Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses photo series — what happens after the fairy tale's over? #

List of most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com — more accurate stats since they removed the irritating double-click behavior in October #

Backbars, Greasemonkey script adds ambient bar charts to social news sites — unobtrusively visualizes popularity on Metafilter, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News, etc (via) #

Hunch.com, decision-making engine, opens to the public — Caterina's new project is weird and good; worth checking out: the stats methods in the API and their cred system #

Nelson Minar on building social capital in multiplayer games — using an avatar creates a barrier to real-life interaction #

E_B_A tells the story behind the "Suing for Hotlinked Images" screenshot — the 2005 conversation is making the rounds again on Digg, Reddit, and Fark, without the followups #

140+ versions of Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson in The Sims 3 — also: Boxxy, Tay Zonday, and Rick Astley all living in one house (via) #

Simon Willison's thoughtful essay on Facebook usernames and OpenID — he also notes that they're not doing an HTTP redirect, instead relying on JS (via) #

ARhrrrr, augmented reality first-person shooter on a handheld — runs on a prototype Nvidia Tegra dev kit; "orange Skittles act like proximity bombs" (via) #

Ian Bogost on cascading failure from Google's malware detection — Twitter uses it for spam detection, which caused Ian's account to be suspended (via) #

Image: Facesquatting (fixed) — Mat Honan's collecting more examples #

Fleet Foxes singer on the beneficial effects of filesharing on music — he argues that free access to music history creates better musicians #

Mythbuster Adam Savage's Colossal Failures — great talk from Maker Faire on how his failures have changed him (via) #

The Simpsons Minus The Simpsons — hand-editing out the main characters, frame by frame #

Rob Matthews' printed hardbound edition of Wikipedia's featured articles — and it only represents less than 1/1000th of the total articles (via) #

Jim Rossignol on the Fermi paradox and why the aliens stayed home — our grandkids might find space exploration boring compared to next-gen virtual worlds and networks (via) #

Microsia, gorgeous sound game/tool for Windows — feels like an in-depth, HD version of Electroplankton (via) #

Windosill demo, now playable online — the first half of the game from the creator of Vector Park (via) #

Trending Topics, tracking Wikipedia zeitgeist — a completely open-source clone of Wikirank built on Hadoop and EC2 (via) #

Daily Show visits the New York Times — I don't think they deserved this treatment; the NYT preemptively responded (via) #

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store — must-read short fiction on data visualization, Google book scanning, and immortality #

Microsoft's Project Natal demo on Jimmy Fallon — Gavin Purcell says the bright red suits weren't for edge detection, but just being silly #

Slate on orphaned tweets — people who post once to Twitter and never return (via) #

Chinese government to require all new computers to ship with "Green Dam" filtering software — ostensibly to remove porn, but it also monitors activity and allows full government control over Internet usage #

Evaluating Google vs. Bing with Mechanical Turk — same as my experience, Google has a slim lead for most queries #

Bygone Bureau's feature on the indie gaming scene — interviews with the creators of Gravity Bone, You Have to Burn the Rope, and The Graveyard #

Last.fm's three founders announce their departure — they're leaving at the end of the month, close to the two-year anniversary of their acquisition #

Anil Dash on the future of Facebook usernames — entirely plausible; until Simon writes his up, I'm linking to Chris Messina's thoughtful essay #

Blind Search, compare results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo — in my queries, Google has an edge over Bing with Yahoo far behind #

Flixel, a free Actionscript library for building complex games without Flash — used to create Gravity Hook and Fathom, and includes the full source for Mode #

Joystiq on Scribblenauts for the DS — its absurdly large vocabulary lets players summon anything from a Kraken to a jackelope #

Alabaster, an interactive fiction fairy tale edited by Emily Short — multiple authors, procedural illustrations, and a tremendous amount of dialogue #

NYT publishes a new photo of the Tiananmen Square "Tank Man" — fascinating to see an iconic moment from a completely new angle (via) #

Ron Gilbert plays Secret of Monkey Island, 20 years later — his random thoughts and memories about making the game as he played through #

Ask Metafilter on musical cliches from TV and film — also, Kick Ass Classical ranks the top 100 classical songs by pop culture exposure #

Pocket Retro Game Emulator — $100 handheld plays NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, and Neo Geo ROMs natively (and most likely illegally) (via) #

Google Squared goes live, structured data search — the quality is spotty, but it's still fun to play with; badly missing sorting and data export #

Dave Eggers on the death of print — he's conflating literacy with print, but I'm very excited to see his newspaper prototype (via) #

God Texts the Ten Commandments — "no omg's" #

Han Solo, P.I. — don't miss the side-by-side; see also: Star Wars in the style of Macgyver, Dallas, and Airwolf #

The Beatles Rock Band animated intro, by Gorillaz animator Peter Candeland — incredible detail and hidden goodies in the newly-released HD version (via) #

Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions — "the more you ignore it, the cooler you look"; it's almost a supercut #

Ask Metafilter on books that people proselytize — Aaron Cohen compiled a list of books and authors, ordered by most mentions #

JD Salinger sues over unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel — a fictional version of Salinger appears as a character in the book (via) #

John Martz's hand-drawn versions of famous album covers — more here and here #

Valve releases plugin to import Sketchup 3D models into Source maps — bring any object from Google's 3D Warehouse into a first-person game #

China blocking Twitter, Flickr, others in preparation for Tiananmen 20th anniversary — I find it fascinating how Chinese citizens view the GFW as an inconvenience or necessary evil #

Johnny Chung Lee reveals he worked on Project Natal — all my doubts about the technology just flew out the window; it is very real #

Steve Wiebe's live E3 attempt to break Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong record — he just started (via) #

Dan & naD, a palindromic sketch — related: the What Song Is This? series (via) #