Only the second title to be featured on Steam Workshop, the creation area of Valve’s community, Bethesda has finally brought us Skyrim’s official modding tools, the Creation Kit. Along with giving players the ability to legitimately mod Skyrim, the kit comes with a high-resolution texture pack for the game, and oddly enough, teamed up with Valve to release a Portal 2 mod for Skyrim, the Space Sphere mod. That’s right, everyone’s favorite insane personality sphere can now follow players around the world of Skyrim. The creation kit is free, and around only 40 megabytes in size, so go grab it, and start modding your Dragonborn heart out, and visit the Creation Kit wiki for all your modding needs.

With each subsequent big event, we continue to see Twitter’s tweets per second record rise. Super Bowl XLVI was yesterday, and one can assume that Twitter was pretty active. If you didn’t see the people you are following spamming your feed to death with extremely informative tweets like “!!!” or “omg,” you still probably wouldn’t be surprised to know that Twitter was quite active during the game, especially during the last three minutes, which is when the tweets per second count was at its highest. During the last three minutes of the game, a count of 12,233 tweets per second was reached. This eclipsed last year’s Super Bowl tweets per second record of 4,064, but didn’t come close to an annual Japanese screening of Castle in the Sky, which hit 25,088 tweets per second.

The big game is on Sunday, so what better time for the Federal government to start seizing sports-related domains left and right under charges of illegal streaming and sale of unauthorized merchandise? This has actually been going on for a while now, but today marks the largest seizure to date: 307 sites in total, 16 of which were allegedly doing the streaming thing, the rest allegedly handling the unauthorized merchandise part.

Sweden’s Supreme Court announced earlier today that they would not grant leave to appeal in the now long-running trial that charged three The Pirate Bay founders with criminal copyright infringement. The sentences and fines against the trio of Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm, are now final. Fortunately for torrenters, The Pirate Bay website was not part of the trial, and was left unharmed and operational. However, with the trial against the three founders out of the way, and with the recent MegaUpload takedown, The Pirate Bay is now more vulnerable than ever, so the people currently running the torrent site quickly moved the address to a .SE domain, in order for it to be out of reach of U.S. authorities. That’s right: Http://thepiratebay.se, and according to a new post on their blog, 2012 will be “the year of the storm.”

China’s Internet is notoriously censored. Former Geekosystem Managing Editor Robert Quigley once visited China and attempted to hold a conversation with me over GChat. He got kicked off for five minutes at a time for every thirty or so minutes of usage. So, if you want to experience what Internet censorship of even the most bland sites and services like GMail and GChat feels like, install this China Channel extension, and be happy you didn’t have to shell out the money to go to China and be annoyed by actual Internet censorship.

Three years ago, Casey Pugh kicked off an ambitious project called Star Wars Uncut. In it, the entirety of the 1977 sci-fi classic Star Wars: A New Hope was sliced and diced into 15 second chunks. Through the project’s website, everyday folks could upload their shot-for-shot remakes of each section with the eventual goal of crowd sourcing the entire film. Though all the clips were apparently complete two years ago, it was only cut into one continuous film within the past few days. Let me tell you, folks: It is charming as all get out. It’s an amazing labor of love, that makes you forget all the cynicism about the prequels and everything that has come since. My favorite bit so far? The part where instead of Princess Leia placing a holographic diskette into R2D2, a hand places a VHS tape on top of a shop vac. You need to see this.

Along with a few other prominent sites, Wikipedia and reddit to name a couple, Google has come out in protest of SOPA. Though they didn’t take the blackout route like Wikipedia and reddit, which would’ve brought the Internet to something that would amount to a near-complete halt, Google displayed their feelings about SOPA with a tasteful Google Doodle, a simple black censor bar covering the iconic Google logo.

Those that regularly visit torrent sites may notice that some of them occasionally feature a message of the day that is promoting music or film that the creators willingly uploaded to the site in the hope that it’d create some artist awareness. However, most of the torrent sites that feature the occasional band or film rarely do it in some official format. The Pirate Bay is here to make artist promotion through torrent sites official, and is launching The Promo Bay, an artist promotion platform through which an artist can be promoted on The Pirate Bay’s homepage, free of charge.

So far, 2012 seems to be the year of launching new video game sites that established editors of other sites leave to found. Vox Media kicked off the trend when a group of recognizable gaming writers went to found the Vox Media video games vertical, and now, with the help of Ben Kuchera, formerly of Ars Techncia, the team over at Penny Arcade will be expanding their empire to more traditional video games coverage.

Ridiculously popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay, will stop serving torrents within the next month. Don’t worry too much just yet, though, as the plan only currently consists of ceasing serving torrents, which means the site will still contain magnet links — links that do not actually store a file, but rather point toward a file. A benefit of magnet links is that, since a site doesn’t actually have any sort of file on hand, it becomes more difficult to accuse a site of any wrongdoing in court. Though The Pirate Bay has only switched the default download file to a magnet link instead of the torrent, and simply lists the torrent file second now instead of first, the site will remove torrent files in favor of magnet links indefinitely in a month or so. This surely marks the end of an era.