"However I am just as impressed but the extent in which Scarry’s work has in fact not dated very much at all. While the book covers an almost bafflingly broad range of occupations and includes sections on the extraction and transformation of raw materials, there is one notable omission: large-scale manufacturing. And without industry, from a Western perspective the book seems in fact almost presciently current. Some of the jobs the author describes have evolved, very few of them have all but disappeared (you can’t easily bump into a blacksmith, much less one who sells tractors); the texture of our cities has changed and those little shops have given way to larger chain stores; but by and large we still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie: we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth. It’s almost as if Scarry made a conscious effort to draw only the jobs that could not be outsourced overseas, and had thus future-proofed the book for his domestic audience." I read this when I was very small, and loved it; fond memories, and sharp analysis

"This is where I write about social & political stuff, mostly relating to sex. Yes, there's going to be a book. As an ex-sex worker, you can imagine what my bias is. Nevertheless, I am also a scientist, so will do my best to present the evidence base for each post." Brooke's new blog. This looks like it could be good.

"Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy." I know that the rhetoric works better as a speech than in writing; still I can't help but agree with this. It tugs at things important to me, and what a small village public library meant for my childhood.

Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.

"The history of roads is the history of ourselves: our desire for community and our fears about its fragility; our natural instinct to expand the possibilities of life set against our premonitions of death, destruction and loss; and our fierce arguments about what is valuable and beautiful about the world. But this history, like the road itself, is full of loose ends and detours, unfinished stories and stalled narratives."

"ASBOrometer is a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics... This app was created by Jeff Gilfelt and made possible by the data.gov.uk initiative, which is opening up UK government data for public reuse." What sensationalist rot; no number of pretty visualisations make this kind of fearmongering acceptable. It's nice that the data is open; it's a shame this is the best thing people can think to do with it. Whether you like it or not, this information is very, very loaded.

"...it's high time we began to understand games on their own terms, with all the potentials and dangers that entails: as arguably the most powerful models we have for connecting and motivating, and understanding those vast, disparate groups of people a digital age throws together." Short interview with Tom Chatfield in the Observer.

"4chan is, I contend, the most interesting angle we have on the evolution of human consciousness. It is a shamanic experience, a bardo of becoming, where the soul is detached from the body, set free to wander in the wilderness of banality until it encounters the epic lulz of meeting itself... and finding that it, itself, is the most disturbing thing on 4chan." o_O. Just worth linking to for the eyeball-expanding prose; there may be something in there, but I'm not sure.

"Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."

Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.

"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""

Wonderful, delightful, charming writing from Duncan Fyfe; this, and the eight chapters that follow it, are pretty essential, and they're nice and brief. Speculative fiction about games, culture, and the future. And fandom.

"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like." And then, 18 pages of wonderful gaming oral history; you'll be smelling the aircon and the chewing gum by the time you're through with this thread.

'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.

"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.

"He probably thinks he is doing a community service but he is blatantly breaking the law and has to be dealt with. I would call him an eccentric." Community service yes; blatantly breaking the law, yes; 'has to be dealt with', really not sure about that. It's not like he was causing harm. Sometimes, the world is a funny place. Oh: and definitely, definitely "eccentric".

"Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.

"Metro Rules of Conduct is a game about the awkward situation of commuting in my hometown, Stockholm. Look at mobile phones, MP3 players and breast for score, but whatever you do - avoid eye contact!" Wonderful; the art-style works really well, as does the head-bob.

"Economics has been defined as the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organization and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." Remarkable article; fascinating for its subject matter, when it was written, what it describes, and the patterns that hold up inside such a regimented economy. A must-read, really - can't believe it took me so long to get around to it.

"This shocking but real dialogue that features in this film gives a clear indication of how the UK today is demonising children." Powerful advertising, for a strong campaign.

"We MUST keep arguing for, and ensure, that all our young people are valued, challenged and that the highest expectation what they can do and where they can go is the minimum they experience when they are in the education system. We’re failing them if we don't and if that's the case then get somebody in who can do it." Yes.

"The conundrum is that no path, no vision of progress – technological, social, moral – will be plausible today if it does not include the complexity of costs, yet it will not be desirable if it does. That makes our society blind." Some good, if dense, Kevin Kelly.

"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.

"Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.

"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious - it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.

"When a sospeso is ordered, the customer pays for two coffees, but only receives one. That way, when a person who is homeless or otherwise down on their luck walks into the café, the person can ask if there are any coffees held in suspense, and can have one as a courtesy of the first customer." Wonderful.

"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging 1, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design." Anne Galloway's PhD thesis, now online.

"Wetherspoons is a model of market efficiency. Prices are low, economies of scale are passed on to consumers and people are offered real choice, on the assumption that they are intelligent enough to deal with it."

"...arguments of this exact form have been raised against nearly every distinctly modern art form." Barber's book sounds interesting, if flawed. Pliskin's criticism is, as ever, good. It's getting exhausting linking to him.

"A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time." Neil Gaiman's essay from SimCity 2000 (I believe).

"“It’s only a game” is a phrase that agrees with all of those who ever looked down their noses at the medium... who want to promote the kind of prejudice that will keep games from ever achieving widespread respect for everything they are."

"...no new water meters means, for practical purposes, no new houses -- ergo, no more growth. You can see that in graphical terms via Trulia." Trulia Hindsight being used to analyse and predict effects of peak oil based on previous evidence. Smart.

