"Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.

"I'm not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time."

"Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas." More hopeful monsters.

"I would separate out the true independent developer vs. the hobbyist," says Fils-Aime. "We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer. Where we've drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue." Sustainable, maybe, but sad at the same time.

The beginnings of an encyclopedia for Roguelikes; some useful stuff in here, given current interests.

Lovely: closing your eyes to change the state of the world, and thus make progress through the world.

"This coffee filter is made of stainless steel and designed for use in the Aeropress® coffee maker." Re-usable Aeropress filter. Nice.

"We need smaller studios and smaller games to train developers and staff up for big projects, and because sometimes they turn out to be good, or worthwhile, or interesting, or are able to take risks a AA game cannot. But, being honest, when was the last time you paid £20 for a game and expected it to take risks, rather than to provide a variation on an experience you have already had – especially when that £20 tag was not a deep discount a month after shipping in response to disappointing sales, like Alpha Protocol and Enslaved?" Lots of good points from Dan.

I swear, just go and read this right now; it might look like it's about games, but really, it's about space, and memory, and Memory Palaces, and wrapped around a retrospective of a marvellous game, and a little bit about how games make us who we are, in ways their creators might never have imagined.

"We already know the decapitated Statue of Liberty in Deus Ex can tell a story; perhaps I want to know if a building can tell me a poem.

In that vein, "Butte, Montana. 1973" is a game where you dig around in a box of dirt."

This is marvellous; thoughtful, interesting, perhaps not entirely successful, but the trick of the rain at the end is a very, very nice touch.

"At this moment of awards-giving and back-patting, however, we can all agree to love movies again, for a little while, because we're living within a mirage that exists for only about six or eight weeks around the end of each year. Right now, we can argue that any system that allows David Fincher to plumb the invention of Facebook and the Coen brothers to visit the old West, that lets us spend the holidays gorging on new work by Darren Aronofsky and David O. Russell, has got to mean that American filmmaking is in reasonably good health. But the truth is that we'll be back to summer—which seems to come sooner every year—in a heartbeat. And it's hard to hold out much hope when you hear the words that one studio executive, who could have been speaking for all her kin, is ready to chisel onto Hollywood's tombstone: "We don't tell stories anymore."" This is good, and sad.

"If you’re like us, your knowledge is spread across several places: Gmail, Google Docs, Basecamp, and more. Redwood makes it easy to search across these sources, right from your desktop." Clever.

"Well, it’s hard to make female characters. First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that." Matthew Burns answers the hard questions.

"The best signpost to the future I know is to follow whatever happens after the word "computational."" Kevin Kelly being smart/interesting/as usual.

"Airport City is a slippy map of airport runways and highway on/off ramps rendered using OpenStreetMap data (OSM). …I became fascinated with the on and off ramps, in OSM, during and still following the creation of prettymaps in 2010. To see them in isolation is to see the gravitation push and pull (the wind patterns and dance moves) of the cities they make possible." Yep, still love Aaron.

"We live in a world where the game of the movie of Where the Wild Things are, Motherfucking Where the Wild Things are, was a fucking cash-grab. This was a game based of Maurice Sendak. This should have been teeming with imagination. This should have been infinitely creative, a wonderful adventure inspiring generations of children. What is it, instead? It's a boring platformer. That's it. Just a generic, ordinary platformer. Are we okay with that? Are we okay with living in a world where a game based on a Maurice Sendak book is anything less than breathtaking, let alone underwhelming? I'm sure as hell not." 'Where are the children's games?" is, in fact, a good question; I can think of a few answers – but nowhere near enough. And, more to the point: there's a lot packed up inside that question that applies to things that aren't children's games. This is a topic I shall be returning to, I feel sure.