Recursive drawing. Watch the video first. Via.
posted to MetaFilter by unSane at 9:40 AM on May 10, 2012 (22 comments)

In a recent episode of Mad Men titled "Lady Lazarus," Pete Campbell has an existential crisis when he sees a picture of the Earth from space, but were there color pictures of the whole Earth in October 1966? First some background...
posted to MetaFilter by quartzcity at 11:03 PM on May 10, 2012 (87 comments)

"For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements". [SLYT] LEAP is a USB peripheral that can provide real-time motion tracking to 100th of a millimeter.
posted to MetaFilter by like_neon at 2:34 AM on May 22, 2012 (60 comments)

Worlds was a 3D Internet chat program that was introduced in 1995. Seventeen years later, YouTube user and game streamer Vinesauce returns to find a small collection of users who take him on a tour of the deserted halls of their virtual land. NSFW due to confused swearing.
posted to MetaFilter by codacorolla at 5:48 PM on May 23, 2012 (22 comments)

Life in Life: Using something called an OTCA metapixel (Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel), which is a pattern in Conway’s Game of Life, someone has implemented the Game of Life inside of another Game of Life.
posted to MetaFilter by Freen at 7:49 AM on May 23, 2012 (37 comments)

So, we were lied to. The good news is that holdkris99 is fine, rather than dead. He's also banned, his wife's (?) account is banned, and they're not welcome back to Metafilter, ever.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:03 PM on May 22, 2012 (1285 comments)

"Blow Job" is a series of portraits of people with gale-force winds blown directly into their faces. (SFW)
posted to MetaFilter by flyingsquirrel at 5:54 PM on May 16, 2012 (62 comments)

Weavrs are a species of new autonomous, emotive, social bots. They feed off of social API streams, wandering around the real world looking at things, posting recipes and dreaming. They can be used for what some might consider evil and what some might consider good. You can extend them with your own code or create a hero's journey for them to experience. If the New Aesthetic was a movie, Weavrs would be the extras.
posted to MetaFilter by jeffkramer at 3:28 PM on May 1, 2012 (26 comments)

Cow Boy - the tale of Boyd Linney, a ten-year-old bounty hunter determined to round up his outlaw family. Or as Chris Sims puts it: "True Grit: The Animated Series".
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 4:40 PM on April 25, 2012 (17 comments)

What if Edward Gorey illustrated Lovecraft? It'd look like John Kenn Mortensen's work, that's what. Except Mortensen makes his art in his spare time, on post-it notes. He has an art book.
posted to MetaFilter by Lou Stuells at 2:35 PM on May 4, 2012 (39 comments)

Observing the "burn jita" player event
posted to MetaFilter by Cloud King at 8:39 PM on May 2, 2012 (46 comments)

Zen Pencils is a blog with a pretty simple premise: take inspirational quotes and set them to comics. It's only a few months old but there are already a bunch of greats within: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, and more in the archives.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 10:46 AM on May 2, 2012 (33 comments)

So, would a search engine be more useful if it just didn't include the Most Popular websites? How about the ONE MILLION most popular websites?
Fortunately, it lets you adjust the filter to exclude the top 100,000, 10,000, thousand, hundred or ten. MetaFilter reappears under the 'thousand' setting.
Via WaxyLinks and HackerNews
posted to MetaFilter by oneswellfoop at 3:30 PM on May 1, 2012 (12 comments)

In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game
posted to MetaFilter by Cloud King at 10:19 AM on May 1, 2012 (41 comments)

A dog stalks a wolf decoy on a golf course very ....very ...very slowly
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 12:54 PM on April 29, 2012 (62 comments)

End Piece: the last artwork of great artists [via mefi projects]
posted to MetaFilter by aniola at 9:59 AM on April 29, 2012 (9 comments)

The Lap of Luxury was a Big Brother-style reality tv show filmed for Spike TV in 2003. The format is familiar: 9 contestants living in a house together, all trying to win immunity, prevent themselves from being voted out and vying to win a $100,000 prize while facing down a smarmy host. Except... only one of them, a guy named Matt Kennedy Gould, was really a contestant. The rest were actors, playing stereotypical reality show roles. The series was scripted, heavily improvised and entirely created around Matt -- his very own Truman Show. Welcome to Joe Schmo.
posted to MetaFilter by zarq at 11:28 AM on April 24, 2012 (55 comments)

Beanplating on The Fifth Element from architecture students at the University of Waterloo.
posted to MetaFilter by Trurl at 5:39 AM on April 25, 2012 (198 comments)

