News You Can Bruise for 2008 December 29

At this point we're close enough to the present that I could just write weblog entries about these, but I press on. Happy 2008!

• The distinctive Halloween costume of my former co-worker, Brian Fitzpatrick.
• One of the themes of this series is me confessing my failure to find something cool and asking for help. I would really like to read this paper on Soviet attempts to build an Internet.
• A Digg-bait list of "bad" local TV ads, two of which (the first and fourth) are actually intentionally funny, and one of which (the third) at least makes sense once you know the local context. The guy in the third commercial has his own sketch-comedy sitcom on local TV which is really unbelievably bad, but even then he gets points for incorporating the employees of his furniture store into the sitcom.
• I wanted a mashup of the Last Supper with Dogs Playing Poker. Then I saw that very thing and stopped wanting it. I can only conclude that that picture causes anhedonia.
• A 13-part documentary on the history of Atari.
• A good guide to non-game homebrew DS software.

I put up a text dump from one of my favorite old PC games, Flightmare. Just because I felt like doing it. It was a fun game and its writing covers the spectrum of game humor: intentionally funny jokes and puns, over-the-top writing that you're not sure if it's supposed to be funny, and hilarious spelling errors.