard of chiptunes but
Warning: sharp, startling static sounds
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
the penguins are gathering in a circle
Vaporwave goodbye to the waking world in dreamcore95.exe, a chill, short idle game with impeccable vibes and, if that's not enough inducement, also a defragging widget.
i've heard of marble madness but
Ivan Miranda decides to use a lot of 3D printing and a lot of hand tooling to, both figuratively and literally, roll his own seven-segment digital clock: Building a Marble Clock - part 1 and part 2.
what calculates the slope of stairs, alone or in pairs
Would you like to look at a truly boggling number of linear and circular slide rules, and related paraphernalia, on a website with a comfortingly 20th century aesthetic?
Of course you would, which is why you should spend some time at The Oughtred Society's Archive of Collections.
It’s just someone holding a piece of steel against a big, spinning rock.
TW Lim writes about knife-sharpening as a process less about making a knife objectively, maximally sharp than about making a knife be what what it needs to be to do its particular job, in Forming an Edge. Don't miss the electron microsopy.
WAH WAH WAH! [wah wah wah wah waaaaaaah]
Bring Me To Life but it's Otamatones
my body is a roadmap of, uh, roads
Do you know your town like the back of your hand?
Then prove it, with, uh, Back Of Your Hand, a web game that asks you to identify randomly selected streets on a map and scores you on how close you got.
finally something involving billions that isn't late capitalism
Got some legos, need to do some long-term planning? Guess you could make a billion-year clock.
when you get your ass handed to you, just hand it right back
The always wonderful Simone Giertz accidentally panders directly to me personally by choosing to make a robot out of stained glass.
give him the gopher repellant
In How To Find Things Online, v buckenham looks at the web as an unwilling data source for Large Language Models (among other omnivorous machine learning projects), and how the changing incentives for both people making content and corporations hosting/controlling that content may undercut the assumption that useful information will continue to find its way into those hungry artificial hippos.
i reckon it looks amazing
Pask Makes A Mid-Century Table: a chill and genial Aussie woodworker narrates his way start to finish through a very pretty one-off dining table project that I absolutely did not start watching just because of the tiling table top pattern. Includes a brief cameo by a placid, sleepy surprise python, because Australia.
what's red and invisible? no tomatoes
Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription: a talk (or the text thereof, and, yes yes, you're very clever, now shut up and read it) about the fundamental inability of transcription to capture that which it is transcribing, by Mefi's Own Allison Parrish.
Accessibility in design is a form of empathy
MeFi's Own Andy Baio on interacting with a world that wasn't designed with color-blindness in mind. Come for the interactive diagrams, stay for the solid The Purge joke.
yeah i got a pentium: a lot of pentium up stress
Defrag your brain and pipeline the instruction set of your soul with Personal Computer, the most recent heavy-as-balls chiptune metal album from the always-excellent (and MeFi's Own) Master Boot Record.
a hand sitting still on a handrail and the bodies blurring past together
Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer with a particular focus on long exposure and city photography, a combination that leads to stunning civic ghostliness as in, among other collections, City of Shadows (1991-1994), or the somewhat more restrained New York (2004-present). See also his photocollage of perestroika-era signs and symbols, Nomenclature of Signs.
the most exciting bank switching story since SVB got shut down
How did the graphics on NES' Punch Out work? It's a little complicated!
i'm in a pipe / i cannot gripe
Nirvana's Nevermind but with the Super Mario 64 soundfont
apparently there was some fuckin' Pink Floyd in there?
take it easy bro, uh--alright, i need a ride, do i need a ride?
Weezer's Blue Album but it's me and my friend trying to sing everything from memory
playing a 2x4 through a tacklebox head into a foamcore cabinet
About a year ago, Nashville musician Jim Lill asked: where does an electric guitar's tone come from? Lill has since asked a few more questions and done his best to document some answers in additional short entertaining videos:
- where does sustain come from?
- where does guitar string tone come from?
- does scale length affect the tone?
- where does speaker cabinet tone come from?
- where does amplifier head tone come from?
- where does sustain come from?
- where does guitar string tone come from?
- does scale length affect the tone?
- where does speaker cabinet tone come from?
- where does amplifier head tone come from?
I refuse to believe that I'm making up nice things about Mike
"Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying "Space" out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation." See also, therein, "Mike's Crush", where you say hi to the very briefly visible anonymous cool smoking woman near the start of the Night Court intro that Mike may or may not have said at one point he had a crush on.
ah yes, the deadly jumbotron
Using only a pixel baseball bat and one (or possibly more) balls, can you fend off an ever-increasing swarm of abstract dots? Find out in the delightful Vampire Survivors-alike Bases Loaded.
