Greg Costikyan makes an interesting distinction between reviews and criticism:

A review is a buyer’s guide. It exists to tell you about some new product that you can buy, and whether you should or should not buy it. A good review goes beyond that, and suggests who should buy it, since not everyone enjoys everything. (E.g., A romance novel may be very fine of its kind, but is quite unlikely to appeal to me, since it is not a genre I enjoy.) …

Criticism is an informed discussion, by an intelligent and knowledgeable observer of a medium, of the merits and importance (or lack thereof) of a particular work. Criticism isn’t intended to help the reader decide whether or not to plunk down money on something; some readers’ purchase decisions may be influenced, but guiding their decisions is not the purpose of the critical work…

Reviews are the inevitable epiphenomenon of our consumer society, writing to help consumers navigate the innumerable options available to them. They can be well or poorly done, but they are nothing more than ephemera.

Full post at: Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren’t It

Newsweek has started a 7 part story of the never revealed secrets of the Obama, Clinton, and McCain campaigns:

This is part one of a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama  camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of  their findings appear until after Election Day.

Full article at Newsweek: Barack Obama – How He Did It

The excellent Chris Glass linked to Copy Paste Character, a free tool that lets you click on any character to copy it to your keyboard.

I wish I had this tool when I worked on the foreign language companion sites at Thomson/Heinle, and often had to get an “a grave” or “e acute” at a moment’s notice.  Now that I’m using a large screen to work on, I can open up this site as a new window and keep it going whenever I need to get a character.

This seems to be a new brand of web site – no navigation or hierarchy, just a single point on the Internet that you can pull up and use as a useful tool.

The site is provided by Konst & Teknik, which have a very interesting site of their own.  I like the way their site seems more web-based than print – no primary nav (save for the bottom) and no three column layout messing up the works.  The simple “Sorted by” in the lower left is my favorite part – you have to play around with it to realize that it changes the list to match your desired sort order, but once you understand the function it’s easy to manipulate.

The whole site has that aesthetic – exploring the (pretty simple) navigation leads to hidden wonders and neat little surprises.  I didn’t even know who they were until I clicked on Contact, and found that they are a two-person agency based in Sweden.

Paul Graham has an extremely minimalist site that I kind of dig.  Lots of content in a really short amount of space on the left.

He also has a neat essay titled “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss,” describing the dangers of programmers working at a large company.

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting article on the benefits of boredom as a prelude to creativity and introspection.

Boredom’s doldrums were unavoidable, yet also a primordial soup for some of life’s most quintessentially human moments. Jostled by a stranger’s cart in the express checkout line, thoughts of a loved one might come to mind. A long drive home after a frustrating day could force ruminations. A pang of homesickness at the start of a plane ride might put a journey in perspective…

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next. Ralley has noticed a kind of placid look among his students over the past few years, a “laptop culture” that he finds perplexing. They have more channels to be social; there are always things to do. And yet people seem oddly numb. They are not quite bored, but not really interested either.

More at the article: The Joy of Boredom.

And on that note, I plan to finish a few more e-mails and then go finish reading War and Peace.