"That’s why I like having these little printed books, or these little files of my notes, because I can literally pull up anything I want to remember from Moby Dick, and in repeating it, remember it. Annotating becomes a way to re-encounter things I’ve read for pleasure." Which is why I have a stack of eight books on my dining table, and more to come over the years - to be read, not just hoarded.

I swear, just go and read this right now; it might look like it's about games, but really, it's about space, and memory, and Memory Palaces, and wrapped around a retrospective of a marvellous game, and a little bit about how games make us who we are, in ways their creators might never have imagined.

"...your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast."

"Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade." Lovely, sharp, writing from Joel Johnson.

I'd forgotten Corewar: another programming game, even more abstract than CRobots, and slightly more arcane. This Gama piece provides a nice primer to the game, its history, and its tactics.

It's more cursor*10, and it's as fiendish and entertaining as ever. The impaled-cursor is particularly cute.

"There was a correlation between their performance on the game and their improvement on certain cognitive tests, Kramer said. Those who did well in the game also improved the most on switching between tasks. They also tended to do better on tests of working memory." Playing the game (Rise of Nations) didn't affect all tasks, but it had improvements on some - seemingly those involving task and process management.

People draw maps and more from memory. The results are interesting to say the least, and, at times, beautiful.

"A library for finding memory leaks." - with solid Rails integration and, apparently, graphs by Gruff.

Really interesting perspective - SSD as intermediate between hard disk (cheap/slow per megabyte) and RAM (expensive/fast). SSD lets you store stuff that gets hit a lot, leaving hd as a storage resource, not an operating resource.