links for 2010-12-03

“Spy Par­ty is two-play­er game with one play­er tak­ing the role of the spy and the oth­er tak­ing the role of the sniper. The spy may be one of any num­ber of par­ty guests, joined by an ambas­sador and a dou­ble agent. The spy has four tasks to com­plete: Bug the ambas­sador, steal a stat­ue, trans­fer a micro­film and con­tact the dou­ble agent. The sniper has just one task: iden­ti­fy and assas­si­nate the spy.” This game sounds excel­lent. I want to play it now.

“So here it is: all recent urban plans I saw where based on the assump­tion that some sort of growth (demo­graph­ic, eco­nom­ic) would pro­pel the city back into the lime­light. Now that this assump­tion has been slashed we need to rethink our urban strate­gies. What will the city look like in a con­tract­ing world?”