Christmas Light Hero — former Disney Imagineer wires his house to play "Cliffs of Dover," with a Wii and 21,268 lights (via) #

Health insurers paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose health care reform — strangely, the writer quotes a Gmail error as an official response (via) #

Nelson Boles' "This one time…" — otherworldly hand-drawn animation; mood feels like Kevin Huizenga meets Grickle #

Gina Trapani on Dan Bricklin's Note Taker for the iPhone — "30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware" #

Matt Haughey selling PVRBlog.com on eBay — 180,000 RSS subscribers, no reserve! #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 winners announced — several are playable online, but not the winner #

Teux Deux — elegantly-designed to-do list by Swiss Miss and Fictive Kin (via) #

SMBC on the future of generational prejudice  #

Super Pork and Beans All-Stars — fanmade megamontage of ten years of web memes #

GET LAMP now available for preorder for 25% off until December 31 — an unbelievable deal, the text adventure documentary will be released on two DVDs in March #

Brandon Boyer's top 10 console/handheld games of the year — skewing heavily towards the innovative, quirky, and otherwise underappreciated #

NYT's 9th Annual Year in Ideas — Kickstarter made the cut! #

Kotaku profiles a young mom addicted to Xbox achievements — she's addicted to grinding through terrible games for the ranking #

TW1TT3R ART — ASCII art in 140 characters (via) #

Jason Louv argues that 4chan is the future of human consciousness — a dystopic take, but there's some truth in here, especially related to attention #

The Web Is Large — very funny mashup of tech digerati quotes out of context #

Facebook's new privacy controls default to publicly viewable — expect a large-scale userbase freakout and real-world repercussions #

Pixeljam's Mountain Maniac — it's like an angry, bearded pachinko for the Atari 2600 #

Norman Rockwell's photographic inspiration — I never knew his illustrations were drawn from staged photos (via) #

The Manhattan Tongue Project — funny, these look older than 1998 to me #

"Mysterious letters" flood Pennsylvania town — the art project frightened some residents, reminiscent of Boston and Ohio #

Panic's lost applications for the Atari 2600 — incredible retro artwork and game boxes; I've seen these in person and they're ridiculously accurate #

Target point-of-sale system uses game mechanics to speed checkout times — cashiers have informal speed contests and sometimes cheat using a "suspend" function (via) #

SiON, Flash 10 software synthesizer — chippy music and sound effects without samples, uses MML for describing music; try it out here (via) #

Google Chrome launches Mac/Linux betas and support for extensions — how long before an ad blocker tops the charts? #

Virgin Galactic unveils first commercial spaceship — $200,000, cheap! don't miss Branson's introductory video (via) #

Crunchpad renamed to JooJoo, goes on sale Friday for $499 — Fusion Garage claims no contract with Arrington existed at all; note that TechCrunch isn't covering the news at all #

Dean Allen elaborates on why he shut down Favrd — a peek into the dark and needy side of social media; I just wish he'd left the archives online #

WPA Cracker, cloud-based WPA cracking service — 400 CPU cluster runs a network capture through 135 million words in 20 minutes (via) #

Google tests real-time search from Twitter, Facebook, news sources — try it here; it's like a live, expanded version of this Greasemonkey script I love (via) #

Beatles 3000 — reminds me of Idiocracy's Time Masheen (amazingly, not on YouTube) #

Dean Allen shuts down Favrd without notice — good discussion on Zeldman's entry #

Effect Games — web-based toolkit for making and sharing hosted JS games; see the platformer tutorial for an example #

Phoenix on La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows — directed by Vincent Moon in Paris #

Michael Jackson anonymously co-wrote music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 — a gaming urban legend confirmed; here's some audio samples #

Paul Spinrad's unpublished 1988 Ayn Rand "interview" for Wired — culled entirely from quotes from her published work, interviews, and marginalia #

Said the Gramaphone's 75 Favorite Songs of 2009 — great list, wonderful writing, and a 315MB download #

Sports Illustrated's design concept for a tablet-based magazine — also, the NYT's Article Skimmer is a more practical experimental UI for online news #

Google launches Public DNS service — lookups are permanently logged but not shared inside Google; 8.8.8.8 is a great IP #

CutCopyPasteGnome — other games I've enjoyed recently: The Next Floor, Saut, and Continuity #

Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk details a Warner Bros. royalty statement — is the lack of transparent accounting due to malice, stupidity, or both? (via) #

Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson no longer identifies with right-wing — feels more like he shifted his own priorities, from foreign policy to science #

Craigslist blocks Yahoo! Pipes — Pipes makes it hard for them to stop commercial use of the feeds, but this is excessive (via) #

Mark Coleran's portfolio of fake interface design for films — I liked his comments on designing the Bourne Identity UIs #

Google Zeitgeist 2009 — Paranormal Activity was the fastest-rising U.S. query this quarter!? #

Khoi Vinh on the design of Basic Maths, his new WordPress theme — I love seeing his design process #