"There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had." John Steinbeck is wise, and a good father.

"Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts." Huge, two-part article (presumably from Saturday's Review) with a great deal of advice - some sensible, some common sense, some insightful, some entertaining - on writing. And: much of it applies to other creative disciplines, too.

"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice - and, frankly, what I knew already - but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.

"Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire."

"...these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator - taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list." This looks like it's going to be an excellent series from Matt Locke.

These feel about right. Or, at least, about right if you agree with Rams as both a designer and a provider of commandments. He's hard to argue with, for sure.

Fantastic, all of it.

Don turns to writing a self-help column. The style is pretty much spot on.

Very good - some good stuff around how the library works, but also lots of basics around how to optimise Javascript.

"Following up on these overviews of the book industry, I thought I'd share some lessons I learned from publishing Bit Literacy." Some useful advice.

"Don't take work only for the money. You get what you do, so work than makes you unhappy is not progressive." S&W in the Telegraph.

"I hate the term User Generated Content... I consider it a pejorative that reveals a lot about the person saying it. It makes members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash." Great article!

I assert a lot of these, too; I should probably follow through on more of them.

Flickr set of an easy-to-understand sabotage manual the CIA produced for Nicaragua. Interesting piece of history - and graphic design - if nothing else. MAKE FALSE RESERVATIONS!