"In an astonishing move, the European Com mis sion (EC) has reversed a decision made in a UK tax tribunal, and refused to classify works by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola as “art”. This means that UK galleries and auction houses will have to pay full VAT (value added tax, which goes up to 20% next year) and customs dues on video and light works, when they are imported from outside the EU. The decision is binding on all member states." Very sad.

"Code-Point Open is a dataset that contains postcode units, each of which have a precise geographical location."

"This is a proposed draft of the Don't Be a Dick license for open source projects. The purpose of this license is to permit the broadest feasible scope for reuse and modification of creative work, restricted only by the requirement that one is not a dick about it." Much to recommend here.

"…we haven’t been able to find the right publishing partner for Quarrel.  Despite the game being finished, super polished, and everyone who plays it having great fun with it, we’ve slowly been remembering why we got out of the traditional games industry for so long and escaped to Interactive Television in the first place: this industry doesn’t value good games.  Players do, but the games industry doesn’t.  Instead it values low risk games – not even “calculated” risk games, just low risk." Such a shame; Quarrel has been looking great, and Denki know their games; it's absurd that this is the outcome facing Denki in 2010.

It's a digital clock made out of scrollbars; divs being resized to force overflow and generate a scrollbar make up the seven-segment display. Bonkers.

"Using a simple correlation scale comparing marketing spend and sales against Metacritic rating and sales, Divnich found that marketing influenced game revenue “three times more than game scores”… “There is no compelling reason to focus on quality, you should literally just spend that money and time on marketing.”" I'm not sure he's suggesting this is a /good/ thing, but he is pointing out that it's what the numbers say. It's still depressing.

"Japanese PSN member RRR30000 has managed to recreate classic shoot-em up gameplay within the game, using a spaceship sticker and massive amounts of free time." Just. Incredible. The enemies-on-sticks have a vast amount of charm, too. I don't think I can escape buying the PS3 this demands, sadly.

"The original page, which sadly has since then disappered from the face of the earth, was all about this hidden "demon face" in one of Aphex Twin's tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker". This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself." Some fun – and somewhat impressive – decoding of hidden imagery on IDM cds. The Venetian Snares cats are particiuarly great.

Well, as long as they ban every other imported phrase. Stupid as this is, I think the comment that it's "the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing" is a bit of an absurd, and somewhat insensitive, overstatement.

"Dante's Inferno, the poem, explores the Christian afterlife, as Dante traipses through nine circles of Hell to get to Purgatory and eventually Heaven. EA will apparently interpret this as fighting supernatural baddies." Oh bloody hell.