Woot : One Day, One Deal (SM)

There's no timer in Shapely; take as long as you need to assemble the colored squares into the required Tetrissy shapes. But... every time you move a square, more pop up. Sometimes you can use this to your advantage. But... sometimes it spells doom, since you lose when the whole grid fills up. But... if you've earned enough points, you can buy various spells to alter the board. But... spells are expensive, so you can't rely on them every time you're in a jam. Shapely seems super-simple at first. But... enough buts. Just play it.

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Can you tell your steak restaurants from your meat markets? Steak House or Gay Bar? gives you the name of a real establishment and you have to guess which kind it is. I only scored 36%, which I guess isn't bad for a heterosexual vegetarian.

(Thanks, FipiLele!)

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They were the melodies that announced that cartoon funtime was here, that it was time again to surrender to the animated haze. In our Pavlovian raptures, us kids didn't notice that a lot of those songs were pretty lousy. Presenting part two of a three-part exploration we're calling Saturday Morning Nightmare: The Worst Theme Songs In Cartoon History. Gluttons for punishment and sugary breakfast cereals are invited to see Part One and Part Two.

WildC.A.T.S.
To be fair, this rap-rocking refugee from the musical litterbox does capture the gratuitous obnoxiousness of the comics that inspired it.

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They were the melodies that announced that cartoon funtime was here, that it was time again to surrender to the animated haze. In our Pavlovian raptures, us kids didn't notice that a lot of those songs were pretty lousy. Presenting part two of a three-part exploration we're calling Saturday Morning Nightmare: The Worst Theme Songs In Cartoon History. Don't worry - you'll still understand what's going on even if you haven't seen Part One.

Iron Man
You know the lawyers were huddling with the songwriters on this one. "OK, I think we can get away with 'I am Iron Man', but we better change a couple of notes of that guitar riff or Black Sabbath will have us in court." We won't hold the mullet against you, Tony. It was a crazy time.

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They were the melodies that announced that cartoon funtime was here, that it was time again to surrender to the animated haze. In our Pavlovian raptures, us kids didn't notice that a lot of those songs were pretty lousy. Presenting part one of a three-part exploration we're calling Saturday Morning Nightmare: The Worst Theme Songs In Cartoon History.

Gummi Bears
Nobody could have predicted that this half-hour candy commercial would give birth to an entirely new musical genre: synth-filk.

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During my teenage dumpster-diving safety-pinning punk rock heyday, no artifact of mass-media punxploitation was more coveted than a 1982 episode of Quincy, ME about a punk-rock suicide. Its portrayal of mindless, nihilistic fashion punks was so ridiculous, it became the standard by which all other such portrayals were measured. In the jargon of the scene, a "Quincy Punk" meant any punk-rock moron worried more about the structural soundness of his liberty spikes than about, say, nuclear holocaust. We all knew about and laughed about the Quincy punk episode, even if none of us had actually seen it. Hey, who collected tapes of Quincy? Occasionally you'd hear about some scary older guy who had a copy of it among his collection of snuff films and Mexican wrestling videos, but we never mustered up the courage to go to his house to watch.

But with the Internet, all things are watchable. Presenting the "band" that launched a thousand awful haircuts, Mayhem, performing the title cut from that episode, "Next Stop Nowhere"...

Read on for the flipside, the even narstier "Choke"...

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I'm not ashamed to admit it: I enjoy playing around with Wikipedia's random-article function. Don't judge me. I'm obviously not the only one. Web developer Jim Blackler took my dirty little secret one step further with Quizipedia, the quiz game built from fragments of random Wikipedia articles. The questions aren't ridiculously hard, but Quizipedia is an unforgiving task master. One wrong answer and you lose. Pro tip: use the "pass" button to come back to particularly tough ones.

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You're locked in a room. You see the door leading out, like so many others in so many other locked-room video games. It isn't even hard to reach. But you discover there's really only one way out of here: to hurl yourself onto giant spikes, or let something heavy crush you, or commit suicide in some other spectacularly gory way. That's the premise of Karoshi: Suicide Salaryman and its sequel Super Karoshi, where you can only beat each level by killing off your poor little guy and any other little guys with the misfortune to be in the vicinity. Designer Jesse Venbrux has hidden plenty of clever surprises in both games - when you seem to have reached the end, don't take the game's word for it.

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British designer Simon Page didn't create these posters celebrating the International Year of Astronomy for work. It was just a lark born out of his enthusiasm for astronomy and his love of the abstract, geometric style seen on so many book covers in the late '60s and early '70s. But the IYA folks got a look at them and the rest is cosmic history. They'll be available for purchase soon, but they're all worth a look now.

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As today's Wootcast shows, nothing excites the teeming mass of humanity like the release of a new operating system, and today people are filled with questions about how to get the most out of Windows 7. And about all kinds of other things, many of which make us want to throw up. Can you tell which of these came from the official Windows 7 FAQ and which came from...somewhere else?

1. What happened to the Quick Launch toolbar?
2. Can I recover files that I have accidentally deleted?
3. How were quartz crystals used for healing in Atlantis?
4. How do I open a file if I get an access denied message?
5. How should I cook my wild boar meat?
6. What's the difference between sleep, hibernate, and hybrid sleep?
7. IT HAS BEEN QUITE A WHILE SINCE YOU LAST ATE HARD-BOILED EGGS IN COMPETITION. HOW MANY DO YOU THINK YOU CAN EAT TODAY IN 12 MINUTES?
8. How do I add or remove index locations?
9. Isn't a hurdy-gurdy something played by a guy with a monkey?
10. If I see a blue or black screen or a screen that doesn't change, is my installation broken?
11. How long will algae-related stains stay off my roof once they are removed?
12. I've found a pager on the sidewalk and would like to use it. What can I do?
13. Why can’t I print to a printer in my homegroup?
14. Can you wax a man's scrotum?

Answers after the jump!

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