News You Can Bruise for 2009 December 30

In 2009 I wrote a lot of stuff. Most of that was novel-related (about 50k usable words so far!), but there was also a lot that I could show you immediately, and did. Here's the Crummy features and weblog entries that make me feel good about how I spent my time in 2009.

• Quick jokes: The secret of manzai, Ultimate Generic Joke, Schooljailhouse Rock.
• Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves, the transcript w/slides of my 2008 QCon talk in which I tell the story of the Internet and introduce a heuristic for web service maturity. The transcript went up in 2009, so it counts.
• The epic six-part series How Game Titles Work.

  As I write this I'm discovering I could go on and on, but think about "Citizen Kane". Not the movie, the title. Kind of a sarcastic title. In fact, it works much the same way as "Leisure Suit Larry." It wouldn't make a good game title, and "Leisure Suit Larry" wouldn't make a very good movie title. But there's some subtle work in fixing on that one of all possible titles for the movie--a title with some sarcasm and some sympathy--and that's the same kind of work you need to do to come up with a good game title.

• Thoughtcrime Experiments! Analysis of the Thoughtcrime Experiments slush pile, and writing tips to get your fiction noticed.
• My critically-acclaimed rewrite of the Battlestar Galactica ending.
• Dada Chess. See also commenter "b"'s lucid explanation of why Black might have an advantage in Dada Chess. (Black's lead over White has diminished in the past 6 months but is still there.)
• Roy's Postcards, which will keep going on for another couple years. (And I should probably process another 100 or so postcards to top up the backlog).
• The tale of the lintsagna.
• "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs", incisive analysis of same, and an audio dramatization.
• The two-part Nostalgiaudit.

(I was planning to post the big "Best of Multimedia" entry tonight, but I don't have time to finish it, so hopefully that will come tomorrow.)