"The (for now) final end product seems incredibly obvious. And popular.

Yet it took decades of iterative innovation, from some of the cleverest minds in the field, to make something so apparently simple yet powerful.

And every step was astonishing." This is great stuff from Francis.

"So, as some of you may know, the old shrine got re-activated as a working shrine a few days ago, and the Church classroom cleared away for meditation and contemplation, led by Fa Zang (Rinpoche), the guy in the buddhist monk robe who has been doing a lot of sewing in the craft area recently." I love mailing lists. And this is a remarkable post.

"Using vim is like talking to your editor in ‘verb modifier object’ sentences, turned into acronyms." Which is a good way of thinking of it.

"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.

"I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books—but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity." Books as a fluid!

"…one of the things I learned in attempting to produce 50 interesting variants on the text is that it is very, very hard. Whatever is done to the text, it is virtually impossible to extinguish Dickens’ intention without extinguishing the whole work (as in the case of the copies which read simply “Fancy fancy fancy fancy…” or “Facts facts facts…” for 300-odd pages). The text stands; it is greater than paper." This is brilliant.

"Brogue is a Roguelike game for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux by Brian Walker." It's REALLY good: stripped-down and straightforward, as Rogue was, but with nice mouse implementation and a lovely auto-explore mode. Really rather nice.

"There are 1868 cars on the highway right now. You can watch them drive by, or draw your own and it will join the front of the line. Where are they going? The journey is yours." Progressive's annual report is done vy an artist each year; this year's is a lovely Aaron Koblin piece.

"The choice for light as a medium is the result of a systematic exploration of what kinds of stimuli pigs respond to. We were aware of some evidence indicating pigs enjoy light. But when we saw how they reacted to a laser pointer, we knew we were on to something." Kars' frankly crazy game for pigs and people is in video form now, but he's deadly serious about it existing. I'm quite excited for him.

Really good look at getting your head around vim from Mislav. Especially on the money with regard to starting slow, and adding things as you need them. The worst thing you can do is _start_ with somebody else's .vim files.

Great profile on Tim Sweeney from Stephen Totilo. Again, part of my childhood gaming, especially ZZT, which was a brilliant editor and one of the first play/create tools I messed around with. Striking to see how much impact the shareware creators of my youth – Carmack, Sweeney, and all the Apogee/id/Epic crews – have gone on to have in the modern industry. Also: striking to be reminded how much of those early PC gaming days were about borderline geniuses writing terrifying graphics engines.

Useful reference material! (And: he's totally right about the Nikka).

Jamie on "Impro" with respect to games. I really need to get on and read it.

Attractive styleguide for a personal site. Might resort to these one day soon.

"If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight." Yep. This is all quite sensible, and something I've long believed. (See also: Garrett Murray's pleading requests for Tumblr to let him pay for it).

"Winning and losing are only defined in their relation to us. Their meaning doesn’t come from an abstract ideal that is buried in the rules of the game, but from our experiences in life, such as witnessing war; or watching Garry Kasparov’s erratic behavior during his matches with Deep Blue; or having once won the emotionally fractured heart of the blonde from class, only to have it crumble in my hands. A game like chess is meaningful because it comments on our wider view on culture—not because placing pieces in a certain position leads to an endgame." On the battle between the logic of systems and the illogic of meanings. Useful food for thought right now.