This is super-good – not just on ARGs, which aren't necessarily flavour of the month, but on designing difficult puzzles for a large number of people to solve, and how not to be surprised by how fast groups are at solving things when they have the network. Gating the experience with slow tasks – MD5 brute-forcing, for instance, is one nice idea; I also really like Adam's points about making sure players know precisely what is in-universe and what isn't, so there's never a question of whether something is right or not; just like a good cryptic crossword.

"If we were managing a brand would we have been so brutal and focused with these things? Probably not. It would have been someone's job to think of these as valuable brand assets and argue for their preservation. For some reason, as soon as you describe something as a brand all this fake science marketing mysticism gets invoked and paralysing decisions get made." Russell on GOV.UK

Hello Lamppost ends up on the Creative Review blog.

And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed – and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.

"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).

A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

"A year with a single Leica and a single lens, looking at light and ignoring color, will teach you as much about actually seeing photographs as three years in any photo school, and as much as ten or fifteen years (or more) of mucking about buying and selling and shopping for gear like the average hobbyist." This is not a bad point.

"It will [violent metaphor] you." Mitch has seen one too many press releases, methinks.

"High-resolution renders of gameplay from Shadow of the Colossus, including earlier versions of the game (where the colossi had differently-shaped eyes, as one example). Most of the screenshots are at or around 2048×1526 resolution – perfect for making wallpapers of any size." Ooooh.