Mike Darga's blog is a smart, insightful, data-driven look at game design, especially for MMOs. It's very good, and goes straight into my subscriptions.

"Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy." Looks like an interesting alternative to iMovie for most of the uses I make of video.

Scans from a German magazine: messy, full of records, sometimes computers.

"Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from my favorite era, the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context–make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large–and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood's approach to the concept has been, from a biologist's perspective, hopelessly naïve." Fantastic: transcripts of a series of lectures about the biology of B-Movie monsters; funny, accurate, informative.

Map of Shanghai, as Sim-City style rendered projection; is this useful? Or is this just a style of imagery computer users are used to?

"I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived." Fantastic.

"Sweet Sue's Canned Whole Chicken (without giblets) is an entire cooked chicken in a can (a big one)." For reference: I am not whole chicken-in-a-can hungry.

John Peel's Festive 50s the Spotify playlist edition. Obviously, there are holes, but nice that it exists.

"Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it's how maps should work." The maps of New York Jack's been working on for a while are now available to buy. Having seen them in the flesh, I can tell you they're properly beautiful.

"Well, ok there probably aren’t that many to give away, and this isn’t a Government mandate or anything, but Sony Europe are giving away free woolen Sackboy toys to Happy Gadders in the UK and Ireland – yay!" Want. Emailed!

"As I listened to Wil’s surprisingly impassioned speech, and the protestations of the other party members, a thought popped into my head: role-playing is when you make poor gameplay decisions on purpose." Dan values narrative success over ludic, rules-based success.

"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal." And, it turns out, you really can rely on the kindness of strangers. If you're a cute robot. And boy, are the tweenbots adorable.

"Oftentimes when a videogame has a skewed, overhead point of view, we call it isometric. That’s rarely the accurate term, though, and it’s not just pointless semantics." A not half bad guide to the different kind of projections used in 3D – and pseudo-3D – games. And, of course, a reminder that most isometric games aren't, and that the projection in Ultima VII was *bonkers*.

Beautiful. And: insanely time-consuming; it's not just stop-motion, but two separate pieces of stop motion put together. I love it when they go swimming.

"I'm going to give you the answer right away and the answer is yes. The only difference between SimCity's 3D and a first-person game's 3D is that SimCity uses "orthographic projection" and limited view freedom. The intent of this article is to explain both of these differences and the reasons for the decision to implement them. Along the way I'll briefly mention some of the rendering techniques and used in SimCity 4 and the issues that come with them." Rather good article explaining about optimising 3D for fixed projections.

"Pretty sure I'm not the first person in the universe to come up with this idea, but I've yet to see another connect-the-dots tattoo." Beautiful.

"It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get." Paul Krugman, you are the best.

"The Theory of Interstellar Trade is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman…. Krugman analyzed the question of 'how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.'" Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, is officially awesome.

"The New York Times Magazine food issue had plenty of fun this weekend; Looks like photo editor Kathy Ryan gave photographer Martin Klimas a 22-caliber rifle and told him to embrace his anger. He decimated an ear of corn, an apple and a pumpkin so thoroughly that the editors could not decide on a favorite." Beautiful.

Strategy game that requires you to work within the boundaries of limited – but potentially powerful – AI, and act as a guiding "real intelligence" for your ships.

"Brownjohn had never worked with live action before, nor had his animation assistant Trevor Bond. Using techniques taught by László Moholy-Nagy, Brownjohn's team beamed light over three separate models; a belly dancer, a snake dancer and a model for close-ups." Short blogpost – with archive behind-the-scenes images – on creating the title sequence for Goldfinger.

"LittleBigPlanet lets [players] run wild, with unprecedented results, but it locks the majority out of the creative process, because it's time-consuming and simply not very enjoyable. We hoped it could do both those things. That it doesn't isn't the let-down it might have been, thanks to the untamed community of brilliant nutjobs that's already out there, appending their DIY masterpieces to this beautiful, mildly flawed, magnificently multiplayer platform game. We salute them, we salute Media Molecule for making it possible for them, and we salute Sony for its total commitment to this brave, hare-brained project. But mostly, we're just happy to see a flagship game for a modern system that's about running from left to right and jumping over things."

"Developed by Peter Chilvers, in collaboration with Eno, the app is described as, “Part instrument, part composition and part artwork…” The idea is that anybody can play with Bloom and coax gentle melodies and ambient soundscapes out of their iPhone."

What a wonderful piece of a UI; two projections of a tunnel-boring machine, synchronized with one another, to help you visualise it in 3D. Lovely – not what you'd expect from a fairly niche company's site at all.