"In what cultural anthropologists are calling a "colossal achievement" in the study of white-collar professionals, the popular radio show has successfully isolated all 7,442 known characteristics of college graduates who earn between $62,500 and $125,000 per year and feel strongly that something should be done about global warming." Ahehehehehe.

"When I was a kid, there are two things I wanted badly and never got… A real dog and a Kenner AT-AT Walker." Linked everywhere, but – utterly charming.

"I suspect 'creating something personal, even of moderate quality' and letting people share it is going to be one of the business models of the next century. And one of the social movements. Which will happen if we can squeeze the convenience and scale of the internet into other places."

"People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don’t play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author’s added a surprise. A violent, horrific, hilarious surprise of biblical proportions." A good community polices itself. This is hilarious.

Grandpa Wiggly rules perhaps more than it is possible to rule. Highlights: Mayonnaise the cat, general levels of tolerance, Six Feet Under fan, the whole conversation with 420Manda420, utterly charming Reddit manner. Sometimes, the world is awesome.

"Craig Raine’s Heartbreak is a novel in the sense in which Eton is a school near Slough. The description is true but misleading. It is really a collection of short stories, loosely linked by the topic announced in the title; but perhaps because the English are said to be averse to buying such volumes, the publishers have represented it as a novel, rather as Jedward are represented as singers." Yes, this has got a lot of coverage (mainly for that opening sentence) but it's still a powerful piece of criticism from Eagleton.

"Henrietta was an African American woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Before she died some of her cancerous tissue was taken – without her permission – and the cells have been reproducing in laboratories around the world ever since.<br />
<br />
Henrietta Lacks' cells are immortal. They are known as the HeLa cell line, and they have become deeply involved in all sorts of medical and genetic research – sometimes in the most unexpected ways."

"What else could we apply crash-only thinking to? Imagine a crash-only government, where the transition between administrations is always a small revolution. In a system like that, you’d optimize for revolution—build buffers around it—and as a result, when a “real” revolution finally came, it’d be no big deal."

Cosplaying not only appearance, but also UI. Lovely.

"More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation." Charming, and generous, too.

"Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is heading to iPhone and iPod Touch on 15th September." Uh-oh. I might end up giving it another crack. (It's clearly a great game, but very hard and even more unforgiving).

Passion Pit cover Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight".

"Suicidator City Generator (SCG) is a Python script for Blender… With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually." Lovely; the preview video should give you a good idea of its capabilities.

"Still, if you're going to watch a pair of zombies go at each other for eleventy-billion hours, far into the night, it might as well be these zombies. They were incredible, astonishing, indefatigable. They fell over frequently but they never stayed down. My hat goes off to these zombies. Possibly my head goes off to them too." Xan Brooks' live coverage of Isner-Mahut. Some great writing in there.

"Even the likes of Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company hide their bloodlust behind a figleaf of fictional "what if" scenarios. Medal of Honor turns a real tragedy into a social shooting gallery, and is going to have to tread carefully to avoid belittling the reality it borrows for our amusement." The problems of making videogames about current conflict, especially when the tactless multiplayer audience get their hands on your content. Not sure I'm particularly cool about this in any way. Oh well.

Collecting casual and informal collective-nouns by scraping twitter. The "What Is This" page is very well done, explaining just what the scraper "sees" in a clear fashion. Fun.

"In AR Monster, you use your iPhone's GPS system and camera to discover and battle more than 600 monsters hidden in the real world. By playing the game in different locations and pointing the handset in different directions, you'll be able to find new kinds of monsters." As is increasingly becoming my reaction to all things AR: "so what?"