Bookmarked to return to at some point. Some of these I've heard, some I'd like to hear.

"The Po-2 biplanes flown by the Night Witches had an advantage over the faster, deadlier German Messerschmitts: their maximum speed was lower than the German planes’ stall speed, making them hard to shoot down." Flying by night, with no radar or radio, dropping bombs on German positions; remarkable women, all.

"Bear in Space has an unusual premise for a children's book. It is the fictional story of a bear who shares film of his vacation to the Moon with his animal friends, but that is not the unusual part." Bear faked his trip; his photographs are clearly manipulated. The child should pick up on that, but will Bear's friends? A Russian tale of space travel from 1970.

"So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.""

The terrible, sad cost of the space race. Warning: contains a graphic image of human remains in an open casket. Also: is, in many ways, very upsetting. But this is history, and it must be documented.

Totally lovely montage of arcade-game death/loss animations. Watching this: I really forgot how beautiful Afterburner looked in the arcade.

"The Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov’s self operation, undertaken without any other medical professional around, was a testament to determination and the will to life." Rogozov was the surgeon on a Soviet Antarctic expedition, on the ice for a year. When he developed appendicitis, his only choice was to operate… on himself. This remarkable BMJ article draws on his diary to explain what happened. (There are two moderately icky photographs, should you not like that sort of thing).

"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.

I've got a way to go with Abel yet; I can't do FADCs at all, but the earlier stuff looks useful.

The title sequence to a Saturday morning kids' cartoon series. Of Watchmen. It is not, shall we say, particularly reverent. Probably better for it.

Tom's been poking Heroku, and now, so have I. It's proper brilliant: a rackup file, a tiny Sinatra app, and the Heroku gem, and you're building webapps in ten minutes. It's crazy and brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing of which we need more of.

"It’s new fun in some Russian cities, to jump from the bridge with the rope in a big group, when there is no water under the bridge but raw firm ice, also they use to jump at that same moment when the train is going thru the bridge". The pictures explain it pretty well.

"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua." And it all looks rather pretty, too. Must investigate further!

danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.

"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

"This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts." Corvus hypothesises what A Lego Clockwork Orange might look like. Thoughtful stuff.

"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic… for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.

65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.

Jolly good interview with Stephen Cakebread and Craig Howard from Bizarre Creations about the evolution of the Geometry Wars series. In a nutshell: simple games, simply made, and then honed to perfection, or as near as you can get. It's the honing that's important

"Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other." Jason Rohrer's new game is for two.

"A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say… It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick." Um.

"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.

"Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.

Make Iced Tea!

"Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.

"Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level — one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.