I will readily admit my excitement for the new Super Mario Bros. Wii game. The actual gameplay looks like any classic Mario side scroller but with 4-player multiplay action and a serious understanding of the legacy they've built over the past 20+ years. I mean, they actually use elements from Mario 2 in this one and that's pretty much unheard of. Beyond that, the site design is phenomenal - the page wipe silhouettes, the loader, the favicon and the copious amounts of real content make this all a very enjoyable browsing experience. I suggest spending some time on here.

Site heads up via Poe.

It's getting to be that time of year again when all the Best Of Year End lists start crawling out of the woodwork. My favorite of these type of lists is the Sleeves of the Year style nominations; what artist had the best album art? With the sheer volume of records coming out in a year it's impossible to keep up and see it all but Creative Review has a slew of fine nominees. I'm not sure I understand the visual allure of the Bill Callahan record but I suppose that's neither here nor there.

In your opinion, what's the best record sleeve design of the year? I'm curious what I may have missed...

I've always been impressed by quality icon design so it makes sense that I'm fairly enamored with the offerings at Iconwerk; the portfolio of Stefan Dziallas. He's done work with Frog, created various pictograms and offers up a variety of other icons for various companies. I am smitten with good icon design - being able to say so much with so little and Iconwerk is crushing it.

Not that I'm really all that surprised by it but did you know that, in Japan, the Kit Kat bar comes in a giant variety of flavors. I don't mean "chocolate" and "white chocolate" - I'm talking Soybean, Chestnut, Caramel and Salt, Green Tea, Lemon Vinegar, Kiwifruit, Mango.. MANGO Kit Kat!

If there was every any doubt that Japan was the master of variety let this be a testament to their cause.

Happy Friday the 13th! Watch some videos!

• Hot Chick Risky Business Fail - not convinced this wasn't setup but it's still pretty perfect in that America's Funniest Home Videos kind of way.
• Feeding a Cat with Chopsticks - I realize cute animal videos may not be everyone's bag but, c'mon, look at this thing. It's either the most adorable creature to grace the planet or a robotic Christmas craze invented by the Japanese that has yet to hit US shores. Either way, I welcome its existence into the world.
• Poison Sockets - perfect. Via Zackle.
• Top 50 Worst Video Game Voice Acting - entirely too long but skip to 4:13 to hear the top 10, entirely worth it. Via Joey.
• Jerry Lewis Typewriter - so good.
• The Slingjaw Wrasse - this fish is terrifying in so many ways.
• Numb3r's Describes IRC - I love terribly descriptions of technology in television and movies but this really takes things to a whole new level, particularly the l33t sp34/<.
• 2012 Trailer - don't forget, 2012 is in theatres this weekend. You are required to view it.

Have a great weekend!

Much work to be done today.. not much time for the blogging:

• The Penny's End is Near - Daniel is convinced we need to get rid of the penny.. there are many others that agree. I'm not so sure.
• White Denim - "I Start To Run" - the official US version of the video from their great album Fits. I still prefer the UK version of the video but either way I'm extremely excited to see them on Monday.
• Beautiful HTML - this is what it should look like.
• Burywood - There Exists An Abstraction Ladder - Thanks to Paige I became aware of this band. Thanks to Bandcamp I am able to obtain the album without living in Austin. I suggest you do the same.

Newsweek have posted a (strangely low quality) video of The Decade in Seven Minutes. Relive the past ten years in under ten minutes. It's a pretty nice overview of the high points mixed in with a few nuggets that I'd forgotten about. I wish they focused on a few more positive things but the impactful points in history are rarely uplifting.

Yesterday, I got my account approved to try out SetJam; a forthcoming site intended to help you discover TV shows on the web. It's pretty similar in scope to Clicker; as I have mentioned before. I'm not sure what I was really expecting from either service but it turns out that I'm pretty underwhelmed by both.

At the heart of it, SetJam is a search engine. The main developer even gives great amounts of insight on how the engine works and it is, supposedly, better than Google. In that regard, the site works well. You search for a show and inevitably some options come up of places to purchase (or maybe stream) the program. Great, but isn't that just an alternative to Google?

