a bunch of neato links
i will be the first to admit that i hate advertising. the idea that someone else knows what i want or need better than i do myself is irritating, if not downright insulting. as a result, i tend to shy away from flash, and i run adblock and popup blockers. in my life away from the peecee, i can't listen to commercial radio, and i love tivo because it means i haven't seen any tv advertisments in literally months. on the internet, this tendency to avoid ads manifests itself as a willingness to use mozilla or firefox and the adblock and flashblock plugins to make sure i don't see those annoying punch-the-monkey ads. that being said, flickr has done some pretty cool stuff with flash and photostreams. to wit:
a brief note: the layout of this page is slightly broken in ie/windows. it's really nothing more than an annoyance, but if you haven't already, you should consider giving firefox a try.
what I'm reading now:
watertiger
americablog
talking points memo
the next hurrah
Drew Curtis' FARK.com
Gizmodo
Bag News Notes
Boing Boing
Real-Time Forecast of Earthquake Hazard in the Next 24 Hours
Go Fug Yourself
Daily Kos
eschaton
you might like prettypictures.com. Mike Medaglia is one of my classmates from Tech, and he's filmed/directed some... interesting...projects. I'm partial, because I'm in The Heist.
another good spot is chickenhead. Chickenhead offers interesting desktop wallpapers, mock banners, and a smorgasbord of links to other off-kilter, irreverant sites. Updated regularly.
the memepool updates somewhat more frequently than chickenhead, but it's not on a regular schedule afaict. but it is searchable, and they have a particularly good archive of flash animations.
for those of you who don't live withing walking distance of the Pacific ocean, there is the California Coastal Records Project. This website was the object of a lawsuit by Barbra Streisand, who claimed it invaded her privacy. Unfortunately, Barb, there is no such thing as privacy in the US anymore. Striesand's suit was dismissed and she lost the countersuit. The couple who took the pictures and coded the site are both CalTech grads.
The next few sites will need you to download plugins for your browser of choice, if you don't have them already installed. For anyone who doesn't use Flash as a matter of principle- good for you, but you won't be able to play any of the games at Orisinal. My favorite is the bumble bees, but I'm also quite fond of the frog game.
another game that looks deceptively easy, but is actually very hard to win on points (because the computer scores more for winning a point than you do) is 3D pong. You need Shockwave for this one.
planarity is a great exercise in spatial reasoning.
and if you were a kid like me who used to read the encyclopedia brittanica for fun, try this instead.