"…it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together." Short interview with Tom Chatfield in the Observer.

"Use and create Delicious bookmarks from the Safari web browser" – with a single keyboard shortcut. My main reason for sticking with Firefox was its Delicious integration, but if this is any cop, I think I'm save from terrible memory leaks for the future.

"I tend to see them as having much more in common with the approach of an architect or landscape designer in terms of shaping and creating flows, confluences and possibilities for enjoyment… As a result I really do think that critical appreciation and commentary from the world of architecture and design could be illuminating and progressive." Jones on the lack of perception – outside games criticism – of games as design objects (rather than media objects). It is excellent; I agree with it all.

Card-based dungeon-crawling game. Basically: card-driven roguelike. Should print it out and take a squint sometime.

"Taps is a temporary web service you run on a server that has access to the database you want to export. You can then run the client to connect to that service and pull data out of it in chunks. It works through firewalls, doesn’t require a direct ssh connection, and – best of all – it’s database independent. So you can export from a MySQL database and import to PostgreSQL, or vice versa."

Vast, detailed CHUD article on an older treatment Cameron wrote for Avatar, which does sound more interesting than the version we got; sadly, it also sounds very sprawling – there's even more world-building going on. Still, some elements cut from it – notably, Hegner – seem like a real shame to have lost.

Vast, detailed CHUD article on an older treatment Cameron wrote for Avatar, which does sound more interesting than the version we got; sadly, it also sounds very sprawling – there's even more world-building going on. Still, some elements cut from it – notably, Hegner – seem like a real shame to have lost.

Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.

"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.

"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.

"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.

This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.

"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.

IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.

"An exposition of the philosophy of Carles as expressed on his weblog Hipster Runoff." Oh god, it's coming full circle

"Two music games got it right on the DS this year, both eschewing fancy controllers, instead focusing on the system’s touchscreen to present their engaging concepts: Rhythm Heaven and Maestro: Jump in Music." Ooh, sounds interesting – will have to hunt that down. (Via Simon Parkin)

"McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path." Sharp review of what sounds like a fascinating book; I particularly liked this quotation.

"Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is — more than anything else — a triumph of human reasoning." Ooh, that could be good, when I have an hour spare. (Another Google TechTalk).

"Every day a song is posted, one second shorter than yesterday's. A tumblr by Tom Ewing." Awesome.

"ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations. ImageOptim combines various optimisation tools: AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT. It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller." Ooh, looks excellent.

"With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code." Hammersley on the value to journalism of sensible datastorage. Data-driven journalism in the sense that it is not *about* data, but in that it is *treated as data* – and from this more stories can flow.

"How does a game about killing people, the Old Testament, and the Borgias completely bore an Italian Jew?" Simon Ferrari didn't like Assassin's Creed II; he explains why. It's entertaining, for sure (but I'm still going to pick it up).

Wonderful interview with Richard Mosse, who photographs (quite beautifully) plane wrecks.

"I wonder what Tulon Ethabathel the Dwarf is doing right now." A US brain surgeon talks about his interest in gaming, the amount of time he gives it – very little – but the nontheless-important role it plays in his life. Lovely article, really; well-crafted and thought-provoking.

"For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical." Can't believe I haven't linked this already. Ours were wonderful; many thanks to RIG and Andy.

It's Mario. And then it's Tetris. And then it's Mario. And then it's Tetris. Copyright-infringing Flixel awesomeness – much better than the concept initially sounds. You should check this out.