"My only objection [to the coverage of le Carré's death] would be: not enough discussion about the relationship between le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, and his wife, Ann, which plays out over the five novels where George Smiley appears as a central figure and is one of the weirdest portraits of a marriage ever committed to the page. The reasons for this omission are most likely either boring (something to do with expectations of the genre) or depressing (something to do with ambient contempt for women), but it’s nice to think that le Carré’s portrayal of their marriage is not given the attention it is due because it is so strange, to the degree that if you start talking about it you will never stop."

Every time I try to quote this I end up reading the whole thing again. For Gawker's "Famous Cuckolds" series, Rosa Lyster looks at George and Ann Smiley. It's a wonderful piece of writing about a wonderful writer, and about wonderful writing.

I viscerally resonated with the way just the thought of having to deal with other people's opinions can make one feel, especially now. Turks and Caicos, indeed.

Anyhow. Not a waste word, and you get the added bonus of remembering le Carré's own words as you read. Cannot recommend this enough.

"You can control time when you can see it." Things I like here: half-day resolution; tracking time as a group, rather than solo activity; the value of projects that may be numerically "over budget". Meetings as "0" is interesting; I'm not sure about that yet.

Nice tutorial for exploring AR with Processing. (Yes, I know it's AR, but I also am interested in how this works, so stop your booing in the peanut gallery).

"The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks." You cannot make this stuff up. Hexagon sounds phenomenal.

"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."