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Just Drowning Democrats Good Republicans please don't look at the blatant fact that neocon rulers sat on their hands and knowingly let New Orleans drown. Nothing to see here folks, just a few drowning Democrats, please move along. A little land clearing for golf courses and seaside condominium, is all, Halliburton has everything under control. Look instead at the difference between the city flooding by breach or overflow of the levees. See! That explains everything. Bush didn't lie after all. Bad things happen that aren't Bush’s fault. That’s all. If those filthy underprivileged people standing in sewage for seven days without food or water had only known they would die by overflow and not a breach. It probably would have made watching grandma being eaten by rats, feel things were really working out quite well.
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Mar-4-06

Sex in an online game? It's about time. Naughty America: The Game is the first of its kind: A massively multiplayer online world that allows players to do what they've always wanted to: be naughty. Check out the trailer.

All links NSFW. Site contains cartoon nudity. Oh, Flash and crappy music abound. You have been warned.
comment posted at 8:08 PM on Mar-2-06

Newsvine launches to the public. It's sort of digg (there is voting) meets metafilter (there are comments) meets the news. It could be really cool, but my first impression is that it takes a lot of work.
comment posted at 8:32 PM on Mar-2-06

sega cd emulator with the penn and teller and stuff
comment posted at 5:39 PM on Mar-1-06
comment posted at 10:47 PM on Mar-1-06

John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk. Hank Mobley. Lennie Tristano. Blue Note. Impulse. Riverside... In other words: jazz. Now three fans in Japan -- a country that has always appreciated America's gift to music even more than the US itself -- have created The Jazz Discography Project, a bare-bones, open-source, astonishingly exhaustive database of the hippest sounds on the planet. For aficionados, just reading an ASCII entry for long out-of-print stuff like A Message from Garcia, featuring a young and then-unknown musician named Bill Evans who would later reinvent his instrument, is thrilling.
comment posted at 5:54 PM on Mar-1-06

Rice, the rocket. Secretary of State shares fitness tips with early-morning DC news. Next week: Cyclin' with POTUS (schedule subject to change).
comment posted at 11:14 PM on Feb-28-06

How Sub-Pixel Rendering Works: a method of anti-aliasing, sub-pixel rendering (or ClearType as Microsoft calls it) exploits the fact that pixels on LCD screens are actually made up of three sub-pixels: red, blue, and green. By constructing fonts using the sub-pixels, the results are arguably smoother lines and easier-to-read type. Sadly (or happily) CRTs benefit little, if at all, from the technology.
comment posted at 11:17 PM on Feb-28-06

Windows Live Local Orgasmically merges street level imagery with satellite to create virtual streetwalks (For Seattle or San Francisco anyway)
comment posted at 4:29 PM on Feb-28-06
comment posted at 6:54 PM on Feb-28-06

Concerned (Half-Life 2 comic)
comment posted at 3:58 PM on Feb-28-06

"The TV networks aired fake video of "planes" striking the World Trade Center!" Apparantly, there were no actual on-the-ground eyewitnesses to planes crashing into the towers, no sounds of impact, and may in fact have been nuclear devices. File under "batshit insane." Although the site goes through a painstaking amount of effort to prove that the attack was hoaxed.
comment posted at 12:54 AM on Feb-27-06

The Century Of The Self. It's a documentary, and the four parts are available at archive.org [2][3][4] -- with a higher quality bittorrent option [via mindhacks]. The program is about the use of psychoanalytical techniques to manipulate and control the "bewildered herd", "engineering consent" in a world fraught with "irrational impulses" [more inside].
comment posted at 1:52 AM on Feb-27-06

(Use the torrent.)
Toy Story 2: Requiem
comment posted at 1:55 AM on Feb-27-06

You can't just give away free software! Or can you? Firefox's copyleft premise destroys U.K. anti-piracy laws. Gervase Markham takes on a U.K. official who wants to arrest pirates for distributing firefox.
comment posted at 5:31 PM on Feb-23-06

Google Pages is basically Geocities 2.0. You get a wysiwyg editing interface, a bunch of templates to pick from, and the ability to make as many pages as you need. Time will tell if this revolutionizes the web the way Geocities did (aside from all the obvious crappy pages from Geocities, it did give thousands of new writers and designers a place to start), but it's certainly a cool set of tools to do something mundane like start a website. [via waxy]
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Feb-23-06
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Feb-23-06

Gore in '08? Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 2008.” His words were eerily reminiscent of a quote from another former Vice President, Richard Nixon, who told the same Associated Press in November of 1965 that he “had no plans to seek the Presidency in 1968.”
comment posted at 4:36 PM on Feb-22-06

Kottke ends the micropatron experiment. After a year (and $39,900), Jason decides that loafing around collecting paypal payments is just too much work.
comment posted at 3:57 PM on Feb-22-06
comment posted at 4:00 PM on Feb-22-06
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Feb-22-06
comment posted at 5:42 PM on Feb-22-06

Why is Ice slippery? You would have thought this would be well defined in 2006. But scientists are still arguing about the key elements. Plus no clear definition of Ice IX...
comment posted at 11:13 PM on Feb-21-06

Praise "Bob", slack off, lose custody of your child. A Texas woman has lost custody of her son, not even being allowed to write to him, because she was involved in activities of the Church of the Subgenius. Although her son never attended any of the events, which involved fun, nudity, and good old-fashioned blasphemy, a New York judge, James P. Punch, allegedly a "strict catholic", has denied custody of the child Kohl out of anger after seeing videos of the church's devivals and X-days. Rev. Ivan Stang goes into more detail about the situation in alt.slack.
comment posted at 9:52 PM on Feb-21-06
comment posted at 10:21 PM on Feb-21-06

