"70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day."

"bringing japanese arcades to you" – a blog about the Japanese Arcade scene. Videos, new releases, and lots of tournament videos. Not bad!

Need to finish watching this, but: for all you can ridicule this, a lot of it isn't half bad; the two modes of videophone (share face/share document) are interesting, if only for how useful the latter is. Also, interesting to see how futurism was represented on film at one point.

"The Bryant Collection is an interactive anthology: a collection of ’story worlds’ by Laura Bryant. They were found at a yard sale in an old strongbox. Five pieces of interactive fiction written by someone who never used a computer. It is interactive fiction, which means that the player types commands in text, and the game responds with text descriptions." This may or may not be true, but the games are very much real.

"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.

"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.

"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.

Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.

Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.

David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.

Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.

Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.

"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".

"…after careful consideration [the editors in charge of style guidelines at the NYT] decided to alter our style. As of now, the spelling whisky will be used not only for Scotch but for Canadian liquor as well. The spelling whiskey will be used for all appropriate liquors from other sources." As it should be.

"…using these guidelines, and building on the experience of much more knowledgeable type gurus, I have compiled a list of font stacks that will both open up more font possibilities for web designers, and hopefully offer more appropriate substitutes:" That's interesting; not sure how appropriate it is, but they're good uses of the cascade, by and large.

"Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal MEP who drafted the report, said: "Video games are in most cases not dangerous. We heard evidence from experts on computer games and psychologists from France, the US, Germany and the Netherlands and they told us that video games have a positive contribution to make to the education of minors."" Etcetera.

A page full of prettiness, and it fills itself up as you go. Art, graphic design, sci-fi book covers; it's all here.

"It’s a scrolling arcade beat ‘em up in the Final Fight-style based within the Watchmen universe. Just like Alan would have wanted." I know, I know. But: it has charm, it's LittleLoud, and it's not like it's setting out to be canon narrative! It's pretending to be a passable arcade game from a long while ago. So I'm going to give it a break (unlike that horrible 3D beat-em-up that's coming out, that looks like it's trying to be Like The Movie).

Music video actively exploiting compression artefacts. The transitions are striking; the reaction to something looking this supposedly broken is peculiarly visceral. Digital patina.