"The best free and cheap New York. Every day." Daily listings of neat free & cheap stuff to do in NYC.

Michael DeForge's ongoing webcomic. It's about ants.

Nice cheap, relaxed bar on the Lower East Side in NYC.

Solid art & music tumblr from my bud Abby.

Beirut-based graffiti artist & graphic designer.

Iranian graffiti artist

"...a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the 'most succinct word', and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It refers to 'a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will offer something that they both desire but are unwilling to suggest or offer themselves.'"

Here's the short version. Geniuses:
* look at problems in many different ways: much insight is just the convergence of different perspectives.
* make their thoughts visible: diagrams are useful.
* produce: the best way to take a great picture is to take a lot of pictures.
* make novel combinations: work across disciplines...
* force relationships: ...even when they don't want to work together.
* think in opposites: doublethink can be useful. Embrace ambivalence.
* think metaphorically: to understand how things work. Just don't mistake metaphor for reality.
* prepare themselves for chance: get excited by the unexpected.

"Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know 'how' to think, instead of 'what' to think."

"Planetary Resources’ mission is clear: apply commercial, innovative techniques to explore space. We will develop low-cost robotic spacecraft to explore the thousands of resource-rich asteroids within our reach. We will learn everything we can about them, then develop the most efficient capabilities to deliver these resources directly to both space-based and terrestrial customers. Asteroid mining may sound like fiction, but it’s just science."

This is a real thing.

Great link blog from Joshual Schachter, Jeff Smith & many other contributors.

"The purrfect Lorem Ipsum alternative." Yet another lipsum generator variant, this time with cat-related words & phrases.

"A quick and simple service for getting pictures of kittens for use as placeholders in your designs or code."

Holy moly, it's a new show with Ze Frank!

Official website of the "English psychedelic downtempo/psybient music project" (Wikipedia).

Interesting article on Israeli airport security, which actually seems much more effective & efficient & significantly less invasive than anything I've experienced in the USA.

Review of a collection of essays by Seymour Krim, "a self-styled literary wild man who stands squarely between Mailer and the Beats."

Website of Ian Huebert, artist & illustrator for The Rumpus.

Cool, cute HTML5 canvas MMORPG, developed by Mozilla as a demo of new web tech. Very easy game tho, got 100% in one sitting.

"animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness."

A wiki catalog of "user interfaces designed to trick people": "Normally when you think of 'bad design', you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind."

"xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this."

"Pickle is a cross-platform pixel editor for creating game animations, tiles and sprite sheets. Pickle is optimized for the Flixel framework, but it loads and saves images in JPG, PNG and GIF formats so it can be used for other game frameworks as well." Haven't used it yet, but it looks cool!

.vimrc commands & autocorrect to make vim more word-processing friendly.

.vimrc commands to make vim more word-processing-friendly.

Cactus's brother, a wild musician and artist. His blog has some really cool digital artwork.

35-minute video conversation between adventure game legends Ron Gilbert & Tim Schafer on what makes an adventure game, what makes them good, the (percieved?) "death" of adventure games, and the new one that they're going to make (Double Fine Adventure). Wonderful video, particularly if, like me, you grew up playing their games.

Adorable short flash game by axcho and knivel.

Great beginners tutorial.

"CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels. Our mission is to help educate and empower artists and their fans to foster a more viable and sustainable future for music."

A 1000px grid for web designers, by Elliot Jay Stocks.

Unbelievable 24-hour comic by Boulet. So good!

CoffeeScript is a programming language that emphasizes readability & brevity of code (inspired by ruby, python, & haskell), & predictably transcompiles to javascript.

A quite comprehensive guide to migrating an existing WordPress-powered site to Jekyll.

Portfolio site of Paul Veer, freelance illustrator & animator from the Netherlands. He's done a bunch of work with Vlambeer.

"Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems."

Basically a whole lot of boot sequences from various vintage & modern OSes. Fullscreen it for the complete experience. Weird/amazing/boring/nostalgic.

Chinese sculptor working out of Beijing and Xiamen. He creates glossy, surreal, grotesque stuff and looks like he has quite a sense of humor!

Powerful interview with Maurice Sendak.

"The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives."

A lot of very nice fonts, and a beautiful site!

Underwater photos of dogs. Amazing & hilarious.

Cage-rage gifs for days.

Nice tutorial from PSDTuts on using Illustrator & Photoshop to make fancy shiny 3D text.

Cross-browser compatibility tables for HTML, CSS, & DOM manipulation, from PPK.

"Compatibility tables for support of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and more in desktop and mobile browsers." Quite comprehensive & useful.

An article by web dev Joni Korpi: he designed his blog "mobile-first", so that the default version of the website would be simple & mobile-friendly, then encapsulated the fancier styling for the site in CSS media queries. That way, old IE would simply serve the simple, basic mobile version (as it doesn't understand the media queries), leaving Korpi free to use modern CSS styling for the "desktop" versions of the site.

