"Kevin Nguyen talks to the minds behind Kind of Bloop, a chiptune cover album of cool jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue." A good interview with some of the Kind of Bloop gang; Shnabubula's "All Blues" is utterly marvellous, so it's nice to hear more from the artist.

"Cheating is hacking for the masses. It is one of many opportunities to ‘soft programme’ our technologies and culture without heavy reliance on advanced knowledge. Cheating creates an opportunity to play with design, think about it, and tinker around. By effectively unbalancing a game, we can move behind the screen to consider games through their limits. If you put too many assets on screen with the Sonic debug mode, the system would freeze and crash. In this it taught young players an important truth about games; that they aren’t infinite systems, but rather careful gestures reliant on an economy of elements. Cheats of the kind seen in Sonic fostered a generation of gamers to be both critical and respectful of what games are. Knowing that the level is one configuration among many comes from a point of view only afforded through cheating." David Surman is writing more about games, and it is a good thing.

Simon Parkin interviews Martin Hollis. As with much of what Martin says, it is gentle, readable, and dotted with nuggets of purest gold. And the word "teleportage". Martin's a lovely, lovely chap, and he really, really knows his stuff; reading this should convince you of that.

The city, it turns out, is there for you to SPEND MONEY IN. And augment the hell out of. No grim meathook future in 2015 Singapore, that's for certain…

"This is a selected list of gairaigo, Japanese words originating or based on foreign language (generally Western) terms, including wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms)." One of my new favourite Wikipedia pages; there is some fascinating stuff in here.

"My other half says I’m losing it. But I think that as an enthusiast kernel developer she doesn’t have the right to criticize people." Generating ASCII pie charts with a single SQL query. It's a very, very big query. It's a bit crazy.

"During peacetime, hats have been instrumental for men to let the non-hatted know just who is wearing the hat around here." I love Valve and I want to kiss them lots.

Yes it is. Jolly good, and the music will drive you crackers.

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate." And so on.

"You've already received more letters from me than any living relative of mine has received to date. Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn't as painful as I portray it. Believe in yourself. Think about the future once a day and keep doing what you're doing. Because I'm impressed. My regards to the family. Don't let a day pass without a kind thought about them." For many years, Alison Fields was penpals with John Hughes. This is a lovely story.

One great big massive thread in which the Left 4 Dead story gets dissected to death – with lots of excellent screengrabs – by perceptive fans. Good stuff: as usual with Valve, there's so much story in the world.

Words With Friends: it's like Scrabulous, but on your iPhone, with push notification. There is little more that needs to be said, other than that it's a very good implementation with some nice UI detail.