MyTube60 gives you an easy way to string together clips from videos on youtube. It allows you to pick your videos, put them in order, and choose start and end points within the video. Also gives you the ability to search power hours put together by others.
posted to MetaFilter by jermsplan at 4:58 PM on April 23, 2012 (10 comments)

This is an online effort to catalog the last artworks made by artists before they die.
posted to Projects by Jason and Laszlo at 8:12 AM on April 16, 2012 (1 comment)

Writer and Interactive Fiction author Adam Cadre (previously) runs the Lyttle Lytton contest. A variation on the Bulwer-Lytton contest, the current incarnation of Cadre's contest has a 200-character limit per entry. Here are this year's winners.
posted to MetaFilter by griphus at 6:38 AM on April 16, 2012 (29 comments)

Virtual Lighting Studio. Works best in Chrome.
posted to MetaFilter by Sticherbeast at 5:08 PM on April 15, 2012 (12 comments)

Alive Inside is an upcoming documentary exploring how listening to music can briefly return memories to patients who previously seemed completely lost to Alzheimer's. An excerpt can be seen here.
posted to MetaFilter by gilrain at 2:25 PM on April 10, 2012 (22 comments)

Five years after Ze Frank's much-loved if uncategorizable The Show closed down (previously), the vlogger/humorist/online performance artist has returned with A Show. via
posted to MetaFilter by Doktor Zed at 5:02 PM on April 9, 2012 (72 comments)

"These automatic arms" is a short Windows game -- maybe 15 minutes long. You appear not to be in control of your arms. Bystanders may be in danger. A tin foil hat may help? Reunite with your child and give them a proper hug.
posted to Projects by nobody at 6:09 AM on April 2, 2012 (4 comments)

Nested.
posted to MetaFilter by cthuljew at 1:45 PM on April 8, 2012 (37 comments)

Olivier DE SAGAZAN usually puts paint and clay on himself, and sometimes hardly seems human. Often monstrous, sometimes disturbing, you may find it beautiful.
posted to MetaFilter by idiopath at 8:06 PM on April 7, 2012 (26 comments)

It has been no secret that Hillary Clinton has been a ferociously dedicated Secretary of State, visiting 95 countries and keeping mum about both the 2012 elections and her prospects after 2013. But when a photo of her checking her BlackBerry (still popular in DC!) while wearing Chanel-style sunglasses suddenly went viral, a Tumblr was born.
posted to MetaFilter by psoas at 12:13 PM on April 5, 2012 (166 comments)

"Dude" is a term with quite a history, possibly starting in the mid 19th century with Erastus Brooks, an editor of the New York Express (NYT excerpt, link to full PDF). In writing, "the "dude" craze began in New York City in 1883," apparently starting with the poem The True Origin and History of "The Dude", published on 14 January 1883, in the New York World. As the "vapid fops" traveled west, dude ranches sprang up, catering to city slickers. Some eight decades after the term proliferated in New York City, "dude" was applied to any male in African American vernacular. In 1969, dude was defined as nice guy, a regular sort of person [YT short clip] in Easy Rider, then claimed by surfers, as represented by Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982. Four years later, everyone loves Ferris Bueller, "he's a righteous dude." Baseketball turns the one word into a conversation in 1998, the same year El Duderino claims the term as a personal title. By 2011, the word, in some circles, has come around to the beginning, with Dude-itors, laid-back editors, the opposite of the "tightly wound, hyper-neurotic editor of yesteryear."
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 10:24 AM on April 6, 2012 (55 comments)

Opening Day is upon us once again. As always, there are a ton of predictions being made for the season.
posted to MetaFilter by reenum at 6:23 PM on April 5, 2012 (55 comments)

Reccommend me some fiction with unusual narrators!
posted to Ask Metafilter by marginaliana at 8:14 AM on April 3, 2012 (60 comments)

Taking off your glasses doesn't automagically make you more feminine ...or DOES IT?!
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 10:45 AM on April 5, 2012 (69 comments)

On May 19, 1984, an unemployed ice cream truck driver named Michael Larson went on Press Your Luck and over the course of two episodes, took home more money than had ever been won in the history of television: $110,237 -- to the shock of the show’s producers and host, the late Peter Tomarken. How did he do it? The show’s game board had only 5 patterns of 18 squares, and Mr. Larson had memorized them all. After the show, CBS tried to disqualify him but couldn’t, because Larson hadn’t done anything illegal. But they did refuse to allow those episodes to be aired in syndication. So, they didn’t re-air until 2003, when the Game Show Network produced a Tomarken-hosted documentary about Mr. Larson’s incredible win: Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.
posted to MetaFilter by zarq at 11:25 AM on April 3, 2012 (42 comments)

