@beep made a favstar-to-favrd simulacra Greasemonkey for you.

What a mensch, that guy

hi, where did you get your ocarina? I cannot see who made it from here! Terry

—I pretty much lost my shit over this.

I don’t do Facebook. I’ve never ousted anyone as the mayor of some hipster bar. Flickr, sure, but I’m a crummy photographer and don’t really connect there. Twitter, for all intents and purposes, is my social network. When I tell people I don’t bother with the other ones, they don’t seem to get it – why is Facebook more frivolous than 140 character “tweets”, they ask. Plus, everyone’s over there in Zuckerland, come on, it’s basically the same thing.

Except that it’s not. Facebook is where people go to dump their lives, waste time and play vampire scrabble while they should be working. There’s no artform, it’s just a heap of digital detritus, which is fine, people need that. Twitter, though, when you’re doing it right, requires craft. Favrd helped us find that.

So, like the rest of you, I was sad to see Dean had shut it down. I share some of your confusion and anger and frustrated respect at what Dean built. But mostly I’m just sad. Not in a “someone died” kind of way, more in a “I can’t believe the town newspaper shut down” kind of way. To me, that’s what Favrd always was, the newsletter (or take out menu, as it were) for our little community, not a community in and of itself.

Dean was clearly tired of being the town crier or enabler or whatever it was we all ultimately took Favrd for granted for being. I can’t fault him that and I thank him for what we had and thrill at the thought of his next project, I’m certain it will be excellent. I found some of you before that wonderful cock and I’ll find more of you after but it’s sort of amazing to think of what we had, fleeting though it may have been.

I loved this photo essay in this week’s New Yorker and I’m glad they’ve put it all online, and added commentary from staff photographer Platon. The photos are unfortunately rather small online, they’re quite striking in print and worth seeking out.

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

—Washington Post, your whitebread cluelessness is almost charming. Almost. (Article, with correction in place) [via Mike Montiero]

That’s an $9 billion dollar check, quite possibly the biggest physical check ever written. Well, besides the ones they give to golf tournament winners.

Last.fm’s 2009 zeitgeist pages are fantastic

Make no mistake, I hate end of year lists, but last.fm has gone beyond that lazy trope that shows up every December. They poured over the mountain of data, figured out who listened to what, built pages for each artist with real information (not just some boring, arbitrary opinion), added data visualizations, photos, events and made something great. Dig the design, too.

I’d love to see this extended into a broader trend application, broken down by genre maybe, available at any time.

I mean, despite his namesake line of sports drinks, Gatorade may not want to feature Woods’ face above the phrase “Is It In You?” anymore.

—@gordonshumway on the Tiger Woods thing. She may be the first person to ever make me wanna read more about sports.

Times Skimmer looks like an interesting project from the New York Times

Seems like the combination of a few past experiments, like Times Extra and Times Reader. I like the idea of a full page digest of news and the execution is quite well done – all markup and javascript, works in a browser without fancy plug-ins. Mobile render is a bit hard to use, though.

After all, he’s been turning out team after team of cocky, whitebread under-achievers for the last two decades, and it’s time someone showed him how the rest of the country feels about his brand of basketball.

—From a Craigslist post from someone looking for cheap tickets to the Wisconsin-Duke basketball game so he can moon Coach K. This looks like it could be my first Kickstarter project. [via my awesome baby brother]