Casual vs. hardcore games on Facebook — interesting thoughts from a Vampires player in the comments (via) #

Gawker responds to Scientology C&D — Nick Denton has balls, and so does his attorney (via) #

Randy Newman's performance at the Apple keynote — here's the lyrics to A Few Words in Defense of Our Country (via) #

Philipp Lenssen interviews Ruth Kedar, designer of the Google logo — some older versions in the comments #

Potrzebie System on Google Calculator — Jeff Atwood has scans of the original article from MAD #33 in 1957 #

Ze Frank on the closing of the ORG community site — the creator of Zefrank.org shut the invite-only community down on January 1, exactly one year after it opened #

Feltron Annual Report 2007 — like previous years, designer Nicholas Felton presents his life as a corporate report (via) #

Theinfo.org — community for people who love to process and visualize large data sets (via) #

Sad, Sweet One-Act Play, Told Entirely By a Burger King Receipt I Found  #

Lasagna Cat — extremely odd real-life reenactments of Garfield comics, from the creator of Ducktales and Infinite Solutions #

Ron the Music Maker, the all-star Scientology album — let's hope Tom lays down a track along with Chick Corea, John Travolta, Leif Garrett, and Sylvester Stallone's dad #

Nick Denton digs up Tom Cruise's Scientology video — wisely hosted on Gawker's servers instead of Youtube, so won't be easily taken offline #

xkcd's Robot9000 attacks noise in real-time chat — a parallel IRC channel only displays lines of conversation that've never been spoken before (via) #

Urban Mapping opens up neighborhood database — hallelujah, this kind of geo data is so valuable and hard to build on your own; update: Zillow followed suit #

Erica Sadun's song recognition software for the iPhone — let it listen to music and it'll try to identify the song #

Superelectronic — like a seizure-inducing Flash version of Superbad or Jodi.org (via) #

Stupidfilter's random stupid comments — from a project to programmatically identify stupid web comments using Bayesian filtering (via) #

Music Thing on the "Compendium of Physical Activities" — playing the accordion is better exercise than "vigorous sexual activity"? #

How Techmeme Changes Over Time — 50 hours of Techmeme screengrabs in 50 seconds (via) #

Elyse Sewell blogs her violent fight with Shins' keyboardist Martin Crandall — former America's Top Model heads to jail after battle with ex-boyfriend; update: switched to Google cache after she locked the entry #

Army Major Andrew Olmsted's final post — blogging from the front lines of the war, he was the first casualty of 2008 (via) #

Adam "Everyware" Greenfield self-publishing his new book — three cheers for cutting out middlemen; pre-orders are now available via Paypal #

How to Read Wired Magazine, Revisited — Derek Powazek returns to Suck.com's original guide #

Video: Excuse Me, Princess — see also: (almost) every Knight Rider turbo boost (via) #

Game Innovation Database — like Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, a tremendous resource in an awkward Flash interface (via) #

Video: Kirby Ferguson on shrinking attention spans — tl;dw #

Flash: Cursor*10 — ingenious game trains you to solve puzzles with multiple versions of yourself (via) #

Scanlation of Shintaro Kago's "Labyrinth" — NSFW comic about mazes, his work is often grotesque but some of the best comics I've seen (via) #

DJ Earworm's "United States of Pop" — mashing up the Billboard top 25 for 2007 (via) #

Alison Jackson's Confidential photo art exhibit — using celebrity doubles to recreate paparazzi shots that never existed #

Yahoo! Picks of the Week closes after 12 years — they've maintained the same inoffensive tone since 1995, but it seemed to get better in the last year #

Valve now selling gorgeous Portal shirts — game-related t-shirts that don't make you look nerdy (via) #

Branscome International's cringe-inducing Pixar knockoffs — don't miss the trailers for Ratatoing and The Little Cars (via) #

Kottke posts his Best Links for 2007 — still the best link blogger around #

Best freeware games of 2007 — quirky independent games, though almost entirely PC only (via) #

Fret Killer, the mysterious YouTube acoustic guitarist — in every video, the commenters repeatedly try to identify this relentlessly anonymous performer (via) #

Christmas wishbook catalogs on Flickr — you'll shoot your eye out! happy new year, everyone #

David Cross on accepting the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" role — I love Patton Oswalt too, but aren't we past accusing people of selling out yet? (via) #

Apple Keynote Index Fund — Matt Haughey finds out the returns for day trading AAPL during the last ten keynotes #

Steal This Film II released — free documentary about history of piracy interviews Pirate Bay, Mininova, EFF, MPAA, and others (via) #

Protagonize, community-driven hypertext fiction — reminds me of Gav and Peloso's interactive story from 1995; Wikipedia has more on the genre (via) #

Danah Boyd on Pew's report on teen use of social media — some interesting trends, including the bits about low-income blogging #

Matt Webb wraps up 2007 — massive brain dump that extends beyond tech into sociology, ecology, marketing, drugs, and genetics #

New Year's Eve invitations found on Myspace — "Dress and drive to impress!" #

Duelity — video art project retells the biblical and scientific creation stories, with the prose and tone reversed #

Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes — funny satire of conference cliches (via) #

Philipp Lenssen's overview of Backrub, Google's precursor — some good Archive.org dumpster diving #

Tristan's tech support hell with Palm customer support — the support tech insisted she was Palm's CEO; contrast with Apple's personal touch #

Snarkout's history of "White Christmas" — after a full year since his last post, Steve returns with a whirlwind history from Holiday Inn to Black Christmas; merry xmas, everybody! #

IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR — memeorific and sacrilicious "tale of three nerds turning a nativity scene into a LARP battle"; don't miss the video responses (via) #