"Today, I made a little application using the Spore API." Specifically, rendering the skeletons of creatures in Processing. Nice.

"LSL is a 2-D arena shooter featuring a robot that falls in love with several lovely female robots each with her own unique abilities and atmosphere… The longer our heroes stay together, the more their relationship will evolve, making them stronger; but this increases the difficulty of the game, too. When they "break up," the enemies are cleared, but so is the score multiplier. Throughout the game, the robot recalls memories of a love before…" This sounds – and looks – delightful.

"For use on days with uninteresting skies." I should like one of those very much.

"Majini have gone through a small part of London, leaving behind a trail of remnant body parts from their victims. Find the bodies on the morning of Thursday March 12th and win a vacation to Africa." Um. Really not sure this is the best kind of live event, chaps.

Seriously, the UI customisation that some players go through amazes me. And yet: the level of customisation possible also amazes me. There's some good stuff in here not just on customising your UI, but also making it look functional and useful; UI design is still possible in the sea of plugins.

"Just because a line is functional doesn’t mean it can’t be clever, funny, insightful, or dramatic. The real art of videogame writing is being aware of the context: understanding how, when and where the line is going to be used, and how to compensate for the times you have no control over when the line is played." A nice piece on writing for games, and brevity (or a lack of it).

Touché.

"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.

"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.

"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.

Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.

Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.

David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.

Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.

Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.

"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".

"LÖVE is an unquestionably awesome 2D game engine, which allows rapid game development and prototyping in Lua." And it all looks rather pretty, too. Must investigate further!

danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.

"I still have nothing but respect for my more traditional industry colleagues, but I’ve stopped worrying about impressing the games industry and its pundits. Or at least, I’ve stopped worrying about impressing them first. Instead, I’ve started focusing more on the people who might be interested in different kinds of game experiences. People who fly for business more than three times a month, or people who read all of the Sunday newspaper, or people who have kids with food allergies, for example. I am sure these people read magazines and watch television and listen to the radio. But it would be short-sighted to label them ziners or tubers or airwavers. They are just people, with interests, who sometimes consume different kinds of media." Bogost is right, and I'm concerned I'm always going to be ashamed I chose to use that word.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

"This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts." Corvus hypothesises what A Lego Clockwork Orange might look like. Thoughtful stuff.

"So why not embrace it? That's why You Have To Burn The Rope is fantastic… for games to become art there must be an awareness and a conversation with its own history. Film, music, and literary critic call this allusion, but for the creators, this isn't just a word, it's a dialogue. Which means it should invite participants. For me, I'm far more intrigued by stop-motion artist Patrick Boivin's attempt at turning a linked sequence of videos into Youtube Street Fighter." I'm not sure I agree with Wang on YHTBTR, specifically, but this paragraph is reasonably sensible.

65 years since the end of the siege of Leningrad, this LJ post shows photographs from the late 1940s merged with images of the location in the present. All are striking; some are very sad. Great contextualisation, though.