"What did The Hustle™ accomplish? I gained weight. I wasn’t spending enough time with my (now) wife. I felt like shit. I began to resent my work, and the work I was producing clearly wasn’t my best. I started cutting corners. I went from a mindset of shipping with quality and integrity to “when is this going to be over?”" I've almost never worked like this – but every time I have, it's always been as terrible as I've suggested it will be beforehand. Mainly on the software end of things, but not always. And the hustle is short-term thinking: the long-term damage is usually so much worse, including, but not limited to: technical debt, RSI, ill health, weight gains, emotional exhaustion, damage to relationships, friendships, and family. I am not only convinced that nothing is worth that; I know it.

Really excellent technical article on the development of Novation's Launchpad S. It's not that remarkable a product in many ways, but this is a super-detailed post about some of the thought and improvements that have gone into what looks, on the surface, like a most incremental upgrade – but is in fact surprisingly comprehensive and affects many things at low levels. Really clear, well explained – as is the rest of Focusrite's engineering blog.

"It's not enough to hope that games might be redeemed as fine art or to be played by people of all ages and backgrounds. Instead, video games' cultural future depends on a rich, diverse, magical ecosystem of weird games of all shapes, sizes, and purposes helping multitudes of people pursue a variety of goals and passions. It's not that games need to "rise to the level" of books and films and the like, but that they need to spread like those media into all the nooks and crannies of human activity. The more deliberately creators populate such an ecosystem, the harder it will become for games to become pawns in the debates of others."

"The reason for [Singstar's relatively "low" Metacritic scores] is also the reason that this is an article about SingStar, and not a review of SingStar Queen and the new wireless microphones: SingStar is now basically unreviewable. Unlike Guitar Hero: Metallica, or AC/DC Live: Rock Band, SingStar has morphed from a game into a service, and defies traditional critical judgement."

"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.

A wonderful old postmortem – on Shadows of the Empire for the N64. As a launch title, there was lots of working with unfinished hardware, prototype controllers, and SGI workstations; it's long and detailed, and a fantastic portal to a world that seems eons ago, even if it was only 12 years away.

"In fact the propeller is really rotating. Russians fix a magnet on their helicopter blades. The device sends a signal to synchronize a movie camera, allowing to visualize efforts and deformations on the blades." Hypnotic, and unnerving.

"Looking in, it’s clear that the game industry is broken and not getting fixed anytime soon. I will not be joining the game industry. I’m interested in building a profitable business making fun games in a good working environment, and that’s simply not what it does. Maybe I could hoist one more flag in the indie games parade, but I think of myself as building a Micro-ISV in the web software business. It’s a much nicer community." As usual: anyone with a degree of sanity looking in from the outside comes to the same conclusions.

"Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it."

Mike Kuniavsky being really good, again, about avatars, physical mashups, and mashups as opportunistic design. Loads of great stuff inside the pdf.

"…yes, if I’d gotten a Lenovo when you all suggested it, I’d have a spill-proof keyboard with drains. That’s my plan for the next time something horrible happens to my laptop, which should be any day now." Randall Munroe's laptop died. I blame the package management, rather than the milk, personally.

"They took the trailer from "WestSide Story" and made it look like "28 days Later", hillarity ensues." No, that's bloody brilliant.

"I would urge everyone to start looking at the world in a different way. Spend some time looking at everyday objects, at their design, their shape, their individual characteristics. Think ahead and imagine their significance. Many are interesting and aesthetically pleasing in their own right, if you just give them some attention." Martin Parr on noticing the everyday.

"The problem is that what made GoldenEye so good was a fleeting, transient quality that can never be grasped again: it's not that the game was especially brilliant by modern standards, but rather that it utterly eclipsed its contemporaries. These days, the FPS is as comfortable on consoles as it is on Windows, and for a Bond shooter to have the same impact as GoldenEye it would have to outperform Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, BioShock, and Half-Life 2. In short, it would have to be revolutionary." Although: a big part of what made it so good was the social side of the jerky split-screen multiplayer, and Live just isn't the same. Yes, there was the context, but there was also some kind of magical glue holding it all together. Still, there are lots of smart, sensible points here, about emerging from the shadow of Goldeneye.

