“Anytime a comment thread becomes huge enough to exhibit emergent behavior, up to and including spawning new species of monsters, you know you’ve touched a nerve.

“Garry’s Mod is a game modification for Half Life 2 created by Garry Newman. While GMod does not possess any traditional gameplay value, it enables the player to freely manipulate all of the objects and features of the Source engine. This has allowed an extensive community to build up for mini-games within GMod.

“I do my best to be in a relaxed state of mind because that’s when I play at my best. I try to slow things down a couple of days before a game. I have long lunches, do things in an unhurried way. The morning of the match I always get up a couple of hours before we have to get to the ground, so that I have plenty of time to get ready. I take my time to have a bath, wear my clothes, eat breakfast. I never rush things, and that sort of sets up my mood for the rest of day.

“I want to be glad and happy with my eyes fully open, without fooling myself in the belief that we live in a pink world: to be happy to be alive in the full knowledge of all misery.

“Spare the group from scale. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.

Sometimes you can do soft forking. LiveJournal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve ever seen. The median size of a LiveJournal group is around five people.

My favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page.

“The overload principle: set moderately difficult but potentially achievable goals. In weight lifting, for example, strength cannot be increased by tasks that can be performed easily or that cannot be performed without injury to the organism. Strength can be increased by lifting weights that are realistic but difficult enough to stretch the muscles.

“Kernel developers at large haven’t the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are. lkml is about as scary a communication forum as they come. Most people are absolutely terrified of mailing the list (e.g. saying ‘my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade’) lest they get flamed for their inexperience, an inappropriate bug report, being stupid or whatever. Whereas enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by 0.1% with patch $Y gets reported, and how quickly it gets attended to.

“Analytical software is necessary but not sufficient. Narrated animation is the secret sauce. The stories that people will understand, and remember, are the ones that have been performed well.

“[When remixing websites,] the dynamic script tag’s main advantages are that it is not bound by the web browser’s cross-domain security restrictions and that it runs identically on more web browsers than XMLHttpRequest. Feature-wise, the XMLHttpRequest object is still a more reliable, flexible, and secure request mechanism.