News You Can Bruise for 2010 December 31

• Early this year I saw a call for academic papers on MST3K: someone was putting together a book. I didn't write a paper because I didn't have any ideas. But the book went ahead without my input! How about that. It's called In the Peanut Gallery With Mystery Science Theater 3000: Essays on Film, Fandom, Technology and the Culture of Riffing and it's coming out in March 2011. You can read one of the papers online.

  (I do have an idea for a paper now that I've finally completed my five-year rewatch. But instead of a paper, I'll put it into the big web page I write from my disorganized show notes.)

• REST in Practice (which I forgot to mention in the book entry, but it was very good) went into more detail than RESTful Web Services about how to use hypermedia to present and navigate workflows. Meanwhile, Mike Amundsen is decomposing hypermedia itself, creating a taxonomy of "application control information". He's got super detailed information on his website, but I think this weblog post makes it easier to understand what he's getting at.
• Speaking of REST, This Week in REST is the new Linux Weekly News.
• Another great weblog I subscribed to this year: Critical Gaming Network. Richard Terrell decomposes games the way Mike Amundsen decomposes hypermedia. Highlights include a parody of Nintendo's "Iwata Asks" interviews about an indie game Terrell made with his brother--a game that combines Street Fighter 4 and Mega Man 9!

• LEGO of the YEAR: ♪ To-to-ro in Le-go ♪

• Webcomics worth reading: Terror Island (possibly the nerdiest comic I've ever read, completed in 2008, but I didn't read it until this year), and Skin Horse.
• Let's close things out with a special space sub-list! For the novel I got to cash in previously discovered space-things like the Peaks of Eternal Light, but my research also uncovered a ton of new things I haven't used yet:
  • I see no reason why the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum shouldn't be selling replicas of the Apollo Lunar Surface Return Container. It's just so... useful-looking!
  • Richard Nixon gloats during the public execution of the astronauts who exposed him.
  • The Flag of Earth.
  • Adorable Russian dental hygiene cloth. It's all part of "the excitement of using space to push excellent products to the market."
  • You've already seen it, and it's great: Spacelog!
  • Raw datasets from experiments run on a wide variety of spacecraft. The National Space Science Data Center, which I linked to the other day, comes close to fulfilling my fantasy of aggregating all space science data ever gathered, but since Carl Malamud isn't running the NSSDC a lot of the datasets aren't really available.

Plus one more link about which I had so much to say that I started writing a whole nother post. You'll see it... in THE YEAR 2011!