My friends (and fellow gamers) are joining the blogosphere in force. Erilar's Day in the Life of a Gamer has returned from hiatus with posts about Mass Effect, holiday gaming goodness, and a test drive of Burnout: Paradise City.

Meanwhile over at Books Like Dust, Damon continues to chronicle his efforts to get through his reading pile, including Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II and Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.

And finally, Cory's launched The Fat Cat Inn blog to chronicle his geek life and New Year's resolutions. First up is a post outlining his goals for 2008, which includes one objective I think most geeks can relate to: losing weight.

Cory Doctorow's posted some thoughts on how to deal with the trolls that inevitably show up in online forums and proceed to sow chaos, poison and discord among a previously happy community. It's partly in response to Tim O'Reilly's suggestion that we have an official "Bloggers Code of Conduct" establishing rules for posting comments to a site (such as no anonymous posting) designed to prevent trolls from getting a foothold.

My sister has a blog, Monkey Foot Designs, which also happens to be the name of her craft business. Lots of crafting goodness to be found, the occasional home improvement post (in this, my sister and I are alike) and periodic photos of my niece Sydney wearing one of Kris's latest designs. There's absolutely no geek content, but it does make me want to pick up an issue of Craft.

It's true. My Xbox 360 really does have its own blog, thanks to the magic of Xbox Live and my publically available stats there on. The 360 Voice throws some meat onto those statistical bones, providing an accounting of what I did the day before in narrative form. Thus, on the first day of my 360's blogging life, it wrote:

Like a king on his throne, NukeHavoc said 'awaken' and for him I did comply. 450 points represents the size of our growing kingdom. Ok, enough of this King Arthur stuff. That is a gain of 10 points over last time! He rallied Gears of War picking up 1 achievement, and after that powered me down without even saying good night. I mean what the heck?

Uncle Bear officially turned 10 years old last week. The venerable ursine is one of the few geek zines/blogs/sites/whatever-we're-calling-ourselves-now to have survived from the year of Nuketown's own genesis. Congratulations to Berin, and here's to another 10 years of geekdom and gaming goodness!

The PATRIOT Act is being used by the FBI and other government agencies (as well as a few private contacts) to build a huge database about innocent people ... people who never receive any notice that they've been investigated or this data recorded. Read the full story.

It saddens and infuriates me that this intelligent design crap is going on in my own state of Pennsylvania. Read the full story.

A discussion of the "undead Constitution" that's given rise to horrors like Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, who's sole asset (at least for Bush) is a non-existant paper trail. Read the full story.

Remembering the print zines of yesterday. Read the full story.

The evil geniuses in the Bush Administration only want us to think that their bumbling idiots, so that they can, you know, be, umm, evil. Read the full story.