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GENETOS is the history of Shoot-em-ups in a single game. Take on everything ranging from Space Invaders-like aliens to 21st Century bullet hell. Power up your craft (by collecting green and blue bits and blobs) with innovations like slow-motion, super bombs, lock-on lasers, and the ability to move vertically. (Windows only) [more inside]
posted by CrunchyFrog at 11:02 PM PST - 10 comments

"For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza. But Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic (R) computer bathed in liquid helium and it's cold in his vault." [more inside]
posted by shii at 10:59 PM PST - 32 comments

Steven M. Johnson is a prolific inventor whose designs revolutionize everything from office apparel to recreational vehicles to basketball. Many of of these inventions are found in his 1984 book What the World Needs Now.
posted by twoleftfeet at 10:32 PM PST - 15 comments

Apollo Gauntlet is an independent cartoon created by Winnipeg animator Myles Langlois, with contributions from Drue Langlois and Hollie Dzama. All 10 episodes are available on YouTube: [more inside]
posted by oulipian at 10:28 PM PST - 5 comments

There's got to be a better way! A digest of why your life is so hard, as demonstrated in low-budget television advertisements. SLYT
posted by Mayor Curley at 10:03 PM PST - 42 comments

Adam Calfee makes beautiful, haunting animations, including videos for
Ill Bill - My Uncle
Ill Bill - War Is My Destiny
Radiohead - All I Need (not quite completed, but a more fully-realized minute long sample here)
and the short piece Moonboy.

posted by StopMakingSense at 7:27 PM PST - 6 comments

Need some good music for a lazy Sunday? Bo Hansson, Swedish prog-rock organist recently passed away and he may have just what you need. So sit back and listen to some tracks off his most well known album Music Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings: Leaving Shire/The Old Forest & Tom Bombadil/Fog on the Barrow-Downs Black Riders/Flight to the Ford At the House of Elrond & The Ring Goes South Journey in the Dark Lothlorien Shadowfax Horns of Rohan and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields Dreams in the House of Healing Homeward Bound/The Scouring of the Shire The Grey Heavens [more inside]
posted by P.o.B. at 2:13 PM PST - 18 comments

Dick Giordano, a comic book artist and former executive editor at DC Comics, passed away on March 27th. [more inside]
posted by HopperFan at 1:24 PM PST - 38 comments

"La Rosa does not care who knows she sees the world from well left of center. Williams balks at accepting the liberal title; instead he states his preference to be known as a progressive. 'When people hear liberal, this happens,' he said while making hand gestures showing steam coming out of his head." Their views and their press are helping to remake Montgomery, Alabama.
[more inside]
posted by jefficator at 1:05 PM PST - 16 comments

Make a Map is a website that lets you create your own maps of the US and areas thereof using various demographics data. It's still in beta stage but it's got all of the US (at least everywhere I've thought to look) and so far has datasets for median household income, population change 2000-9, population density, median home value, unemployment rate, average household size and median age. It's fun to use and taught me a great deal about my home city. The sitemaker, ESRI, also has a pretty good free globe map software, ArcGIS Explorer, for which you download map layers and add-ins.
posted by Kattullus at 12:14 PM PST - 13 comments

Ever wonder how military aviators get their callsigns? Chances are good it won't be based on something you're proud of. Apparently being too influenced by Top Gun and asking to be called "Iceman" is a frequent, and bad, move: see "Slush" and "Snocone", and that's just from the S's. [more inside]
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:49 AM PST - 31 comments

Charles Stross exposes some common misconceptions about publishing. How Charles Stross got into the writing game.
posted by Artw at 9:12 AM PST - 48 comments

President Barack Obama, and Jay Leno at the 2010 White House Correspondents Dinner. (SLYT)
posted by timsteil at 8:53 AM PST - 104 comments

Gulf Oil Spill "Out of Control" New estimates of the BP oil spill have it spilling out 25,000 barrels of oil a day, far higher than the original estimates of as low as 1,000. NOAA fears that it could get to as high as 50,000 barrels a day. Alabama's governor, said they are planning for a worst case scenario of 150,000 barrels (6,000,000 gallons) a day. That's an Exxon-Valdez every two days and a fix may be months away. The question now may not be whether this is Obama's Katrina, but whether it's his Chernobyl.
posted by empath at 8:52 AM PST - 391 comments

Poto & Cabenga is a quite difficult one button, two screens flash game made by Honeyslug.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 8:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Ben Heine is a Belgian painter, illustrator, portraitist, caricaturist and photographer. His recent project, Pencil vs. Camera, is an amalgam of illustration and photography, creating something similar in a single image showing two different actions. His Flickr Photostream.
posted by netbros at 8:25 AM PST - 3 comments

OMG it's a huuuge hand drawn map of London. And with psychogeographical annotations too! [more inside]
posted by Monkeymoo at 8:20 AM PST - 22 comments

Potential Conservative MP Philippa Stroud founded an evangelical church that tried to 'cure' homosexuals by driving out their 'demons'. Stroud is head of the Conservative thinktank The Centre for Social Justice, lauded as the most influential thinktank in Britain who have heavily influenced David Cameron's views and policies on the family. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:14 AM PST - 50 comments