I’m exhausted just watching this.

A site devoted to Children’s books, curated by the children.

Another nice rumination on gaming, linked from the Gamification preso below.

Excellent presentation on the folly of adding game-like elements to apps, sites, etc. without considering why games are fun in the first place:

It is an invariable principle of all play, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

Resilience scaling has been modified for linear returns, as opposed to increasing returns. Under the new formula, going from 30 resilience to 40 resilience gives players the same increase to survivability as going from 0 to 10. Resilience now scales in the same way armor and magic resistances do. A player with 32.5% damage reduction from resilience in 4.0.6 should see their damage reduction unchanged in 4.1. Those with less than 32.5% will gain slightly. Those with more will lose some damage reduction, increasingly so as their resilience climbs.

Everything that is wrong about MMOs in a single patch note.

NPR on Radiohead’s influence on jazz:

Oddly enough, Yorke/Greenwood/Selway et al. might just be the most-played jazz composers to have emerged in the last 20 years - even though they’re not really jazz composers.

The Brad Mehldau solo piano version of Exit Music linked at the top of the post is great - scary jazz, but great.

Brilliant fake Twitter tale of Rahm Emmanuel (the new Chicago Mayor). Such a great use of Twitter for storytelling, curated into this piece by Tim Carmody.

Grim tidings. Interesting observation that one of the reasons may be that listeners aren’t having to replace CDs with a new better sounding medium (instead they’re just ripping their existing collection). That is in stark contrast to the LP to CD upgrade boom.

I’m this guy’s mum - put it away. We had a family dinner where the topic of how British Parliament worked (Lords, MPs, etc.), and it was much a more entertaining discussion trying to work it out via brain power rather than lazily looking it up. This tweet has it right:

My new standard of cool: when I’m hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever. (via Daring Fireball)

It’s hard to explain the attraction of Baseball to a non-fan (though not as hard as cricket), but there’s something about the precision and slow construction/destruction of an inning. Like the double-play as explained by this graphic on Eephus League:

There is little on this earth that I love more than the double play; when executed well it’s as graceful and smooth as any ballet and it whispers “There is order amidst all the chaos.”