"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.

"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.

"What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today… Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product."

Italians getting into rental, rather than ownership. Products become services.

"The unforgiving streets of public television are no place for weakness: either you fight, or you die. Join the courageous young brawler Large Avian as he embarks on a rampage of revenge against the animatronic gang that killed his family and defiled his nest. Watch as our hero trashes Oswald the Grump, spells out certain doom for the Cracker Beast, and puts their calculating, blood-sucking leader down for the count. New episode every Sunday!" Want this so badly.

Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.

"Some time ago, Simon Schama wrote an article for the Guardian on the perfect bolognese sauce. Like any other enthusiastic cook, I've been finely honing my sauce for years and finally had it nailed down to what I considered to be Very Good. However, I saw the article as an opportunity to challenge myself, rip it up and start again and above all, get one over Schama. So here's my recipe:" Epicly epic bolognese recipe. Should try this some time.

A rough guide to building your own ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter. Might come in handy.

"I missed this earlier in the year. In their issue 923, Domus magazine published this hidden illustration of ‘Miss Web 2.0’. Imagine planning it." I daren't. That's amazing.

Jolly good, that man; speaking sense and pointing out the hypocrisy of the media talking this all up. And: how is this different to the hoo-haa over expenses in any other year? No, I don't know, either.

"Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun." The Penguin thing is a bit over-done, but there's a care and attention to detail here that really sets them apart.

"…there’s no real hope for the Survivors. Each trip through a campaign is different, but it begins with them knee-deep in the undead, and ends with them escaping to an uncertain future. We never see the Survivors truly safe. Between chapters, they rest in Safe Rooms, but they can’t hide there forever. Most unsettlingly, there are signs that the Survivors themselves remember doing all this before." Francis, incidentally, hates Beckett.

"Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome." Jack gets interviewed by Jennifer over on the Kicker blog. And: "Always have nice pens".

Jason Rohrer has a new puzzle game out, designed primarily for iPhone but also available for OSX/Windows/Linux as ever. The UI is very thoughtful, for something finger-driven; the game mechanic is complex, but I think I'll get a handl eon it soon. I hope.

"As I watched the gunfire on screen, I should have been wondering what it was like to actually be in the shoes of those soldiers. But as I sat staring, I instead wondered whether the Marines had bothered to observe that building for civilian inhabitants before demolishing it. I wondered how any Marine that got shot in Iraq could endorse a game based on Fallujah where you can be hit by a hail of bullets and walk away. By the end, I was left wondering what Konami was thinking." A strong article from Nick Breckon on the problems already showing with Six Days In Fallujah. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, and not at all knee-jerk. I, too, am already concerned.

Lovely: Creature Comforts meets "Hey There Little Fella". Totally charming.

Ocean Quigley has a blog, and whilst all the stuff on Spore and Sim City 4 is super-nice, what I really like are his paintings and sketches, which are just lovely.

"Daily deep-dive analysis of a specimen from the modern world's most exciting communication medium for penis humor."

"…hard-core players are comfortable mentally manipulating Peggle's complex physics. They can build models about where the ball is going to go, even after the seventh or eight collision. A frustrated casual gamer looks at Peggle and sees chaos; a hard-core one sees causality." Oh – now that _is_ an interesting way to look at things.

This is great: a 25-minute video from Blurst looking at a short prototype they built. During the retrospective, other members of the team question the designers/developers about their intentions, their goals, and examine ways to make the prototype into a better game. There's some good questioning, some nice explanation, and it's a great insight into a process built around rapid prototyping and execution on top of Unity. Interesting to see how another company work on rapid prototypes and then try to "find the fun". Also: making the prototype public is another great piece of explanatory work.

Lovely interview with Dylan Cuthbert, of Pixeljunk, about some of the design processes behind the Pixeljunk games.

"A frequent question people ask us is “how do I transfer my database between my local workstation and my Heroku app?”" The answer is: using taps. Database push/pull, to/from Heroku, and to/from different database vendors. Very, very clever.

Jolly good, this, with lots of sensible points and a real clarity of thought for what otherwise could just be Powerpoint-by-numbers.

Cordell Barker's 1988 cartoon. I didn't even think this might be on Youtube.

After yesterday's stop-motion, this is perhaps even more remarkable and strange. Seriously, it's jaw-droppingly clever; daren't think how long it took.

"For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need." Late to link to this, but as everyone else who has done already would point out: it's great.

"The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere. Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way." Peter Molyneux becomes a bit more self-aware, possibly a little too late.

How did I miss this when Lee first wrote it? This is all-encompassing, wonderful stuff about visualisation, exercise, comics, futurism, privacy, and the whole shebang. Top notch stuff, worth a read.

"Clatter is a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on to a soft contact lens. Clatter differs from other, commercial lens services by being open source and "riding" other services to create free cross-platform access." From Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless.

"The question of responsibility and accountability gets sticky here – especially if we consider that technologies are too often viewed as neutral tools or isolated artefacts. If we draw out these flows, these networks, these interconnections, we find ourselves faced with the possibility of being connected to people/objects/places/activites/ideas that we may never see. And with intimacy always comes risk."