Takeshi no Chousenjou may be the hardest videogame ever written. With a title screen warning that it was "created by somebody who hates videogames" (actually writer/actor/director/comedian Takeshi "Beat" Kitano) "Takeshi's Challenge" forces gamers to endure such tasks as singing karaoke for an uninterrupted hour and holding a single button for four straight hours. Players who endure to the end are rewarded by having to hit the final boss 20,000 times. If you don't speak the language, you might be able to enjoy the game as a Japanese precursor to Grand Theft Auto, but those who understand it more fully see it as "a videogame that riffs on human disappointment for as many hours as the player is willing to search for redemption." Warning: last link contains possible spoilers for Mother 2 and some of the Metal Gear Solid games.
comment posted at 9:56 PM on Feb-21-06

We have all seen lots of YouTube and Google Video but have you ever seen a woman breast feed a cat? (nsfw) Or a 500 KV electrical discharge? wonder what the daily show take on social networking is? check out videosift, a digg like collaborative blog for trolling up the best/weirdest? in video on the web. [via mefi projects]
comment posted at 11:17 PM on Feb-21-06

Newsvine. It's like MetaFilter, only without the filter. OK, actually it's more exactly like NewsFilter. Nifty interface, though.
comment posted at 11:28 PM on Feb-20-06

"Don't talk to me. Don't speak to me. Stay with me." Three years later, the author of Atlantic Monthly's most popular essay sits down for an interview.
comment posted at 3:45 PM on Feb-20-06

I love beer mats. Those with a low tolerance for slow-loading pages with too many graphics on them - or pages that require horizontal scrolling need not click. Other tegestology pages. I had no idea.
comment posted at 4:47 PM on Feb-18-06
comment posted at 2:26 AM on Feb-19-06

The Value of Algebra: "Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers."
comment posted at 11:46 PM on Feb-16-06

"The Korean Saving Private Ryan," or Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004). Reviews. Plot synopsis (spoilers). Box Office: Over 20% of South Korea saw this film.
comment posted at 5:36 PM on Feb-16-06
comment posted at 6:39 PM on Feb-16-06
comment posted at 8:45 PM on Feb-16-06

Survivorman. An incredible show of one man surviving all alone in some of the harshest conditions for 7 days without a camera crew. He has to not only survive but carry 50 pounds of camera equipment he uses to film the show. Don't be fooled by the 30 minute abbreviated shows being aired on the US Discovery Channel, the good stuff is the meaty hour-long episodes available on The Science Channel.
comment posted at 9:37 PM on Feb-15-06

Sports Illustrated's infamous swimsuit issue has taken to featuring naked models with the swimsuits painted directly on their shameful nakedness in recent years; for this year's entry they feature Heidi Klum in a tribute to the bathing suits of the 1940's. Full gallery online here.
comment posted at 5:35 PM on Feb-15-06

60 "secret" Abu Ghraib photos have been leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald. (Warning, very NSFW and disturbing.) They are thought to be among those viewed in private by U.S. senators following a May, 2004 hearing and "withheld from the public to protect the integrity of military trials and to avoid further inflaming America's enemies."
comment posted at 12:49 AM on Feb-15-06
comment posted at 9:25 PM on Feb-15-06

Track your comments. Remember back before Matt gave up his day job? How we didn't have an easy way to keep up with conversations we participated in? Hate that you can't do that with other sites you frequent? Now you can.
comment posted at 1:03 AM on Feb-14-06
comment posted at 6:57 PM on Feb-14-06

We've heard of outsider music, but along with this is the strange world of song-poems. ...ordinary people" respond to come-on ads on the back pages of magazines, mailing in their heartfelt but often bizarre poems to "music industry" companies that, for a fee, turn those poems into real recordings. More inside...
comment posted at 9:02 PM on Feb-13-06

Watch news events happen in realtime as they get pumped into RSS-space™. In the grand if not lengthy tradition of newsquakes, vanishing point, and newsmap. Plugins and stuff required. [Visualize the hell out of the news, come here, post it, then get hauled into Metatalk for your trouble!]
comment posted at 8:41 PM on Feb-13-06
comment posted at 9:12 PM on Feb-13-06
comment posted at 9:31 PM on Feb-13-06
comment posted at 6:03 PM on Feb-20-06

The Compact "About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear..." And presumably gas, insurance, electricity, water, etc. Oh, and Internet service-- they have a blog and a Yahoo group. Did I mention one of them currently works as a marketer and another one is a currently a professor in marketing?
comment posted at 5:45 PM on Feb-13-06

An Australian Government Member of Parliament (MP) will be trying to amend a crucial piece of legislation which, if the amendment is successful, will make it far harder (if not impossible) for Australian women to gain access to abortion drug RU486 because of fears that making it easier for women to access the drug will lead Australia down a path of Islamisation. "I've actually read in the Daily Telegraph where a certain imam from the Lakemba mosque actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years' time. I didn't believe him at the time but when you actually look at the birthrates... we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence." Liberal MP Danna Vale said today. Has she been reading Metafilter?
comment posted at 6:38 PM on Feb-13-06

Home Prices Do Fall A look at the collapse of the 1980's real estate bubble through the eyes of The New York Times
Better with Times select. Also better with Firefox's fetch text extension
comment posted at 11:22 PM on Feb-12-06

Cheney accidently shoots a hunter. oops.
comment posted at 11:28 PM on Feb-12-06