Maybe Hip which has been broadcasting from Chicago only since Nov/Dec of 2009 is already starting to find it’s feet successfully as the new independent pop culture-focused internet television network. Their stated goal, to be a place where original video entertainment centers on all things that may – or may not – be hip.

Be it music, film, TV, pop culture, news, events in Chicago or around the world the crew of Maybe Hip are successfully writing, filming, producing & creating high level content on a shoestring budget. It’s funny, driven and earnest in it desire to inform & entertain. Needless to say it reminds me of another group I knew 5 years or so ago.

The company, founded in 2009 by Patrick Lothian, Robby Silver, and Lexi Scherr looks to add to the growing internet television industry discussion by creating original content for Generation Next that is more mainstream then the work done by people like Revision 3.  It’s raw, it wears it heart on it’s sleeve & it wants to have fun and bring everyone along.

Time will only tell if the group can continue to refine their voice, onair chemistry & most of all get past the coming wall that is continuously meeting weekly deadlines for more then a year with no budget. So far though it looks to be a group worth keeping an eye on and more importantly, watching.
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Infosthetics.com a site dedicated to collecting, sharing and promoting the art of pleasing data visualization celebrates it’s 5th birthday with a flash visualization of all their posts over that time broken down by time, category, comments & author using color and line. Bad at Sports would like congratulate Infosthetics “Where form follows data” and we follow them. Keep up the good work!

New City art editor, Frieze contributor, independent curator and culture essayist Jason Foumberg has a new website, designed by Ryan Swanson, that kicks ass. Professional writers know how important it is to have all of their written material online in an easy to access format. Foumberg’s site shows an eye for typography and design and has tons of flair. It’s actually fun to navigate – check it out for yourself!  Bravo to Ryan Swanson for his bang-up job here, and to Foumberg for reminding  us that writers and other culture workers deserve to have gorgeously designed personal websites too.

ESPN Homepage Hack Screenshot

It is unknown when exactly the hack was added but on Monday 4/27 it was discovered that entering the Konami cheat code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter) at the official ESPN Web site made glittery pink unicorns with rainbow manes and tails pop up all over the site. And more clicks led to more unicorns.

In addition to this visitors also got their headlines in hot pink and the Comic Sans font (every designers fav font).

We at Bad at Sports want to officially deny any rummer that Duncan MacKenzie was behind this in any way whatsoever. Yes we may be horrible at everything ESPN reports on and yes we all love some glitter loaded unicorns but that by no means implicates Mr. MacKenzie in this act. As for the mountain of MySQL & Javascript training books that were found at his residence after tracing an IP address to his billing address we have been informed to say “No Comment” and hope this suffices.

The hack has since been removed but Cnet caught a screenshot of it before the takedown.