<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=8395e249-65ed-4338-8f45-476eda102531" target="_new" title="The Guild Season 2 Trailer">Video: The Guild Season 2 Trailer</a>

Season 2 of “The Guild” (see my previous post), created by and staring Felicia Day, has just begun. Here’s the trailer. Season 2 will be exclusively distributed by Microsoft via MSN Video, Xbox Live Video Marketplace and Zune Marketplace.

Yesterday Felicia did an interview on NPR where she talked to Alex Cohen on “Day to Day” about creating “The Guild” and why she decided to work with Microsoft to distribute the series.

See Previously: The Guild, The Adventures of a Group of Online Gamers

Lori and I are having some R&R in Destin, Florida. In the evenings we walk down to the snowy white beach to watch the beautiful sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico. This area of the Florida panhandle is known as The Emerald Coast and the locals sometimes jokingly refer to it as the “Redneck Riviera”.

Photos & Video: Sunset in Destin, Florida

UPDATE: Here are Lori’s photos of Destin.

photos by Scott Beale

Survival Research Labs just turned 30 today. Congratulations on an amazing three decades! SRL founder and director Mark Pauline writes:

30 years ago today, I started Survival Research Laboratories. I had come up with the idea of machine performances a few weeks earlier, and when the owner of a local free magazine, “Boulevards Magazine” heard my spiel, and learned that I was thinking of forming SRL as a company, he offered me, a free, full page ad space in his November issue.

I started working on the first SRL machine “The Demanufacturing Plant” the next week. It appeared in the first SRL show “Machine Sex” staged on St. Patrick’s Day in 1979.

More Coverage: Boing Boing

image via Survival Research Labs

A Shell Oil Company ROV (remotely operated vehicle) shot photos of a rare alien-like Magnapinna squid with “elbows” at the Perdido ultra deep oil drilling site in the Gulf of Mexico. National Geographic has the full story, including photos and video.

Thanks to Kevin Mathieu, RICK! and Jozef Zábojník for the tip!

image via Shell Oil Company

Egg Nog pre-mixed with Evan Williams seven-year-old Kentucky Straight Bourbon whiskey. It’s actually pretty good and has a slight hint of Twitter.

photo by Scott Beale

Wonderful stop-motion animation by Pes in honor of Scrabble’s 60th Anniversary.

Also check out Pes’ new Fireplace Screensaver.

See Previously:

- Western Spaghetti, Stop-Motion Animation by PES

- Game Over by PES, Arcade Game Stop Motion Animation

UPDATE: Ed Hunsinger produced his own stop-motion video in honor of Scrabble’s 60th anniversary.

Current recently launched a new TV Free Burning Man channel on iTunes featuring videos produced by Current at the annual event in the Black Rock Desert.

Justin Gunn and the Current crew have been doing an amazing job documenting Burning Man since 2005. Here are the TV Free Burning Man archives (2005-2008) and Burning Man Community section on Current.

Bike Porn 2: Bikexploitation, a collection of short movies on the theme bicycle exploitation, is currently touring the West. It is making stops in the Bay Area at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on Friday, November 28th and at LoBot Gallery in Oakland on Saturday, November 29th.

The next Dorkbot SF takes place this Tuesday, November 25th at Retox Lounge in San Francisco and features presentations by Laura Mappin (Laser Cutting), Trademark G (Touchscreen Video Controller for Live Mashups) and Sam Coniglio (Designing the Orbital Lifestyle). See the event listing for more info.

photo by Sam Coniglio

Here are live reports at 35,000 feet by Brian Lam of Gizmodo and Ryan Block of Engadget using the new GoGo inflight WiFi service on Virgin America.

The speeds are 3.6Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream, $10 for short flights (less than 3 hours) and $13 for longer flights (over 3 hours). Virgin America has announced that it 100% of their flights will have this service by April 2009.

See Previously: Wi-Fi Available Soon on American Airlines & Virgin America

These cute little Christmas Coke Bombs are sure to be an explosive hit this holiday season. I can just picture naughty Santas wearing a bandoleers of these during Santacon this year.

UPDATE: Ryan and Kevin in the comments have a brilliant idea, a Diet Coke version with built-in Mentos. I couldn’t find the Coke Bombs in Diet, but I picked up some Mentos and I’m thinking about doing some experimentation.

photos by Scott Beale

A police car dashboard camera captured a meteor over Edmonton, Alberta yesterday.

Here’s more on the meteor sighting from the Edmonton Sun and CBC.

guest post by RICK!

I’ve been a fan social network event calendar sites like Going.com, but Jersey Oakland-based SonicLiving has been busy working on some cool features.

The iTunes scanner goes through your music library.

You can decide what bands you’re interested in seeing in concert.

Never miss your favorite band coming to town.

Very cool but SonicLiving took it step further and partnered with Pandora to offer concert listings to its 19 million users. Bands you discover and bookmark on Pandora now show up in the new SonicLiving-powered concert section.

So you have one less excuse to go to a Web 2.0 party instead of live performance.

Here’s a brilliant mashup of the super annoying Toyota commercial “Saved by Zero” re-mixed with the American version of “The Ring”.

via Videogum

Here’s wonderful collection of classic “The End” title cards from movies.

via Daring Fireball

The latest TV ad for World of Warcraft features the original Prince of Darkness Ozzy Osbourne.

Blizzard also released another WoW ad featuring Steven Van Zandt who played Silvio Dante on The Sopranos.

See Previously:

- Mr. T & William Shatner Featured in World of Warcraft Commercials

- World of Warcraft Toyota Tacoma Commercial

via WoW Insider

Google has just launched SearchWiki which allows you customize your search results.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account.

We’ve recently started using the WordPress plugin Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) by mitcho to show possibly related posts on Laughing Squid blog. It works much better than most of the other related posts plugins we’ve used in the past. You can disallow by category and tag, limit by match threshold using matching scores and it can also add related posts to your RSS feed.

guest post by Dave Schumaker

This Saturday, November 22nd, fellow guest blogger Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics, will be leading a free, public walking photo tour on Treasure Island that is being organized by the website Photojojo.

A man-made island originally built to host a 1939 World’s Fair, Treasure Island was once home to fantastic (but ephemeral) architecture, gala displays, and the (in)famous Gayway — a bawdy playland for World’s Fair visitors. Treasure Island was also intended to serve as an airport. With the outbreak of World War II, the US Navy took over the island, and it remained in Navy hands until the base was closed in 1994. Elements of all this history survive to this day, but Treasure Island’s abandoned state also makes the island feel spooky — like a post-Apocalyptic ghost town floating in the middle of San Francisco Bay.

After this photo safari, we’ll meet up at a bar back in the city to share photos, have a few drinks and give away prizes.

If you’re interested in this weekend’s photo safari, more information is available on the Facebook or Upcoming event pages.

For those who missed us last time, we’ve also put together a short video of the event.

I agree with John Gruber on this one, so far Tweetie is the best iPhone app for Twitter out there (I’m sure more are on the way). It’s meets most of my mobile Twitter requirements. You can download it for $2.99 from the iTunes Store.

Here’s a breakdown of it’s features:

- Handle multiple twitter accounts.
- View your timeline, replies, direct messages and favorites.
- Browse your friends and followers.
- Post new tweets, retweet
- Reply directly to tweets and send direct messages.
- Follow and unfollow people.
- Mark tweets as favorites.
- Navigate reply chains.
- Inline web browser.
- Post links with automatic link shrinking via bit.ly.
- Upload pictures to twitpic.com.
- Update your twitter location.
- View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
- Save your favorite searches.
- Implements the full twitter API.
- Uses secure connection (https).