"I view ValhallaPlate as being closely related to an SM57. Or a hammer. No need to be delicate with the tool. No need to think about things too much. It just works." I liked this line on toolmaking, especially when it comes to music technology.

Much more Illustrator-like than Sketch is, in many ways, and affordable. Certainly leaps ahead of Inkscape in not being rubbish. Going to use this for lasercutting/frontpanel work, I think.

Really good article on the realities of installing iBeacons, and, secondarily, the way you develop your own internal processes just to solve workflow. I liked the trolly; I felt for the BKM very much as I read this.

Fascinating article capturing how various translators worked around their languages to translate not only the absence of gendered language _suggested_ in Ancillary Justice, but also the author's deliberate use of the feminine as a generic case. (Also, how to translate things for different cultures – what they expect and what they intimate).

Yes, it's a bit heavily focused on copying/emulation, but there's some useful stuff in here and some interesting starting points.

Thoughtbot's engine for Rails admin UIs, sans-DSLs. Filed away for reference.

Corrie Corfield on Peter Donaldson. Lovely.

[this is good] and I will remember more of it in future.

Wonderful, dense, three-part study of one of GTA V's renderer. I like Adrian's posts because he focuses on the art of the technology, as well as the technology of the art; a reminder that game art isn't just plonking OBJ files into a world, but relies on a whole host of developers, maths, and drawcalls.

Interesting; the wrapper Github used for Atom, as a platform. Makes building desktop applications for web-folk like me a notch easier, though as ever, I find the Javascript ecosystem baffling.

Wonderful article from an architect who worked on "The Witness" about the role of architecture practice in game design, and all the rough edges architects see within game worlds. Good on spatial design principles, too.

"Every gallery project needs an Andy" – and other insights from Tim Hunkin on installation design, following his work on 'The Secret Life of the Home' at the Science Museum. All rings very true for me, and glad to see it's not just me that finds this sort of stuff challenging. Also: very interesting on museum culture.

Lovely interview between Jeff Bridges and Roger Deakins – on film, and how they get made, and feel. Lots of deep knowledge and affection in this; I really enjoyed it.

"At last week’s Game Developers’ Conference I delivered a talk titled “AI-driven Dynamic Dialog”, describing the dialog system used in Left4Dead, Dota, and basically all of Valve’s games since The Orange Box." This is a brilliant talk – really worth going through the PDF for. In a nutshell, it's how the Left4Ddead conversation works – something I tried emulating with my Twitter bots a while back – but also sheds light on how I could have sped up some of the decision-making code on Hello Lamp Post. It's also good on what designing (andwriting) for this kind of work looks like. Might have to write something longer on this.

"The amygdala is the “fight or flight” and emotional memory part of the brain. Its job is to protect by comparing incoming data with emotional memories. An amygdala hijack occurs when we respond out of measure with the actual threat because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat." Wow, there's actually science behind that feeling. Useful to give it a name, too.

"This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear." This is crazy – and one of the few optical illusions I've seen that still works when zoomed-in super close. It's so hard to make head or tail of.

"So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF." This review is, essentially, amazing, and has elevated ROTF to a must-see for me.

"I'm continually drawn in by the belief that everyone finds their own way through life, age, cities, networks, whatever. And as Meehan's tale recounts, it's the whispers we leave on the wind that entice others to follow our hints." Just go and read the story; it's wonderful, and the fragments George picks out so carefully constructed. That made my evening.

"The reason for [Singstar's relatively "low" Metacritic scores] is also the reason that this is an article about SingStar, and not a review of SingStar Queen and the new wireless microphones: SingStar is now basically unreviewable. Unlike Guitar Hero: Metallica, or AC/DC Live: Rock Band, SingStar has morphed from a game into a service, and defies traditional critical judgement."

"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.

A wonderful old postmortem – on Shadows of the Empire for the N64. As a launch title, there was lots of working with unfinished hardware, prototype controllers, and SGI workstations; it's long and detailed, and a fantastic portal to a world that seems eons ago, even if it was only 12 years away.

"In fact the propeller is really rotating. Russians fix a magnet on their helicopter blades. The device sends a signal to synchronize a movie camera, allowing to visualize efforts and deformations on the blades." Hypnotic, and unnerving.

"Looking in, it’s clear that the game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does. Maybe I could hoist one more flag in the indie games parade, but I think of myself as building a Micro-ISV in the web software business. It’s a much nicer community." As usual: anyone with a degree of sanity looking in from the outside comes to the same conclusions.

"Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it."

Mike Kuniavsky being really good, again, about avatars, physical mashups, and mashups as opportunistic design. Loads of great stuff inside the pdf.

"…yes, if I’d gotten a Lenovo when you all suggested it, I’d have a spill-proof keyboard with drains. That’s my plan for the next time something horrible happens to my laptop, which should be any day now." Randall Munroe's laptop died. I blame the package management, rather than the milk, personally.

"They took the trailer from "WestSide Story" and made it look like "28 days Later", hillarity ensues." No, that's bloody brilliant.

"I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance. Many are interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their own right, if you just give them some attention." Martin Parr on noticing the everyday.

"The problem is that what made GoldenEye so good was a fleeting, transient quality that can never be grasped again: it's not that the game was especially brilliant by modern standards, but rather that it utterly eclipsed its contemporaries. These days, the FPS is as comfortable on consoles as it is on Windows, and for a Bond shooter to have the same impact as GoldenEye it would have to outperform Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, BioShock, and Half-Life 2. In short, it would have to be revolutionary." Although: a big part of what made it so good was the social side of the jerky split-screen multiplayer, and Live just isn't the same. Yes, there was the context, but there was also some kind of magical glue holding it all together. Still, there are lots of smart, sensible points here, about emerging from the shadow of Goldeneye.

"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.

"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.

"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.

Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.

Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.

David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.

Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.

Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.

"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".