"The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."

"The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."

"How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.

"The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator."

"Each issue of this unique title is 3,840 half-inch-square panels of nothing but dots talking to each other. The concept is that everyone is drawn so far away that all you can see is a dot. And the dots do stuff. Like smack each other, or give birth, or die. It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing."

Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.

Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.

Jaw well and truly on the floor.

"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."

"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.

Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine – the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.

Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?

"Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!

"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.

"The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.

This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.

"And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.

"The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."

"Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."

Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).

"Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.

"Imagine if Apple had decided to make a MacBook that was priced like an iPod. That's what Asus is doing."

"If you've ever needed to produce PDF documents before, in Ruby or another language, you probably know how much it can suck. Prawn takes the pain out of generating beautiful printable documents, while still remaining fast, tiny and nimble. It is also named after a majestic sea creature, and that has to count for something."

"EA has confirmed that the advert was paid for by Obama."

"I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left. The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed."

"The 2 opponents perform magical gestures with their hands to create their supernatural weapons – spells. Some are so potent as to be able to blind a man, call forth terrifying creatures, or even kill the unfortunate victim instantly. Consequently each wizard must rely on his own cunning to be able to time enough defensive spells to avoid the brunt of his adversary's attack, yet force in sufficient offensive spells of his own to crack the magical armour of his opponent, and kill the wizard outright. The game is an attempt to capture the spirit of such a battle in as simple yet exciting way as possible." The "waving hands" game by Richard Bartle.

"Pretty sure I'm not the first person in the universe to come up with this idea, but I've yet to see another connect-the-dots tattoo." Beautiful.

"It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get." Paul Krugman, you are the best.

"The Theory of Interstellar Trade is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman…. Krugman analyzed the question of 'how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.'" Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, is officially awesome.

"The New York Times Magazine food issue had plenty of fun this weekend; Looks like photo editor Kathy Ryan gave photographer Martin Klimas a 22-caliber rifle and told him to embrace his anger. He decimated an ear of corn, an apple and a pumpkin so thoroughly that the editors could not decide on a favorite." Beautiful.

Strategy game that requires you to work within the boundaries of limited – but potentially powerful – AI, and act as a guiding "real intelligence" for your ships.

"Brownjohn had never worked with live action before, nor had his animation assistant Trevor Bond. Using techniques taught by László Moholy-Nagy, Brownjohn's team beamed light over three separate models; a belly dancer, a snake dancer and a model for close-ups." Short blogpost – with archive behind-the-scenes images – on creating the title sequence for Goldfinger.

"LittleBigPlanet lets [players] run wild, with unprecedented results, but it locks the majority out of the creative process, because it's time-consuming and simply not very enjoyable. We hoped it could do both those things. That it doesn't isn't the let-down it might have been, thanks to the untamed community of brilliant nutjobs that's already out there, appending their DIY masterpieces to this beautiful, mildly flawed, magnificently multiplayer platform game. We salute them, we salute Media Molecule for making it possible for them, and we salute Sony for its total commitment to this brave, hare-brained project. But mostly, we're just happy to see a flagship game for a modern system that's about running from left to right and jumping over things."

"From Liverpool 1995, to Nevada 2035, to a PlayStation somewhere near you. Once upon a time, I helped to write the world of WipEout." Nice article from the writer who helped write a lot of the texture and world for Psygnosis' Wipeout. Glad that writing like this is still somewhere, even if it's in the furthest recesses of fansites.

"But these arguments aren't getting us anywhere because the problem isn't the games. The problem is the _play_. When we engage with games, we _play_ with them. We don't read them; we don't attend them; we don't view them in a gallery. We _play_ them. And that's a big problem."

"This has to be the most quick-and-dirty data visualizer out there: I wrote an ascii art plotter script that takes a column of numbers on stdin and throws out a plot on your console." Oh, that's going to come in handy.

"As the population of the system grows, everyone's personal horizons begin to shrink. With enough people, eventually you're talking to the people right in your neighborhood. To get a message to someone across the country, you might lie about your location, or ask that it be passed on, Milgram-style." Filtering by proximity in a restrictive – but potentially more useful – manner. Interesting.

"This is the challenge, it seems to me: it's to do with the tools of design– rules and states– what other media do with images and sound: reveal the world as seen through different eyes, with lapidary clarity and moral courage. And this means moving beyond merely empowering and entertaining the player."

"Everything breaks, so what happens when we wire the world on the sort of massive scale being proposed and every day is more irritating than the next? Probably what will happen is that people will just walk away from the entire project damning it first with market insignificance and if that doesn't work then rendering it meaningless with government regulation. It's worth at least talking about." Aaron is awesome.

Crazy flash-based cheesy trance machine. Far more entertaining than it should be.

"Developed by Peter Chilvers, in collaboration with Eno, the app is described as, “Part instrument, part composition and part artwork…” The idea is that anybody can play with Bloom and coax gentle melodies and ambient soundscapes out of their iPhone."

What a wonderful piece of a UI; two projections of a tunnel-boring machine, synchronized with one another, to help you visualise it in 3D. Lovely – not what you'd expect from a fairly niche company's site at all.

"The future is terribly easy to predict. It’s predicting the instantiation that’s hard."

"These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age." Beautiful.

Lots of sed-goodness here.

Javascript demoscene craziness from Matt Westcott; 3D, music, and the most incredible editing tool I've seen in JS ever.

"The rest of this article will be a tutorial showing you how to host and manage Git repositories with access control, easily and safely. I use an up and coming tool called gitosis that my friend Tv wrote to help make hosting git repos easier and safer." Nice guide to getting up and running with gitosis.

"Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes." Lols.

"The Mugen (infinite) series of toys from Bandai Asovision has now brought us the Mugen PeriPeri, a keychain toy that aims to replicate the pleasure of opening a package for the first time. Snacks, boxes, and other tear-open packages tend to reveal good things, so perhaps experiencing this sensation boosts endorphins and sends us into pleasure mode." Tear-off wrapping you can tear forver.