So I guess I’ll fill in. Because I’m ashamed and uncomfortable, I’ve put all the crappy camera phone pictures of my recent trip to Denmark beneath a More button.

I flew to Copenhagen on Wednesday night so that on Thursday I could attend the LEGO World conference, see the reveal of LEGO Minecraft, and interview the game’s creator Notch and current developer Jeb.

The flight was from Heathrow Terminal 5, the best of all the world’s terminals. I spent an hour or so in Giraffe, eating a rocky road sundae and then some olives. This was the lurid part of the trip.

The flight out was in the afternoon, but we flew in to darkness, meaning half the sky was full of stars and the other half a sunset. The iPhone 3GS camera did its best, bless it.

By the time I reached my hotel, it was late, and I went pretty much straight to bed. The next morning, I head over to the Bella Center just a little outside the center of Copenhagen. I knew I was attending LEGO World, but I hadn’t really looked in to what that was like. It turns out it’s like this.

About half the halls at the convention center were just pits filled with Lego and young kids. There was also lots of fuel for your nightmares, it turns out.

The best part of the relatively small convention was the fan room, where the blocks’ most dedicated fans showed off their absurd creations. Like large, bustling towns, with working railways.

And the countryside just outside those towns.

In the morning there was a two-hour seminar on Lego’s various research projects. They’re trying to create “a seamless play experience” between the “physical and digital realms”, using augmented reality, Kinect toys, iPad apps, 3D printing and bullshit marketing terms. There was a hall where you could go play around with some of their prototypes, the best of which was a music program controlled by placing, turning and twisting cubes on top of a touchscreen table. It had very little to do with Lego, though.

The most fun to be had was just wandering around and staring at the mountains of bricks, whether they were loose on the floor, or used as part of giant construction projects.

It’s only now that I realise, hey, the building in the middle of the photo below looks like the courthouse from Back to the Future. And wait a minute, isn’t that the park in front of it and, yes! Doc and Marty and the DeLorean. And wait a minute, there’s the Ghostbusters and the Blues Brothers on the right, too.

Even the QR Codes were made out of Lego.

As was this enormous, life-sized car.

After lunch, I attended the press conference where Lego and Mojang revealed the pricing and look of the Lego Minecraft sets. They look neat, but are small and expensive. Given that Minecraft’s world is already just blocks and nature, it’s hard to create a Lego set that feels especially Minecraft-y, and not just like regular Lego.

After interviewing Mojang – who are lovely, shy people, who seem a little bewildered by their success and fame – I had a long wait before heading back to the airport. While pootling around, I found an open storage room at the back of the press room. There was a giant minifig head inside it. I hadn’t seen anyone walking around the showfloor dressed in it, and it had black smudges across its face. The dirt and perma-grin made it look insane.

So I put it on. This was the scuzzy part of the trip.

Then I flew home.

I do this because I know that if I bookmark the page and close the tab, then I’ll never read it. Bookmarks are where websites go to be forgotten. But the flip of that is that when there’s more long articles I want to read than normal, I end up with thirty or forty tabs open at the same time. I will almost always eventually read everything, but in the meantime, my screen becomes cluttered. It starts to feel like my brain is cluttered, filled by half-read thoughts, and it becomes harder to finish reading any of them.

So in the interest of clearing some brainspace, I’m linking and closing all of the tabs I currently have open. I’ve done this before, by reading each article first. This time, I’ve read all of some of what’s below, and some of all the others. I’m not guaranteeing the quality of any of it.

A Beautiful Mind, about an autistic artist.

Consider the Lobster, which I think is the last famous piece of David Foster Wallace journalism that I haven’t read.

An annotated version of Obama’s third State of the Union.

Burgled in Philly.

Navigating Love and Autism, in the New York Times.

The Rise of the New Groupthink, from same.

The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. The New Yorker still capitalises “Internet”.

Film Critic Hulk’s Screenwriting 101.

Stumptown Girl, about the creators of the TV show Portlandia.

2011: The Cinescape, a montage of movie clips that makes me wish I was a film editor.

A Field Guide To Developers.

An interview with Bill Clinton.

Some answers to this year’s Edge question.

Response to the response to Level With Me, Robert Yang’s collaborative Portal 2 level experiment, which requests that gamers be more knowledgeable about games. Also this.

Linked from within the above: Donkeyspace.

Happiness takes (a little) magic, about stepping away from the damned internet.

Playing God: On Death, Motherhood and Creating (Artificial) Life.

Paul McCartney takes the Tube.

The Brain on Trial, which is disturbing enough you’ll tell your friends.

Lack of Love, a forgotten, probably terrible game that I am thinking about playing.

Don’s collection of certifications is impressively esoteric. He has taken CPR courses, and he’s qualified to use an electric defibrillator. He has a pyrotechnics-display license, so that Nucla can have fireworks on the Fourth of July. When he heard about a new type of hormone therapy, he flew to California to attend two days of classes, and now he compounds medicine for four transgendered patients who live in various parts of the West. Every three months, Don talks with them on the phone and prepares their drugs; he finds this interesting. On Friday nights, he announces Nucla High football games. They play eight-man ball, although if a bigger school comes to town they switch numbers with every possession, so that each side can practice its plays. When Nucla is on offense, it’s eight-on-eight, but it becomes eleven-on-eleven when the other team has the ball. Occasionally, somebody gets confused, and Don’s voice rings out over the loudspeakers: “There’s eleven white guys and eight blue guys, and that won’t work.” The football might not be first-rate, but the players’ names are a novelist’s dream. Nucla has Seth Knob, Chad Stoner, and Seldon Riddle. Dove Creek has a player named Tommy Fury. Blanding has Talon Jack and Sterling Black, Tecohda Tom and Herschel Todachinnie. Shilo Stanley, Terrance Tate, Dillon Daves: if alliteration ever needs an offensive line, recruiting should begin around the Colorado-Utah border.

For a start, there’s a small picture of me on the cover, in the lower right. “Cover model” is totally on my CV now.

This issue of PC Gamer is especially great because it’s the first without the coverdisc. I was Disc Editor when I first joined the magazine, producing two CDs and a DVD every month, and I second Tom’s sentiments when I say that I am glad that it is now gone. There are two great advantages: we’re no longer sealed in a plastic bag on shop shelves, and we now have more pages.

Having so many pages suddenly frees us up to do a lot of big, silly, fun things we normally wouldn’t have space for. This month, that’s produced a ludicrous amount of great writing: Tom’s Skyrim diary and interview with Todd Howard, Owen’s interview with Gabe Newell, Craig’s huge feature on Firefall, large previews on Planetside 2, World of Warplanes and half a dozen others, the Making of Shogun: Total War, a free and exclusive TF2 hat and lots, lots, lots more. It is probably the best issue of PC Gamer I’ve ever worked on.

My favourite piece is the entire team playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator together, which is why I’m dressed as a Vulcan on the cover. It’s a multiplayer game where everyone controls a computer terminal on the bridge of a Star Trek-style spaceship, and everyone should make their friends play it with them immediately.

You can buy the magazine on shop shelves and from Apple’s new Newsstand, where it was very briefly the top grossing magazine. It’s now about 12th, which is still great. Buy it buy buy it buy it.