Another week has passed, and gosh, what a glorious week! Each day seems to have been filled with sunshine, with frequent blue skies and an outside temperature which often hasn’t required coats. Being British, this has meant that the phrase “what a lovely day it is” gets uttered at least every hour, with a tone of surprise that never seems to be diminished, despite the self-evident nature of the statement.

Sunshine brings a few problems of its own, of course. Our studio/‘Room’/office has lovely big double-height windows which let in lots of light, but do occasionally leave you squinting in the sun. The natural and obvious solution to this, of course, is to draw the blinds, giving you light without glare. However, because the sun moves so relatively slowly, going from a position behind the building to a position directly above the windows sometime after 1PM, it usually takes a while for one of us to realise that the blinds need drawing, and so in the intermediate time, our eyes slowly strain more and more in order to see our screens, such that by the time that someone does draw the blinds, you are often left with a headache that lasts the rest of the afternoon.

I am reminded in this observation of the boiling frog story: which is that if a frog jumps into boiling water, it will jump out, but if placed in cold water which is heated slowly, it will allow itself to be boiled to death. A quick reading of the Wikipedia page suggests that this anecdote is probably not true, and that despite some dodgy Victorian experiments testing the hypothesis, most contemporary biologists believe that the frog would certainly attempt to escape the water before it got too hot.

From this I can conclude that humans are stupider than frogs.

When not basking in the sun, this week we have mainly been continuing work on our Facebook ‘Games of Judgement’ project, with a new release of two new games slated in for early next week.

The disappointment of the week was a few of us spending a day and a half coming up with ideas and preparing a response for an interesting tender from a national museum. Unfortunately, we then got news that the project was to be postponed and the tender withdrawn. Twas a shame, as our idea had gotten us excited, and involved looking at the history (and ongoing changes) at Wikipedia, as well as our personal online histories. Perhaps we will be able to explore the ideas in some other form though.

Things we’ve been looking at and debating include Rev Dan Catt’s Long Good Read Newspaper, and Dentu/BERG’s Swappu – both of which are either interesting or weird, depending on who you ask.