"After a couple of appearances on the interview program “Donahue,” in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on “Match Game” and a guest appearance on “Fantasy Island” as the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts." Snorting with laughter a bit.

"This is why vacations are essential. They hold up the mirror and show how much energy you’re spending simply to achieve baseline steady state in your day." Yes, that.

"It has reached gabber zero – the point at which a programming language is able to support the production of live techno."

'“To me, the computer is just another tool,” Ms. Burns once said. “It’s like a pen'. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you."' A lovely obituary, but also, what a quotation – a nice corollary to the ones I usually wheel out about literacy.

'“To me, the computer is just another tool,” Ms. Burns once said. “It’s like a pen'. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you."' A lovely obituary, but also, what a quotation – a nice corollary to the ones I usually wheel out about literacy.

"This is not to say that real human interactions are not ritualized to the point of mechanic in some ways, but that procedural rhetoric about human life nearly always makes a specific argument: life works this way, life works that way. Counter to this, Gone Home eschews systems; in particular, it avoids systemizing anything about its characters. Instead of portraying the characters themselves, or providing a set of interactions with those characters, it presents instead a series of artifacts from the characters’ lives without trying to build mechanics around them. The family is only present through those artifacts, the shapes and shadows each member leaves behind. In a certain sense, you could say that the game sets its sights low. But it also hits its mark extremely well– and by doing so achieves something greater than a reductive mechanical take on those same characters ever could. Gone Home is not intended from the top down to be “a game about life”, as some ham-handed experiments have been– instead, it simply represents or evokes certain lives very well (and therefore naturally becomes about life). The game allows its characters to exist on a plane that we usually reserve for ourselves." This is a fine paragraph from a very astute take on Gone Home; for someone who talks so much about games as systemic media, it's good to be reminded so eloquently of all their other qualities I'm prone to forgetting.

"LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF" Like Skitch but spitting out animated gifs; I'm really interested in animated gifs as a documentation format.

"I thought: what if there were an all-text Myst MMO?" And then: Zarf built it. Or rather, is building it. A super-interesting experiment in what a MOO for the Tumblr and Twine generation might look like; I'd be fascinated to see the Twine community spin up a server or ten.

"Connecting the Twine to a WiFi network is elegant and features a lovely twist: you flip the Twine on its “back”, like a turtle, and it makes its own WiFi network available. Connect to this from your computer, and you can then give the Twine the necessary credentials to log on to your home network, and once you’re done, flip it back onto its “belly” again and it will be ready to use. I really loved this simple, physical interaction." Oh, that's lovely.

So far: much happier with this than I ever was with Sparrow; the shortcuts are the ones I need, and it handles plaintext. So going to try living with it for a bit.

Wrapping sidekiq into your unicorn process; might be useful for a prototype I have in mind.