"Snuggling with a baby walrus feels like being pinned under a warm, very chubby person who is wearing a damp velour jumpsuit that smells faintly, almost pleasantly, like low tide" Awww.

This is marvellous: Tog on magic and software, and what one can teach the other. The stuff about perceived time periods, and also on distraction, is particularly great. It's not just about the functionality: it's about how you present it; showmanship all the way down. (And: I like the reminder about the kinds of honesty that are important, in order that dissimulation still works0.

Excellent, thoughtful article from John Allspaw on what experience in software engineering really looks like. Valuable reading both for software engineers, and also for the people who work with them.

"Popular media plays an important part in how technology is understood and how it is expected to be. Which, I would argue, also could mean that these understandings can be challenged through stirring popular imagination. And using media and communication as a tool." Einar's talk from Playful was a real favourite, and I'm glad he's put the whole thing online now. Completely worth a read.

"jq is like sed for JSON data – you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text." Sounds super-useful.

"there will be some noise as this is a busy shop but there will never be disorder"

"We drove about for another hour or two after that, and by this point dad was hooked. Not hooked on L.A. Noire's narrative, perhaps, or caught up in the complex chains of missions, but hooked on the city, on the fascinating, insightful job that Rockstar had done in stitching the past together. Even though I can't actually drive, and the car we were in wasn't a real car anyway, I had a strong sense that I was in the front seat, turning the wheel beneath my hands, and he was riding low in the back, face pressed to the glass. Role reversal. It happens to all fathers and sons eventually, I guess. Why shouldn't it happen because of games?" Chris Donlan takes his Dad – who grew up in late-40s/early-50s LA – on a tour of LA Noire's Los Angeles, and what happens is a remarkable piece of virtual psychogeography. Perhaps my favourite piece of games writing this year.

1994 Tom Chick and I have a lot in common – a love of submarine sims and slightly over-technical flight simulators. And X-Com. (Well, UFO, really). A lovely piece of writing about what game design in 2012 looks like (amongst other things) compared to our youth.

Beautiful slit-scan photography.

"Porthole streams music from your favorite music player to all your AirPlay speakers, in sync." Slightly cheaper alternative to Airfoil.

MattB writes down his tips for language processing/machine learning; useful that somebody's done this.

"Riders pass through openings in a waterfall created by precisely monitoring their path via axel-housed encoders, creating the thrill of narrowly escaping obstacles." Brilliant.