News You Can Bruise for 2009 August 26

You may have noticed that Sumana's weblog has been down. For quite a while. That's because the Berkeley OCF has been down for quite a while. We plan to take action on this once Sumana is less stressed by other things, but in the meantime Sumana is one of the people posting at Geek Feminism.

Three other weblogs I subscribed to recently:

• The Game Developer Research Institute is devoted to digging up the most obscure information about the video game business as it used to be: most notably, who did coding work for whom, and who ripped whom off.
• Similarly, Hardcore Gaming 101 not only has insanely detailed essays about specific game series, it now has a weblog that digs up more general retro tidbits, compares American and Japanese versions of games, etc. Less obscure stuff here than at the GDRI, since it focuses on the games rather than on the software companies that make them.
• The great thing about the Internet is that you can get access to cutting-edge scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of those papers are incomprehensible. Until now, the public was forced to resort to print science-popularization magazines with their long lead times. But now, there's the physics arXiv blog, presenting understandable summaries of the arXiv's most interesting or sensationalistic papers, as they're pre-published.

Uh, and a Wii Fit update: I've lost 6±1 pounds since I started my maniacal jogging a couple months ago. Not a whole lot, but it's the first time in my life my weight has gone down instead of up, and I haven't really made any other lifestyle changes.