"I view ValhallaPlate as being closely related to an SM57. Or a hammer. No need to be delicate with the tool. No need to think about things too much. It just works." I liked this line on toolmaking, especially when it comes to music technology.

Much more Illustrator-like than Sketch is, in many ways, and affordable. Certainly leaps ahead of Inkscape in not being rubbish. Going to use this for lasercutting/frontpanel work, I think.

Really good article on the realities of installing iBeacons, and, secondarily, the way you develop your own internal processes just to solve workflow. I liked the trolly; I felt for the BKM very much as I read this.

Fascinating article capturing how various translators worked around their languages to translate not only the absence of gendered language _suggested_ in Ancillary Justice, but also the author's deliberate use of the feminine as a generic case. (Also, how to translate things for different cultures – what they expect and what they intimate).

Yes, it's a bit heavily focused on copying/emulation, but there's some useful stuff in here and some interesting starting points.

Thoughtbot's engine for Rails admin UIs, sans-DSLs. Filed away for reference.

Corrie Corfield on Peter Donaldson. Lovely.

[this is good] and I will remember more of it in future.

Wonderful, dense, three-part study of one of GTA V's renderer. I like Adrian's posts because he focuses on the art of the technology, as well as the technology of the art; a reminder that game art isn't just plonking OBJ files into a world, but relies on a whole host of developers, maths, and drawcalls.

Interesting; the wrapper Github used for Atom, as a platform. Makes building desktop applications for web-folk like me a notch easier, though as ever, I find the Javascript ecosystem baffling.

Wonderful article from an architect who worked on "The Witness" about the role of architecture practice in game design, and all the rough edges architects see within game worlds. Good on spatial design principles, too.

"Every gallery project needs an Andy" – and other insights from Tim Hunkin on installation design, following his work on 'The Secret Life of the Home' at the Science Museum. All rings very true for me, and glad to see it's not just me that finds this sort of stuff challenging. Also: very interesting on museum culture.

Lovely interview between Jeff Bridges and Roger Deakins – on film, and how they get made, and feel. Lots of deep knowledge and affection in this; I really enjoyed it.

Gibson on retro revivals, reproducing vintage gear, and Japanese fashion brands. Lots on technical clothing overlapping with the street. Lots of interesting detail, too.

Rather wonderful interview with J G Ballard in 1984, in the Paris Review; effusive, head-screwed on, but god, his working process is hardly something you can emulate: such absolute control and certainty!

"I don't usually do in-depth analyses of my bots, especially one that's probably not gonna break ten followers, but my most recent bot is very personal to me, and the making of it turned out to be much stranger than I expected. It's The Bot of Mormon, "the most correct bot", a text-generating process with a very niche audience but the niche audience includes me, so I'm happy." Great, detailed post from Leonard on making programattic jokes: his explanation of the ongoing struggle to make the bot entertaining is good, and the solution he comes to smart.

"A wood and brass sound synthesizer built by Max Kohl after the design by Hemholtz. 39½ x 29 inch mahogany base with turned feet, fitted with 11 small wooden platforms, each marked with a number and the words "aus" [from] and "ein" [to], 10 of the platforms fitted with tuning forks and accompanying brass Helmholtz resonators, the tallest measuring 18½ high, each pair ranging in size according to their graduating frequencies, 11th platform fitted with 1 large horizontal master tuning fork." Oh my.

"When I was a child in school, the fact that the laws of nature seemed to be permanent and immutable, compared to the laws of the state, made science most attractive to me. And I recall as a kid in school, a physics experiment—and my also mischievous pleasure that even these overwhelming, secular authorities couldn’t change the direction of a beam of electrons." And it goes from there. Ursula Franklin sounds quite remarkable.

"…drawing, even at a representational level, is the construction of ideas. Therefore the conscious manipulation of ideas through the act of drawing becomes highly fruitful for a designer." More from Matt on drawing, and particular approaches aimed at unlocking drawing-as-thinking. Excellent as ever. I continue to vaguely try drawing in all workshops and for myself, and am still amazed by the number of people who, in design workshops, illustrate what they mean with sentences. For reference: I am a truly appalling draughtsman who was the despair of many an art teacher.

Both of these are great, and express some of what I've been trying to say in recent talks far better than I've expressed myself.

Rather good interview with MJH; covers lots of bases, carried out just before Light was published.

"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.

"It feels like a blip to be in this world full of squares of glowing glass, and it doesn't seem plausible that we'll have that forever." Yes, that.

"So what happened when you removed collision detection?" "Players started looking for other ways to get more feedback. Helping each other yielded the most feedback so they began to do that instead. It was fascinating." A lovely interview – and great piece of writing fro Simon – with Jenova Chen. The parts on how players regress is particularly interesting, as is Chen's ambition to be _different_ rather than just 'artistic'. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote about collision detection, hence quoting it.

"Fountain is a plain text markup language for screenwriting." More plaintext formats for writing in. This is good.

"When I'm evaluating entrepreneurs and their ideas, I look for "innovation bipolarity," a version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Entrepreneurs should be able to argue passionately that their idea will change the world, and then, without skipping a beat, honestly assess the risks standing in the way of its success and describe what they are doing to mitigate them."

"I wanted to make the ship move, and I wanted to make it speak, and I wanted to speak back to it, with it, together. To make something." The poetry of creation is important. Also, @shipadrift is lovely, but you already knew that.

More useful vim stuff.

"In my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology, at the start of the chapter on Carpentry (my name for making things that do philosophy), I talk about the chasm between academic writing (writing to have written) and authorship (writing to have produced something worth reading). But there's another aspect to being an author, one that goes beyond writing at all: book-making. Creating the object that is a book, that will have a role in someone's life—in their hands or their purses, around their mail, in between their fingers. Now, in this age of lowest common denominator digital and POD editions, it's time to stop writing books and to start making them." I am not totally sure I buy all of Bogost's argument, but I like his points explaining the role of artefacts. However, POD is weirder than he gives it credit.

"[Was shooting The Artist very different to making a 'regular' movie?] No, it’s a regular picture. The only difference is, there is no boom mic. And the story is not being told by what comes out of your mouth. If you want to tell the story, the story being the narrative, not the plot—the plot’s fairly simple—but if you want to tell the narrative, then you have to be concise with your reaction, and let the reaction get into your body and your face in a way you don’t necessarily do when you have dialogue, because the dialogue takes care of that." James Cromwell interview by the AV Club. I enjoyed this line especially.

"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.

It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)

Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.

"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.

"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."

"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.

"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.

A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).