Cracking article on John Chowning, who invented FM synthesis whilst at Stanford, and the long road to it becoming a commercial and creative prospect. Interesting on the relationship of IP to universities, but also fascinating on Chowning himself – a composer and musician, not a mathematician, who developed one of the hardest-to-understand forms of synthesis simply as a way to push the palette of timbres he could compose with. Brilliant.

Alan Adler sounds like a smart and thoughtful chap. Really nice story of just sticking at making things, and understanding what you're doing. (And: not just for coffee fans; there's a LOT about flying rings in this).

"I'm a mechanical jokemaker". Completely charming; I love the typewriter-robot. Also, excellent footage of a sketchbook.

"The [Manufactured Normalcy] Field is Rao’s attempt to explain the process of technical adoption. Rao argues that when they’re presented with new technological experiences people work hard to maintain a “familiar sense of a static, continuous present”. In fact, he claims that we change our mental models and behaviors the minimum amount necessary to work productively with the results of any change." Cracking post from Greg, which pretty much resists blockquoting, so go and read it all.

"Dreams of Your Life is not likely to change your life; but that it has the remotest chance of doing so, despite its simplicity of structure and odd subject, makes it an important work." High praise – but also thoughtful writing – from Greg Costikyan about Dreams of Your Life.

"…the definition of a bot seems quite arbitrary, where do we call an application or a string of actions or scripts a 'bot', and where or when do we call it something else? Is the only reason for calling a scripted set of actions a bot, the fact that the script takes the role (and maybe the place) of a human being as a form of artificial intelligence, like they do for instance on wikipedia, in chatrooms, twitter or spamming us through mail (do they really set out to maximize their chances of success? – which is what often AI delineates)?
And what about the new generations of Twitter web scutter that does not seem to be intelligible in any human-sense kind of way, but do follow scripts and try to maximize something (followers, tweets)?" Bookmarked if only for use of the phrase "web scutter".

"I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine." Lovely post from Stamen about the early stages of invention for this project.

Nice post about building your own maptiles in Tilemill. Something to return to when I have a location-specific maps problem to solve, perhaps.

Really interesting post about the architecture at Tumblr, which has changed a lot over the past few years, and is a fascinating selection of tools stacked together. Especially good on the reasoning behind tool selection.

"Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas." More hopeful monsters.

"I would separate out the true independent developer vs. the hobbyist," says Fils-Aime. "We are absolutely reaching out to the independent developer. Where we've drawn the line is we are not looking to do business today with the garage developer. In our view, that’s not a business we want to pursue." Sustainable, maybe, but sad at the same time.

"I see Valve Software today holding the same position in the overall media landscape that Marvel Comics occupied in the early-mid 1960s. In both cases, we have two experienced studios, neither the mainstream-recognized giants of their fields, who made an unusual decision: they chose to spend the creative capital gained from prior commercial success to quietly revolutionize their respective medium's dominant genres, rather than take the safer path of grinding out more derivative sameness."

Ben Zeigler's notes on Bunge's Jaime Griesemer's talk at GDC, all about balancing. Sample quotation: "It can be tricky to balance, because designers can misinterpret competence (getting good at a weapon) with the weapon being balanced. We CANNOT use our intuition at this stage because it will lie to us. Changes will have to be done in larger batches, and we need to avoid bias effects." Really, the whole thing is jampacked with interesting stuff (not all of which I agree with, but most of it is very good indeed).

"It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain." And now you know how.

"The game is very impressive, and gives some great experiences. For example, a friend at work solves most problems with a jetpack and a lasso, instead of a grappling gun. In his heart he's a cowboy, and in mine I'm Batman." A comment on Brandon's year-end post about the uncanny valley of Scribblenauts; this line really, really stood out for me.

"Sides chosen as Demo-Soldier tension mounts". I love Valve. I love them so very much. I reckon TF2 is the unsung hero of their games, frankly – and their continued dedication to it is just marvellous.

"But 2009 was about a lot more than that handful that we knew would top their respective Metacritic charts (and retail sales lists) six to nine months before their release date, and… this list for Boing Boing will instead focus on the games that left their own strong mark on the year, just, sadly, a mark that in most cases went mostly overlooked." Brandon kicks off his end-of-year list. It is good!