The Offworld's best indie and overlooked games of 2008 — also: Gamasutra's top 5 indie games #

Left 4k Dead — lo-fi zombie shooter in 4k of Java (via) #

NORAD's Santa Tracker on Twitter — they just passed through Kazakhstan; also tracking on Google Maps and in 3D on Google Earth #

ScummVM adds support for 7th Guest — I didn't realize they expanded into non-Scumm engines last year, including the Sierra AGI games #

Double Fine's Psychopedia, official Psychonauts encyclopedia — they've been adding rare concept art and unseen videos daily #

Achievement Unlocked — meta-game where unlocking achievements is the goal (via) #

Map visualizations from BBC's Britain from Above — incredible work, from FlowingData's best infoviz of 2008 (via) #

Twitter Venn — lovely visualization using Venn diagrams for keyword relationships #

Lore Sjoberg's Secret Origins of Santa Claus — "by the year 2100, Santa will be a genetically-engineered cyborg half-Yeti who can transform himself into a pure datastream" #

Digging into groupsquatting on Facebook — one company registered Class of 2013 groups for 250+ colleges; the CEO responded in the comments #

Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute — from the Universal Record Database, an open alternative to Guinness for stupid human tricks #

Aviary, web-based image editing suite, goes public beta — their blog and Hall of Fame shows off the power of the apps #

Touch Arcade reviews Rolando for the iPhone — the consensus is it's the best, most fully-realized game released so far #

Pitchfork interviews The Lonely Island — they talk about music, their new album, and their creative process at SNL #

NY Times' Represent, find your elected representatives in NYC — allowing community contributions and expanding this to the whole country would be brilliant #

The Pianocktail, a piano that mixes drinks based on what you play — here's video of it in action, and the development blog from conception to its Monday premiere (via) #

Yahoo! Query Language — structured data from Yahoo! Search, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and more using a SQL-like syntax #

Mightier, indie game lets you design levels with pen and paper — print the puzzles out, solve them, and scan it with your webcam (via) #

Paul Graham on the end of credentials — he argues that a free market's focus on performance eventually makes degrees irrelevant (via) #

Michael Bywater writes about his father's dignified death — I spoke to him earlier today; this is why his Infocom article for Wired was postponed #

Brady Forrest on the incredible growth of Open Street Map — it's unfortunate that Google Map Maker is competing with OSM, rather than contributing to an open web #

YouTube adds new HD section — plus, a much larger player for HD videos #

Flickr adds snow, Santa hats/beards for the holidays — I'll leave it to you to figure out how to use both #

Australian court allows legal papers served via Facebook private messaging — first court papers ever served on a social networking site? (via) #

New HD videos of Noby Noby Boy gameplay footage — try the "Download" link if the stream isn't working; related: Phat Knits #

Most Emailed News — aggregating popular articles from major newspapers and magazines (via) #

13-year old Guitar Hero phenom's flawless win on "Devil Went Down to Georgia" — the most impressive GH video I've ever seen; he won the Guinness record in May (via) #

Evolution of the WordPress interface from 2003-2008 — I'd love to see the same thing for Movable Type #

MTV greenlights CollegeHumor TV show — rumored back in February, sounds like CHTV stretched into a full show #

James Surowiecki on why newspapers are hurting — "We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free." (via) #

Twelve Days of EFF — animated tribute to the EFF's amazing work this year #

Chris Han's Love Songs, mashup of 33 songs with "love" in the title — watching the fullscreen output from Ableton Live is strangely hypnotic (via) #

Flickr designer George Oates on her insane layoff from Yahoo! — she was in Taipei when she got the call; her last Flickr blog post about The Commons was just posted yesterday (via) #

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes — documentary about his obsessive research, now archived at the University of the Arts London #

Siam Waxy — I think I should change my logo #

1UP's exclusive preview of Noby Noby Boy, new game by Katamari Damacy creator — Wired has more screenshots, mostly taken from the adorable official site #

MusicBox, mapping and visualizing music collections — the demo video gives a great overview of the software, created for her thesis at MIT (via) #

Parry Gripp's Young Girl Talking About Herself — Nerf Herder's lead singer is making minute-long pop gems inspired by YouTube culture (via) #

The BennyHillifier — add "Yakety Sax" to any YouTube video (via) #

People who inspired pop songs — the Metafilter thread mentions more, including Dave Couiler #

Antville's Best Music Videos of 2008 — the best music video community nominates their picks for their yearly awards #

Snowstorm, customizable Javascript snow for your website — breakable Christmas lights, too #

I Love Katamari comes to the iPhone — very slow once the ball gets big, but how could I not buy this? #

New York Times' Year in Ideas 2008 — love the selections, not fond of the un-weblike layout that's hard to link to #

Rara Racer, meta racing game in the form of a YouTube playthrough — very clever, the narration reminds me of Night of the Cephalapods #

Parkour in the 1930s — from Gizmo!, a 1977 documentary about oddball inventions (via) #

Chef, an esoteric programming language where source resembles recipes — try the Hello World Souffle, discussed in Nick Montfort and Michael Mateas' paper on weird languages and code aesthetics (via) #

Jeff Atwood on Swoopo, the most evil shopping site ever — it's a money-making machine, preying on hope and desperation #

RoboCop Rap — you down with OCP? (via) #

Jessica Delfino's I Wanna Be Famous — old, but new to me (via) #