This seemed pretty sane to me; filed away for reference.

"A billion drinks per day of Coca-Cola is an amazing thought, but such uniformity is a symbol of inertia, not dynamism. For the most part world trade still travels at the speed of shipping containers, not data packets." I chatted to Matt at dConstruct about this, and I'm really glad he's written it up: so much good examples and thought, about recognising the difference between pace and impact, of attention versus raw numbers.

"Well, it’s hard to make female characters. First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that." Matthew Burns answers the hard questions.

"The best signpost to the future I know is to follow whatever happens after the word "computational."" Kevin Kelly being smart/interesting/as usual.

MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for WordPress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5… but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.

Blimey, ReBirth, entirely ported to iPhone and on the App Store. Looks finickity, but it was loads of fun, and for $7… I might end up with that.

"Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;<br />
<br />
I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010."

Engine Yard have a new blog about Rails, consisting of screencasts and tutorials, and it looks good. One to subscribe to.

"The pattern we see here is to keep crises small and frequent, as Ed Catmull of Pixar says in an excellent recent talk. When describing the difficulty Pixar's artists had with reviews ("it's not ready for you to look at"), he realized that the only way to break through resistance to reviews was to increase the frequency until no one could reasonably expect to be finished in time for theirs. The point was to gauge work in motion, not work at rest." I liked this quotation, but as usual, the rest of Mike's post is great.

"Goblin Slayer is a quick, easy to play boardgame of heroic adventure and underground combat for two players." Tabletop dungeon-crawl boardgame with nice little board structure and not bad artwork.

"Still, if I told myself as a child that I’d have a pocket computer powerful enough that it could play games that knocked the Spectrum into the dirt, along with music at the same time, and then look up almost anything from an encyclopedia, almost anywhere in the world, and in only a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d have believed it." Strong truth; I marvel at some of the technology I own, and wonder how I could ever have explained it to my eight-year-old self. Not explained the possibility; explained that it was within reach.

"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.

"In this piece, each of the departments involved in making a videogame are examined and accused of one particular vice. In making these assessments, the assumption behind each is that the purpose of the videogames industry is to make games that players want to play, and not to make the games that developers want to play." It is good, and I'm looking forward to the second part.

"…as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way." 2K Marin's JP LeBreton with a smart, insightful take on the road ahead for games design, and the many positive steps being taken along it (and: a decent commentary on the "shooting people" issue).

"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." This really feels very familiar: it's the most under-appreciated art in the stack of software development, and the one that takes the brunt of the crap.

"Best of all, for impatient gamers the developer plans to conceal load screens with a mini-game where players can connect a USB keyboard and write an undergraduate thesis on the illustrations of Gustave Dore." Seriously, this already sounds much better than the Redwood Shores version…

Farbs quit 2K Australia. This is his resignation note. It's fun, and not in any way mean.

'London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."' Oh god.

"Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots."

"[within the games industry]… the creativity-medium-invention and attitude-practice-deconstruction models often hold no water. Rather, there is only importance placed upon the “talent-meiter-immitation” model that is still in practice in the industry today." An interesting analysis of the nature of education (as it relates to the games industry) and models of learning. I have often lamented the depressing state of how career progression in the industry works, and this article helps quantifies it.

A thoughful post (as ever) from the L4D team detailing some of the balancing and planning that's gone into the Survival Mode experience. Looking forward to firing this up next week…

"The genre of the palindrome, playful and ludic as it is, nonetheless has a strong implication of violence. In the work of its foremost practitioners, Velemir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as some of their postmodern successors, the palindrome is closely linked to death, cannibalism, beheading, and murder."

Tom Francis posits an alternate ending to Bioshock, that makes sense of the Vita-Chambers switcheroo, gives the player the agency they've craved, fixes some of the issues with the original ending, and asks you kindly to DROP THE GODDAMN RADIO.

Ooh, this looks like a very interesting write-up of a thoughtful SXSW session. Marked as something I need to follow up on.

"You don’t need to be able to lose for a game to be enjoyable or challenging. You just need to be able to fail." Some good notes on the purpose of failure in games, and how to sensibly work failure as a mechanic into games without irritating players.

The Klein Four are "the premiere a capella group of the world of higher mathematics". Judging from this video: yes, so they are.