It's the end of the semester and my brain is going haywire. I have at least two major papers to write, each one in the 15-20 page range; I need to finish my Christmas shopping; I have some client-type projects that have to be polished off... Arg!

I find tackling a day of such magnitude (well, week; there's no way I can finish all of this today) is like tackling a big meal. First, cleanse the palate. To that end, a collection of links I wish to share with all you peeps out in peepland.

• EA Opens Chicago Studio. There would be definitely worse lives – I wouldn't mind moving back to Chicago for a couple of years, but I'm not sure EA is the best employer for a guy who doesn't play that many sports games.
  
  
• A Revamped Yahoo Turning to Users. Since Yahoo! is now one of the C3 partners, I've been paying a lot of attention to what's going down over there. The pros: they're cranking up the stuff we're talking about: user-generated content, folksonomy tagging, social networking, etc. The cons: they're dialing down the stuff I'm the most interested in, like providing original IPTV content.
  
  
• String Theory in Ex Machina. "It's not about the branes, it's about the bulk." I love it.
  
  
• Me and Toys. How cool is this? I'm going to be giving a guest lecture for my friend (and one of the most inspiring people I've ever met, OMG, look at the stuff he's done!) Barry Kudrowitz's toymaking class this spring. Be sure to check out Barry's appearance in Psychological Science, of all places.
  
  
• Forbes on Books. Excellent report from Forbes on the current trends in publishing. I love the whole counterintuitiveness of Cory Doctorow's giving-books-away-sells-books and Internet-breeds-literacy concepts. Hey, I bought my copy of Eastern Standard Tribe after reading it online...
  
  
• Xbox ready to rumble against PS3. Sounds like all the similarities are more remarkable than the differences.
  
  

More to come, obviously... Onward!