"I know which side I'm on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static."

""The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs" is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War." James is brilliant, but I knew that already. This is quite a thing.

"You never see anyone using a slide rule in a film. Matinee idol scientists always work out algorithms unaided in their brilliant minds, or scrawl them manically in chalk on giant blackboards. By the same token that unfairly condemns people with colour-coded ring binders as the owners of overly tidy minds, slide rules are supposed to belong only to the pedantic foot soldiers of science, the plodders who have to show us their workings out. But slide rules are lovely things: pleasingly solid, elegantly mysterious in their markings, the perfect marriage of form and function." Joe Moran on slide rules and scientists.

"…it’s a bit disingenuous to claim, as [World War Z]’s dust jacket does, that Brooks does for zombies what Studs Terkel did for World War II. Yes, his choice of narrative frame refreshes a genre that had already entered its baroque phase. But World War Z never quite manages the same level of moral pique as The Good War and Warday; it is so constrained by its undead subject matter that it can only gesture at modern-day relevance before falling back on the same shopworn themes. Although it has more brains than the average zombie story, it still doesn’t have much of a heart." Really good piece on oral histories, real and fictional. And: I now want to read Warday, if I can find a copy.

"…don’t confuse this kind of data exploration, where the goal is to size up the data, with building proper data plumbing, where you want robustness and maintainability. Perl and bash scripts are nice for the former, but can be a nightmare for building data pipelines." Lots of good stuff in this article; this was a highlight.

"But we have got the resources to save ourselves. General perception of games is jammed as masturbatory power-fantasy, sure, but the talent is hardly lacking. So let’s plea to them: we need a Joyce, or a Waste Land, or something you have to play with an abridged notes guide over your knee as you rip through it, something hardcore in its modernism that wants to make you work, make you sweat for its charms. We need cultural elitism to save ourselves." I am really, really enjoying Five Players at the moment.

Oooh. A bit like Skitch for files, and likely to replace Senduit in my toolkit.