"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." Both the letters described, and Robin's point, are beautiful.

"Skateboarding, metal work, solitude, machining, precision, and practicality. That's where Roy began." Lovely interview with a chap who makes custom jeans, on his own, simply because he decided one day he wanted to – and then he got good at it. The photographs of his workshop at the end are lovely.

This is beyond brilliant. Not because it's More Hard Fun From The Maker Of QWOP, but because it's actually easier than QWOP, and it tickles exactly the same part of my brain that bouldering itself tickled, and it makes brilliant use of finger-gymnastics and the keyboard, and it's marvellous, really. I just want to go home and play it all night.

"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point – that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.

"The puzzles [in Limbo] aren't brain-busters, and even though you die a lot, it always puts you right back where you started. It's just so capricious. It never bothers to set limits or rules for the world you're in. Its sole concern seems to be killing you for no apparent reason. Instead of asking you to apply what you learned from your previous deaths, the game keeps changing the rules so it can kill you again. It's as though it's making things up as it goes, like a rambling first draft that could use a good revision."

"I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people recently about how they bookmark stuff. It seems to be on a lot of peoples’ minds as more and more of our reading moves onto screens. So I thought I’d share a few things, and ask for some feedback." James on bookmarking and annotation – something I'm a big fan of.

"For the past 20 years I’ve had this urge to make a series of games that never were – mainly to suggest lost archives now discovered; to create an emotional resonance akin to that experienced by, say, new-found Beatles demo tapes – but also the idea of recreating contemporary games and themes in an old style to suggest an alternative past and present." Lovely writing, smart ideas, nice little game, but the clarity of thought is the real stand-out here. Another example of why I love Denki so much.

"…The teachers, by applying the rules and practices of arithmetic to play, prepare their pupils for the tasks of marshalling and leading armies and organizing military expeditions, managing a household too, and altogether form them into persons more useful to themselves and to others, and a great deal wider awake.” Well done, Plato.

"Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths?" Yes, they should.

“I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.” And now, I love Walter Murch even more.

Depicted as a grid by artist Susan Wolf; to circumvent the large number of languages spoken in Joburg, taxi drivers have official hand signals to take you from A to B. This PDF shows all of them. (via Bobulate)

"“Notput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting."

"I had been studying this style of letters on similar buildings in Washington, D.C., and something about them always felt a little dull. But in the Claremount letters I found life in the charming way the awkward proportions and loose spacing came together. So I set about designing a Claremount typeface." Nice article on designing a typeface, and, I must admit, it's rather good-looking (especially for something named after me).

"…it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together." Short interview with Tom Chatfield in the Observer.

"Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown, a new Young Foundation book published on Tuesday 30 June argues that Britain's schools need to prioritise grit and self-discipline. Drawing on evidence from around the world it shows that these contribute as much to success at work and in life as IQ and academic qualifications."

"What’s happening here is a very neat trick. While Link can move a single pixel at a time, in any direction, the longer he continously moves in any direction the more he gravitates toward aligning himself with the underlying grid of the screen." Lovely little analysis of the different ways the original Legend of Zelda, and the subsequent Link to the Past, subtly correct the player's input to ensure they never feel cheated by pixel-perfect hit detection.

"Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade, so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation, is mine." Steven Poole's list is good, though two entries for the MGS series is one too many, IMHO. I'd swap one of them for something Harmonix-flavoured.

"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?" Games released twelve months ago this week, by Andre Torrez. He's right, you know – games don't have to be about nowness all the time.

"It’s pretty difficult to talk about what you’ve got wrong. When you’ve been working on something like School of Everything very intensely for two years you can’t really blame the mistakes on anybody else. But the truth is that we need to rethink because we haven’t managed to make the idea financially sustainable yet." And so they're doing out loud. It's a big move; I hope it works out OK for them, because they're definitely Good People.

"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."

"On the contrary, the quick wins of some big ticket consulting sessions sell our discipline short by pretending that design is some magical elixir that can be poured into a situation and zammo everything is fixed up. Like accounting, medicine, and just about every other profession, design is a practice which is persistently useful at regular intervals. If anything, during this transitional period where business and government are slowly coming to terms with the potential yield of having design as an integral part of the conversation it behooves us to collectively seek longer engagements, not shorter." Some excellent stuff from Bryan Boyer.

"As a real-life pro skater, you might spend three hours out of every day practicing. Three hours trying new tricks, screwing up and the ground abruptly slipping out from under you. Imagine living your life in that fog of frustration, embarrassment, adrenaline and pride. Now let's imagine you got really sick, swallowed, like, nine Paracetamols and passed out in bed. THPS2 is what you'd dream." Quinns goes misty-eyed over THPS2, and he is right to do so. It was wonderful.

"It’s pretty common to want SQL queries against a particular table to always be sorted the same way, and is one of the reasons why I added the ordered scope to the utility scopes gem… Well now you can specify default ordering, and other scopes, in edge rails directly in your ActiveRecord model." Hurrah!

"With the recent addition of dynamic scopes, however, you now have a way to both quickly specify query logic and chain further conditions. The naming works in the same manner as dynamic finders and the chaining works in the same fashion as conventional named scopes." Ooh. New in Rails 2.3, and passed me by a little.

Really rather good series of tutorials on the FCE4 basics.

"So here's my theory: WoW doesn't resemble a film. It resembles, rather, a medieval cathedral. And a magnificent one: it is the Chartres of the video-game world. Like a cathedral, it is a supreme work of art that is, on a brick-by-brick basis, the creation of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen, many of whom will be long gone by the time it comes to completion; indeed, since WoW is in a state of permanent expansion, it may not ever be "complete". All those programmers are the modern-day equivalent of stonemasons, foundation-diggers and structural engineers."

"This December, the Eisner-winning artists behind such acclaimed projects as "Sugar Shock," "Umbrella Academy," and "BPRD: 1947" will present "Daytripper," their first original title from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint… The comic, which jumps around moments in the life of Brazilian aspiring novelist and newspaper obituary writer Brás de Oliva Domingos, will follow the main character as he explores and evaluates his own existence and attempts to discover the answer behind the mystery of the meaning of life itself." Oh. This sounds good!