Brandon Boyer plays with Jason Rohrer's Sleep Is Death — collaborative game, where one person manipulates the world for another #

Soren Johnson's "Fear and Loathing in Farmville," notes from GDC 2010 — best summary of the turmoil social gaming's causing in the gaming industry (via) #

Fredrik Larsson's TV Theme Song Medley — I'm a sucker for people accompanying themselves (via) #

Jane McGonigal's TED talk on using games to save the world — games can motivate you to do mundane tasks or something meaningful, choose wisely #

C-SPAN opens massive video archives — 160,000 hours of video dating to 1987 #

Joel Johnson, "Raiding Eternity" — more tech writing like this, please #

xkcd's Google phrase frequency charts — "I got $x problems" #

Newspaper Club designs, prints, distributes overnight newspaper at SXSW — I was lucky enough to grab one of the hand-numbered issues #

Crowdsourced demographic study of Chatroulette — the info was gathered by Hacker News users #

Progress Wars — countless hours of fun #

Piano Improvisation on Chat Roulette — amazing how much creativity the site's inspiring (via) #

8-Bit Austin — I think I'll use this map to get to Datapop 2010 #

Spritely, jQuery plugin for sprite and background animation — see also: gameQuery #

Trololololololo Shreds — some context (via) #

Preview of Sword & Sworcery EP for the iPhone — looks unlike anything I've ever seen #

Sitby.us — essential iPhone-optimized site for SXSWi session planning #

Danc on the release of Ribbon Hero — turning Microsoft Office into a game, with competition against your friends (via) #

"Play" by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman — avatars as Russian nested dolls (via) #

Chatroulette Map — I think I'd rather not know, thanks (via) #

Steamshovel Harry — not sure how I missed this one last year, metagaming with music by Brad Sucks #

El Fin Del Mundo by Alberto González Vázquez — there's so much I love about this, I can't quantify it all (via) #

Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired — also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books #

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer — related: McSweeney's categories for the meta-awards (via) #

Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live — for the first time, backed by The Roots #

Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica — related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton #

The Panic Status Board — the instant feedback made work more game-like #

Valve ports game library and Steam service to Mac — Portal 2 will be released for Mac simultaneously with PC, along with "all of our future games" #

Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy — fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information #

8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York — he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide #

Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game — watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead #

Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency — "Maybe I'll learn something." #

PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania — I love how expressive they are #

Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music — very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine #

GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story — scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen #

Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft — he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts #

LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes — looks like the regex was a bit greedy #

NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines" — very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year #

YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos — a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now #

OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" — Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles #

Roger Ebert starts subscription service — $4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1 #

Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation — nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories #

Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead — radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots #

Unit Testing Achievements — I'm still waiting for a ticket tracker with game mechanics (via) #

The Skull of Regret — even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great #

NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line — hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second (via) #

Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project — even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license (via) #

Bioshock's lead level designer remakes Arcadia in Doom 2 — don't miss his companion article about Doom as Robotron #

Pictures for Sad Children, "Play Play Play" — Level End (via) #

Nieman Labs tallies original reporting vs. rewrites for the Google/China hacking story — 121 different versions of the story, but only 13 did any original reporting #

Joel Johnson's extremely painful, personal story of sexual abuse — so horrible I hesitate linking to it, but I will, if only for Google justice #