"...toilets are the mirrors of culture with their prominence for everyone’s life in the society. the design of toilets can be a powerful element in providing anyone’s happiness, a sense of wellbeing, or even a feeling of small everyday achievement."

"I believe there’s a much larger story about how our whole civilisation is based to some extent on our desire for booze - one that goes back even further than human civilisation itself." James on fine form at Interesting.

"The Man is not only keeping us down, he's got an annual 8.5-ton carbon footprint". An MIT class calculate the average carbon footprint of authority.

"The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going." Wonderful talk from Shirky.

"With money, it seems, it is not familiarity, but unfamiliarity that breeds contempt." People are less good at estimating the value of unfamiliar currency, no matter what it says on it.

"...the same topic kept coming up, over and over... you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science."

Remarkable series of images by Chris Jordan depicting rates of consumption in America through exhaustive diagrams. Staggering when you see them in close-up.

Lots of choice quotations here, but most are too long for a 255-char delicious box. Changing this prevalent perception is going to be hard; changing gaming is as hard. Lots to chew over int he coming years, really

"The thing about games and virtual story worlds ... is at least they give you feedback and points for doing things. That way we know instantly what our strengths and weaknesses are, and how we are doing. We don’t really get that in everyday life."

"That’s why I enjoy @towerbridge so much - less the concept of machines talking, but more a simple reminder of the disrupted moments in everyday city life." All this is also true. Beautifully put, by Tom.

"With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom." Wonderful article about education.

"This article explores the practice of "beeping" or "missed calling" between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call"

"why on earth do we believe that just because technology can expose people means that it should?" danah, as ever, very insightful, on the problems of exposing user data, regardless of whether it is already "public" or not.

"...it became painfully clear that most business people are unaware of their role in the system... What I found was that many powerful people desperately want to help solve these problems but they seem unaware of their role in perpetuating some of the ill

"I was so busy working in 2007, I forgot to blog about most of it! So here is a top 10 countdown looking back at the ideas and projects that I'm very glad were a part of my year..." Jane McGonigal reviews her year.

"for all the evidence to the contrary I’ve observed since I’ve been an adult myself, it’s hard to entirely shake the old Dad Knows Best hangover." Great writing from Alec Meer about explaining games to our parents - and the hell of twin-stick contro

"Originally, I started a generic post on the business or marketing books I’ve read this year. But there’s only really one book I want to write about, because I think the ideas in it are incredibly important to anyone in marketing or product design. "

Lots of interesting numbers here...

"From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with." Superb post by Adam Greenfield. Makes me question a lot of my recent design.

Nice looking site for perhaps the more grown-up gamer looking to connect and share with others; the focus on sharing the spaces you play in is a really interesting touch. Can't wait to try this.

Dan Hill: "The Well-Tempered Personal Environment" Dan's talk from Interesting South. Something to watch when I have a bit more time; it looks like a wonderful concept.

"If you're a parent, I would be [concerned] about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds)... our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of this world you got to buy the right stuff." Sadly, yes.

Guest edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: a special issue of the JCMC on social network sites. Must return to this, because there's lots to sink one's teeth into.

A rather lovely article from Rands, on the way a certain part of society just "is". Accurate, not that judgmental, and quite sweet, really.

Rex Sorgatz on his essay in Wired, where he suggests that "gaming has become the prevailing narrative of our time."

"...in some states… a sex offender might not have done anything really offensive." Great analysis from Stephanie Booth of the dangers of blanket bans, and the complex depth to the concept of "sex offence".

"...when you come back from Reboot, all other conferences suffer by comparison; however, I think there are some lessons that other events can learn from Reboot and LIFT that might help them improve." Great notes from Lee Bryant.

...as compiled by Donald E Brown.

Tør Nørretranders' weblog. He was fabulous at Reboot this year.

They're not falling. At least, not as high as you think. Wonderful composition n this photos.

"On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America." Joshua Bell busks for the Washington Post.

Danah's keynote from ETech. It's very good.

Reasonably interesting speech from George Osborne at the RSA; interesting given how savvy it is, and how (within reason) fair. Certainly interesting coming from the conservatives.

The 2007 contest winners are now up. They're very impressive.

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them.

Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

"Are smart people overrated?"

Matt Webb's notes on "The Semiotcracy". I always misplace this whenever I need to refer to it.

"By today, the headquarters of Front National has entirely disappeared from Porcupine; in its place, a tiny casino has sprung up overnight, and is already receiving customers." Second Life _is_ Las Vegas!

A perceptive and detailed analysis of the Dunbar Number - and why some of the hype around it is misguided.

"Cologne was built by Charlemagne – but Cologne has the shape that it does today because of the abilities and non-abilities of a Lancaster Bomber." Phenomenal interview. Worth savouring every word.

"the strength of social contact between people cannot be measured by frequency or intensity; a better measure is the number of communication channels used by people" - I like Chris' ideas, but need to think a bit harder on them.

Fairly old now, but some great notes from Henry Jenkins.

"Every artform, every storytelling tradition needs the ability to represent violence because aggression, trauma, and loss are a fundamental aspect of the human condition. The idea that game violence is in and of itself bad is an absurdity."

These marketing strategies are bogus forms of anti-capitalism, fraudulent denials of the unbreakable-but-contradictory relationship between quantity/exchange value and quality/use value. Between them, they promise a new economic culture, in which 'economy

"What one will then wear on the wrist will be, not a mini-computer, but a computerized dialling system to the big hook up." Jim R on fine form, on one of Brian Aldiss' many visions of the future.