Sundays are for heroic dwarfs entering the gold-filled lair of the sleeping malevolent dragon of games journalism, and awaking it, saying it’s the 300th anniversary of the Sunday Papers, and whether it would deign to rise up one last time and scour the earth with its fiery prose and/or compiling a list of the finest recent writing (mostly) about games. And the Dragon did rise up, and its wings blotted out the sun, and it said “Okay – as long as I can get it done before I finally get around to going to see the Hobbit this afternoon.” And the Dwarfs said “Sure.” And the Dragon said “Great, let’s do that then.”

• I was in Venice last weekend, and rather reading Mann’s Death In Venice as I planned to on the journey, I couldn’t turn away from Leigh Alexander’s Breathing Machine: A Memoir of Computers. Well, I could, but only when the turbulence got a bit crazy and I had to have a little cry. It’s a short e-book, which you can buy in all the usual places. Gamasutra ran an excerpt if you need a taste, but if you’re reading the Sunday Papers, I suspect you’re already clicking buy and I’m speaking to thin air. Come back, you *crag*ers. It’s Leigh writing precisely and beautifully of the coming of age of herself and the consumer information age. Also, lots of text adventure chat.

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