"Commissioned by the advertising agency Nordpol+ Hamburg I designed the origami models and consulted the stopmotion as well as the computer animators of this world wide corporate movie that tells the story of the japanese sports brand ASICS. The movie won a Grand Prix at the Eurobest, gold at the New York festival, gold at the London International Awarts, silver at the Clio in Miami and two times bronze at ADC Germany." And it deserves all those awards; a beautiful piece of animation and paper-folding.

"…it turns out that a GBA and a cart isn’t any more use than a GBA on its own. It’s only when you build a machine out of a GBA and a cart and a me that you’ve got a real Rhythm Tengoku Machine. Bolt those three components together and you’ve built an entirely new organism, an extraordinary creature who can shoot ghosts, dance with monkeys, and climb stars like staircases."

"You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds." High concept, I'll give it that.

"Durham University's Dr Shamus Smith, who helped spearhead the project, told BBC News that that while bespoke 3D modelling software was available, modifying a video game was faster, more cost effective, and had better special effects." Quite true. Although: "gamers" tend to treat it as a game, wheras "non-gamers" treat it as a training exercise, and behave accordingly.

Microsoft on their new MSN Music service, weighed-down by DRM. I don't normally link to stuff about DRM, but frankly, every single response in this is comedy gold.

"The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan."

Beautiful.

"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.

You can now use Shoulda macros in RSpec as well as Test::Unit. Thanks, Thoughtbot! Might take a poke at this some time.

"I’m a web developer at heart, and a scripting language user by preference. Coding for the iPhone doesn’t feel as fluid in text handling or HTTP access as the environments I’m used to. Fortunately I’ve been able to find some fantastic open-source libraries and wrappers that make up the difference. Here are my favourites so far:" A useful – and interesting – set of links from Matt B.

"Oh words, words, words." Beautiful. Thanks, Simon.

"The Wii has captured the imagination of millions of people who didn't consider themselves gamers at all. Why are we so surprised? All this has happened before." And, no doubt, all of it will happen again. Some good insight and quotation from Mitch Krpata on a history of Nintendo's console marketing and sales strategies.

War reporting from a virtual world; Jim Rossignol documents the first skirmishes in the Offworld/RPS/Escapist conflict. Looking forward to more of this.

"It is from the era when people were all 'we will not know if acid is dangerous until we test it on THE FOXIEST GIRLS IN ENGLAND.'" Too right.

If you can see it, it exists. If you can't, it doesn't. Lovely, tough, fun.

"We were delighted to have George Oates, ex of Flickr who started and managed the Commons, come to visit us at the National Maritime Museum in November 2008. When she was here she curated some Commons content for us. This set is the first of this content." Some wonderful selections; the full archive must be remarkable.

"Perhaps more charities should project a less glamorous image, and remind us that they still have to do all the boring stuff that everyone does at work. And perhaps then we wouldn’t have such unreasonable expectations. Sponsor a filing cabinet, sir?" The thing I like most about this is being told exactly where your contribution goes; you get a real connection with a real thing. I'd rather buy charities a shelving unit than £25 of vague platitudes.

"Whiskey Media provides fully structured data APIs for the following: Giant Bomb (games) Comic Vine (comics) Anime Vice (anime/manga)". This is a really good page for both explaining what you can and can't do, and explaining what the damn thing is. Wonder how good the data is?

"Have you ever wanted to sink your hooks into a gaming database full of release dates, artwork, games, platforms, and other sorts of related data? I'm going to guess that, for the bulk of you, the answer's probably no. But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use." Giant Bomb really are doing some pretty interesting stuff, alongside their more traditional content.

"Customers seem to respond better to the Sims than all the adventure games ever made combined together. Then there are Bejeweled and Peggle and other game games. Who needs a stink’n story? I prefer making interactive stories." The writer of "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble", interviewed on RPS, drops an interesting one.

"The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one? I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life." Ben, on the details of The Paper. Good stuff in here.

"This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper." Which, right now, is what I need. For a former front-end-dev, I'm a bit behind the curve.

"So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads." Fascinating interview with a smart guy, who at one point in his life, did some bad (if not entirely unethical) work.

"I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on." There is loads in this interview that is awesome; it was hard to choose a quotation. Rigopulos is super-smart.

"On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Perfectly executed.

"The Bop It commands are called out in different tones. These tones differ from version to version as well. In Bop It Blast, distinct tones are employed by both male and female speakers." I did not know that.

"A couple of other examples of this kind of thing we like, are the bookish experimentations of B.S. Johnson, whose second novel Alberto Angelo contains both stream-of-conciousness marginalia, and cut-through pages enabling the reader to see ahead – possibly the most radical act I know in experimental books." Yes! And which I bang on about interminably. I love this stuff.

"I hit upon a card game mechanic that I thought would work. I explored it a bit and it wasn’t long before I realized that in order for the design to really sing, it needed to be a collectible card game with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cards. This sprawling design would create the sense that a large part of the story is happening outside the realm of the game currently being played, much like the feeling you have while reading the novel." Corvus' own entry for his roundtable is bloody marvellous.

Blimey – 1.68gb multisampled Yamaha C7, for most popular soft samplers, for no money.

"No consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo. Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets…" and, even if it's not exactly powerful and the business model still seems sketchy, this could be really, really interesting.