"It's not enough to hope that games might be redeemed as fine art or to be played by people of all ages and backgrounds. Instead, video games' cultural future depends on a rich, diverse, magical ecosystem of weird games of all shapes, sizes, and purposes helping multitudes of people pursue a variety of goals and passions. It's not that games need to "rise to the level" of books and films and the like, but that they need to spread like those media into all the nooks and crannies of human activity. The more deliberately creators populate such an ecosystem, the harder it will become for games to become pawns in the debates of others."

"The Simplest Screen Recording App For Your Mac. Ever." Looks it. I'm fed up of wrangling things like iShowU, so I might investigate this.

Don't forget to enable XSendFile for the Vhost in question. Like I did, and wondered why 0b files were coming down all the time.

"…let’s be clear that it is a phenomena to design for, and with. It’s something we will invent, within the frame of the cultural and technical pressures that force design to evolve.

That was the message I was trying to get across at Glug: we’re the ones making the robots, shaping their senses, and the objects and environments they relate to.

Hence we make a robot-readable world."

Solid Jonesgold. Very true, and something that's been in the back of my mind – like many others – for a while now.

"Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, took off at dawn and flew across the capital. Each balloon plays a different element of a musical score, together creating an expansive audio landscape." Marvellous.

"It was supposed to be a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floated eerily above the heads of spaced-out festival-goers. It has become instead a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floats somewhere through the troposphere without anybody actually seeing it, or even knowing where it is." Awesome but sad all at once; and yet, expensive or not, it feels like a genuinely valid affordance of the art. Oh well.

"the footage gopro cameras produce is fantastic and i’ve seen some crazy stuff filmed with a gopro, but i think i found it’s achilles heel – my skateboard." The camera may be dead, but the footage is ace.

"Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking." Yes. (Also: Sorrell is blogging. This is good.)

"Artist Rodrigo Derteano's autonomous robot plows the desert ground to uncover its underlying, lighter color, using a technique similar to the one of the Nazca lines, the gigantic and enigmatic geoglyphs traced between 400 and 650 AD in the desert in southern Peru. Guided by its sensors, the robot quietly traced the founding lines of a new city that looks like a collage of existing cities from Latin America." Oh gosh this is awesome.

As usual with things like this: a decent client library that's at least somewhat up-to-date (official or no) goes a long way to helping you decide which [x] provider to use. In this case: SMS gateways that send to the UK.

"I want to suggest that there is a utility for procedural literacy that extends far beyond the ability to program computers. Computer processing comprises only one register of procedurality. More generally, I want to suggest that procedural literacy entails the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems, not just on the computer, but in general."

Uh-oh. Hoping I won't have to be looking into this any time soon.

"Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said." I am wearing out the "James is brilliant" button on my keyboard, but I will keep pressing it as long as he does this sort of thing.