"keep some parts of myself severely to myself, am thus able to maintain a deep fruitful disjunction between this real world & the real real world." (and: of _course_ the "Robin" commenting on MJH's blog is Robin Sloan)

"The lineage of luxury in art – from lapis lazuli, to bronze casting, gold plating or diamond encrusting –  extends now to graphics cards, ray-tracing, skin rendering, reflection mapping and to processor speeds, hyperthreading, render farms and the complex world of outsourcing, government subsidies or mineral extraction. It’s important and interesting! Curators take note!" This is good / the Ed Atkins also sounds good.

Bookmarked for reference – Dan's lists are usually good.

Beautiful. (via Denise).

"King Lear would have killed it in Silicon Valley." More Maciej, and yes, it's great.

These are also good. And funny.

Seems like a reasonable set of tools to help out with this.

"MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that's arrived so far." Useful!

"The reason I am able to make Twitter bots is because I have been programming computers in a shitty, haphazard way for 15 years, followed by maybe 5 years of less-shitty programming. Every single sentence in the big preceding paragraph, every little atom of knowledge, represents hours of banging my head up against a series of technical walls, googling for magic words to get libraries to compile, scouring obscure documentation to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do, and re-learning stuff I’d forgotten because I hadn’t used it in a while." This paragraph also represents my experience of both programming and how I write my toys; a slightly round-about set of experience to get to where we are now, with lots of reading the manual and doing things in dumb ways occasionally. Programming!

Yep, this all seems like a very good list to me. Filed away for the next time I have to do anything with maps.

Enjoyed this a lot: Kim Stanley Robinson on California, SF, and the relationship between the two. For me, timely.

"In this film I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to be able to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems for securing, cooling and maintaining them." Looks beautiful: Timo's customary look in enveloping, three-screen 4K. Gosh. Also: the uses of stills-as-film is really interesting to me at the moment.

"One-thousand dollars invested at a 20% discount with 5% interest (calculating interest every 3 turns, but simple, not compounding interest) means a player will have starting debt of $1000. After three turns the debt is $1050, 6 turns is $1100, 9 turns is $1150, etc. Totally manageable. The banker is your friend and wants you to succeed."

A lovely game – almost a poem, but definitely Enough Game – by Holly Gramazio, about being a blackbird in a city. It made me feel many things, which is what the best writing does. Also, I shall now probably play it again.

"We foresee an amazing future where not only can your household devices communicate with each other, they can also communicate with us over the same Internet lines. How cool would it be if your fridge could post a Medium here on Medium every time it needed you to buy more milk? And that’s just one idea." There are many more ideas in this post.

"At a coffee shop near his office, Kazemi says he feels about his bots the way he imagines parents must feel about their children. “I’ve created these things, and they’re kind of separate from me now, and so I do feel kind of proud of them,” he says. “Every morning I wake up and I look at the last two hours of TwoHeadlines, and it just gets me every time.”" Yup. That.

"Under the [Do What You Love] credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love (which is, in fact, most labor) is not only demeaned but erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from the spectrum of consciousness altogether." This is astute and good, on what happens when work is divided into either "things you love anyway" or "labor that we will banish from view" – and the enabling forces that let someone Do What They Love.

"…we though it would be it would be interesting to ask the students to deconstruct a logic prevalent in the games industry (F2P) and to then apply that logic to a real-world system (in this case, a London transport) service." I loved this when Kars first told me about the brief, and I love seeing it again now.

Great article from Jeff Minter on the journey from 70s vector art, 80s vector games, through to the (excellent) Tempest 2000 – including some great stuff on embracing the Jaguar's chips and instructions to make beautiful weirdness – and onwards through Nuon and Space Giraffe to TxK on the Vita. A really lovely balance in the article of coding voodoo, focusing on gameplay, and always wanting to make things both weirder and prettier. (Incidentally: I loved T2K when I first played it, but playing an original Tempest cab at Ground Kontrol was a special moment – striking how much a spinner changes that game). Definitely recommended.

"I was hoping that Simon Starling [would engage with CGI as a medium creatively]. But he didn't – he used it _invisibly_. CGI is always used invisibly. You're not supposed to see the seams. It's supposed to appear like it's not CGI in order to fool the eye and boggle the mind. Sadly (for me and probably no-one else) CGI was again denied the opportunity to do anything more than _facilitate_." I enjoyed Starling's piece, but this is astute and fair criticism. (I'm rather taken with Alan Warburton following his Spherical Harmonics at the Photographer's Gallery. All of CGWTF is very good.)

Lovely article about the lengths you can go to in order to rescue data – and what the meaning of that for computer art is. Super-glad people know this sort of thing.

"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.

"The notion that an artist’s life project, his crowning glory, should have been a sort of side project, something done in the margins, as it were, while he was busy getting on with the real thing (whatever that was) is to be savored. It expresses an almost universal truth, and says everything about Phillips’s infatuation with whim, chance, and the vicissitudes of choice." Lovely review. Also, gosh, the second edition looks exciting.

"Work energises work, and I have set about filling some of those remaining frames for Version II which, in anticipation, hold blank grey sheets. Half a dozen have already appeared with more to follow as the exhibition heads to its closing in January 2014. One such revised page features Peckham mud combined with that gathered from a nearby river in Massachusetts." What a wonderful way to hang it.

"Here are ‘the obsolete industrial plants; the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies … the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital’ and so on. Here is the self-consciously world-historical Lowry, showing us Britain mired in its past, and perhaps the future of China. But here and there is the old local Lowry, whose people cannot see beyond the foreground terraces to the dystopian prospect, and so seem to manage, to cope, even to enjoy themselves, on their own tight patch. People stop to chat or just to stand about; kids play; dogs and babies get taken for walks; women wear bright vermilion, the happy colour of the summer of 2013, and apparently of 1950 too. It’s hard to say this without sounding as folksy as Brian and Michael, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is, but right now what I most admire and enjoy about Lowry is the interest he shows, without any apparent agenda, in what people do. I have no idea why that should be so moving." Wonderful article from this fortnight's LRB about the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain.

"Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled." There is so, so much in this interview, that quoting it feels somewhat futile. It's a really lovely thing piece, that goes far beyond cyberpunk, and delves deep into Gibson's writing and history. There are at least five meaty quotes I wanted to yank; it's worth reading and rereading.

"Distributed as a stripped down, customised GNU/Linux Operating System, the gallery merely needs to copy a single file onto a USB stick, plug it into a computer on site and boot it on the day of the opening. Remote Install then analyses its network context and the amount of space given to it – the free space on the USB stick. It then logs into the artist’s server and creates a file of random binary data to exactly fill this space and proceeds to download it over the course of the entire exhibition. An algorithm ensures the last byte is downloaded on the last second of the exhibition." Gosh. Still: that feels about as thorough as digital-art should be.