"On my way home from FOO I sat staring out the car window, all of these impressions, ideas, and seeming contradictions bouncing around in my head. And then something occurred to me. O’Reilly’s human-centered approach is still a kind of systems thinking. O’Reilly is still building a model of what the geek world is working on. They’re just doing it through the social relationships that their employees form with other geeks. The “data” they gather is stored in their employees heads and hearts and in those of the wider community of geeks they bring to events like FOO. Instead of trying to live in the model, O’Reilly tries to live in the community."

"In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again." Somewhere between savage and affectionate, like the best parodies.

"Twenty-one years later, an anonymous software engineer pulled together various digital artifacts to create a multiplayer game for his son.

Tonight, while playing that game, I ran into my 15-year-old self."

What magic smells like.

"In contrast to the human-scale of the prototype, the Clock in the mountain will be monumental, almost architectural in scale. It will be roughly 200 feet tall. Located under a remote limestone mountain in the Sierra Diablo Mountain range in Texas, it will require a day’s hike to reach its interior gears. Just reaching the entrance tunnel situated 1500 feet above the high scrub desert will leave some visitors out of breath, nicked by thorns, and wondering what they got themselves into." Beautiful; not only that they're building it, but that pilgrimage is practically built into the design. "You wind the clock by walking", as it were.

"The value of the web is in its history. The value of the web is that it grows over time and that it spiders out making connections, just as often doubling back on itself to find previously unseen patterns and connections. It is not a linear progression through time and space always discarding the near past. Or if it is then I'm sorry for wasting everyone's time because that sounds about as exciting, and about as valuable, as any given season of canned television programming."

This is lovely: Lucier translated to the physical from the sonic; making rooms from previous rooms.

"At Southern Impact in Laredo, TX, we met a talented SSF4 Chun-Li player named Mike Begum (aka "Broly" or "Legs") who has a condition called arthrogryposis. Despite his circumstances, he became one of the top Chun-Li players in Texas after playing the game for just 6 months, and is also one of the best Super Smash Bros. players in the state. In this interview with Gootecks, Broly talks about how he plays without using his hands, why and how he uses Chun-Li, and his advice for others in similar situations." I cannot play Chun-Li, or to be frank, my mains, nearly as well as this. You go, dude.

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Both the letters described, and Robin's point, are beautiful.

"I wonder if the use of the calibration pose will fade to the point where it becomes retro, included only by nostalgic programmers who that want to create that old 11-bit flavor of early depth cameras in their apps. Will we eventually learn to accommodate ourselves to a world where we’re invisibly tracked and take it for granted. Will the pose fall away in favor of new metaphors and protocols that are native to the new interface world slowly coming into existence?"

"…as soon as consumers become used to things acting this way, they’ll start actually expecting things to act this way. And when that happens, beware any software company that doesn’t deliver the same experience. In the new world Apple will create, to ask a user to manually sync files between different devices will be the equivalent, back in the ‘80s, of asking a bunch of home computer users used to interacting with GUI’s, to use command lines instead." Yep.