Oh, that's rather nice: file under another way of making Madeleines. I particularly like the way it illustrates the sentence being built up – that always counters disappointment nicely.

"Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year." Not sure I'll even get anything in for Week 1, but worth bearing in mind.

"A bit like Doctor Who’s different incarnations, while still the same company, the spaces we’ve worked in have created very different feeling BERGs.

And, a bit like Doctor Who, I guess you have one incarnation that you always think is the best, or ‘yours’." All of this.

"Games of every hue are mental anchors – lumps of code that occurred at regular intervals in your life that you can hang your memories around. The reason retro gaming has such an appeal is because it provides a direct and unchanging channel to your past self – someone probably very different to the person who struts around with your body hanging off him today. For many (and overall, of course, for me) the skies weren’t only bluer, the grass wasn’t only greener and the world wasn’t only simpler in games of yesterday – so too our memories of our lives while we played them." Gosh, coverdiscs. So many memories.

"But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners." Lots of great stuff in this Stross Keynote.

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"Shepard gets in his warm space suit and Mako vehicle and takes on the blizzard. I go outside and walk to work in the rain. That comparatively insignificant section of the game stands out more clearly than any other, which doesn't mean anything to anyone else other than me. I never loved Mass Effect, but I may remember that for the rest of my life." Duncan Fyfe on memories. He speaks truth.