"A 1.5km circle; over 10km of shops. 1500 in fact – including 4 “compass” Starbucks (not including roaming franchised coffeebots). Infinite mall." Chris channels his inner bizarro-world JG Ballard to predict the Mall Event Horizon.

An excellent selection of auto-response bots.

" If real human players are serving as the authority, the spirit of the rules is intact even if they are not followed literally. Rules are checked for reference when a debate comes up about a certain ability or tactic, but they are not a constant authority. There’s a certain flexibility present when the players have the final say on what is acceptable. They only bend the rules when it makes the game more fun." This is very good: textualism versus contextualism.

A lovely, sad, tiny story by Leonard.

"A short while into the process of making these videos, Alan Kay said, “The main question here is not is this technology probable but is this the way we want to use technology?” One effect of the video was engendering a discussion (both inside Apple and outside) about what computers should be like." On video not needing to be realistic to be useful.

"I keep reading books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally." Ursula LeGuin on obscenity, swearing, and the way it's used on contemporary media. (LeGuin is someone who, for reference, has always used language precisely and carefully; she is not a prude, just bored of a lack of imagination.)

This large image (4400×2364 pixels) is completely marvellous: a genuine history, reaching back into trends from the dawn of literature, and with a healthy chunk of 19th century gothic/mystery in there. Makes me very happy, especially in terms of fond memories of books I've enjoyed.

"The first 5 summoners who received 1+ week suspensions who reply to this thread – I will reply to your post with additional details explaining the suspension." Great thread: trollers and griefers ask to know why they received bans, understanding that the complaints against their names will be revealed in public. Then, some of them appear confused as to precisely why their crimes were considered so. Interesting piece of transparency from the LOL staff.

Shutterbug vs the Super Metroid soundtrack, from the new Team Teamwork joint. Oh yes.

"In recent years we've seen plenty of criticism (including mine) leveled at video games that rehash old ideas; games that rely on genre formulas; games that ape the language of film. Games, we're often told, need new ideas. Games need to grow up. Games should leverage their defining interactivity. Cutscenes are lazy. Let movies be movies. Players want to write their own stories. Games don't need authored narratives. Games don't need linear stories. Games don't need stories. All games should be fun. No they shouldn't.

The problem with these reductive arguments is they fail to account for how art rails against boundaries; how artists inevitably seek to situate their work in the margins no one can own. Artists instinctively push back against "don't," "shouldn't," and "must." This is why we give them genius grants. It's also why we put them in prison. The real action is in the margins." Good stuff from Michael.

"It's true that Wyndham's preference is for no-nonsense, brisk, wry narrators, and the horrors that visit the books can seem like opportunities to show off good old British pluck. But the books are surprisingly unheroic, and often (notably in the cases of Kraken and Triffids) peculiarly open-ended. And if you look closely, you begin to see that there's something very uncosy, persistently unsettling, about these books, that continues to ask profound questions about the limits of our culture and the foundations of the post-war world."

"We’re happy to confirm the news today that the sale of the company is complete. We appreciate all of your support, comments and warm wishes in the preceding few weeks.

Viacom and MTV Networks have been an amazing home for us over the past 4 years. It’s where we launched both Rock Band and Dance Central, worked with The Beatles, Green Day, AC/DC, The Who and thousands of other artists. We want to take a moment to thank everyone in that organization who helped make these awesome games possible.

We’re excited to be returning to our roots as an independent and privately owned studio."

Brilliant news.

"What this magazine requires," he said, "is red-blooded, one-hundred-per-cent dynamic stuff, palpitating with warm human interest and containing a strong, poignant love-motive." "That," we replied, "is us all over, Mabel." "What I need at the moment, however, is a golf story." "By a singular coincidence, ours is a golf story." Lovely short Wodehouse about the coming of Gowf to a far-off land.

