On the one hand: a nerdy deconstruction of the plot holes in the Toy Story 3 and their implications for the franchise is rather missing the point of the film, in that it's a work about emotion, and you're supposed to forgive narrative flaws if you notice them, because they're in the service of a emotional point. But I'm certain Wallis knew that when he wrote this. His broader point, though, is excellent: that all narrative is now interactive narrative, and that people will take any narrative, and find things in it the creator never intended, and invent new material in the vacant spaces of all stories, and that decrying that is pointless – we should be embracing it.

I am particularly interested in the first two, and wish to remember to return to those ideas later.

This isn't big news, or anything I'm going to need later, this just made me smile.

Heatmaps for the city. Ten kinds of awesome.

This will be useful in the near-to-medium future.

I have no use for this right now, but I'm just bookmarking it so I don't forget – I really like a lot of the pieces they have here, and one day, I will have the spare cash and space for seriously nice furniture.

Facebook have added 4square like geolocation into their offering. Naturally, they've fucked the privacy settings up on it, by making it possible for your Facebook friends to include you in their location updates, so you'll need to go in and turn that setting off, so that your friends can't advertise when it's appropriate to burgle you. Fuckwits.

BERG produce a site that helps you understand the scale and distances of things in the recent, and not so recent past. If the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed at your front door, could the distance they walked have enabled them to buy a pint of milk? How far away from your parents house would the German trenches have been, if WWI had happened where you grew up? And so on, and so forth. Nice!

If I didn't have my Dodocase, or if, god forbid, anything should happen to it, I'd want one of these, I think.

China Miéville has a blog. I believe this may be relevant to our interest

In case were weren't aware NHS Tayside are offering a £68,000 a year job for a fucking homeopath, despite having laid off 500 people due to the current round of cuts. The level of angry this makes me is hard to fucking describe – it is a near perfect example of the counter to the "well, it can't hurt, and it might help some people" argument that others put forward. Anyway, setting incandescent fury aside for a moment, here is an amusing read: A qualified neuroscientist applies for the job.

interesting article on the daily routine of the Obama presidency, and the difference between the media now, and the media of a decade ago.

This has been doing the rounds, so you may well already have seen it. But in the event that you haven't, here's a fascinatingly in-depth look at Pac-Man – you may think it's a very simply game, and it is, but its very simplicity masks an awful lot of very subtle design decisions that are key to understanding the tactics required to win.

I haven't looked in the photojojo store in ages. There is a truly staggering amount of stuff in here that I really want. Just sayin'

Something that's been at the back of my mind recently: good fictional role models for boys.

Someone has dug up the add in support of net neutrality that Google produced 4 years ago. Now, I'm the first to admit that that what was true 4 years ago isn't automatically true today, and that people who can't change their minds about things in response to changing circumstance and new arguments are stupid people. But: I don't see that the circumstances and arguments in this particular case have shifted in that period.

"The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly. "

Actually, really true. There are absolutely hordes of ties in here that I would actually wear. Astonishing.

This guy is offering ten quid portrait photography to, essentially, passers-by, so that everyone can have a decent profile pic on any on-line service they care to use it on. Wish I'd thought of this. And also that I wasn't a total bag of arse at portrait photography.

This is, frankly excellent. It can be boiled down to: expect to pay money, so have an idea how much you can afford. And also, be absolutely sure that you actually need to buy design, rather than doing it yourself, or buying off the shelf. I've had a half written post on selecting an agency in my queue for a while, and this has obviated my need to write it quite nicely.

Yahoo was somewhere that, ten years ago, I would have love to have worked. I would have loved to have worked at some of the companies they've since bought. But I wouldn't have taken a job there any time in the last six years or so – I'm sure it would have been, y'know, fine, but it wouldn't have been what I really wanted in working for a internet company. This article does a pretty good job of explaining why.

Watch this. It will be the best three minutes you spend all day.

Reminder to self to pick this book up.

The complete Nathan Barley on the YouTubes. I imagine that some of you might like this.

"Jugaad" is also a colloquial Hindi word that can mean an innovative fix, sometimes pejoratively used for solutions that bend rules, or a resource that can be used as such or a person who can solve a vexatious issue. It is used as much for enterprising street mechanics as for political fixers. In essence, it is a tribute to native genius, and lateral thinking.

Excellent article on feature design. I think the art of building good apps is to have an underlying system engineered for maximum flexibility, with a user interface engineered for maximum power – that is: build systems that *can* do lots of things, as long as one can figure out a way to make accomplishing them trivially simple for the user. If you can't see how to do that, then it doesn't matter that that the system *could* do it, you shouldn't allow it to.

Some good stuff in here – a clear articulation of why the language of skepticism does not get through to the people it most needs to, and how we can do something about that.

One to write about later. Short version: I have used Google's mantra of "don't be evil" as a yardstick that I feel they often fail to live up to, mostly through lack of thought. This document, and the changes it proposes are not that. They are active "evil", a very sign of corporations laying the groundwork to maximise their own revenues at the expense of their customers. Whatever Google's founding principles may have been, they are just another corporation now, and worse, they're one who have decided to throw their very considerable weight behind practices that will make life less fair for the consumer. I really, really hope the FCC steps in to stop this – essentially what they doing is saying that "the public internet" should be neutral, and then not properly defining "the public internet" thereby leaving them free to define "the private internet" as anything they want.