Fantastic, all of it.

Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.

"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.

"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."

"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.

"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.

"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.

"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.

I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.

"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.

"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.

Big guide to levelling hunters. Lots of good hunter stuff on here, actually, which muggins needs to learn quite fast.

"What I like about the rhetoric idea is that it places the accent on how the work operates on the player, and this is essential for an interactive medium. What I don't like is that it's a resolutely utilitarian framework for critical analysis: it focuses in on the way that games might change our opinions for good or ill at the expense of the way games might transport, entertain, humiliate, and ravish their users." Pliskin on Bogost's Procedural Rhetoric; both the post and its comments are smart, nuanced discussion around the idea.

"There was a correlation between their performance on the game and their improvement on certain cognitive tests, Kramer said. Those who did well in the game also improved the most on switching between tasks. They also tended to do better on tests of working memory." Playing the game (Rise of Nations) didn't affect all tasks, but it had improvements on some – seemingly those involving task and process management.

"Regardless of the dubious value of trying to dubiously value the art, one thing is immediately clear: in a reversal of casino logic, we value the rarity of the green stripe: 0, house wins."

"As editorial director of Ladybird Books, Douglas Keen, who has died aged 95, was responsible for the first experience of reading of millions of children." Myself included; I learned to read with Peter, Jane, and my Mum, sitting on my bedroom floor each morning.

Amazingly, a few in here I didn't know – "move selection" and "delete only whitespace" for starters.

"I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. Covering both commercial and non-commercial games from the earliest arcade games through contemporaty titles, I look at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. The book reflects both theoretical and game-design goals." Add to cart.

"I won’t rant about how our tax dollars pay for these images and how we deserve better. But what I do find alarming is that these documents are used to brief major decision makers. These decision makers may know a thing or two about policy and politics, but if decoding and understanding the armed forces budget is the goal of these documents, then there is a huge failure here." Datafail and slidecrime, all under one roof.

"The true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal – whose rhetoric, far from empty, is the deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels the state forward safely and wisely. This is clearly what Obama, too, is aiming to embody: his project is to unite rhetoric, thought and action in a new politics that eschews narrow bipartisanship. Can Obama's words translate into deeds?" Nice article on rhetoric and oratory. Cicero really is quite the writer, you know; ages since I've read him, but this brings it all back.

"When the mechanics are broken there – no matter what great ingredients or designs you had – the dish disappoints. Execution is very much part of the analysis there – as is service, mis-en-scene. Food is never evluated (in the Guide Micheline sense) out of context… but the mechanics are fundamental to everything else." Robin Hunicke on another parallel to games criticism; I think she might be onto something, and it's another good contribution to the mound of Mirrors' Edge coverage.

"Though few gamers might be interested in long haul trucking, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on a small group of gamers and offering them the best experience they can get within their limited requirements. In fact, the more MMO developers who realize this—that a small group of loyal players is better than a huge group of disinterested players—the better, honestly." Very true – a nice conclusion to Matthew Kumar's round-up of a somewhat niche – but interesting sounding – browser MMO.

"The moisturiser, far from the trusted friend and counsellor of the first reading, is The Picture of Dorian Gray." Alex tries to read that Nivea ad that's all over stations right now. It is confusing.

"We think it's one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century." Awesome. This is why kids go into engineering.

"Maps, databases and other resources that help you dig deeper." A shame the raw data isn't available, but great they're collating this stuff and seeing it as another channel of news they provide.

"A favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, Rogue popularized the dungeon crawling computer game dating back from 1980 (and spawned entire class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes"). gandreas software now presents the classic for the iPhone/iPod Touch." Oh god, Rogue for the iPhone. Unusual gestural interface, but it's a perfect port, and brings back memories of being 7 all over again. Needless to say, I installed it immediately.