Yet another entry in the weird, wonderful world of "why I like fighting games and their community". The vast amount of jargon that the streams lead to is weird, hilarious, and entirely befuddling for an outsider. McCormick's article is nice because it captures the excitement of the weird end of the community, and explains it to an outsider well.

"The miniE shield is designed as an Arduino shield that holds all required hardware components to sport the miniEngine motion-control-system for timelapse photography." Iiinteresting. (Motor control / camera control all at once).

"There doesn't have to be a binary choice between hiding networks and revealing networks to be evil and hegemonic. We could decide to materialise technology infrastructure and demonstrate that it is marvellous, powerful and useful. Maybe that would encourage people to try and make it their own things with it rather than just run away."

"Incidentally, I would like to bring attention to the marvelous pseudocode system that Melanie developed for parsing Lewitt’s statement. (Others of you did something similar: notably Julia, Chloe and Miles.) As far as I’m concerned, Melanie has earned the right to title her pseudocode as she did. This document is really a gem: through its indentation and other typographic cues, Melanie presents a visualization of the structure of Lewitt’s work which is not otherwise available in either of the versions officially published by Pace." This is good (and how I still explain things to myself, slowly turning comments written and indented like this into code).

"A portrait is not worth considering. Heads is heads and for kings and queens and tails should tell tales of the land over which they reign, and be part of our house of memory." Tom Phillips has designed a 50p to commemorate Benjamin Britten.

"After a couple of appearances on the interview program “Donahue,” in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on “Match Game” and a guest appearance on “Fantasy Island” as the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts." Snorting with laughter a bit.

"This is why vacations are essential. They hold up the mirror and show how much energy you’re spending simply to achieve baseline steady state in your day." Yes, that.

"It has reached gabber zero – the point at which a programming language is able to support the production of live techno."

'“To me, the computer is just another tool,” Ms. Burns once said. “It’s like a pen'. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you."' A lovely obituary, but also, what a quotation – a nice corollary to the ones I usually wheel out about literacy.

'“To me, the computer is just another tool,” Ms. Burns once said. “It’s like a pen'. You have to have a pen, and to know penmanship, but neither will write the book for you."' A lovely obituary, but also, what a quotation – a nice corollary to the ones I usually wheel out about literacy.

"This is not to say that real human interactions are not ritualized to the point of mechanic in some ways, but that procedural rhetoric about human life nearly always makes a specific argument: life works this way, life works that way. Counter to this, Gone Home eschews systems; in particular, it avoids systemizing anything about its characters. Instead of portraying the characters themselves, or providing a set of interactions with those characters, it presents instead a series of artifacts from the characters’ lives without trying to build mechanics around them. The family is only present through those artifacts, the shapes and shadows each member leaves behind. In a certain sense, you could say that the game sets its sights low. But it also hits its mark extremely well– and by doing so achieves something greater than a reductive mechanical take on those same characters ever could. Gone Home is not intended from the top down to be “a game about life”, as some ham-handed experiments have been– instead, it simply represents or evokes certain lives very well (and therefore naturally becomes about life). The game allows its characters to exist on a plane that we usually reserve for ourselves." This is a fine paragraph from a very astute take on Gone Home; for someone who talks so much about games as systemic media, it's good to be reminded so eloquently of all their other qualities I'm prone to forgetting.