Collectible card games have never been an interest of mine. Unless you count the Culdcept series…which is digital so it doesn’t really count. Wizards of The Coast just released some artwork from their latest Magic: The Gathering expansion set, New Phyrexia, and this stuff is kind of gorgeous. The detail that goes into this artwork…

Aperture Laboratories is looking for investors. They’ve created four videos to showcase some of the technologies they’ve been working on: Panels: Bot Trust: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMSAzZ76EU Turrets: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i-nMWgBUp0 Boots: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX9Sc88qreg Portal 2 comes out a week from today. I am…excited. Order it now.

Nice profile of Radiolab in the New York Times. This is how “Radiolab” addresses the tension between authenticity and artifice: capturing raw, off-the-cuff moments (or trying many times to get them right) and editing them in a gripping pastiche. The hope, Abumrad said, is to preserve the sense of excitement and discovery that often drains…

The Anonymous/Sony battle that’s been raging this week just blows my mind. Could you imagine end-users demanding permission from Nintendo to use NES cartridge programmers back in the 80s? Or the ability to install an alternate OS? Well that’s basically what’s happening here in 2011. At one point Sony provided users with the tools to…

From 2006 to 2009, Spain’s El Bulli restaurant was named “The Best Restaurant In The World” by Restaurant magazine, though they slipped to second place in 2010. El Bulli sits high in the mountains of Catalonia, Spain at the end of a winding one-lane road. The Amateur Gourmet documented the 30 course meal (!) they…

Someone at Salon just discovered Star Wars: The Musical, an original high school musical production that I worked on. I was on the stage crew doing…well, I can’t remember. 1996 was a long time ago. I do remember pushing the massive wall of the garbage compactor onstage with a handful of other nerds, though. At…

If Japan melts down, America will be okay. Japan won’t be okay. In fact it’ll be pretty horrible over there for a long time. But radiation levels over here are not anything to be concerned about. …health and nuclear safety experts agree that even if radiation levels around the plant reach Chernobyl-like levels, Japan’s disaster…

You Are Listening To Los Angeles takes live LAPD police radio calls and overlays them with ambient music. You wouldn’t think so, but the end result is greater than the sum of its parts. The live feed is provided by a contributor to Radio Reference, which also hosts hundreds of other live feeds from across…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cds7lSHawAw This is a promo for a 13 minute short film, Las Palmas, which is in production and will be released later this year at a Swedish film festival.

You’re not allowed to take pictures inside the Sistine Chapel. Because someone’s already taken one for you. Pan around, zoom in and out. Kind of cool.