Take a typical Saturday in the USA, find every gun death that day, and tell the story of each. What you will get is not a book about gun control, but about victims: ordinary people struggling against the legacies of poverty, segregation and American history. Compassionate, sceptical, thoughtful and honest, Gary Younge’s work reminds us what great journalism looks like. It could hardly be more timely.

Orwell believed diseased language was both a cause and effect of totalitarianism. Before he explored these ideas in 1984, his 1945 essay Politics and the English Language proposed that modern English, full of jargon and complexity, allowed politicians to conceal their intentions behind euphemisms and doubletalk.

I’m piloting an armed robot through a fictional concentration camp. I’ve seen men beaten, starved, murdered and eviscerated. I’ve scrambled out of a cart of emaciated, mutilated bodies – eyes cut out – and wrought revenge on my captors with vivid, pornographic violence. Now I’m trudging through the ashen rain with a heavy metal riff building in my ears, a Jewish Technology Wizard riding on my back whilst I cut through soldiers’ bodies with my oversized minigun and blast them into quivering lumps with an infinitely-replenishing rocket launcher.

Is it necessary? For sure it’s fun as a kind of power fantasy, but I’ve an unease aching in my stomach and a feeling of wrongness I don’t want to peer into too hard. The New Order’s tone is all over the place – it’s a game that really doesn’t know what it wants to be. It presents itself Doom-style ‘neo-retro’ FPS, but it plays like a cover-based shooter. It tells me serious, sentimental war story, but then throws me dual-wielded shotguns like a level of Quake. It laments the tragedy of war, but then there’s times when it looks a lot like a Nazi torture simulator. Ultimately, there’s a fun – if limited – game underneath, comprising some impressive set pieces and frenetic firefights – but as a unified whole it’s a bit messy.

I hate the single var style in JavaScript. For the sake of clarity, I’m talking about this:

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var alpha = 1,
    beta = 2,
    gamma = 3;

It’s awkward to write, annoying to debug, misleading to read, and utterly unnecessary in 2017. Allow me to explain why.

I almost never use the word ‘beautiful’.

Do you remember the Net Yaroze?

Back in the days of the original PSOne, Sony released a special black PlayStation. It allowed ordinary people to create homebrew PlayStation games, with the help of a home computer, exclusive Sony development software, chunky programming manual and plenty of patience and care. Net Yaroze games couldn’t be played on ordinary PSOnes directly, but the Official UK PlayStation Magazine released demo discs that let you finally play the best at home. I recently came across such a disc – featuring 14 of the magazines’ favourite picks – and wanted to share it here.

Recently, I’ve been examining how everyday fallacies can contribute to stress, our worry and our turmoil. One I’ve spotted of my own is something I call the ‘Augur’s Fallacy’.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting The Yard, an intimate and vibrant little theatre a whisker from Stratford’s Olympic Park. I watched Pilgrims, a 2013 play by Elinor Cook.

This review will contain spoilers.

I’ve attempted pair-programming several times, including in an organization that (briefly) considered rolling it out as a mandatory process for all engineers (you can guess how well that idea panned out). Personally, I’m not a huge fan. In fact, I’ll go further than that – I’m a downright pair programming skeptic.