I thought I’d try something a little more front-and-center than my del.icio.us links, since I’ve got a little to say about a bunch of stuff piling up in NNW that’s worth a bit more than just bookmarking.

• This is impressive, though it might not seem so at first. Each of those Elementals is being controlled by an individual player, making the synchronization quite impressive.
• Gawker Stalker snorted some ajax in the bathroom. I’m surprised to see a mashup from Gawker, but they’ve been all about rolling out the fanciness lately. I can’t wait for Defamer to get all up in that business.
• The Pirate Bay: torrent tracker, schwag seller, and political party. I love how everyone (and by “everyone” I mean politicians and regulatory bodies) conveniently forgets that a lot of the internet isn’t American, and that our puny laws can’t touch sites hosted in other countries. For that fact alone, the internet will never really be regulated. On the flip side, it’s what makes firewalling entire countries so dangerous. But I digress - the real point is that filesharing has a posse in Sweden. I’d love to see some US politician pick up the Creative Commons flag and run with it.
• International gay politics factoid of the moment: the Netherlands is offering gay Muslims refugee status (in a begrudging, “crap, well, now that you’ve outed yourself on your refugee paperwork, they’ll kill you for sure if we send you back, so we guess we’ll have to let you stay” sort of way), but to try to screen out potential homo impersonaters, they’re testing them with a video of two guys making out and a topless woman. Maybe it’s an American thing, but I don’t think most people would have hugely obvious reactions to either. Then again, maybe if your life depended on it, you’d drool and cringe with the best of ‘em.
• Is Amazon trying to beat Google to the GDrive punch? Amazon S3 sure looks like a play for storing all the world’s data… [via Snarkmarket]
• I’ve been thinking recently - as much as I hate Condi, wouldn’t it be interesting if she and Hillary ended up being the frontrunners in ‘08? Two women running against each other, guaranteeing a female president, might make for one of the most even-handed presidential races in my lifetime.

And…
I just figured out a neat trick in Safari - if you want to open a URL in a new tab, paste it into the front tab’s address bar, then command-return to open it behind, without losing focus on what you’re looking at. S’awesome.