From Raph Koster’s Home Page:

But there are no games that are user-built the way the web is.

An interesting look into the destiny of Homo ludens and his experiments on the Internet.

Jim Rogan writes in the Philadephia Enquirer:

Pat Robertson, bless his pointy little head, has done the good people of the Dover Area School District a big favor.

Last week, he lashed out against them, saying they no longer merited the mercy of God. In the true spirit of Christian charity, he hinted that they deserve whatever heavenly misfortune might befall them.

Whenever you have someone like the Rev. Pat on your bad side, you know you’re doing something right.

Ramen, brother.

Lifehacker presented the SimplytheBest Fonts archive: a nice place to find free fonts. I liked the Vitamin font, and used it to create the following with some GIMP Script-Fu:

What a surprise!

You Should Get a PhD in Science (like chemistry, math, or engineering)

You’re both smart and innovative when it comes to ideas. Maybe you’ll find a cure for cancer – or develop the latest underground drug.

Make Einstein write whatever you want. I love stuff like this.

The 1925 classic Phantom of the Opera is available as a download from the Internet Archive. Very cool, one of my fun memories of my time spent in New Jersey was seeing this film in the chapel at Rutgers on Halloween, accompanied by live organ music. Unfortunately, the mpeg itself is of very marginal quality: lots of artifacts, dust, scratches, and general nastiness. If you’d like to see a beautiful rendition of this, try picking up this gorgeous edition on DVD that I blogged about before. The Phantom of the Opera, The Ultimate Edition from the Milestone collection has multiple versions of this classic story, with very clean imagery from a pristine copy, beautiful tinting, and a great sound track. Spend the $15 $25 bucks or whatever. It’s worth it.

Ars Technica has a nice article on cobbling together a collection of free tools to rip high quality video for the iPod on your windows box (it also covers other alternatives too, but I’m inherently cheap). Check it out.

Scott Remnant is a bit of a Formula-1 buff, and so ran one of those cool Java applets that news agencies provide to keep track of race results in real time. But the problem was, the applet sucked (bad interface, the fonts were too small, you know the drill). So, he cleverly ran tcpdump to figure out what was going over the wire and wrote his own version. Rockin’.

I need such a gadget to monitor baseball games too. Maybe next year I’ll give it a try.

Witness a pack of knitted zombies re-enact that classic Night of the Living Dead.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing, who hardly need the link juice, but still…

A 13 foot Burmese python tried to eat a six foot alligator. Results aren’t pretty: Warning! Icky picture might freak you out. Don’t blame me.

I suppose that I’m in many ways your typical smart geek: I can probably identify 95% of all the quotes from Futurama, but I have a heck of a time remembering to put my keys someplace where I can find them. That’s why I rely on tips like this one from lifehacker. Unfortunately, the main problem with me isn’t finding remotes, it’s finding the correct remote.

I use a similar technique to keep track of my keys. Witness my keychain on the right, with its absurdly large green Mike from Monster’s Inc. dangling from it. It’s large, which helps keep it visible, and green, which means it contrasts with the contents of virtually any cluttered horizontal surface upon which it lies.

It took me months to find the spare key which is not Monster-equipped.

Fellow Pixarian Jeff Pidgeon has a new PidgeonBlog to augment his Cafe Press Store Full O’ Swag. Follower’s of the Flying Spaghetti Monster might appreciate his stylish line of pirate inspired apparel.

Exactly what it sounds like: XYZ Computing describes a project to get a M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard to boot from a stick of USB flash memory. It uses Puppy Linux, and is pretty straightforward. As it happens, I have exactly that motherboard: I remember trying to get it to boot USB stick memory and failing, and this author suggests that upgrading syslinux might be all it takes. I’ll have to try it again.