Vimeo user kingcosmonaut3000 has created a video which plays a succession of the images returned by Google Image Search when it’s fed its own results. It flicks through 2951 images displayed at 12 frames a second.

Starmaps become dark photos of men at conferences become an LA Noire interrogation scene becomes a shot from Pirates of the Caribbean. They cycle through similar subjects, then matching colours, then shapes.

What’s amazing are the spurts of innovation after periods where the image stays fairly constant – they’re sort of like flowerings of culture after long periods in which everything has stayed uniform. Like the Renaissance, or LOLcats and Y U NO Guy.

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Since New Year’s Eve I’ve been quietly wondering whether there’s a really good game you can play at a dinner party with a good variety of friends. You know, both game players and not. Jocks and nerds – the mix.

To end 2011, we took part in a murder mystery dinner party at a friends’ house. It was based on a boxed game called Death By Chocolate. A prominent American chocolate maker called Billy Bonker has been found dead, and for some reason a peculiarly colourful set of characters have gathered for dinner, and one of them did it.

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You know those magazine features in which the very first paragraph reverberates throughout their lengths? The ones that you realise have seeded clues from their outsets that flower into revelation after revelation by their ends? The ones that tell stories about places and people you’ve never heard about before, and wonder how you never did until now? The ones that sweep from the personal to the national so naturally that one feels as consequential as the other?

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Ruins are fetishes. Ancient structures are romantic, no matter how mundane their previous functions. Modern ruins are poignant, laced with reminders of impermanence and folly. And for all this they’re powerful.

Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, who he’d had employed to design the third Reich’s triumphal city, were fascinated by the idea of ‘ruin value’. Inspired by the picturesque weathering of Roman structures, they wanted to create structures which would still proudly stand a 1000 years on. As writer Lee Sandlin says in his essay Losing The War:

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Both The New York Times and Guardian have now published accounts of working with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, providing fascinating insights into their working practices and the cultural clash of two very different types of organisations. Both also take the opportunity to attempt to describe and explain Assange, and one word, though only used once in each article - and obliquely at that - stood out to me: geek.

Geek’s a pretty amorphous sort of a word, used both as an insult and as a badge of honour. And commentary on WikiLeaks and Assange has regularly used it to describe the nature of the person who lead this extraordinary set of events.

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I heard a fantastic interview with the journalist Gay Talese on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast recently, about his article on the soprano Marina Poplavskaya. With the likes of Tom Wolfe, he was one of the proponents in the 1960s of new or literary journalism - reportage with narrative flow and subjectivity that strives to express truth in a deeper sense than simple facts.

His craft was formed in a very different environment to the one in which we as game journalists work today. We have very few staff, we have a very wide remit, we must report immediately, we must bow to the strangling restrictions of PR departments, we do not have fact-checking departments.

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Current total obsession: 100 Rogues on iPhone. And by a long, long way, it’s not being played enough if a figure of 946 players on its Game Center scoreboards is anything to go by.

That’s because 100 Rogues is one of the most consummately crafted games for a mobile device I’ve come across. Not bad considering that until the latest update it crashed and wheezed with staggering abandon on my iPhone 4 and features an interface that, if you’re not grumbling at its convoluted menu, you’re cursing because it’s gotten you killed.

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In Yakutsk, most buildings are built on stilts. Not because it’s sited on a swamp, or on the shores of some inland lake. No: Yakutsk is sited on Siberian permafrost. And it necessitates architecture that’s based on the need to avoid transferring heat to the ground below. You see, if it does, it’ll melt the permafrost, which, even during its 30C summers, lies only 1.5m below the surface. Because when the permafrost melts, buildings sink and collapse.

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Perhaps conspicuously absent from my post on the need for a bit of magic in technology was Arthur C. Clarke’s famous edict, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think it kinda supports my point, adding the one that technology and magic aren’t so dissimilar as technology’s relationship with science and magic’s relationship with mysticism might suggest.

Anyway, it also reminds me that I recently listened to an incredible group discussion that was held in May 1970 between Clarke, sociologist Alvin Toffler, who was about to publish Future Shock, and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. It’s called 2001: Science Fiction Or Man’s Future?

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Sorry for this screed, but it appears I haven’t had my Delicious links properly linked up lately. It’s worth it, I swear, if only for the casu marzu.

• The Suits of James Bond - Well, just that, really. Good fetishism.
• Clive Thompson: Will the word processor destroy our ability to think? - Looking at the impact of cut and paste on writing, and asking the question: has it changed the way we think? I can't really imagine writing anything fully structured in one pass, but I must have done so when I was at school and early university. It's strange to realise how alien the concept is now.
• Designing Media: Interviews - Hyper interesting - a series of fantastic four-minute interviews with leading editors, designers and writers about the changing form of media, all to publicise Bill Moggridge's new Designing Media book. Includes Neil Stevenson on making PopBitch, Chris Anderson on Wired's relationship with its website, Ira Glass on telling narratives and Mark Zuckerberg on sharing and social connections.
• The Twitter Hulks - From Feminist Hulk to Cross-dressing Hulk, Lit-crit Hulk to Film-crit Hulk.
• Paleo-Future Blog: Dawn of the Wireless Phone - Professor William Edward Ayrton wondered in 1901 what it would mean to have portable, wireless telephones: "Think of what this would mean, of the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole, not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws."
• Chris Burden's Metropolis II - "It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation. In "Metropolis II," by his calculation, "every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city," Mr. Burden said. "It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It's quite intense.""
• Batman symbols - Must be most, if not all of the Batman symbols. A remarkable range of shapes, but all maintain its distinctive identity.
• NYT: The Attention-Span Myth - "At some point, we stopped calling Tom Sawyer-style distractibility either animal spirits or a discipline problem. We started to call it sick..." What exactly is an attention span? And is it really good to have one? Great piece of assumption busting.
• Nine Eyes of Google Street View - Jon Rafman's cuts of Street View, showing beauty and ugliness, humour and horror in momentary, sliced, sections of the world. Makes you realise that, though public, streets tend to go often unobserved. And it's a project that seems rooted in a kind of compulsive madness of panning and zooming. Deckard surely has nothing on Rafman.
• The Atlantic: The 12 Timeless Rules for Making a Good Publication - The Atlantic's mid-20th century exceedingly elegant and thoughtful editorial guidelines. My favourite: "Always remember that the fastidious element in the Atlantic audience is its permanent and valuable core."
• Clay Shirky: The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics - Guess what! Shirky doesn't think it's been an enormous success. Expanding on that, the venture "suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms".
• On Set: Empire Strikes Back - Vanity Fair - Pictures from the set of Empire Strikes Back show the wonderful mundanity of making fantasy. Mattresses scattered beneath the platform during the climatic scene between Vader and Skywalker, model makers towering above AT-ATs. Also, check the way they created the yellow scrolling text at the start - they actually filmed it.
• Human landscapes in SW Florida - Patterns amid natural forms in new housing estates in Florida.
• Cheese I'm afraid of #43: casu marzu - Maggot-riddled casu marzu from Sardinia doesn't sound like my thing. It's eaten with thousands of maggots still in it, maggots which are not only able to jump six inches but also have mouthhooks which they can use to tear up your insides.

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