Giles is both good at writing and good at blogging. This was good reading after a set of long-distant train journeys for work this week.

"It’s the symptom of the algorithm. It’s what comes out of the digital-political-economy of cultures that live by networks and the machinary (soft/hard/hashtag-y) that underpin it all. All this #newaesthtic #ooo #futureofproduction stuff is the excess. The unexpected, unplanned for result. It’s the things that happen without one self-consciously *going after* #newaesthetic / object-oriented ontological / future of network connected things sensibilities." A calm, rational, open-ended commentary from Julian. I liked this point.

"We'll only really understand what we're doing when it stops feeling new, when we have a sense of history about what we're making." Better keep on making, then. (This is good. Also: well done Phil. It's important to say well done, and this is a lot of effort, and it's been brilliant. Finishing in May! Gosh).

"I’d love to run, edit, and write for a publication bigger than just me and my blog. I don’t have time, so I won’t, at least not any time soon. But if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules:" These are all correct. Also: they apply to everything from a blog upwards, frankly.

Matt Brown and Mark Slater, writing about music and things. Looks set to be like a cracking little blog.

Reviews of Phill Niblock's "Touch Three": drones created by stripping out attack/release/breath sounds from acoustic performers, and then gluing them together. What we're listening to right now, too. (It is better than that description makes it sound).

This is, in fact, the most successful rotary encoder code I've found to date.

Excellent summary of what happened on the Yaroze – and a quest to track down all the released Yaroze titles.

Jason Rohrer's recursive shooter, which I must pick up at some point.

"…several months ago, for no particular reason that I remember, I thought it would be silly and possibly fun to play all the Final Fantasy games." A blog to chronicle that journey, from I through to XIII, excluding XI (sensibly) and including X-2 and Crisis Core. Blimey. Not my cup of tea, but the endeavour alone is worth a bookmark.

"I started with Valentina Tereshkova in January 2009 thinking if I drew one every week I'd finish the series around the end of the year. See how well that worked out." I like Phil Bond's art already, but this set of portraits of female astronauts is just lovely.

Six-panel comics truncating movies in their entirety. Although the Zombieland one won, I love the American Psycho one.

"McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path." Sharp review of what sounds like a fascinating book; I particularly liked this quotation.

"Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is — more than anything else — a triumph of human reasoning." Ooh, that could be good, when I have an hour spare. (Another Google TechTalk).

"Every day a song is posted, one second shorter than yesterday's. A tumblr by Tom Ewing." Awesome.

"SoI think it's not unreasonable to read that the article is presenting the stance that the evolution of the status of games from 'toys and entertainment' to 'art' is fundamentally linked to the idea of authorship coming from the singular creative vision of an individual. For the record, I strongly disagree with this stance – and furthermore, I feel it is treacherous ground in which to plant the 'games are henceforth art' flag, as I suspect it is ground that will quickly be lost to (or surrendered by) the first generation of artists who even attempt to question it (in fact – for those of us 'in the know' it has been and continues to be, questioned all the time)."

"…sometimes I fear our endless preoccupation with making the case for video games is self-defeating. It feels defensive and, at its worst, produces a kind of micro-culture obsession with analysis: a 24/7 bloggo-Twitter tilling and re-tilling of the same small plot of dirt. In this self-absorbed environment, each new game's worth is measured by its ability to move the needle on emergent narrative, artistic expression, genre refinement…or whatever criterion we're applying this week to prove games matter to people already convinced." Yes. Not the reason I've been taking a break from writing about it, but something that plays on my mind before I put fingers to keyboard.

"Jones said how most open city games tend to come with about 100 licensed tracks, but that they realised that most players would far rather listen to their own mp3 collection. But this is an online game. So they’ve done a deal with Last.FM to use their technology in such a brilliantly imaginative way. If you’re listening to a favourite track in your car, and drive past some other players, should they have the same track on their hard drive the game will find it, and they’ll hear it from your car as you go by. Should they not have it, the game will find a track that’s similar and play that instead." Just that quotation alone is remarkable, but it really does sound like APB is something special; let's just hope it's a success.

"…there are an awful lot of excellent reasons for ending a blog, and that many blogs which do end are by no means “failures”. Social media coverage in general should focus a lot less on the things people do or don’t “achieve” via these tools, and more on the fact that conversation, writing, collaboration and suchlike are pleasants thing to do in and of itself. Reclaim social media for the flaneurs, is I guess what I’m saying!" Tom Ewing is right.

"An obsessive meeting schedule is an investment in the boring, but by defining a specific place for the boring to exist, you’re allowing every other moment to have creative potential. You’re encouraging the random and random is how you’re going to win. Random is how you’re going to discover a path through a problem that one else has found and that starts with breathing deeply." Oh. That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Alan Taylor on a year of the Big Picture. It's been a successful one, if you ask me, and it's a wonderful site; there are few updates in my RSS reader I look forward to as much as it.

If you want a wrap-up of the Microsoft keynote, you could do no better than Brandon's wrap-up for Offworld – spot on, nicely detailed, and covering all the facts with great illustration. Whilst their titles – L4D2, Forza 3, etc – are obviously real assets, it's their commitment to the 360 as a platform in the living room that was impressive.