Excellent description of configuring OBS et al for streaming code/development.

"That demo got the attention of venture capitalists. And when a cool-looking magical thing gets the attention of venture capitalists, discourse tends to spiral out of control." Good, even-handed look at GPT3. It's both impressive and unexciting for me – there are so many underlying issues besides the 'magic', not to mention the relative failure rate, the complexity of any real-world deployment, and as ever, a lack of nuance in a lot of media about discussing text-generation. This lays out some of the points with the latter well.

Really good, clear visual guide to flexbox.

"One succeeds because it leverages the player's motivated, explorative, self-driven experience; the other fails because it relies on a hackneyed, disjointed "epic" plotting (told in 3 separate plot-lines via cutscenes) with incongruous settings and 2-dimensional characters. One succeeds because its formal systems directly feed the player's connection to the world and characters; the other fails because its formal systems bear no discernible relationship to the stories the game wants to tell." This is strong stuff from Michael; I am increasingly fed up of the focus on (poorly-told) stories in games.

"Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning." (Gravitation, still, being my favourite of Rohrer's games, I think).

"Crucially, Goodrich entreats the public to note the following: "this change should not directly affect gamers, as it does not fundamentally alter the gameplay." This one statement should cause considerable distress, as it suggests a troubling conclusion about Medal of Honor as a work of public speech.<br />
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To wit: it suggests that the Taliban never had any meaningful representation in the game anyway. If a historically, culturally, and geographically specific enemy can simply be recast in the generic cloth of "opposition," then why was it was called "Taliban" in the first place?<br />
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And if the Afghan war in which the new Medal of Honor is set was one explicitly meant to drive the Taliban from their strongholds in Afghanistan, why should it matter that the game is set in that nation in the present day at all? In short, how was this Medal of Honor title meant to be a game about this war in particular?" This is a marvellous, critical piece of writing from Bogost.

Nice post on Awk basics – most of which I knew, but the examples are still great, especially those involving variables. The links out to the Hacker News and Reddit threads are also full of good stuff.

"Nolan’s cities are iconless places. The Hong Kong sequence in The Dark Knight omits the harbour, the HSBC and Bank of China buildings, and that city’s famous apartment buildings, instead focussing on vertiginous aerial view of the masses of anonymous buildings in Central. Cobb and Mal’s ideal city four dreams deep in Inception is an infinity of curtain walled downtown, ordinary in the extreme and all the more unsettling because of it. In any case it will be interesting to see where Nolan takes Gotham city in its third outing, likely deeper into the fantastic generic." Interesting take on Christopher Nolan's nowhere-cities. Worth also noting that whilst Cobb and Ariadne build cities, Arthur's dreams tend towards interzones – airports and hotels. There's something on the Interzone and its relationship to that film to be said, too.

Straightforward guide to making bots work with OAuth.

"You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon."

"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS to govern the country."

"Think about it: These two guys were carrying the gross domestic product of New Zealand or enough for three Beijing Olympics. If economies were for sale, the men could buy Slovakia and Croatia and have plenty left over for Mongolia or Cambodia… These men carrying bonds concealed in the bottom of their luggage also would be the fourth-largest U.S. creditors." Um, wow.

"After a stint shuttling back and forth from his farm in upstate New York to LA, where he consulted on a project for Steven Spielberg and EA, Rohrer has now joined the roster of multimedia stars at Tool of North America, which produces high-end commercials and interactive campaigns for the top advertising firms in the nation." Hmm.

"What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book?" Geoff Manaugh expands on a comment he made at Thrilling Wonder Stories; the stuff about 'quipu' is also awesome.

"I’ve always been interested in the relationship between gameplay and musical performance. Theres a remarkable structural similarity between certain game systems/mechanics and compositional ones. There is also a risk/reward/challenge aspect that is core to both practices. Anyway, for a short talk I took part in for the Leeds Evolution Festival I wrote a quick augmented chess/draughts app." And the result is a video-processing step-sequencer. Nifty.

"It is easy to have fresh bread whenever you want it with only five minutes a day of active effort. Just mix the dough and let it sit for two hours. No kneading needed! Then shape and bake a loaf, and refrigerate the rest to use over the next couple weeks. Yes, weeks! The Master Recipe (below) makes enough dough for many loaves. When you want fresh-baked crusty bread, take some dough, shape it into a loaf, let it rise for about 20 minutes, then bake. Your house will smell like a bakery, and your family and friends will love you for it."

"Explore London on foot with our suggestions for some great capital walks, including riverside rambles, architectural adventures, even the odd pub crawl." A useful page to bookmark.

"I think in films, zombies are cyclical. They come around, they get reinvigorated. I think in games, they're a constant. In games, zombies just represent this thing around which you can construct a game. There's no morality to them. There's no worries about racism that games are having right now. If it's a zombie and it's a pure zombie, a stupid zombie like the ones we have, they're a game mechanic. They're fodder, they're whatever you want to put in a game, however you want to deal with it."

"This is John Connor, leader of the Human Resistance… Microsoft’s Project Natal must never be completed, no matter what the cost. This machine, with its RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software, as well as its ability to track up to four human users for motion analysis, is clearly the precursor the killing machines of the near-future that haunt my dreams every night."

"I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!!" Oh sweet jesus.

"Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune. Betting the wrong way, Adolf Merckle took his life." A powerful example of how much you can lose when shorting goes wrong.

"Instead of encouraging you to join a group, find new friends, or spread the word, Burger King’s new Whopper Sacrifice Application is offering you a free Whopper if you DE-FRIEND 10 people from your friend list." Um.

Two hours of HD Dwarf Fortress tutorials. Will they make it any easier? No idea, but it's got to be a start.

"We spend a lot of time talking about games and films, but a much more useful corollary is music. The processes are spookily similar. Creators devise an experience, and commit it to code. The code then sits there, lifeless, until a performer picks it up. Then, through a complex tool which requires substantial manual dexterity to master, the performer interprets the experience the creator devised. No two people will play the code the same way. Some players will perform better than others. Some will get stuck and give up before the end."