It's a good trick: instead of worrying about compatibility between individual CSS declarations, you can just hide them all on the other side of a media query...!

A bunch of shapes & symbols (including an infinity symbol and a yin-yang!) that you can make with a single HTML element and some clever CSS. Neat!

CSS compatibility tables from Quirksmode.

Richard Stallman's proposal for an equitable system of file-sharing that would support artists, with some specific notes on implementation and encouraging international adoption.

A funny, rapid-fire TEDx talk by psychologist Shawn Achor.

There's a pervasive idea that goes roughly like this: "If I'm successful, I'll be happy." Achor posits that there are problems with this: first, that once (if) we achieve that benchmark for success, whatever it is, we'll always immediately go about resetting that benchmark further away, and, consequently, our mental requirement for happiness moves with it. (As an aside: it seems to me that this may be a reaction to the attainment of that goal not bringing happiness -- it doesn't occur to us to find fault in the overarching (unconscious) thesis of success -> happiness, so we assume that where we went wrong was in assuming that THIS success -> happiness, and we apply the same formula to the next major task that comes along.) Second, this is a poor representation how the brain actually works.

A much more accurate idea, says Achor, is this one: "If I'm happy, I'll be successful." People tend to do better work when they are happier and more positive, and consequently it is the people who are already happy who become more successful. Additionally, says Achor, the release of dopamine associated with happiness activates the brain's learning centers. (Presumably the rest of us see happy, successful people and, perceiving a (valid) correlation between happiness and success, tend to infer an invalid causation of success -> happiness when really we should think happiness -> success.)

So the task becomes, then, to already be happy, or at least positive, regardless of "success" -- and this, suggests Achor, is simpler than it sounds. Here's the list of daily tasks he gives for training your brain to be happier and more receptive to good things in 21 days:

* 3 gratitudes - list 3 new things you're grateful for (no repeats!) - trains you to become more aware of, and look out for, the positive things in your life instead of only thinking about the negative stuff

* journaling - write about 1 positive experience in the last 24 hrs - same as the 3 gratitudes, and inspires some reflection

* exercise - teaches the brain that behavior matters & feels good

* meditation - overcomes "cultural ADHD", helps you focus

* random acts of kindness - write a positive email (or a letter or whatever), praising & supporting someone in your social circles.

A silent comic about cats & zombie rats with excellent animal characters, by Edward J Grug III.

An online implementation of the Oblique Strategies deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Nice yoga place in Astoria.

Beer distributor in Astoria. Looks good.

A listing of all the fonts in Google's Web Fonts service that have variants -- a sign of quality in a font.

A simple & straightforward guide to git commands. "No deep shit!"

Hilarious super-quick presentation by Gary Bernhardt about the things that ruby and javascript do that make you go WAT.

"A journal focusing on creativity, risk, and what connects us as artists": a series of interviews with artists & designers in an elegantly designed format.

Heavily designed articles by Trent Walton, with fancy CSS.

Hahaha way to go, TPB.

Opera's web developers' documentation resource.

Home of Joshua Davis, early Flash pioneer (remember Praystation?) and procedural/generative artist.

MDN's extensive online documentation wiki for various web technologies, quite useful for web developers.

A monthly & quarterly journal of quality art writing.

A poem involving sources of inspiration, by Stephen Elliott.

Know Your Meme article on the "Streisand Effect", which occurs when an attempt at censorship results in publicizing that which was intended to be censored.

Solid dude, composer and musician.

Poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (2005).

Excerpted from "Circus Fire, 1944," from "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart".

An article by Roxane Gay for The Rumpus on the lazy maintenance of the white-male-dominated literary status quo, with an actually fascinating discussion unfolding in the comments. It's set off by a list of books Lev Grossman (critic, Time Magazine) said he's looking forward to in 2012, ending with a glib apology (that doesn't quite ring true) for the list consisting entirely of white men. Roxane calls him out on his insensitivity and cheery acceptance of his own prejudices. The comments thread has an excellent discussion, which Lev himself joins in on.

From the 1960s and 70s.

A gallery of badass women from WWII, contributed to Wikimedia Commons by the National Archives and Records Administration.

How to do custom scrollbars in WebKit, from CSS-Tricks.

Writer artist, teacher, and game designer operating out of Copenhagen. Creator of the flash game adaptation of "The Artist is Present" and "Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment".

Official site of musician Nicolas Jaar.

An article by Roger Smith on the "untranslatable" Danish word "hyggelig", which has connotations of hominess, coziness, warmth, friendship, and sitting round a fire with friends, blankets and ale while a winter storm rages outside. It also has perhaps a touch of the insular and exclusive to it, however...

Comics about the Iraq War, on ACT-I-VATE.

"Straight baby thighs, son."

Hilarious article (surprisingly respectfully) ripping on a lot of today's big names in hip hop. Supposedly by Ghostface himself.

Article from Chris Coyier on lesser-known attribute selectors in CSS.