A Gamer’s Manifesto. Entertaining, at times a little OTT and a bit too optimistic, but there some salient points nontheless. Plus: it made me laugh.

I love both of them dearly, I really do, but I also love comics, and so The Amazing Adventures of Lethem & Clay is, all in all, a very beautiful thing. Curse you, Candace Bushnell.

BBC Backstage launches. Lots of RSS feeds (and APIs in the near future) to play with – and, with a few caveats, you’re free to do what you want with all that lovely data. I’ve written a bit more about the scheme over at the other weblog I contribute to. Suffice to say, Ben Hammersley is right – this is seriously exciting stuff. The BBC are on the Cluetrain. Who’s next?

Comprehensive archive (with scans) of 50s and prior romance comics. It’s a genre you may not be very familiar with, but tons were churned out in this era; in some ways, the ads in each issue are even more interesting (from a cultural-history standpoint) than the comics themselves. Warning: they have severely dated. Just in case you hadn’t guessed.

37Signals latest webapp, Backpack launches today. 10am CST, which will be some time this afternoon. If it’s anything like as good as Basecamp or Ta-da lists, it should be something special. Keep your eyes peeled, folks.

Mock Duck – “a delicious assortment of thrift-store cookbooks“. If you’ve ever wondered how, following the apocalypse, you will pull off a swanky 60s-style dinner party with only tinned food, you could do better than some of this lot. You might get bored of luncheon meat and baked beans, no matter how cleverly disguised, though…

More Google Maps hackery: Blockies allows users to tag photos by location, but even better, it then displays the locations of any photos tagged appropriately on this page, which hacks Google Maps to great effect. I’m kind of in love with Blockies, conceptually, and really want a London version… (I mentioned Blockies a few days ago).

Stonking huge quotation from Steven Berlin Johnson (and his new book, Everything Good Is Bad For You in his post on what might have happened had videogames come before books: “While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.“.

A pair of interesting screenwriting links, today. First, the weblog of John August, who wrote Go, Charlie’s Angels, and Big Fish. From there I found the site for celtx, a free cross-platform screenwriting program based upon (of all things) Firefox. celtx is pretty good – a bit clunky and it takes a while to get used to, but not half bad. John August is great; lots of interesting posts and he really likes to engage with his readers.

McSweeney’s lists: Physical theories as women. Delightful, and oh so true. “4. General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons“.