Today’s theme is interactive mash-ups and remixes:

• Play Lunar Lander in the Windows copy dialog when you’re copying lots of files from one place to another.
• Live the dream: you can be an unpaid K-Mart associate in VR. Closed for Christmas, but now back and chock-full of post-holiday White Sale and bluelight specials, along with everyday deals, like buying six cassette tapes and getting the seventh free. One explanation here.
• Put “Doom running on” in Google and you’ll see some fun autocompletes. The pregnancy test one’s a hoax. But running Doom in Windows Notepad seems legit.
• There’s candy bar Doom, which is frankly pretty dumb but for the slogan, “do not eat if it’s Turing complete.”
• You might have missed how rats have been trained to play Doom II. They don’t seem to be very good at it, though, but are kinda cute running on the ball.
• Sadly, Doom running on an IKEA TRÅDFRI GU10 RGB lamp controller has only left a trace after a takedown. But, through the magic of archive.org, there’s more that can be unearthed, including the code (but not the video, sadly).
• Katamari Hack. The items above are all pretty involved to do yourself. This last one’s a little fussy to get going, but just 30 seconds work. On that page is a bit of Javascript at the top, in a box. Copy it. Go to some web page, such as this one or this, on Chrome (may work on others) and hit F12 (on the PC; on a Mac it’s command-option-i). In the debug area that appears, choose the Console tab, paste the Javascript, hit return. A dialog should appear in the web page. Hit “Start!” and then right-click hold to roll the ball around. Have fun! Note that browsers and https security has evolved such that this little hack won’t work on many pages, so enjoy it on the few that do.

Let’s focus on colors. We’re in, we’re out, it’s quick, unlike yesterday’s post:

• Jos Stam told me about the color named Isabelline. The story’s probably apocryphal, but fun. This one’s now in my neurons along with chartreuse and puce. As well as the trademarked pink (I found the full rundown here).
• Is it fuschia or fuchsia? I finally forced myself to learn the right one a few years back.
• Car paint in real life: it’s complicated.
• Harvard’s art museum has a collection of pigment for colors. It’s off limits to most people, in part because some contain dangerous chemicals. Someone just tipped me off that there are video tours, however. Here are three: short, medium, longer.
• Wikipedia has a crazy long list of colors, divided into parts. Here’s G-M. I like the duh text there, “Colors are an important part of visual arts, fashion, interior design, and many other fields and disciplines.” Proof that Wikipedia is meant for aliens who have never visited Earth before.
• If you just can’t get enough about colors, consider getting the book The Secret Lives of Color. Some you’ll know, some’s obscure knowledge (when did red, yellow, and blue become the primaries?), some’s more obscure knowledge (the long list of colors, each with a story, making up the bulk of the book). It’s relatively cheap and, well, colorful – nicely produced.
• Need more colors? AI’s got your back. So so many great names here, I can’t even pick out just one. Just a few shown below.

Time to catch up with too many links collected this past year. Today’s theme: interactive web pages. Plus, bonus nostalgia!

• Karl Sims’ Reaction Diffusion Tool. Play with the sliders, or just hit the Example button (up to 20 times) for some fantastic presets. If you’re old enough or nerdy enough, you’ll know Karl Sims from his SIGGRAPH papers in the early ’90s, such as this one. You’ll also then likely know of the two reaction-diffusion SIGGRAPH papers from 1991 (1, 2), based on Alan Turing’s paper in 1952. Now together, in one lovely web app.
• Recursive Game of Life. Use the mouse scroll to zoom in and out, left-drag to pan. In high school I used to hand-evolve Life patterns on graph paper, then later print out generations on green and white paper using the school’s administrative computer. This infinite recursive Life evolver would have fried my brain back then. Look closely and admire how cells get filled using glider guns and there’s some message passing between cells done with glider streams. (Follow-up: secrets revealed here. Thanks to Eran Guendelman for the tipoff.)
• Omio.io works. The recursive game of Life is the first one here, followed by many others. I’ve looked at only about half of these so far, as it’s like a box of delicious chocolates. You want to savor but one at a time, though maybe nibbling just one more would be OK… And each is a little puzzle: what’s this about? how do I interact? A few are just links to projects – consider these strawberry creams or coconut clusters from an interactivity standpoint, but they’re still interesting. There are earlier works (as GIFs) from the creator, who I now am most definitely following on Twitter (and thanks to Jacco Bikker for the tip-off).
• The Origami Simulator is misnamed, in that it simulates all sorts of papercraft patterns. Poke around under the Examples menu to see what I mean. While unlikely to help you make any of these, it’s fun to look at and drag the Fold Percent slider. For me, instant nostalgia: I attended the OrigaMIT convention last month, mostly admiring the amazing creations. Some pics, plus a NeRF I made of one display, and another NeRF.
• I mentioned Townscaper in the browser last year in a blog post around this time of year. It’s a lovely way to build a picturesque town, but what about destroying one? Behold Toy City. It takes a bit to load and initialize; you’re ready when the red ball (i.e., you) appears. Then WASD, arrow keys, and space bar your way to cute toppling. This was made with “Spline,” described as “A friendly 3d multiplayer design tool that runs in the browser.” I haven’t explored this app further yet…
• If you desperately need to visit another super-cute environment, see Choo-Choo World. Me, I can barely make a track loop, but it’s still tooth-achingly pretty. This one’s produced by Lusion, which is either a firm, “the place where all real-time magic begins,” or a dark entity from beyond the abyss, judging from the music that plays when you visit and then go to any other page of theirs (“contact” is great). In reality, the pages there are fun and point to a bunch of other projects to check out. It’s “interesting” to read about interactive story books (like this one) while listening to their music of doom.
• But, really, what we most need is a web page that finds our pointer. Done.

What’s really happening in a single cell in Life: