YouTube user HomeStarRunnerTron made a neat musical remix of scenes from the hilarious 1993 classic Groundhog Day, quite possibly the only movie to ever successfully pull off a comedic suicide montage. HomeStarRunnerTron assures that each and every bit of the remix was lovingly crafted solely out of bits and pieces from the movie, some auto-tune, and nothing else.

(Waxy via Laughing Squid)

This game by Sophie Houden popped up in a Reddit thread on a satirical map comparing FPS design in 1993 versus today which has been making its way around the Internets of late. The Linear RPG consists of a linear path connected by nodes; to beat the game (which doesn’t take too long), all you do is continue to walk along the line, although you may have to go backwards to grind against weaker enemies. As such, the game parodies linear role-playing games (*cough* Final Fantasy XIII) which consist of strung-together cutscenes, with a little stat grinding thrown into liven things up.

The mystery of The Linear RPG is that in spite of its deliberate monotony, it’s somehow fun. There’s gotta be a profound journal article on human psychology in there somewhere; surely Square-Enix and other game makers would be interested.

See also: Progress Quest.

>>>Play it here.

(Sophie Houden via Reddit)

Wired’s top product picks of 2010 (Wired)

Windows Phone 7 now available in the US (Switched)

Large Hadron Collider generates a ‘mini-Big Bang’ (BBC)

Lets try that again: Comic-Con registration starts November 22 (ComicsAlliance)

The deaths of Sackboy (Kotaku)

Robert Downey Jr. to voice Mr. Peanut (NYT)

How to hack an NES cartridge into a wireless router (Unconventional Hacker)

(title pic via Failblog via Blastr)

This past weekend, robbers armed with semi-automatic handguns stole 100 copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops from a GameStop. While two customers were “forced into a storage area at gunpoint,” the sheriff’s department says that neither they nor GameStop employees were hurt.

No, the game probably wasn’t stolen because video games cause violence OMG; rather, video games are worth money, and this is a popular, anticipated game. (It’s currently retailing for $60.) When a different band of gun-toting thieves stole 1,000 copies of Rock Band from a truck leaving a distribution center in Long Beach, California, no one accused rock-and-roll music of tempting youths to thievery. Although EA’s spokesman did drop a righteous one-liner: “We’re glad no one got hurt … We hope these guys end up forming a rock band in jail.”

For law-abiding citizens, Call of Duty: Black Ops will be released tomorrow.

(via PCMag)

Mark Haub, professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate a Twinkie every three hours for ten weeks in an attempt to prove that caloric intake, rather than the healthiness of food, was the main factor contributing to weight loss, to which I reply, “Duh.” Read on for details.

(via Reddit)

If this Newsweek essay written in 1995 by Clifford Stoll was to be believed, we’d be in a somewhat different place today.

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Flash forward to the present day; many large retail stores have been gutted of their staffs as a cost-saving measure, in part due to online competition.

Even more amusing is Stoll’s frustration with search; Stoll makes a whopper of a logical error when he assumes that the state of search technology with which he’s familiar is a fundamental property of the Internet, but he provides a handy snapshot of just how bad it was in 1995.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”

The article currently has about 3,000 Facebook recommendations on Newsweek.com, by the way.

(Newsweek via Nick Douglas)

Today in hypotheticals: As the geek world gears up for the international theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on November 18th, the Los Angeles Times informs us that none other than Steven Spielberg wanted to direct the Harry Potter films way back in 2001.

Spielberg was even offered the director’s chair by Warner Bros., but one notion of his caused the studio to pass on him, ultimately settling on middling Home Alone director Chris Columbus for the first film: Spielberg wanted the Harry Potter films to be animated by DreamWorks.

These comic book characters are more interesting than your regular action heroes. It would be very hard now to go back to Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard unless he was popping claws like Wolverine or started climbing up the wall like Spider-Man.

- Mark Millar on the power that realistic special effects have given (his?) super hero movies.

For the record we think that John McClane would kick Spider-Man’s pansy ass and that he and Wolverine would probably get along disturbingly well.

Fashion editor Caitlin Burke solved a seven-word, twenty-seven-letter Wheel of Fortune prize puzzle with the only hints up on the board being an apostrophe and one “L,” and only one letter being guessed before her “L,” which was an “R” that didn’t appear in the phrase. The amazing accuracy of her guess isn’t even the best part, but the fact that she used the puzzle’s answer, “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” as her reasoning for attempting the guess with only one letter on the board. Caitlin, on the other hand, probably feels the trip she won to the Caribbean is the best part.

Update: Burke explains her wheeling strategy: (video)

I just looked at it, and um, I don’t know, that’s what came to me immediately. I thought it was “I’ve got a funny feeling” but when “funny” didn’t fit I was a little rattled and “good” came to me and I knew that’s what it was.

(via Bits & Pieces and The Daily Mail)

For the uninitiated, speedrunning is a common practice in the gamer world where people attempt to beat games as quickly and efficiently as possible, leading to some very impressive results. Andrew Gardikis set the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning record at 5 minutes back in 2007, but he couldn’t recreate the feat at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. at Manhattan’s Nintendo World Store when Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was watching.

Japanese design studio Daisuke Motogi Architecture recently showed off the “Lost In Sofa,” a chair made of dozens of upholstered cubes such that books, TV remotes, drinks, and what have you can all be crammed in the chair itself. For the ultracompact living room.

Daisuke Motogi explains:

Things often get lost under the sofa. It’s ordinary for a coin which slipped out of your pocket, or a never-to-be-found remote to be accidentally found in between/underneath the sofa cushions. Maybe you’ll find a forgotten 10,000yen bill that you once hid there…

Got five figures to throw around on a piece of real comics history? Then you can go put in your bid at the Heritage Auction Galleries auction of the original pencil and inks of the first page of Watchmen, scripted by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons.

The bidding currently stands at $6,500, but don’t expect it to stay there for long. In the words of Heritage Auctions themselves:

Watchmen pages do not come along often, in fact Heritage has never offered one before! We know of many people who have read Watchmen who have never read any other comic book, and given that mass appeal, we expect very strong demand for this lot.

Just be careful when reading the rest of their description. It’s got a serious spoiler in it. ಠ_ಠ

Tomorrow at midnight Eastern time, entries will be closed for our contest to win a box full of Magic the Gathering: Scars of Mirrodin cards. So if you’re interested and haven’t yet entered the contest, be sure to tell us, in exactly ten words, why you like Magic.

Full details here.

We called it (not that it was hard to call): Less than a week after going on sale, Microsoft’s Kinect already appears to have been successfully hacked, as can be seen in the proof-of-concept video above and another below. But while a DIY electronics company called Adafruit Industries had placed a $2000 bounty on the code for an open-source Kinect driver, the NUI group hacker who pulled this off says he isn’t interested in the prize, and won’t be releasing the source.