God, I’d forgotten just how well Greg Costikyan writes some times. In particular, his presentation to Free Play in Melbourne, downloadable from this post, makes its (very worthwhile) points well. If the games industry doesn’t collectively wake the hell up, and snap out of being marketing-and-publisher-driven, it could find itself in deep trouble. Greg explains this point in his slides in, well, a little more detail than me.

If things look a little odd around these parts, it’s because I’m in the middle of a live re-design. I’ll be going back and forth between the old template and the new whilst I iron things out. So don’t be alarmed…

Matt takes his games-as-tidying-up metaphor further, and touches on several things swirling round my head for a year or so now – the comparison between the western tradition of warfare-based games – chess, backgammon etc – versus eastern & African traditions of sowing, acquiring territory, growing. I like the distinction Matt suggests – the western games, more generally, as “literal”, and the eastern games as “oral”. Food for thought – thoughts I ought to start joining together, soon.

Whilst the excellent Blinksale has been getting a lot of plaudits recently, I only just discovered Side Job Track (launched in November 2004), which is in many ways just as noteworthy. It exists to track progress on projects and jobs for freelance, part-time, or small business workers, and it’s really pretty good; simple to use with excellent help and notifications – it’s very consistent about letting you know what you’ve just done, and what will happen when you click something. The only slight problems are that the invoicing is a bit less awesome than Blinksale, and that it’s very focused on building up lists of standardised “services”… when many people are consistently doing bespoke work. Still, worth checking out.

In the boring-but-useful category comes Anti-RSI, a simple, not-overly obtrusive break manager for OSX. I don’t need it to prevent RSI, I do OK at that myself. I need it for my own sanity. Will check it out and report back; think it could make things calmer and less stressful, especially when bugfixing programs in languages I don’t really know.

Vienna is a new, freeware, opensource feedreader for OSX. It’s in final beta but I’m really liking it; very stripped-back interface, support for groups, smart folders and Atom. I’m going to experiment with it for a bit; NNW and me have only got on so well, recently, so this could be the change I need. Recommended, anyhow. [via Jon Hicks]

Google Moon. Awesome. In honour of the first manned moon Landing, on July 20, 1969, Google have produced a small-ish map of the Apollo landing sites and surrounding area. The imagery is not from Keyhole this time, but Nasa. Unfortunately, Nasa could only supply information to a certain resolution; undeterred, Google used their common sense, which is why what you see when you zoom all the way in is just too beautiful.

Django looks rather interesting; a fairly substantial Python webapp framework, with a leaning towards publication of, well, stuff. Might bear it in mind if I ever get around to Python, and if I ever master my bloody Unix PATH.

Finally, six months after I commented the block out, I’ve got some Flickr pics in the sidebar. Which will hopefully make me updated it more. Scraping courtesy of the surprisingly good flickrRSS.

Fun with the local webserver this weekend. Having installed MySQL, I promptly set up a local install of WordPress (good) for hackery and tomfoolery. Then I installed myself a copy of Justin Vincent’s ezSQL (handy, even if some of his programming ideas are a little misguided IMHO), and Smarty, and got to work on something I’ve been meaning to work on for a while.

Development going very well. Smarty in particular is delightful – its approach to templating makes perfect sense now, and it has some lovely little functions and tools in it that have made knocking out templates really easy. Fun, fun.