(Buy the t-shirt)

B/X Blackrazor is a nifty old school gaming blog with a focus on the Basic/Expert edition of Dungeons & Dragons. After reading it for several weeks I discovered that the author is local! Well, local-ish: I'm in Tacoma, he runs his weekly D&D game at Baranof's in Greenwood. So close, and yet so far.

JB frequently writes recaps of these Thursday night games, so it was was fun to read a perspective from one of his players. And that post comes with yet another bonus surprise: at least a few of JB's players work at Woot, a company I dig quite a bit. Neat.

I strongly encourage you to add Halford 3: Winter Songs to your holiday rotation. (And now's a great time to get it because according to his site, through December 26th you can save $2 off a Halford Amazon.com MP3 purchase using code GIVEMP3S)

You'd think a Christmas album by a heavy metal frontman would be a silly goof; but Halford's epic renditions of traditional Christmas carols reminded me of how powerful they are. The new tracks are fun, and "Light of the World" is surprisingly personal.

Merry Christmas everybody, and a happy new year. Gloria in Excelcis Deo!

I got a holiday email from the Bing team inviting me to download a free music mp3 from Amazon. After getting a code to redeem for $1.29 in credit, I was directed to Bing Music where I could search by song, artist and/or album for what I wanted. Once there, I could select an option to buy the track from Amazon and use my credit.

I got something I genuinely wanted for free, and as part of that experience I discovered how Bing Music works. Well done, says I.

(I picked Queen's "We Are The Champions", having realized that, inexplicably, I have almost no Queen in my music collection anymore.)

Google also did a great job with this year-end video of showing off their products and features without it being about their products and features:

When you set up a profile on the social network Diaspora (currently in alpha), one of the first things it asks you to do is create your Aspects. You're given two at the beginning: Work and Family. When you add contacts, you group them by Aspect, which determines what they see of your content -- you might choose to share some things with co-workers, others with family, etc.

There's also a role-playing game called Diaspora, one of several that are based on the FATE system. In FATE, you define characters, places and situations by their Aspects.

Coincidence? Either way, for some of us the urge to monkey with our Diaspora profiles a la Spirit of the Century will be irresistible, as this screenshot proves.

Man. Remember when game blogs and podcasts and message boards were all debating the iPhone's viability as a game platform? And yet, today I look at the top-selling apps for 2010 and behold! All games. So I guess people like it pretty well.

Via @barsoomcore:

Characters in All Outta Bubblegum have one stat -- Bubblegum. It's technically a number which varies from 0 through 8, though the designers highly, highly recommend that you don't do anything so banal as write down a number, and, instead, pass out actual sticks of bubblegum to the players. This will also help when you play All Outta Bubblegum drunk, which is, let's be blunt, probably the only time you'd even consider playing this game.

The rules.

Photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt