Incredible recreation of The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up from the original samples. Mind boggling to think about deconstructing it all to rebuild from scratch.

Speaking of the P100, Cee-Lo’s Fuck You comes in at #26, and the accompanying blurb is a nice summary of the state of the music business:

How an instant classic works in 2010: a YouTube lyric video gets posted on 4,500 blogs and racks up two million clicks in its first five days online. William Shatner sings it, 50 Cent remixes it, Cee-Lo himself performs it on every talk show known to man. The official music video is viewed online 29 million times. It gets nominated for four Grammys, including Record and Song of the Year. Everybody and their mom gets it stuck in their heads for months, but nobody minds, because it’s one of the most joyful break-up anthems in history, a song so bulletproof, even Gwyneth Paltrow couldn’t completely ruin it on “Glee”. And yet, so far, it isn’t a blockbuster sales-wise, with both the song and its accompanying album barely cracking the top 10 for only a week. But as long as the Internet exists, “Fuck You” will live on, long after anybody remembers what an Xbox or an Atari is.

Also, true story: there was a 10 year old girls birthday party over the back fence this afternoon. The boombox was pumping out Top 40 hits, and the girls gleefully sang along. Then Cee-Lo came on:

I see you driving ‘round town

With the girl that I love

And I’m like

At this point I’m bursting with anticipation that the gaggle of girls will swear their little hearts out…

…

…

Forget you

Damn radio edits.

Pitchfork’s choice. I downloaded #1 and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Tim Carmody lists 33 films to watch to make you instantly more of a buff:

Also, I knew I didn’t want to pick the best movies ever made, or my favorites, or even the most important. Again, that pressure, it’ll cripple you. I wanted to pick a smattering of films that if you watched any given, sufficiently large subset of them, you’d know a lot more about movies than when you started.

How game developers use MAME, despite publishers believing it is the root of all evil:

When we looked closer into this we discovered that the “port” team had actually written an emulator for that console (based on MAME btw) and simply used it to run a hacked version of the original ROM image which they’d downloaded from a warez site.

Why Shakespeare helps.

The New York Times Chrome “app” is very nice - simple and readable. The design is so similar to a touch interface that the first thing I tried to do was flip the pages with a mouse gesture. Failed, unfortunately - would have been a nice surprise if it worked.

It only works in Chrome, which is kind of weird.

Everything you wanted to know about South American Death Metal Grindcore but were too terrified to ask - and hear.

I like the idea of the eBook, but it seems like the industry is making the same mistakes the music business did - heavily DRM’d, non transferable, single device files. iBooks doesn’t allow you to read a book on your Mac that you bought on your iPhone. Google Books don’t work on Kindles or iBooks. You need to create an ‘Adobe identity' before you can read the book you bought. Etc.

It’s like they want you to keep buying the dead tree option - and maybe they do, for the time being at least.

If I was FIFA I’d pick Qatar too based on these images (despite several looking like the Eye of Sauron). Pity none of them exist yet, and interesting that the environmental spin has started already: “eco friendly soccer utopia” indeed.