"Perhaps we should be turning up at the cinema expecting more stories about resilience, or reports from the future where the problems are what to do with limitless energy, or Japanese consciousness multipliers, rather than dustbowls and gasmask hipsters. Authors: is that nihilism really what you want to leave behind? Your silhouette a stoop, rather than a hurrah?" Jim, quite rightly, likes his "shiny retro shit".

"Trace Holden Caulfield's perambulations around Manhattan in "The Catcher in the Rye" to places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden had an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date." Lovely.

"Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed or wanted, e.g., by “life”), remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Radium-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both." Lovely essay; a nice bit of SF history (and originally published on IO9, I believe).

"I saw these two videos of Rock Band Network tracks over at RBDLC and couldn’t resist sharing them. The first is a serious jazz tune: “Footloose and Fancy Free” by Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. The thing that’s interesting about this is that the “guitar” track is actually piano — something Guitar Hero has done in the past but Rock Band has generally shied away from. But what’s even neater is that the “vocal” track is actually a sax line, intended (one would assume) to be played with a sax or other horn; the “lyrics” are simply the notes being played." There's no question that building tunes for RBN is hard wokr, but god, this Bill Bruford video is stonking, and the sax-as-vocal idea is cracking.

"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management." It's a detailed strategy, but well thought-through; I'm certainly going to bear some of this in mind in future (and, indeed, the way the release branches are handled is familiar).

More brilliant data-analysis and writing from OkTrends – perhaps my favourite data-blog out there, and one of my favourite discoveries in 2010 so far.

"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.

"Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature – really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

"Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing – it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves."

"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."

"The future is terribly easy to predict. It’s predicting the instantiation that’s hard."

"These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age." Beautiful.

Lots of sed-goodness here.

Javascript demoscene craziness from Matt Westcott; 3D, music, and the most incredible editing tool I've seen in JS ever.

"The rest of this article will be a tutorial showing you how to host and manage Git repositories with access control, easily and safely. I use an up and coming tool called gitosis that my friend Tv wrote to help make hosting git repos easier and safer." Nice guide to getting up and running with gitosis.

"Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes." Lols.

"The Mugen (infinite) series of toys from Bandai Asovision has now brought us the Mugen PeriPeri, a keychain toy that aims to replicate the pleasure of opening a package for the first time. Snacks, boxes, and other tear-open packages tend to reveal good things, so perhaps experiencing this sensation boosts endorphins and sends us into pleasure mode." Tear-off wrapping you can tear forver.

"You have 1 point. 1 point is rubbish. You want more." Beautiful, fun-looking trailer for an XNA title due out next sure – that simultaneously captures what games are basically about. Or, at least, what points are all about.

"Wells has received insufficient credit as a writer of rhythmic, incantatory prose, long-breath paragraphs to cut against his tight journalistic reportage. The War of the Worlds makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable. Wells predicts an era when fiction and documentary will be inseparable." Fantastic writing from Iain Sinclair on HG Wells.

"When a sospeso is ordered, the customer pays for two coffees, but only receives one. That way, when a person who is homeless or otherwise down on their luck walks into the café, the person can ask if there are any coffees held in suspense, and can have one as a courtesy of the first customer." Wonderful.

Wikipedia quotation of the day: "Variations of the red eye based on the number of espresso shots include the black eye, which is made with two shots of espresso, and the dead eye, which is made with three shots of espresso. A 'fight club' contains four shots of espresso." A "fight club"!

"You forgot one thing, Dr. Roberts. You forgot that people are dicks." Aheheh.

"Perhaps then what people object to, whether they realize it or not, is an ideological and theological issue with religious gaming, rather than any particular distaste as the idea Christian gamers might simply want games that explore their faith and service their community."

"So why am I mentioning this now? Because Alternity has just started. This is a new Harry Potter game, and it starts from the beginning — September 1, Harry's first day at school. Only not as in The Philosopher's Stone. In this scenario, Voldemort, er, won." Fanfic-cum-alt-universe-RPGs in the Potterverse being run solely on Livejournal. Amazing.