Ireneo’s Memory

Just under two years ago, I listed the fifty best links of my first thousand posts.  Here, now, are the best of the best from the second generation:

1. Knytt Stories: A free, extensible, and elegantly minimalist platforming game with rock-solid controls.

2. Gear’s Heart: A frankly astonishing piece of handiwork.  Just turn to crank to experience (and recover from) heartbreak.

3. Complexification: Proof that making software that makes art is itself art.

4. One Year In 40 Seconds: Soothing time-lapse photography/animation.

5. Catatumbo: The Everlasting Storm: In Venezuela, there is a storm that has raged every night for hundreds of years.

6. This. Fucking. Election.: We’ll remember the buzzwords far longer than we remember the scandals.

7. Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken: Chicken chicken chicken chicken.

8. 5 Card Nancy: Telling a story competitively and cooperatively.

9. The World Community Grid: Do the right thing.  Donate those clock cycles you aren’t using to charitable science.

10. And I Refuse To Forget: A short film about the power of love and the dangers of memory.

11. “Weightless” by Erika Janunger: A clever and stylish piece of media art.

12. How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: Why computer scientists probably shouldn’t take up literary criticism.

13. Cake Wrecks: The very best of the very worst of commercial cake making.

14. “Garbage Island” by VBS.TV: A raw and striking documentary about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

15. The Light Blubs of Pieke Bergmans: Light fixtures in need of a diet.

16. Dean Kamen’s “Luke Arm”: The future of prosthetic arms.

17. Evolving Clocks: Proof that evolution is a blind watchmaker, provided the clocks can breed.

18. The Comedy of Victor Borge: Classic pieces by one of the all-time great musical comedians.

19. The Junior Science Club Musical Archive: The life’s work of the prolific Logan Whitehurst.

20. Portrait Of The Godfather Using The Hand-Drawn Script: A stunning combination of design and obsessive compulsion.

21. The Loudness War: How digital recording, instead of enriching popular music, is draining it of its essence.

22. Modern Hobo Code: How hobos find the best ATMs.

23. team9: Superlative music mashups from down under.

24. “The Ecstacy of Influence” by Jonathan Lethem: A thoughtful essay about the artistic merit of plagiarism.

25. Using Photographs To Enhance A Static Scene: New tools with which your eyes can be lied to.

26. The Hauntening: Short film showing what happens when the ghosts aren’t too bright.

27. Garfield Minus Garfield: Easily the most brilliant of the Garfield remixes on the net.

28. Keepon: The most adorable of all the robots.

29. How To: The Droste Effect: Escherize your photos.

30. Teach The Starlings: A mad quest to educate starlings about their origins.

31. “City of Shadows” by Alexey Titarenko: Haunting, eerie long-exposure photography.

32. The Reimagined Still-Life Paintings Of Jose Manuel Ballester: Imagine your favorite paintings with all the people removed.

33. Wordle: A powerful and intuitive new text visualization web application.

34. Principles of Economics, Translated: What economists really think about, behind the buzzwords.

35. The Disumbrationist Hoax: One man humiliated the art world by revealing that it will accept anything as genius.

36. Kids In Mind: Movie Ratings That Work: Forget G through NC-17.  This site has the best movie rating system you’ve ever seen.

37. Ladies of the Ages: Beauty through the generations.

38. The Wooden Mirror: Your reflection, in animatronic wood.

39. “My Paper Mind” by Javan Ivey: The baffling beauty of stratastencil animation.

40. Seven Deadly Glasses: The sins, as hilarious wine glasses.

41. “Always Outsiders, Never Outdone” by The Prodigy: A free album of solid remixed electronica.

42. Igudesman & Joo: Comedic chamber music, provided the chamber is a rubber room.

43. The Journey of Mankind: Our current best guess at human migration.

44. Books That Make You Dumb: See what kind of brains those who like the same books as you are sporting.

45. Lost Cities: Photographing the ruins of lost civilizations the world over.

46. How To Make A Crowd Without Extras: How to turn a car load of props and a couple of guys into an entire war.

47. Map of Humanity: All that we are, in geographic form.

48. Ambigram.Matic: If you’re looking for a site that generates ambigrams, look no further!

49. Beyond Red & Blue: Understanding America’s political landscape using subdivisions other than state lines.

50. Norwegian Recycling: A young kid with real talent for chopping & mashing music.