The site does offer some other options; such as saving your "Favorite Shows" but it runs all of that functionality through your Facebook account which, frankly, I've no interest in coupling with SetJam. There is zero option to just save the information on their servers, nor is there any way to provide feedback / contact the developers unless you do it through Facebook. Maybe I'm just being a codgy old man but I really don't want all my online activity running through one central hub showing what I'm doing.

And maybe my Torrent Friendly ways are blinding me but I don't really see the benefit of having a site that, mostly, just links me to the Amazon store to download a movie.

In the end, neither SetJam nor Clicker really do much of anything for me - though I think both are done quite well.

Since I had no idea such a thing was set to exist I will assume you did not either. So here's the official heads up - It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia will release A Very Sunny Christmas, a 60-minute movie, on November 17th. You can watch a little behind the scenes bit on it here or just watch the commercial.

The Choose Your Own Adventure Visualized essay is impressive to say the very least. First there is the notion of appreciating gathering statistical data from books of my childhood and, secondly, it's coupled with a series of fantastically designed and implemented charts and graphs. Add to that the Animations, Gallery and Playable Version and.. well.. you've got a not-to-be-missed web phenomena!

Typically I'd shrug off a web article about childhood nostalgia but this is something of a different breed; brilliant and enjoyable in so many respects.

The story behind The Beatles Never Broke Up is laughably insane - parallel dimensions and what not - but that's not the point. The point is that it's a quality mashup of Beatles solo songs presented as if it were an unreleased album from the band. I've been giving it a good listen for the past few days and rather enjoy it.. it's familiar but still new.

Related: Scenes from an Alternate Universe in which The Beatles accept an offer from Lorne Michaels to reunite and perform on SNL. At the heart of it, it's fan fiction.. but without the creepy parts.

Both links via WAXY; basically the best site on the Internet.

What's the most impressively immersive / over-the-top / informative site you've encountered this year? If you didn't say JimCarrey.com you're honestly missing out. I realize it seems very odd for him to have one of the most insane sites that I've seen in a long time but it's true! Every page has tons going on, there are great transitions between sections and it actually manages to contain a load of relevant information. In terms of 100% Flash experiences, this one wins the top prize in terms of awe factor.

Looks like Typekit is officially live and ready for usage. If you aren't familiar, Typekit is a service / method for using a number of OpenType fonts in web design as plain text. This is good and bad - it means less time spent making graphics to replace text and more flexibility in design but it also means that a novice designer can make their entire site use this font instead of something "lame" like Verdana. It's a bit scary for the future look of the web but the potential good, hopefully, will outweigh the bad.

Long story short, the service is now ready for live deployment and they've got a nice trial signup deal if you're curious to try it out.

It'd been too long since I visited the works of Mike Bertino and he seems to have only improved over time. Not that he wasn't always great but the new stuff is even further out, more surreal and filled with entertaining characters. I'm also pleased to see that he has a Shop setup with a number of very affordable prints - "Don't Forget to Pack" being my favorite of the group.

Be sure to visit his blog for even more newness worth enjoying.

Given 60 Minutes propaganda report on the MPAA last week and the general nature of Huffington Post I am inclined to read this article on the Electronic Pearl Harbor with a grain of salt. That being said, the source of the information - Jim Lewis, director of Technology and Public Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies - seems to be a pretty reputable source. Though not a government entity he was in charge of creating a report for the Obama administration regarding cyber security. According to him, in 2007:

Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.

Is this paranoia at its greatest usage? A lot of this seems pretty dramatic and quite an area of concern if anything confidential was breached but this is the first we're hearing of it.

Evan Williams has posted a rather lengthy bit of insight regarding the forthcoming official "ReTweet" feature that Twitter is going to roll out soon (it's in beta now). The interesting part, to me, is the amount and style of thought that went in to putting this feature together. Instead of just taking the standards that the community has established, they're tweaking the way things will work; despite it possibly not sitting well with the masses. It seems to be similar to a bit of tough parenting.. we'll see how that works out for them.

Via Dolan. Oh, and I realize the irony of following a post about tuning out with a post about a forthcoming Twitter feature.. bah!

Over the past year I've encountered a number of articles promoting the notion of "Slow Living" - taking a moment to tune out the cacophony that is The Internet and just exist. A return to form if you will. This Washington Post article is another in that same line of thinking and contains a few interesting factoids:

In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that's 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

...

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

Part of me is quite tempted by this notion of just completely severing the connection but then how would I spend my free time?