I won't do Timo a disservice by quoting one fragment of this essay; it's one of those lovely pieces of writing where not a word is wasted, where it all builds an argument, and you should just read the whole thing. Lots of topics I've been touching on in recent years, in part because of my time at Berg, and the designers who are my friends and peers. This is what needs to be beaten into the world, a little; the way to beat it in is to build it in, through our work and products. I should work on that more.

"I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase "I saw.""

"Drawings are not just end products: they are part of the thought process of architectural design. Drawings express the interaction of our minds, eyes and hands. This last statement is absolutely crucial to the difference between those who draw to conceptualize architecture and those who use the computer." Not just true of architecture, either.

"There are many things about my youth that have been ground into fine dust by a relentless online culture determined to use every emotion I've ever felt as a wedge into CPM advertising or a dubstep meme remix.

This is not one of them."

"Realising the dude starting at you is googling you with their eyepiece." This is good.

"Bear in Space has an unusual premise for a children's book. It is the fictional story of a bear who shares film of his vacation to the Moon with his animal friends, but that is not the unusual part." Bear faked his trip; his photographs are clearly manipulated. The child should pick up on that, but will Bear's friends? A Russian tale of space travel from 1970.

"A Vim plugin which shows a git diff in the 'gutter' (sign column). It shows whether each line has been added, modified, and where lines have been removed." Lovely. Also available for emacs and Sublime Text 2.

"Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly. The critique of startup culture that came in large part from the agile movement has been replaced by sanitized, pompous, dishonest slogans." This is all very good.

"The most impressive request thoroughly embraced the nature of TCP/IP, and arrived in a number of packets, out of order and with some data corruption (see the missing data on the envelopes), which we had to reconstitute into the actual request within our ‘server’." Everyone involved in this post is brilliant.

'"Screw this,” said Horace, downing his Babycham. “I’m going skiing.”' As niche fiction goes, this is very niche, but it is quite a thing. I am not sure how many people Horace fiction is relevant for, though.