An a capella Tribute to John Williams.

It’s worth noting that this is Karina’s fault for linking it to me. I’d put a medley like this on my iPod if it were in MP3 form.

It’s a cliche as old as time, linking what sounds like an amazing video about this leaked game or that upcoming movie or those Swedish models, and instead the anxious web user finds themselves watching Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, a cheesey 80’s song. It’s so common a phenomenon, that it has it’s own name “rickrolling”.

Well, MTV finally pulled their head out of their bad reality-tv laden arse and created MTV Music, a music video site that makes it easier than ever to trick your friends into watching bad eighties rock.

As a teenager I was in a family that didn’t really encourage rock music, let alone have the spare funds to waste on cable television, so I missed out on a lot of common reference points for pop culture. Now no longer! I can go watch all the pink and neon blue videos of the past. Even better, I can embed these gems of the codpiece era in blog posts, making other people suffer with me (or unsubscribe from my blog, I suppose.)

Welcome back to relevance, MTV.

I definitely need a tidbits section on the sidebar for stuff like this.

Square-Enix has released an RPG for the iPod called Song Summoner. You create warriors from various songs on your iPod, and fight foes in a Final Fantasy Tactics fashion with them. Ever want to see how the Bohemian Rhapsody stacks up in mortal combat against Thriller?

Oh. And it’s only $5.

I knew the iPod was also a software platform, but this is the first time I thought of it as something that a real game (as opposed to solitaire) could be played on.

Everyone else has linked to it, so the following isn’t precisely a new scoop, but here is a really fascinating article by Cameron Adams about the handwriting of typographers. I found the article timely because I’ve been corralling up information about what I see as the enhancement of typography in web pages with the current and upcoming CSS @font-face support for some sort of blog entry thing, which should be bursting forth somewhere in the near future. (I make no promises about it being insightful, mind you.)

I wasn’t shocked to discover that a lot of the typographers featured have horrible handwriting. After all, house designers allegedly have bad livingrooms, and web designers frequently have blogs that aren’t quite put together yet. There’s something about being involved with something professionally that causes a person to give up on any application of the career in their personal life. Mind you, my own handwriting is chicken scratch, so I’m not much of one to talk.

However, after some tragic scuffles with legibility the article comes to Nikola Djurek’s sample, which looks like something that was used to draft the Constitution. Handwriting of that quality makes me feel like my own attempt at imparting words to paper is a stillborn abomination that was tossed into a dumpster somewhere around the third grade.

Actually, I’m pretty sure my handwriting was better in the third grade than it is now. I’d hit the high point of mastering cursive, and had yet to begin the downward slide in legibility that would coincide with my obsession with keyboards and the flickering glow of monitors.

I need to add an “elsewhere in the web” sidebar or section to this site, I think, for stuff like this. Hardly a novel concept, I’m sure. I’m sure there’s a WordPress plugin (or twelve) for that, considering the many blogs I’ve seen equipped with such. Does anyone have any suggestions? I guess I could stop being lazy and look for myself, actually.