How a Macworld cover is made — timelapse of the photography, Photoshop, and magazine design (via) #

NYT Mag cover story on the making of The Beatles: Rock Band — great discussion of the difficulties and appeal of rhythm games (via) #

Second Skin, documentary about the real lives of MMO players — looks great, only available free until the end of tomorrow (via) #

BackUpMy.net, online backup of blogs, tweets, mail, and photos — yes, a cloud service that backs up your cloud services (via) #

Silent Conversation — game that plays with text and words as side-scrolling platforms #

How the Soduko Grab sudoku solver for iPhone works — simple explanation of a practical use of computer vision #

Mike Sacks interviews Dan Clowes for McSweeney's — including gossip about his foibles with the New York Times during Mister Wonderful (via) #

Joshua Schachter's A Tiny Thread, very simple Twitter conversations — 208 lines of Python on Google App Engine #

Google opens up next-gen search infrastructure for testing — try it out; seems speedy and seems to rank real-time results higher #

Visualization of a Choose Your Own Adventure book's outcomes — 8 out of 42 endings were favorable #

Facebook buys FriendFeed — will it get sucked into the black hole, or help Facebook open up? Techcrunch says it's a talent acquisition #

Ars Technica on the worries of high-frequency algorithmic trading — used for years, it's accelerated since the Wall Street crisis #

Full House, Alternate Intro (via) #

Tr.im shuts down, breaking millions of shortened links by year's end — we were warned; someone should call Archive Team #

Waterloo Labs' FPS with real-life guns and shovels — needs more crowbar (via) #

Ice T repairs a Macbook Pro — the YouTube comments are a nice blend of racists and PC/Mac wars #

You Only Live Once — more meta-gaming: This Is The Only Level (via) #

Reddit user compiles George Sodini's Internet traces — includes his Google search history, revealed by exploiting his webmail account (via) #

Kate Miller-Heidke's Facebook song — lyrics here (via) #

Steam's Indie Games weekend sale — curated by Braid's Jonathan Blow and World of Goo's Ron Carmel (via) #

Know Your Meme on Weegee — a brief mention of YouTube Poop, which deserves its own video #

Skulpt — client-side Python interpreter (via) #

Translation Party — Japanese-English translations until reaching equilibrium; more examples: don't panic and don't covet (via) #

Vacation '58 — John Hughes's short story that kicked off his long and wonderful film career #

Sincerely, John Hughes — touching story of his long relationship with a teenage fan turned pen pal #

1944 industrial film about making the Minneapolis Star-Journal — delightful look at how the news was made; the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy in January #

John Gruber on Apple's censorship of the NinjaWords dictionary app — don't miss Phil Schiller's response which, while thoughtful, doesn't address the App Store's larger issues #

Your World of Text — infinite canvas for collaborative, real-time text; scroll around, explore, and add something (via) #

Mario AI Competition — built on a modified version of Infinite Mario Bros. (via) #

The Smoking Gun unmasks creators of Pranknet, destructive phone hoax group — lulz all around (via) #

Interview with Home of the Underdogs' creator, Sarinee Achavanuntakul — talks about the ethics of abandonware, why she gave it up, and the current revival (via) #

Sticky Light, interact with lasers without a camera or projector — someone needs to commercialize this, it looks like a wonderful toy (via) #

Eurogamer's feature on Tim Langdell's EDGE trademark trolling — they interview both Langdell and Mobigames, quoting emails between the two (via) #

Delicious adds Twitter integration, new search tools — if you don't like the new freshness, the old Fresh page is still around #

Flip Flop Fly Ball, Craig Robinson's baseball infoviz — Ballpark Orientation, Major League Fields, Ball Size Comparison and the Wu-Tang vs. E Street Band (via) #

Bygone Bureau interviews GOOD Magazine's infographic designers — some incredible work, though a few would give Tufte a seizure #

NYT's visualization of music purchasing trends by format — even without any visible axes, it's still understandable; from this op-ed on the rise of streaming #

Transparency Corps, Sunlight Foundation's crowdsourcing project — making government more transparent; check out the leaderboard #

Jude Buffum's Mushroom Recession — 8-bit commentary on the recession, and explains where those pits go (via) #

Sam Winston's portfolio of word and letterform art — don't miss Romeo & Juliet, Dictionary Story, and Pencil Drawing (via) #

GameSetWatch interviews Vector Park's Patrick Smith — if you still haven't bought Windosill, we have nothing to talk about #

Panic cofounder Steven Frank's quitting the iPhone — Arrington made the same move today, both fed up by idiotic recent App Store decisions #

Brent Simmons' anatomy of a feature — "piece of cake" (via) #

MoneySeize, maddening and addictive Flash platformer — losing your mind? try the walkthrough video #

Golan Levin at TED on using technology to make synesthetic art — great followup to his 2004 presentation #

How to Avoid Ads in Gmail — just add tragic words to your signature (via) #

Launch years of today's most popular websites — from IMDB in 1992 to Bing earlier this year (via) #

Yahoo! Developer Network on the Microsoft announcement — BOSS and Searchmonkey up in the air, everything else unaffected (directly) (via) #

Leaked images from Epic Mickey, dystopian Disney videogame led by Warren Spector — fantastically bizarre, and the biggest Cory Doctorow bait I've ever seen #

Loren Carpenter's Vol Libre, fractal CG short film from 1980 — online for the first time, with a wonderful backstory #