Happy Holidays, everyone! I can tell it’s Christmas Eve, because I sincerely hope that everybody’s having a happy holiday, even the people that annoy me.

(Speaking of people that annoy me: I think I finally made one of my shallow epiphanies towards understanding the ongoing War on Tolerance that takes place around this time of year. When non-pundit people get agitated at the sight of a Christmas tree or Santa Claus with the wish “Happy Holidays” attached, their discomfort is a lot like when non-southerners are baffled by the proper use of “y’all.” They assume the worst and fail to give others credit for understanding the concept of inclusion — when a southerner says “y’all,” he’s making the charitable assumption that you’ve got someone else in your life who’s also invited; and when a person says “Happy Holidays,” he’s not excluding Christmas, but inviting those who don’t celebrate that particular holiday to enjoy the festive excess of the season. Even heathens.)

Via Jackson Publick’s blog, there’s word of the next Venture Brothers season, and a contest that’s already been won. But the crew has given everyone a version of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” as performed by The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend. (I haven’t listened to it yet, so I can’t vouch for its work-or-family-party-appropriateness).

It didn’t take long back east for me to get whipped back up into the Christmas spirit, and I didn’t have to do any shopping, which is the best gift of all. I hope everybody’s enjoying the best time of the year, and looking forward to next year!

There’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Chung Lee, who’s been doing experiments with the Wii remote, then putting his results up on YouTube.

The ones I’ve seen take advantage of the fact that the Wii remote is an IR camera, not just a standard IR-output remote, which flips the whole method of interactivity with the Wii on its head. As a result, he’s turned it into a low-cost interactive whiteboard, a Minority Report-style multi-touch finger-tracking system, and coolest of all, a VR head-tracking system:

The last one I definitely want to try sometime (he’s included all the necessary software with his demos), and would make for some awesome games if developers could get clued in and start taking advantage of this. When “Wii as lightsaber” is the coolest idea anybody’s proposed for the system, it’s clear that they need input from clever guys like this. (And Nintendo desperately needs to hire this guy as soon as he’s available).