Another Flixel tutorial, this time updated for version 2.

"Just for fun, I shoot one of [the hostages] in the pillow case. The head area immediately becomes a blur of pixels, just like you'd see if you were watching some graphic amateur camerawork on the news.<br />
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The effect is unnerving. It's somehow more realistic and more disturbing than the cartoon splatter of bright red blood and bits of brain you see in most games. It taps into that part of the psyche which knows that if something's too horrible to be shown, it must be really horrible. Or is this just IO's attempt to get the game awarded a lower age rating?<br />
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"No, not at all," says Lund. "This was an idea the team came up with – wouldn't it be fun to mimic that thing about something being too graphic, that documentary style? It's a good way of showing you got that headshot in a new way."<br />
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That's marvellous (as is, from the sound of it, K&L2's take on "realism" – namely, that Police Camera Action is a more realistic aesthetic that 24).

"The Collision Detection Kit is a package of classes for pixel-precise, shape-based collision detection for all display objects. It is written in Actionscript 3.0 and meant for Flash Player version 9 and higher. The kit comes with several features to control how collisions are detected, and provides data for the user of the kit so they can do something about the collision." Might be interesting, we'll see.

"The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology." Oh dear.

"…after spending this weekend fighting Resident Evil 5's grabasstical interface I am somewhat persuaded that there's a real divide when it comes to eastern and western design sensibilities, and this divide has everything to do with the design-centric and productivity-centric tendencies of North American tech culture." Which is an interesting way of looking at it; I'm going to hold my thoughts until Iroquois has written more on this. Manveer Heir (of Raven Software) leaves an interesting comment on the post.

"Playdar is a music content resolver service – run it on every computer you use, and you'll be able to listen to all the songs you would otherwise be able to find manually by searching though all your computers, hard disks, online services, and friends' music collections." Feels a lot like Audioscrobbler did when that first launched; it'll be interesting to see what user-friendly services get wrapped around it.

"The PushButton Engine is an open-source game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences." Flash and Box2D from the looks of things. This could be really, really interesting.

"…these ideas have been massively influenced by friends working in game design, agile website design or service design. Narrative media is still (outside of gaming) light-years behind the curve compared to the work going on in these disciplines, so a lot of the time I’m trying to act as a translator – taking concepts and ideas from more functional design disciplines into narrative/editorial contexts. When I speak to indies or producers, there’s a set of blogs/presentations that I tend to refer them to, so I thought i’d start by sharing this reading list." This looks like it's going to be an excellent series from Matt Locke.

Takahashi being wonderfully perceptive and making some interesting observations. Also, describing some lovely design decisions in the beautiful, soothing, and bonkers Noby Noby Boy. I still need a soundtrack CD for that game.

"Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit! BBC, you just don’t deserve to get your hands on these shows." Yes – whilst we all binged on the Wire when we had it on DVD, that doesn't mean that the "binge" is the correct method of consumption. 60 episodes across 12 weeks? Madness, and I say that as a Wire fan.

"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).

"…I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.

Pup ponders the heat-death of the universe. Beautiful, and a lovely use of space, too.

"CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources – equipment, procedures and people – to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations."

Scrapes lots of things, produces a useful page which actually manages to stay up. Also, it spells TRANSPORT CHAOS the only way it should be spelt: in capitals.

Named for the year the BJP was founded; nicely written, and not just a fast-moving press release stream.

All Kenta Cho's code on wonderfl.

Kenta Cho's making stuff on wondfl, in ActionScript. This example is ASCII-based bulletty goodness.

"So perverse as it might sound, I'm going to plead for less choice in video games. It's a paradox: by limiting the player's discretion, you can expand the narrative possibilities of the medium. Coercion can create a kind of emotional heft that you can't achieve within the confines of the empowerment-myth." All true, and FC2 is a fantastic example of this. But: this is just one way of making games. More of this, yes, but don't forget all the other approaches.

"write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time." And you can fork other people's code. It's like github and Heroku all at once, but for Flash.