"In school most people got to try drawing or playing instruments. Trying out code should sit in the same category: as a creative pursuit that you should at least try before you decide whether you like it or not. There is a huge drive now to get kids to do just that, whether it’s to give them skills required by the modern world or whether it’s about teaching creative ways of thinking. CodeClub is one of the initiatives that has the potential to not just show how much this is needed, but provides the solutions. Kids will be okay." [this is good]

A huge, fascinating, braindump from Bret Victor, mainly on the state of how programming is being taught (especially in the "learn to code, live" idiom that's popular at the moment). A lot of it is very good; I'm not sure it applies everywhere, and I'd like to see examples not about geometry (which I think are entirely possible, given Victor's idioms). But still: it's huge, and dense, and well-reasoned, and has lots of jumping off points. Good to see someone thinking about this stuff like this.

"It’s okay if they don’t completely understand how a program works after they’ve played with it a little. Very few ideas are completely original. The more material you give your students to plagiarize, the wider the range of derisive works they’ll make from them." Perhaps my favourite point in this very good piece. (Though I've found GameMaker way less of a "kit" than it makes out). But yes: no-one wants to learn to program (for its own sake). People want to learn to make things for screens; programming is incidental.

Really good look at getting your head around vim from Mislav. Especially on the money with regard to starting slow, and adding things as you need them. The worst thing you can do is _start_ with somebody else's .vim files.

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Both the letters described, and Robin's point, are beautiful.

"Skateboarding, metal work, solitude, machining, precision, and practicality. That's where Roy began." Lovely interview with a chap who makes custom jeans, on his own, simply because he decided one day he wanted to – and then he got good at it. The photographs of his workshop at the end are lovely.

This is beyond brilliant. Not because it's More Hard Fun From The Maker Of QWOP, but because it's actually easier than QWOP, and it tickles exactly the same part of my brain that bouldering itself tickled, and it makes brilliant use of finger-gymnastics and the keyboard, and it's marvellous, really. I just want to go home and play it all night.

"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point – that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.

"The puzzles [in Limbo] aren't brain-busters, and even though you die a lot, it always puts you right back where you started. It's just so capricious. It never bothers to set limits or rules for the world you're in. Its sole concern seems to be killing you for no apparent reason. Instead of asking you to apply what you learned from your previous deaths, the game keeps changing the rules so it can kill you again. It's as though it's making things up as it goes, like a rambling first draft that could use a good revision."

"I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback." James on bookmarking and annotation – something I'm a big fan of.

"For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present." Lovely writing, smart ideas, nice little game, but the clarity of thought is the real stand-out here. Another example of why I love Denki so much.

"…The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organizing military expeditions, managing a household too, and altogether form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others, and a great deal wider awake.” Well done, Plato.

"Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths?" Yes, they should.

“I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.” And now, I love Walter Murch even more.

Depicted as a grid by artist Susan Wolf; to circumvent the large number of languages spoken in Joburg, taxi drivers have official hand signals to take you from A to B. This PDF shows all of them. (via Bobulate)