Aha: a course for people who can program already! Good; Python is my Umpteenth language and I can just about bodge it together, but it'd be nice to know it better. Might hammer at this over some evenings.

"…he doesn’t strike me as someone that Hubertus Bigend would hire. He strikes me as somebody that Hubertus Bigend would trick an opponent or enemy into hiring.”

"The real Grim Meathook Future, the one I talked about back when I wrote that thing and the one I see now, is the future where a relatively small slice of our species lives in a sort of Edenic Eloi reality where the only problems are what we laughingly refer to as White People Problems, like being able to get four bars’ worth of 4G signal at that incredible pho joint that @ironicguy69 recommended on Twitter, or finding new ways to lifehack all the shit we own into our massive closets…while the rest of the world is reduced to maintaining our lifestyles via a complex process of economically-positioned indentured servitude and clinging with the very tips of their fingernails onto the ragged edge of our consumer leavings, like the dorky dude who shows up the first day of school with the cheap K-Mart knockoffs of the pumped-up kicks the cool kids are wearing this year. In other words, the Grim Meathook Future is the one that looks like the present, the one where nothing changes."

"In my philosophy, Street Fighter is a game, but really it's a tool. It's like playing cards or chess or tennis: it's really about the people. Once you know the rules it's up to the players to put themselves in the game, to choose the nuance of how they play and express themselves. I think fighting games flourish because it was this social game. If it had been a purely single-player thing, it would never have grown so popular."

"…let’s be clear that it is a phenomena to design for, and with. It’s something we will invent, within the frame of the cultural and technical pressures that force design to evolve.

That was the message I was trying to get across at Glug: we’re the ones making the robots, shaping their senses, and the objects and environments they relate to.

Hence we make a robot-readable world."

Solid Jonesgold. Very true, and something that's been in the back of my mind – like many others – for a while now.

"Well, it’s hard to make female characters. First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that." Matthew Burns answers the hard questions.

"The best signpost to the future I know is to follow whatever happens after the word "computational."" Kevin Kelly being smart/interesting/as usual.

Lovely.

"We access that history with tools that were, almost entirely, the props of science fiction my parents might have encountered – if they read it. My phone is my sonic screwdriver, the internet my TARDIS; these are the tools with which I unlock and manipulate time."

Nice post on future interfaces, but primarily bookmarked because I can *never* find that GITS:SAC still when I need it, and it's *brilliant*.

"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.

"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).

"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."

"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.

"We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area." Some nice work from Alper and Kars.

Brad Sucks has converted his own material to Rock Band tracks in Rock Band Studio, and will soon be selling them straight to your 360. Harmonix really are bringing something to the game here – amateur/unsigned musicians can now use Rock Band to sell music (with appropriate notecharts, obviously), in the same way they started to use MySpace as promotion a few years ago. Awesome.

"…to prove I could, I made a small desktop application. It’s called Clarke. It’s really not very exciting — don’t get your hopes up. It’s just a toolbar thing that sits there, quietly, using Skyhook’s API to triangulate your location from nearby wifi points, pushing it to Fire Eagle. Yes, it’s YAFEU (Yet Another Fire Eagle Updater)." Tom makes Proper Software. He is smart.

"Cracking the bus network is really the key to most cities, and we’re nearly at the point of directed bus serendipity. In London, at least."

Joel Johnson rounds on Wired for the gulf between their online and printed formats; the comments thread turns into a much more rational, and reasonable, discussion from many Wired staff, past and present.

"Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. It’s based on the robust DOSBox emulator, with a lot of magic sprinkled on top. Run DOS programs from Finder. Wrap your games into tidy packages that launch like Mac apps. Painlessly install games from CD—then bundle the CD with your game so you don't even need it in the drive."

"The lesson to be learned here is that when something screws with your careful plans, you take control of that thing, warp it to your every demand, and channel it into a concentrated stream of Awesome. That is how you do PR." Pretty much. Valve have handled this brilliantly – the achievement they awarded themselves being the icing on the cake – and not only have they been on-brand for a savvy, internet-enabled company, they've also been spot on-brand for TF2.

"…this is a good time to consider zzt’s library – not because it’s changing, but because it’s probably complete. the long-running game archive z2 just declared zzt dead, and why not – it’s served its purpose: allowing people who aren’t programmers or digital artists an avenue to game creation before game maker or construct existed. now they do." ZZT must have been one of the first games I played, and I poked around its level editor. This retrospective both fascinates and arouses nostalgia in equal measures.

"But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners." Lots of great stuff in this Stross Keynote.

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"Shepard gets in his warm space suit and Mako vehicle and takes on the blizzard. I go outside and walk to work in the rain. That comparatively insignificant section of the game stands out more clearly than any other, which doesn't mean anything to anyone else other than me. I never loved Mass Effect, but I may remember that for the rest of my life." Duncan Fyfe on memories. He speaks truth.