"In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again." Somewhere between savage and affectionate, like the best parodies.

"In 1992, Wolfenstein 3-D revolutionized video games and created the 3D first-person shooter genre. Now, after decades of development, Wolfenstein 3-D has been converted to breathtaking, epoch-making 1-D. You can now play the game in a single, dazzling one-pixel line." Title-sequence and everything. Spot-on. Much like Cow Clicker, if you're going to make the joke, you have to make the game.

"it comes as no surprise that a well-known Swedish furniture-maker has taken the opportunity to enter the specialist adult market, furnishing the adulterers of the green belt with the tools necessary for their pleasures." Ahehehe.

"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."

"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.

"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.

"What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today… Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product."

Italians getting into rental, rather than ownership. Products become services.

"The unforgiving streets of public television are no place for weakness: either you fight, or you die. Join the courageous young brawler Large Avian as he embarks on a rampage of revenge against the animatronic gang that killed his family and defiled his nest. Watch as our hero trashes Oswald the Grump, spells out certain doom for the Cracker Beast, and puts their calculating, blood-sucking leader down for the count. New episode every Sunday!" Want this so badly.

Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.

"Some time ago, Simon Schama wrote an article for the Guardian on the perfect bolognese sauce. Like any other enthusiastic cook, I've been finely honing my sauce for years and finally had it nailed down to what I considered to be Very Good. However, I saw the article as an opportunity to challenge myself, rip it up and start again and above all, get one over Schama. So here's my recipe:" Epicly epic bolognese recipe. Should try this some time.

A rough guide to building your own ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter. Might come in handy.

It's Oregon Trail, but where you take everybody's favourite emo band on tour of the states. Surprisingly deep and detailed, an affectionate tribute to Apple II entertainment and the rigours of being a touring rock band. It is very silly, and somewhat ace, and will be getting a blog post in due course.

"Tips and tricks only the pros knew, UNTIL NOW! Get ready to PWN up some NUBS on Xbox Live and get some MAD BP'S BRO!" I'm pretty sure I've played this guy.

"These are just various photos taken during the development cycle of the businessib. Enjoy them. We hope you think they are as hilarious as we do." Oh my word.

"If you keep the city and concentrate on putting more world into it, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle– you can add things into this city without having to add much physical space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And media– web sites, radio stations, tv shows– don't take up space either. Think of this cheap empty space as a place to tell new stories, because as a developer, you are good at this." Iroquois, hitting many nails on the head all at once, again.

The Guardian Open Platform launches, with their Content API, their Data Store, and a selection of client libraries for the API (one of which I did a smidge of work on). This is not just a good thing, it's a good thing Done Right, and I'm looking forward to what's next from the Open Platform team.

"A collection of accidents that happened while working on maps and other graphics." Bloopers from interactive infographics. Delightful; the patina and happy accidents of the 21st century.

Custodian is the Ruby gem for accessing the Guardian Open Platform Content API that James Darling, Kalv Sandhu, and I (although my contribution was minor) built. There's a Google Code link to it, but I'd imagine the github version is where the action will be.

"You may not know his name but you will certainly know his work: Morris Cassanova (aka Mr Chicken) designs and makes signs for most of the fried chicken shops in the UK." That's a good market to have sewn up, I'd imagine.

Jones annotates his screengrabs from the James Coburn classic; lovely to see it all captured so well, even if I'd disagree that the plot is a thing of "gossamer" – it's a _tiny_ bit thicker, surely?

"…as the cards become more prevalent, and the features of one card start to trump another people end up carrying multiple cards with overlapping functions. The only way for the user to know which card to use? Gosh – to remove the card from the wallet. Convenience indeed."

Don turns to writing a self-help column. The style is pretty much spot on.

"It was September 29th; exactly two months from the Saturday of Thanksgiving break and one of the few times I would be able to make the trek up to New York to dine at Per Se. I would have to call to make the reservation at Per Se at exactly 10 A.M today if I had any hope of getting that Saturday reservation. The only problem? I had school." Some lovely writing from a young foodie on securing a reservation at Per Se, and what happened when he went. And, of course, what he ate.

A somewhat geeky – and swear-free – Downfall adaptation, but pretty spot-on nontheless.

A better way of handling TextMate projects, or so I'm told. Giving this a crack.

"…what is user experience design by itself, those areas that aren’t filled up with other bubbles? I tried to answer some of that in an earlier post, but the short answer is: not much, aside from coordination between the various disciplines, or what used to be called creative direction. It’s about the joining of the different disciplines, and not particularly a discipline in and of itself… Without the “raw materials” of the disciplines that make up UX, UX would be empty indeed." Some nice thoughts, clearly delineated, from Dan.

"AlterEgo is a Ruby implementation of the State pattern as described by the Gang of Four. It differs from other Ruby state machine libraries in that it focuses on providing polymorphic behavior based on object state. In effect, it makes it easy to give an object different “personalities” depending on the state it is in." Oh, that could be really handy.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"Simply stick your finger in the hole and a virtual representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games… from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man." Um, wow. Although I'm always afraid of putting appendages in boxes I can't see inside, though.

I think they're wrong, you know. It's not theatre; it's protocol. Maybe people aren't used to the protocol; if yours is the first app they encounter, they'll think that it's OK to show what passwords are – and perhaps that it's OK to write them down elsewhere in plaintext. Applications have a degree of responsibility for users' interactions across the internet, and quirky and cute as this may be, it's just not the place to demonstrate your shining personality.

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"…it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself." Yes. This is a problem.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality." No, it does not seem appropriate. It seems bonkers.

Hey, I've been in that relationship too! These made me laugh a lot.

"bill. francis. louis – look here. help." Ah, the fun of the farm. It's all coming back to me now.

Um. An "artwork/game/digital poem/world of scribbles" from Jason Nelson. Stop trying to "get it".

"My Favorite Book Covers of 2008" Some I'd seen before; some I'd not. Some very beautiful things here.

"I come from a software background, as well as an artsy-fartsy one. I want to see games as art, but they’re also supposed to work as logically-constructed bodies of code. And in a lot of cases, reviewers need to see them as software rather than as art. Here’s why…" I think Steve has some good points here, but I'm not totally swung yet; after all, games might _be_ software, but do we _experience_ them as software? I'm not sure that we do, and that's why we respond to them in the manner we do.

"The ultimate resource in grid systems."

Pretty much spot on. Especially when it comes to GRIMDARK PIRATE COMICS.

"Does the road to ludonarrative unity really lead us where we want to go? Is the destination reachable? Is it possible to embrace a design aesthetic that takes us in another direction that could be just as fruitful, if not more so? Okay that was three questions, but it's my blog so I get to ask as many as I want. Now if I could only answer them." This is going to be interesting when I come to write about Far Cry 2.

"a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day". Yes please!