"The walkthrough posted by Lee Beng Hai belongs in a “best games writing” list somewhere, not so much for the prose, but for the depth of his coverage and the gratitude I feel for it, like he’s the first guy in my tribe to wander into the jungle and come back with all his limbs." Chris Dahlen on why nobody's writing about Demon's Souls, but everybody's playing it. (Also: "It’s not “flow”, because flow implies progress; it’s more like tantric sex with a slide rule" is a brilliant analogy).

"Clarity is a Splunk like web interface for your server log files. It supports searching (using grep) as well as trailing log files. It has been written using the event based architecture based on EventMachine and so allows real-time search of very large log files. If you hit the browser Stop button it will also kill the grep / tail utility."

"a JavaScript GameBoy Emulator" Blimey.

"Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”" So true. I'm trying to recall our own nomenclature.

Great interview with Lantz, expanding on his "games aren't media" angle and some other interesting points on aesthetics; totally marred by Michaël Samyn's trolling of a comment thread (on his *own* company's blog). Still, read the top half!

Spaff is now a Molecule, hurrah! Excited by what a community management team for Media Molecule might cook up…

"…let's end the era of Bushnell's Law, not because it's useless or base, but because it's wrong. It doesn't explain the phenomenon we have assumed it does. Or more precisely, let's excise the first half, and keep the rest: 'A game should reward the first play and the hundredth.' How? By culturing familiarity and constructing a habitual experience. By finding receptors for familiar mechanics and tuning them slightly differently, so as to make those receptors resonate in a new way, and then coupling those new resonances with meaningful ideas, practices, or experiences." A rather good – and certainly thought-provoking – Ian Bogost piece over at Gamasutra.

If you tilt N64 cartridges, amusing glitches happen. What you might not predict: loads of Japanese (real-world) videos pastiching "tilted" Goldeneye. This is bonkers.

This is ridiculous.

"Slowly, over time, a page typeset in 1771 might start to get a whole new life, thanks to the growing authority we grant it through that elemental gesture of making a link." And this is why we need to empower the socialised book, not just through Google Books, but through the physical things themselves.

Official Poken site.

"Simply pull out your Poken and ‘high five’ it with your new best friend’s. Clever RF technology then zaps the info between the devices, so next time you log on to your favourite site, your profiles are linked. Genius!" Physical exchange of details, dead cheap, integrated through a web intermediate. Lovely.

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" It's good to see that Sony can still afford their weekly supply of crazy pills. Locking up potential inside a monkeypuzzle is a _good_ thing? "Official" leadership? What the hell, Kaz?

"A dude by the name of Phoebus has posted a collection of his research on Left 4 Dead's infected and weapon damage statistics over on the official Steam forums. I think that it'll be of great interest for any serious player of the game to delve into this information." There's a question over their accuracy, but there's still a decent amount of detail here, and the details on tail-off of weapon damage is useful to know. Also a relief to have the hellacious friendly-fire damage on Expert confirmed.

Fascinating to watch some of the body shapes – the hunched run, and in particular the the saut du chat – carry through to modern Parkour; that which is practical has always been so. As with all parkour: parts of it are beautiful, parts of it entertaining, and parts of it superhuman.

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

"This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person."

"The Napbook is a laptopcase which also happens to be a comfortable cushion." I could do with one right now.

"I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colours", a pixelated Cthuluesque love-hate story. Sweet; overwritten, but the core mechanics is nice, and the pace of the game is very soothing.

Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview – which has nested threads in posts – grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.

Bonkers. It's a man, dressed as something a bit like a slinky, and it broke me a little.

"AlterEgo is a Ruby implementation of the State pattern as described by the Gang of Four. It differs from other Ruby state machine libraries in that it focuses on providing polymorphic behavior based on object state. In effect, it makes it easy to give an object different “personalities” depending on the state it is in." Oh, that could be really handy.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"Simply stick your finger in the hole and a virtual representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games… from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man." Um, wow. Although I'm always afraid of putting appendages in boxes I can't see inside, though.

I think they're wrong, you know. It's not theatre; it's protocol. Maybe people aren't used to the protocol; if yours is the first app they encounter, they'll think that it's OK to show what passwords are – and perhaps that it's OK to write them down elsewhere in plaintext. Applications have a degree of responsibility for users' interactions across the internet, and quirky and cute as this may be, it's just not the place to demonstrate your shining personality.

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"…it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself." Yes. This is a problem.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality." No, it does not seem appropriate. It seems bonkers.

Hey, I've been in that relationship too! These made me laugh a lot.

"bill. francis. louis – look here. help." Ah, the fun of the farm. It's all coming back to me now.