Dancing with Han Solo is a real thing that exists.
posted to MetaFilter by DoctorFedora at 6:33 PM on April 2, 2012 (99 comments)

Dutch astronaut and physician André Kuipers brought his camera aboard the International Space Station and took some photos in his spare time, the results are breathtaking.
posted to MetaFilter by quin at 8:00 AM on March 29, 2012 (36 comments)

You may have seen the news footage about a guy in a Batman suit being pulled over in suburban DC. It turns out that there is a lot more to the story.
posted to MetaFilter by COD at 11:37 AM on March 28, 2012 (75 comments)

Animated map of current wind in the U.S.
posted to MetaFilter by grouse at 1:41 PM on March 28, 2012 (54 comments)

The Mind is a Metaphor. A database of thousands of metaphors organized by category, like 18th century, Liquid, or Jacobite. It's maintained by University of Virginia English Professor Brad Pasanek.
posted to MetaFilter by shivohum at 6:06 PM on March 27, 2012 (19 comments)

Wikipaintings is a fantastic resource, a well curated database of the world's great paintings that will blow your mind. Click the logo in the top left corner for a collection of a random artist's work in chronological order. Their popular artists and popular artworks.
posted to MetaFilter by Blasdelb at 9:45 PM on March 26, 2012 (25 comments)

Kate Beaton, on loss and home.
posted to MetaFilter by kagredon at 11:22 PM on March 23, 2012 (41 comments)

Jim Rossignol, of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, explores the strange beauty at the edges and behind the scenes of video games. The article uses images from artist Robert Overweg.
posted to MetaFilter by gilrain at 2:09 PM on March 23, 2012 (17 comments)

"A futuristic buddy cop movie costarring Whoopi Goldberg and a dinosaur? How could that possibly go wrong?" Theodore Rex: The Best of the Worst.
posted to MetaFilter by codacorolla at 9:43 AM on March 19, 2012 (105 comments)

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
posted to MetaFilter by chunking express at 12:38 PM on March 22, 2012 (83 comments)

TIGsource is a blog about indie video games that also has a very active forum community of both amateur and professional indie game designers/programmers/artists. About two months ago one of the forum members (Daid) whipped up a tool to display the art images of a particular thread so he could find something, and it turns out it's a pretty great thing just to browse for its own sake, which you can do here. Updated once a day and, obviously, image intensive. [previous tigsource mentions]
posted to MetaFilter by curious nu at 2:53 PM on March 20, 2012 (5 comments)

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? (SLYT, but incredible)
posted to MetaFilter by roomthreeseventeen at 10:44 AM on March 20, 2012 (133 comments)

4x5 Kodachromes from the American war effort in 1942.
posted to MetaFilter by Sticherbeast at 9:01 AM on March 20, 2012 (33 comments)

The Swedish Chef (Muppet Wiki) is the incomprehensible preparer of foodstuffs for The Muppet Show. A rather literal variation of the Live-Hand Muppet concept, the Swedish Chef is a humanoid character, with human hands rather than gloves. An annotated list of every televised appearance of the Swedish Chef is after the fold... Børk! Børk! Børk! [Click here to view the thread translated fully into Mock Swedish]
posted to MetaFilter by Blasdelb at 9:30 PM on March 16, 2012 (45 comments)

Earth in perspective:

• Stratocam takes the most beautiful landscape satellite photographs from Google Maps, as voted on by visitors, and switches them every few seconds, with a fullscreen mode.
• ChronoZoom is an interactive, zoomable HTML5 timeline of the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens, with embedded video and lectures.

posted to MetaFilter by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 1:55 AM on March 17, 2012 (10 comments)

The first episode of the second season of PBS Arts web-original series Off Book is Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium (mini-documentary, ~7 min). "OFF BOOK explores cutting edge arts and the artists that make it. Breaking the mold of the definition of art, OFF BOOK explores the avant-garde, the experimental and the underground artforms that are supported by online communities."
posted to MetaFilter by flex at 2:50 PM on March 8, 2012 (10 comments)

Two brothers and two awesome courses in one awesome channel: John Green teaches you world history and Hank Green teaches you biology.
posted to MetaFilter by Blasdelb at 10:03 PM on February 29, 2012 (19 comments)