I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.

"An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years. The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway." Wow. Via BLDGBLOG

Lovely interview with Danny Trejo about many of his roles. If you like movies, totally worth a read. He's really quite a guy.

Mecha-choreography, filmed in Armored Core 4 Answer. Pretty, and I'm not really one for Machinima, but there's something about the jet-trails that just works.

"Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years.  It is one of the most insidious and heinous practices that has ever overwhelmed the industry… I speak of course, of THE COLOR GRADING VIRUS THAT IS TEAL & ORANGE!!!" Oh dear. An entertaining follow up to that great Stu Maschwitz post on 'porange'.

"10 years ago, on this Friday in March of 2000, the Dot.Com bubble burst in the UK." [This is very good, Simon Wistow!]

"Institutions are platforms / Sketching in things". Chris' introduction from the #mbsp SXSW panel; really good stuff, and that was only the introduction! Would have loved to have seen the whole thing.

"Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade." Lovely, sharp, writing from Joel Johnson.

"People are pink/orange (a color I like to call porange) / Grass and summer trees are green / Water and skies are blue / Fire engines, stop signs, and blood are red" Lovely post about colour grading – how it affects a scene, how we remember colours. Also: porange!

"All true Londoners have a south London past. There they experienced their first flat, their first date, their first taste of city life, with nothing too exotic. They dallied in Clapham, flirted with Dulwich, tested their mortgage muscle on Stockwell. (I lived awhile in Upper Norwood.) South London is the kind of place, as was said of George Bush, that “reminds every woman of her first husband”." I enjoyed a lot of this article by Simon Jenkins, although he goes *way* too far when he mentions Cyprus and Yugoslavia…

Much as I respect their output, I do find Tale Of Tales attitude towards games is increasingly… asshole-ish, frankly. Their behaviour (reported) at Art History Of Games only makes them seem like trolls; I fear their ultimate end will be obscurity, more than anything else. Which is a shame, because there really is value in what they're doing. There's just no value in trolling anybody else.

Ooh, this is interesting: reviews of screenplays circulating around Hollywood; well-written, incisive thoughts on the writing process, and some great links (from time to time).

"Glitch is a massively-multiplayer game, playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web. It is currently in development and will launch late in 2010. Private alpha is beginning shortly and a public beta period will begin this summer." Exciting!

Daniel Terdiman interviews Stewart Butterfield and Cal on Glitch, which is what Tiny Speck are making. Good interview, and worth noting just how often they threw things out.

"Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?" Marvellous, marvellous article, citing that Weizman piece I always end up citing, and looking how John McClane traverses the Nakatomi Plaza tower not through its corridors and elevators, but by literally infesting it.

"As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real – so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible – ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time." Beautiful.

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature – really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

"Thunderbirds is Rescue Fiction. All kids respond to rescue scenarios. Rescue Fiction is emotionally maturing – it removes the wish for magic, religion or flying people to zoom in to save the day; it confirms that it is a far more glorious and dazzling thing to invent ways to rescue ourselves."

"Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing." Amazing.

"The camera itself will trap Harry, leaving him all the more vulnerable because he is alone." But of course. A wonderful opening to a wonderful, wonderful film; still, perhaps, my favourite film, and one so rooted in editing and film-making. The camera, constantly trapping Caul, boxing him in, is worth paying attention to, and this short description of the opening captures its predatory nature.

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate." And so on.

"You've already received more letters from me than any living relative of mine has received to date. Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn't as painful as I portray it. Believe in yourself. Think about the future once a day and keep doing what you're doing. Because I'm impressed. My regards to the family. Don't let a day pass without a kind thought about them." For many years, Alison Fields was penpals with John Hughes. This is a lovely story.

Initial trailer for Tron Legacy (previously, the horrendous TR2N); somewhat excited just to see the lightcycles back in action, and very beautiful to see a trailer with so little overblown music in it. Still, what's the potential for this to go horribly wrong?

"Is this interview just going to be you hawking your wares for the next 20 minutes?" No, it's going to be better than that. A frank – and hilarious – interview with Mark Rein from Ellie Gibson. He really is like this, you know.

"During the Develop conference earlier this week, Edge Online editor Alex Wiltshire chaired a panel discussion on the close relationship between architecture and videogames, and here we have a recording of the full session for you to download." I still have to write it up, but it was really, really good. Worth a listen.