PC Gamer’s Feb. issue notices four game-related weblogs:

Ron Gilbert — In 1989, Gilbert wrote “Why Adventure Games Suck, and What We Can Do about It,” which led to his creating the wonderful Monkey Island adventures. The blog is spunky.

Unknown — The writer claims to be the spouse of an EA game developer. The “blog” is a single entry pointing to an essay on why life as a game developer sucks. The page also promises a ” a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry” which will eventually be available at Gamewatch.org

American McGee – He was the producer of Alice, a nicely-imagine first-person shooter. He has since been turned into a brand, although his second game — the “brought to you by” Scrapland — has gotten mediocre reviews. He writes in his blog every couple of weeks about industry news. One entry points to the personal website of Norm Felchle, the artist responsible for much of the look of Alice. Among his galleries you’ll find a moderately scary collection of photos from fans modeling Alice outfits.

John Romero – Romero was half of the duo responsible for Doom. He’s all of the singularity responsible for what may be the industry’s biggest fiasco, Daikatana (free 107MB demo here), a mediocre game totally killed by hype. Among the goodies: A collection of game music. (I have to say I’m a little — and unreasonably — put off by the “planetromero.com” url of the site. I think he’s maybe up to Village Romero or possibly Canton Romero, but not a whole planet.)

The article doesn’t mention, but should, Terra Nova, a blog devoted to the academic study of virtual worlds. Don’t let the “academic” part scare you, though. This is a lively place.

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Hoder reports that Iran has cut off access by Iranians to all blogging services and some social software sites, including Orkut. As Dan Brickley writes, “There go 65,000+ Iranian blogs (per blogcensus) and 7%+ of Orkut’s user base, in a flip of a switch.” Hoder suggests some actions we can take, including having the EU and US demand an end to Net censorship during their negotiations with the government.

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Brian Dear suggests “Taggle” as a future site that would let us type in a keyword and get back all the pages that use that word as a tag. And in the comments people suggest links to a whole bunch of interesting tag work.

I think I’ll do a long-overdue issue of my newsletter, Joho, on taxonomies vs. tags. All the cool kids are doing tags, you know. But I’m so wrapped up now in researching the Feb. issue of Esther Dyson’s newsletter, that I may not get to it. And what’s the topic of that Feb. issue? Taxonomies and tags! That’s also (roughly) the topic of the book I’m working on. As the saying goes, when all you have is a <entity type=”tool” field=”carpentry”>hammer</entity>, everything looks like a <entity type=”fastener” field=”carpentry” driver=”hammer”>nail</entity>.

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Terry Heaton raises an important issue: Many of us tend to be, um, lax about copying copyrighted material onto our own servers so that we can make it more broadly available. At some point, we’re going to get sued.

Just in case you were looking for something else to worry about…

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HumanRightsFirst.org is live-blogging the Gonzales hearing. Cool! (They also have links to the Real Player feed from C-SPAN.)

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Modern medicine has crossed into magic.

My wife Ann went into the Brigham and Women’s Hospital today at 6AM to have her tachycardia — episodes of a racing heartbeat — fixed. A little before 10AM, they threaded five wires up through her arteries (veins?), from her groin directly into her heart. Ann says the procedure was basically painless.

Once the catheters were in her heart, the doctors stimulated a tachycardia episode and used that to figure out which circuit was going astray. They heated the tip of one of the wires and burned a square millimeter or so of her heart. They then tried to stimulate another episode. They failed, which is a good thing. Ann was wheeled back into the recovery room a little before 11. There she lay on her back to let her blood vessels recover. She was discharged at 3, and was told not to lift any heavy objects for a day or so; otherwise, she can go back to her normal routine of lifting light objects. We’ve been home for half an hour, and Ann is resting in bed, drinking a cup of tea.

Everyone we dealt with at the hospital treated us with warmth and humor.

Details about Tachycardia: Ann had been having episodes for several years. We were assured that they were not life-threatening to healthy hearts, but because of the episodes’ frequency, duration, and intensity — typically over an hour, 250 beats/minute, about once a month — her cardiologist thought she was a good candidate for the procedure she went through today. (Beta-blockers were making her tired so staying on medicine forever wasn’t an attractive option.) We were told that the fatality rate is well under 1% and the chance of ending up needing a pacemaker because of the procedure was also under 1%. The success rate is 95%. So, we decided to go ahead. Her problem turned out to be with the AV node.

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I have very limited Web access today, so I won’t be doing much (= any?) blogging. Try to carry on without me.

I did, however, give blood this morning, the first time in several years. I used to give a few times a year when it was convenient, e.g., when a bloodmobile would drive up to the doors of the building where I worked. Now that I have to get off my fat ass to drive 10 minutes to the blood clinic, I don’t do it. If only I could give blood over the Web…

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Ethan has a fascinating post about the growing skepticism about the reports from the Burmese government that the tsunami caused only minor damage. The Myanmar government continues to refuse aid.

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This chess game shows you what the computer is contemplating. Very cool. (Via Pito who also has some ruminations on folksonomies today.)

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Tim Bray points to a presentation by Brian Nielsen and Mikkel Hippe Brun on how Denmark is adopting the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL). Tim writes:

Check out slides 4 & 5: they estimate the annual savings achievable from invoicing in UBL at somewhere between €100M and €160M. I may be out of step with the crowd but it seems painfully obvious to me that UBL is going to be huge and I don’t understand why more technology vendors (including my employer) aren’t refocusing their e-business strategy around it.

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