2008 Roofball World Championships
Throw the ball on the roof. 1. If you catch it when it comes down, that's a point. 2. If it hits the big chimney pipe, that's five points for a Ping. 3. If it goes up on one side of the ping pipe and down on the other, that's an Around for ten points. 4. If it hits the the small chimney pipe, that's a five point multiplier for the catch itself. 5. If it hits the grey Volvo on the way down, that's minus one point. 6. If it goes over the house, that's minus five points and you have to go get the ball.
Got it? Good. Let's play Roofball.
Got it? Good. Let's play Roofball.
secrets of the abyss
A short surreal animated film by Felix Colgrave: DONKS.
does what it says on the curb
Written In Stone: a collection of photographs of maker's marks in sidewalks.
lost your keys in the spacetime curvature again
Woodworker Olivier Gomis builds a wormhole-themed coffee table.
I started recording them on 3” × 5” file cards
Mathematician and numeric encylopedstrian N. J. A. Sloane looks back on the history of his work and collaborations on what became the wonder that is the OEIS in a brief and very accessible paper, “A Handbook of Integer Sequences” Fifty Years Later.
So, wake up, Mr. Freeman. It's time. It's time to be green.
Mario Carey
All I Want For Christmas Is You except it's the Wii Shop channel music, or vice versa maybe
Ah, yes, the [complex plane coordinates] genders
not me playing on the floor, lunch break, sophomore year of high school
Narrative designer Bruno Dias (cf. Fallen London) presents: A [not yet] Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, an ongoing weekly series about the decades-long evolution of which kinds of decks competitive M:tG players were relying on in tournament play and exactly which stupid terrible broken cards were responsible for that before subsequently being banned from play forever. The story begins with Chapter 1: Magic as Dr Richard Garfield, PhD Intended.
you're a rich_lord, but you've gone too far
Black Growth, Green Growth, and Creepy Eyes: three of a number of fascinating and unsettling procedural animations by rich_lord.
it's kind of like Suspiria but for synth nerds with perms
The year is very very definitely 1971, and these are Rare Moog Dancers.
Cathode Ray Thread
Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game "Sentinel".
if Tetris were Thanksgiving dinner with your shittiest uncle
Want to hate Tetris, or for Tetris to hate you? The answer may be Hatetris (which you can play here), an adversarial Tetris game (by MeFi's Own qntm) that tries to serve you the worst possible pieces you could ever not hope for. Here's a detailed writeup of understanding and breaking the high score record by David & Filipe, who just shattered their previous record with 148 whole points.
Fractal calculations, Kanagawa vibes
Koch snowflake a little too symmetrical for you? Consider the Kochawave Curve [pdf] (arxiv.org page), a variant that leans hard to the side and has a number of interesting properties and tilings of its own.
there’s a lot less money and attention in the niches than we thought
Dave Karpf takes a critical look back fifteen years later on the classic Kevin Kelly essay Thousand True Fans, on what it got right and the various things it got wrong or never grappled with to begin with.
We got blood red martinis / We got Christina Ricci
Come and find me / at the Goth Beach
from the folks who brought you FaceParagraph
Tired of image-sharing sites that don't aggressively compress every uploaded photo down to a 1K jpeg? Great news: now there's Kilogram, the lowest-quality photo sharing site on the internet.
The Captain and Tenebrous Spiels
MeFi's Own Andy Baio is tracking a mystery over on waxy.org: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements and nobody knows how
i tried to think of a Hellraiser joke about drum machines and souls but
Can I offer you a fully operable web implementation of the Roland TR-909 drum machine in this trying time?
taking Silent Hill cosplay in a different direction
I! Love! My! Mom! [gutteral screaming]
Youtube music types Adam Neely and Rob Scallon give each other crash courses in writing and playing songs in their respective genres in: Metal Musician Sucks At Jazz and its companion piece Jazz Musician Sucks At Metal.
Glitchy Glitchy Ya Ya Da Da
I think that I think therefore I am, or do I and am I? Also: a montage.
Here's an interesting 25-minute video essay from Mike Rugnetta on dirt on camera lenses, questioning the principle of suspension of disbelief, Descartes vs. Spinoza on evaluating truth, and the nature of our internal engagement with fiction.
Ecce Logo
North of the Border, Canadian maker of things, discloses: I made a Realistic Lego Man and I'm Sorry.
I Made Some Tools
*pulls out acoustic guitar* anyway, here's Redwall
You ever wish you were an adventurous pixel-art mouse doing inventory tetris while exploring a randomly-generated dungeon and engaging in turn-based combat with wee slimes and hostile rodentia? Great, you should play Backpack Hero. You should also play it if you haven't specifically wished for that previously, because it's delightful and charming and good.
Beastly AIs known to let the piece, mmm...drop
In his blog post "Can you be sure to clear a line at Tetris?", theoretical computer science researcher Antoine Amarilli asks: can you be sure to clear a line at Tetris? Specifically, even if the computer hates you and doesn't want to let you?