By Pentadact

This is a thing I do now. Most of this stuff I mentioned on Twitter, but it’s not an ideal channel and I don’t like that I never link stuff here anymore.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ’1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0′s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.”

I approve. It’d be a shame for anyone to hear a couplet so painfully double-edged as “When you touched a friend of mine / I thought I would lose my mind” and miss the grim joke.

Oh yeah, good news: I’m working on a really long post about a really esoteric subject that involves lots of strong opinions about game design ideas I have no experience working with.

Truffle fries in San Fran.

The restaurant of endless meat, with 2K’s Karl Unterholzner and Jordan Thomas.

Mr Gish unwisely shows his daughter the drawing Mr World of Goo did of him naked.

Dylan Moran, yesterday.

France’s pimary exports are textiles and macro photography.

Space Invader ice cubes.

Kim arranged I think my first ever surprise birthday party.

Halloween.

The silence here lately has been down to a dangerous daily routine of falling asleep in front of Star Trek: The Next Generation, waking up at 5am and playing Prototype until work. Dangerous, but not unpleasant.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew.

Meanwhile, The Sounds have a new album. It’s nudged them back into the lead as my most-listened artist on last.fm, partly because their songs have a tight neatness to them that allows me to listen to them almost indefinitely without irritation, and partly because until this album, they were unique in never having produced a worthless song. That’s the last one on Crossing the Rubicon, but it’s their best album despite it. Two reasons, one of them is this:

Do you find that some bands just sound like two guitars and some drums? When No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake kicks in, it reminds me that The Sounds are one of the few that don’t. They produce a thick ribbon of undulating noise that your speakers seem happy to belt out, as if they’ve finally got something to sink their drivers’ teeth into.

The other reason is Home Is Where Your Heart Is, but it’s possible I’m just being a big sap about that one.

I see now why most swords extend in only one direction.

I knew BeBot – a beatific tuxedo’d robot for the iPhone who sings at your touch – was awesome. I didn’t realise he was awesome.

Via, of course, Waxy.