"The moment I walk into a bookstore I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it’s the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it’s the social reverence for the library-like quiet — you don’t yell in a bookstore, you’ll piss off the books." I never tire of linking to Michael Lopp.

"Pit is a wonderful game, probably the best game released in 1904. I imagine that Wheedle came about by Knizia taking a look and saying to himself "that's interesting… but I think I can do better." And so he did." Ooh, this sounds good!

"But we are spoiled. Spoiled to the core. As a kid, when I skipped to the Odeon to see Watership Down, popping back via my granddad's house, if he asked me what I'd watched, I'd recount it in glorious detail. It was the 70s. He didn't do spoilers. He was a grown man. He'd spent two years in a trench during the Battle of Monte Cassino getting his hair parted by bullets, so whether Hazel the cartoon rabbit got squashed while out hunting cartoon carrots wasn't really his concern." I am largely spoiler-immune; I always argue that *how* something happens is more important than *what*. Apart from, you know, the massive ones that are at the core of things. Anyhow, Grace Dent doesn't care either.

"I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!!" Oh sweet jesus.

"Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune. Betting the wrong way, Adolf Merckle took his life." A powerful example of how much you can lose when shorting goes wrong.

"Instead of encouraging you to join a group, find new friends, or spread the word, Burger King’s new Whopper Sacrifice Application is offering you a free Whopper if you DE-FRIEND 10 people from your friend list." Um.

Two hours of HD Dwarf Fortress tutorials. Will they make it any easier? No idea, but it's got to be a start.

"We spend a lot of time talking about games and films, but a much more useful corollary is music. The processes are spookily similar. Creators devise an experience, and commit it to code. The code then sits there, lifeless, until a performer picks it up. Then, through a complex tool which requires substantial manual dexterity to master, the performer interprets the experience the creator devised. No two people will play the code the same way. Some players will perform better than others. Some will get stuck and give up before the end."

"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.