"An 11 minute documentary exploring the merits and impact of pixel art, animation and chiptune music." Nice interviews, careful, and thoughtful.

"Our original inclination was to put game content under "~/Library/Application Support/Steam", along with the other support files Steam uses. The problem is that uninstalling an application is meant to be as simple as dragging it from the Applications folder into the Trash. However, uninstalling Steam this way will leave all of your game content on the drive, which could easily be quite a few gigabytes of wasted space. Our solution was to put the content in a very visible and often used location so users could easily find and delete the game data if they didn't want it anymore. That's right, we chose the Documents folder specifically because it was visible and often used — the very reasons users don't want it there." Well done, Valve, for explaining this in the short term, and providing a solution in the long term. (And: their thinking wasn't so woolly, really).

"The route of the [Metropolitan] line between Paddington and Bayswater (opened in 1868) necessitated the demolition of 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, situated on a long, upmarket terrace of five story houses, and it was decided to build a 5ft-thick facade which matched the houses either side of the break."

Back in 2006, early on a Saturday morning, artist Julien Berthier installed a new door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement… Unbelievably, Berthier adds, "Almost 4 years later, the address still exists. Regularly graffitied it is even cleaned by the city service.”

"Someone at work recently asked how he should go about studying machine learning on his own. So I’m putting together a little guide." Ooh, useful. Lots of starting points for machine learning in R.

"When you look at the dubstep scene you realize quickly that it’s a fairly young genre. Not in terms of its own existence as a named thing, but as a measure of the age of many of its prominent musicians. They’re of the generation that doesn’t know a world before the Nintendo Entertainment System and a lot of the music reflects that… If you had a giant Venn Diagram of dubstep and 8-bit chiptunes, you’d see a large overlap between the two. Why dubstep is particularly prone to this, more than other electronic styles, I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with its relatively lo-fi, home studio feel of the genre? … There’s a hidden, untold history there, but it’d be best told by someone that knows the genre, and its players, better than I do. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying it until it’s pillaged and destroyed for all its worth." Mike on the overlap between dubstep and chiptune culture.

"All artworks have been created using data from the game "Unreal Tournament". Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself. There are 20-25 bots playing each game and they play custom maps which I create. Each map has been specially designed so that the AI bots have a rough idea of where to go in order to create the image I want. I log the position (X,Y,Z) of each bot, every second using a modification for the game, I also log the position of a death. I then run my own program written in Processing to create printable postscript files of that match."

"Kevin Nguyen talks to the minds behind Kind of Bloop, a chiptune cover album of cool jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue." A good interview with some of the Kind of Bloop gang; Shnabubula's "All Blues" is utterly marvellous, so it's nice to hear more from the artist.