"…the whole thing comes to a head with the Louvre, the only building in the game with four culture slots and a truly dazzling theming bonus if you can match the specific criteria. Offering massive boosts to your stats, the Louvre is essentially the headshot of the cultural world." The overhauls to the cultural victory in the forthcoming Civ V expansion sound great. Also: the way Christian writes about it is great.

"i'm tired of feeling like i'm writing to 17 year olds when i write about games. if we can't accept a base level of validity to the thing we're talking about without having to constantly feel shame and prove and defend its existence, then i'm not interested in participating in discussions surrounding games. it's stupid and boring to have so much of the talk be constantly channeled through that. who cares what Roger Ebert or whoever else who never played a videogame thinks or has thought. games are games and they can do good or bad things depending on how they're used. they're only just one tool." Yes, all of this post, and this in particular. I like games; I also like books and films and art an all manner of things. Culture is culture, and I engage with it all in a pretty similar way. A nice piece of writing expressing that, though, and reminding us of the ways we _can_ engage with our cultures and media.

"That is how the internet first appeared to me: as shared experience of make believe and dreams. And while much has changed in the decade since: that slipperiness, those mutable boundaries, the capacity for experimentation and imagination still is here. The internet is made of dreams."

More short stories I've been enjoying recently.

"It’s not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story." Applies to lots of things.

"This post is a look at the biggest downfalls of distributed startups – specifically the rise of monoculture, siloing of the workforce, isolation of management, expense of communication and loss of group context." Lots of great points, and well-observed counters; useful reading if you only ever work from home occasionally, let alone all the time.

"Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly. The critique of startup culture that came in large part from the agile movement has been replaced by sanitized, pompous, dishonest slogans." This is all very good.

"Brasfrwrw" has got to be witch-rain, right? This is great.

"…a new study has identified 11 synesthetes whose grapheme-color mappings appear to be based on the Fisher Price plastic letter set made between 1972-1990". Culturally induced colour-mapping.

"‫قلب‬ is a simple, Scheme-like programming language that you code entirely in Arabic. It is an exploration of the impact of human culture on computer science, the role of tradition in software engineering, and the connection between natural and computer languages." Somebody asked me at Four Thought about non-English programming languages, and I had to explain there really weren't many/any. This is a nice counterpoint, though it's as much a statement as a practical tool, I guess. Still: it's a statement about the thing I explained to the audience member.

"Popularity rules, and fitness for purpose is secondary. We even make up a little rationalization about this: “Our code must be easy to read for the next programmer, so we pick idioms that will be familiar.” That would make stellar sense if idioms are forever, but they aren’t. They come and go like trends in pop music, and Ruby Archeologists can accurately date a business application by examining its gemspec file." I liked this line of thought.

'Together with Caper I have also been working on a small art project for the RSC. We’ve been interested in working with the building itself… We wanted to explore the building as a whole, the total sum of effort and action that makes experiencing the performance possible; some of it behind the scenes. To do that, we wanted to put together an app that would analyse, visualise and display activity in the building as it happens." Lovely stuff from Natalia; this is another piece of work commissioned at the same time as the piece I'm doing for the RSC (more of which anon).

"The fascinating thing about the New Aesthetic could be that it was never new — it went from being unknown to being ubiquitous and thoroughly banal with barely a blink. The frisson of shock or wonder one experienced at seeing an aspect of the New Aesthetic out in the wild comes because that is the only time it will be noticed; afterwards it will pass unobserved. The New Aesthetic is not about seeing something new — it is about the new things we are not seeing. It is an effort to truly observe and note emergent digital visual phenomena before they become invisible." This is a really solid, careful piece from Will Wiles.