"[Donald Winnicott] maintained that [the transitional object] was able to occupy the space between me and not-me where play occurs, where we are neither trying to impose ourselves on our environment, nor being dictated by it. Play is not goal-directed or purposeful, not about trying to fulfil an instinct, as in sexual intercourse (versus flirting). Rather, like much of art or sport or fun, it is done for its own sake." A wonderful article about men and their bears, with an interesting psychoanalytic note in the middle of it.

"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.

Fantastic presentation from Giles Bowkett, which is about generative music, art, shipping, Ruby, and building things for yourself.

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"At its core, what should this product be best at? When users think of this product, what is the central feature(s) that should spring to mind? Everything else is distraction, clutter, cruft."

"I think this vision of artistic expression as a form of collaboration is a truer description of the nature of game design than of any other medium, because video games are inherently interactive." Pliskin on Steve Gaynor, and the gap between the screen and the gamepad.

Portal-inspired homebrew game for the DS. Looks rather sweet, although not keen on collect-em-up mechanics.

That they are. Got to love the type on these.

"Cosmovox is a unique and innovative musical instrument for the iPhone and iPod touch." Nearly a theremin. Nearly.

"Tim, or perhaps T.J. (we were at the pudding stage), began talking about the experience of editing Cliffhanger (the edition we were going to print), and about some of the material that had to be changed or cast away – characters’ names, a lesbian sex scene, the ending itself – and we wondered whether, in a born-digital text, these sloughed-off palimpsests acquired an existence of their own, beyond the shadows of an HFS hard drive; in a library run by Veet Voojagig, perhaps." Picador publish both the final version of the book in print – and the urtext as a separate digital product. Fun.

"The time comes again. Here’s the first five pages from the first issues of PHONOGRAM: THE SINGLES CLUB. Not only that, but we include seven sample B-side pages, plus a little introduction about what they’re all about, like." Looking jolly good, and am rather excited by the B-sides.

Wonderful pastiches of popular US newstand titles to promote the new season of Dexter. The New Yorker pastiche is particularly superb.

"…we're always being told art should disturb. Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. He's a real force of imagination in a world that is full of fakes. If there was any justice this man would get the Turner Prize."

"Basically WipEout HD is the first game I've come across that seems to be operating with a dynamic framebuffer. Resolution can alter on a frame-by-frame basis. Rather than introduce dropped frames, slow down or other unsavoury effects, the number of pixels being rendered drops and the PS3's horizontal hardware scaler is invoked to make up the difference." Interesting – and technically fascinating – post on Wipeout HD's dynamic framebuffer, used to keep the framerate at a rock-solid 60fps at the expense of horizontal resolution

"Truth be told, I don't think in terms of absolute F/stops and shutter speeds. They are not what is important. It's the relationship between the different light levels that is important." This is why I love David Hobby: he talks about photography (in general) in the same words as me. Exposure isn't about numbers, it's about sliding scales.

Wow.

Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.

"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.

"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.

"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.

"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.

"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.

"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).

"You know the [dark days] when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web war born, back before that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked."

"…doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly."

Ooh – a decent search tool for cc'd Flickr images.

"This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art."

"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.