• "We always knew Magic: the Gathering was a complex game. But now it's proven: you could assemble a computer out of Magic cards." Oh lordy. Via Aanand, this proof that you can make a Turing Machine out of Magic The Gathering.
  • "Perhaps the best Wii idea of all, and one too little copied in other consumer electronics, was that the device itself lit up when something important had happened to it. If a friend sent you a message or if a game needed an update, the system would start emitting a blue glow from its disc drive. You didn't have to turn the Wii on to know something was ready for your attention; the device's light pattern showed it. Most inert consumer electronics do nothing like this, which is a pity. What a disappointing failure that we don't have more electronics that make themselves useful even while they are more or less turned off." Steven Totilo's farewell to the Wii is full of some lovely thought and analysis – as well as great game write-ups – but this in particular bears repeating. (It drove me mad, but, still).
  • "A recently-surfaced 1980s brochure reveals that Nintendo nearly released a knitting add-on for the NES. Posted on the Facebook page of former Nintendo employee Howard Phillips, the brochure shows off the Nintendo Knitting Machine, a device that would have connected to the NES and allowed players to create and print their own designs." This would have been brilliant; I'm trying to imagine games with knit-out (as opposed to print-out) elements now.
  • "The Bullet gem is designed to help you increase your application’s performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use counter cache."
  • "In the golden age of BASIC, it was easy for anyone to write a program. Now we offer you this exact same capability, but this time with the advanced features of the Nintendo DSi™ system… Many programs are included to ensure that you can fully enjoy using BASIC. The included programs were also written in BASIC, so you can add new features to them in order to enhance your games. You can also take the programs and data you create and convert them to QR codes that can be shared with friends who also have Petit Computer on their Nintendo DSi systems. (Programs included: 12 feature samples,5games, a character picture tool,a background screen creation tool,a graphics tool,and a picture-drawing tool.)" Interesting – especially the music-creation stuff, as Create Digital Music proved.
  • "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.
  • "…now we know the [Nintendo 3DS'] 3D will have little to do with tracking technology, but Looksley's Line Up (as Attakoreda has now been released as in the U.S.) still might've made a nice showcase title for the new tech." Attakoreda – that funny 3D hidden word game of a few months back – is getting a western DSI release. Excellent.
  • "Red Dead Redemption is fully aware that our view of the Old West is more social construction than historical knowledge. I happen to think its main character is also intended to be a construct, a man who is a fiction in the world of the game. That is, the John Marston we play is the man as imagined by his son, Jack." That's an interesting take, although this article feels a little crit-heavy to me; I'm not convinced that the writing is as sophisticated as this criticism makes out.
  • "Egmont Press and Penguin Publishing will launch a range of children's books onto the Nintendo DS in a licensing deal with entertainment software company Electronic Arts (EA). It is the first time that children's books have been developed specifically for the Nintendo DS platform in the UK." Ooh, that's kind of awesome.
  • "Gemcutter is the next generation of gem hosting for the Ruby community. Instantly publish your gems and install them. Use the API to interact and find out more information about available gems. Become a contributor and enhance the site with your own changes." Apparently this is the next big thing, post-github not serving gems. Let's chase this trend for a bit.
  • "…it’s been a week and we’ve decided to not bring back the gem builder. It was a fun experiment but Jeweler and Gemcutter combined make it ridiculously simple to publish a gem. The gem builder use case (fork a project, make a change, publish a gem, install it) is now easier than ever using these tools." Which is all very nice, but a bit of a PITA for anyone who'd been depending on this. Still: gems.github.com will serve for another year.
  • "In Nokogiri  's are converted to whitespace, but they are not a normal space and aren't removed with the standard String#strip and friends." Needless to say, this is somewhat annoying. Thanks for fixing it, internet!
  • Now that Net Yaroze has closed its doors, Edge catch up with some former Yaroze developers; they have some interesting things to say on the state of games education in particular.
  • "[Our heroine's] name is Marta Louise Velasquez, and she’s quite possibly the most unpleasant female lead character in the history of gaming. She’s also what makes TD2192 worth remembering." Indeed, I have many. She did not lead a happy life, I'll give Richard that.
  • "Critical thinking is the key to success!" Professor Layton is on Twitter. Officially. This is good.
  • why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment – even discussion – we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience." Dan Taylor explains Shownar from the BBC's perspective
  • "Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months. We’ll learn a lot having it in the public eye, and I hope to see it as a key part of discovery and conversation scattered across BBC Online one day." Matt talks about Shownar on Pulse Laser.
  • "Shownar tracks the online buzz around BBC shows. It's an experimental prototype and we want your feedback." What I've been working on in the first three months at Schulze & Webb, and is now live. Exciting!