"The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sources from “clean” places like Australia or Canada instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder." Depressing, and a very, very good point. It doesn't make me any surer of what to do, sadly.

"It's not a subscription; it's more casual than that. It's an **impulscription**; they get the chance to dangle the week's headlines under your nose, and you get the chance to buy if you like the look of that issue. No obligation, no hassle. It means I never have to miss an Economist Technology Quarterly, and nor do I have to take out a proper subscription and then suffer the guilt of seeing unread copies piling up in the living room.<br />
<br />
I want all magazines to be available like this, please." What a great idea. (Also: I *love* 'impulscription').

"Still, if you're going to watch a pair of zombies go at each other for eleventy-billion hours, far into the night, it might as well be these zombies. They were incredible, astonishing, indefatigable. They fell over frequently but they never stayed down. My hat goes off to these zombies. Possibly my head goes off to them too." Xan Brooks' live coverage of Isner-Mahut. Some great writing in there.

"Even the likes of Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company hide their bloodlust behind a figleaf of fictional "what if" scenarios. Medal of Honor turns a real tragedy into a social shooting gallery, and is going to have to tread carefully to avoid belittling the reality it borrows for our amusement." The problems of making videogames about current conflict, especially when the tactless multiplayer audience get their hands on your content. Not sure I'm particularly cool about this in any way. Oh well.

Collecting casual and informal collective-nouns by scraping twitter. The "What Is This" page is very well done, explaining just what the scraper "sees" in a clear fashion. Fun.

"What's needed, from a gameplay perspective, is a romantic partner who is sometimes also functionally the villain. There's a reason people write buckets of fanfic about the secret love of Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter: passionately clashing with someone is a form of intimacy. It raises the emotional stakes between those two characters _far_ more reliably than attempts to portray attraction in interactive form." Emily Short on fine, fine form, about the difficulties of writing romance into games. An excellent piece of writing on game design.

"Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire."

"In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means." Rands helps you discover what the words actually mean. As usual, he is right.

A game about protest, conflict, and shades of gray. Worth playing through to the 'end'; certainly made me think, and unlike any game I've played in a while. Not sure how this passed me bay.

"He's going to like that album, and then he's going to ask you about The Police, and he's going to want to know why they aren't together anymore. How are you going to explain what happened to Sting? You know, when he started singing about turtles and ponies and became an obsessive Beanie Baby collector. What are you going to say?" Bill doesn't want to have to explain Sting to Eli.

"To justify such an investment in time, a game would not only have to match the content of the course, but provide a learning experience that couldn't be accomplished through reading, writing and class discussion." Todd Bryant on how he integrated playing games into his teaching programmes; some nice ideas in here, notably using MMOs for language tuition, and some commentary on the suitability of various titles for this sort of thing.

"Maybe [games publishers] think there could never be enough competition, excitement, betrayal, surprise, defeat, skull-daggery, and general griefer-worthy assholeishness in a game without direct conflict. But the last year’s worth of news out of Wall Street tells a different story. It’s a tale of a system corrupted from the inside by the scheming, cheating, gaming of a few powerful and greedy individuals. If this is not prime material for a videogame, I don’t know what is."