"I am anxious for you and the boy's future — make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games — they encourage it at some schools — I know you will keep him out in the open air — try and make him believe in a God, it is comforting. Oh my dear my dear what dreams I have had of his future and yet oh my girl I know you will face it stoically..." Whatever his flaws, this is a remarkable piece of writing; Scott's final letters to his wife, as his Anatarctic expedition reached its close. Very sad.

"To train the astronauts, he set up a makeshift facility seven miles away from Lusaka, where the trainees, dressed in drab overalls with British army helmets, would then take turns to climb into a 44 gallon oil drum which would be rolled down a hill bouncing over rough ground; this, according to Nkoloso, would train the men in the feeling of weightlessness in both space travel and re-entry." Wow.

"Use [ffffl*ckr] to find the photography you like using the simple idea that people whose work you like, probably like stuff you'll like. You start with a set of pictures - if you authenticate, it'll use 20 of your last 100 favorites - otherwise it'll start with somebody's favorites. Click any picture to load more. Don't like what that person likes? Scroll back and click a different picture you like. It's that simple."

"I was, instead, going to see what it would take to drive around the world in a single sitting. It would have to be a single sitting because, without unlocking the game, I could not easily return to where I had driven to, or save my location. I was going to drive without the safety-net of a saved game, or even a checkpoint." Jim takes a tour of a properly big open-world; Fuel's not a game I'm very interested in for its mechanics, but the world always seemed interesting, and it's nice to have that confirmed.

"As I tried to unravel Braid’s interstitial text I realized that solving the puzzles and understanding the text required very similar approaches. Their concealed machinations and thematic ambiguities are teased out using the same mental processes, and are part of the same overarching search for meaning. In a way, I was “reading” everything in the game. It’s not the unification of narrative and gameplay that we’ve come to expect, but it’s a refreshing and effective one." Dan Bruno has an interesting perspective on Braid; not sure I agree with it entirely, but the feelings he describes are certainly familiar.

"Zapm is a science fiction roguelike game by Cyrus Dolph. It's my humble attempt to create "the sci-fi Nethack". It is very much a work in progress."

"That's how I got here. How long will it be before someone builds a raft and sets sail in space? Bill Gates has over fifty billion dollars. What if Richard Garriott had fifty billion dollars? If he wanted to, would that be enough money to build a rocket to get him into space, and a self-sustaining environment in which he could live? Would he want to sail away and never come back? ... No matter what happened in our future, [whoever built that raft] would forever be the first. A thousand years from now, people would remember his name." Bill Harris is awesome.

"A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again... In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer