Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.

"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.

"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.

"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.

This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.

"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.

IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.

"How does a game about killing people, the Old Testament, and the Borgias completely bore an Italian Jew?" Simon Ferrari didn't like Assassin's Creed II; he explains why. It's entertaining, for sure (but I'm still going to pick it up).

Wonderful interview with Richard Mosse, who photographs (quite beautifully) plane wrecks.

"I wonder what Tulon Ethabathel the Dwarf is doing right now." A US brain surgeon talks about his interest in gaming, the amount of time he gives it – very little – but the nontheless-important role it plays in his life. Lovely article, really; well-crafted and thought-provoking.

"For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical." Can't believe I haven't linked this already. Ours were wonderful; many thanks to RIG and Andy.

"In [Nude] she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her." I love Economist obituaries, and this one – of Charis Wilson – is no exception. Lovely.

"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

"We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area." Some nice work from Alper and Kars.

Brad Sucks has converted his own material to Rock Band tracks in Rock Band Studio, and will soon be selling them straight to your 360. Harmonix really are bringing something to the game here – amateur/unsigned musicians can now use Rock Band to sell music (with appropriate notecharts, obviously), in the same way they started to use MySpace as promotion a few years ago. Awesome.

"I did a set of four walks in Austria; two long ones, two short ones. I did some "daystreaming" where using bits of technology I was updating my location, status and pictures as I walked." Ambient information gathering, whilst taking in the outdoors, and all for charity. Lovely.

And it just worked first time. Awesome!

"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.

"Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body… We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.

"SoI think it's not unreasonable to read that the article is presenting the stance that the evolution of the status of games from 'toys and entertainment' to 'art' is fundamentally linked to the idea of authorship coming from the singular creative vision of an individual. For the record, I strongly disagree with this stance – and furthermore, I feel it is treacherous ground in which to plant the 'games are henceforth art' flag, as I suspect it is ground that will quickly be lost to (or surrendered by) the first generation of artists who even attempt to question it (in fact – for those of us 'in the know' it has been and continues to be, questioned all the time)."

"…sometimes I fear our endless preoccupation with making the case for video games is self-defeating. It feels defensive and, at its worst, produces a kind of micro-culture obsession with analysis: a 24/7 bloggo-Twitter tilling and re-tilling of the same small plot of dirt. In this self-absorbed environment, each new game's worth is measured by its ability to move the needle on emergent narrative, artistic expression, genre refinement…or whatever criterion we're applying this week to prove games matter to people already convinced." Yes. Not the reason I've been taking a break from writing about it, but something that plays on my mind before I put fingers to keyboard.

"Someone at work recently asked how he should go about studying machine learning on his own. So I’m putting together a little guide." Ooh, useful. Lots of starting points for machine learning in R.

"When you look at the dubstep scene you realize quickly that it’s a fairly young genre. Not in terms of its own existence as a named thing, but as a measure of the age of many of its prominent musicians. They’re of the generation that doesn’t know a world before the Nintendo Entertainment System and a lot of the music reflects that… If you had a giant Venn Diagram of dubstep and 8-bit chiptunes, you’d see a large overlap between the two. Why dubstep is particularly prone to this, more than other electronic styles, I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with its relatively lo-fi, home studio feel of the genre? … There’s a hidden, untold history there, but it’d be best told by someone that knows the genre, and its players, better than I do. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying it until it’s pillaged and destroyed for all its worth." Mike on the overlap between dubstep and chiptune culture.

"All artworks have been created using data from the game "Unreal Tournament". Each image represents about 30 mins of gameplay in which the computers AI plays against itself. There are 20-25 bots playing each game and they play custom maps which I create. Each map has been specially designed so that the AI bots have a rough idea of where to go in order to create the image I want. I log the position (X,Y,Z) of each bot, every second using a modification for the game, I also log the position of a death. I then run my own program written in Processing to create printable postscript files of that match."

"Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult – but successful – expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. I'll let the photos below tell the rest of the story." Royal de Luxe are the same group who did "The Sultan's Elephant". Thought: it's all a bit Bioshock, isn't it?

The future of image processing and 3D graphics is awesome, bonkers, sort-of relevant and full of bunnies. Worth a watch.

Me, talking to the chaps from Slub about livecoding and the like, for Wired. Turned out alright, I think. Shame there wasn't space for it in the print edition in the end, but online now.

"…he and his brethren were plotting a future in which all writers and musicians would be at the mercy of the mathematicians and the electronic and numerological world they have created. Art is now content. It merely embellishes a "platform" of the kind I struggle to read about in the media pages which are now indistinguishable from the technology pages." I like Andrew Martin's writing a lot, but this article is both rubbish and angry-making. Grr.