"And that is the best definition of casual that I can come up with: Casual players cannot be rated better or worse than other players." Torres finds a nice overlap with the Hicks/Hudson duality; I like his suggestion that casual players don't have metrics for comparison, because their primary goal is fun, and you cannot compare types of fun.

"File under Career, Future, Success"

"Video game designer Robin Hunicke, noticeable at any gaming event for having the reddest hair of anyone in attendance, is trading her big-company background for ThatGameCompany, a sign that the small studio behind Flow and Flower is growing its ranks." Oh. That *is* interesting.

Someone will come.

"The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets." Hmn. Not sure what the market for these is, beyond curios; they're not particularly high-resolution, for starters.

"Professional photographic & art printing with great value? theprintspace delivers. At the printspace we understand what professional quality means, and we also offer 48 hour turnaround time & guaranteed satisfaction." As recommended to me by Jon.

"I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug – seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable." Roland drops some Treetop science, and it looks very useful. Good stuff!

"'taking three great graduates and putting them to work on the next Godfather game… is a fine business decision, but the perspective for us is that it is a much better idea to take these three guys who perhaps have a beautiful idea and a different way of working, protect them a little bit as they build up a new idea and a new way of looking at things and a new way of design – and a few years from now they will be a much better business," Blackley explained. "In the '90s there was no mechanism to do that – and we lost a generation of designers. I think its important we look to reclaim that new generation.'"

It's an open-source radio-trigger for small flashes. Really! The hardware, the software – the whole lot – is open source. The Strobist community never ceases to impress with its ingenuity.

"Verbing weirds language"

"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".

More on the phenomenon that is Ken Fighter Ken.

This is a pretty accurate explanation of the state of the majority of SF4 online. It's also quite funny, and is the reason the phrase "Flowchart Ken", used to described a particular kind of player, is already entering the SF4 Lexicon.

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again." Ryanair's social media strategy is pretty much on-brand, it seems.

'A morose-looking guy stood at the bar talking to his friends, wearing a Flashbang Studios t-shirt. Emily leaned across the bar next to him, and shouted giddily over the music: "hey, I like that developer."' A lovely piece of speculative writing from Duncan Fyfe.

A first, rather long, post on the S&W Blog, in which I talk to Jack about a project he's been working on for a while.

"This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK." Epic Eegra thread taking the Dante's Inferno-shaped ball and running a very, very long way with it.

Full version, no out! The beta was lovely, so I'm looking forward to this a lot.

"[Wrestle Jam is] completely playable. There was an intro screen, character select, win / loss conditions, opponent AI, eight different attacks," Furino explained. "It was as close to a genuine old-school wrestling game as I could make it in the time allowed. I even mapped an old Nintendo controller to the input system so they could play it that way." Gosh, that's lovely, if not totally unexpected from Arronofsky. Lovely interview, too.

"Oh, that's because it's an alternate reality report…"

"Starting a new column reprinting classic Game Developer magazine articles, this January 1994 premiere issue article goes behind the scenes of Id Software's Doom, talking to John Carmack and revealing technical specifics of the seminal game's creation." And it's cracking – lots of great detail, some neat ironies, and quite a bit about the id team's fondness for NeXT workstations.

Consolevania is over. A shame, but they make their case well, and it was lovely when it lasted.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"Your argument did not address my own, but nice try". I think I'm going to need this in future.

These are lovely. The more I think about this, the more I like his Die Hard poster.

"The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases." Not super-accurate, but not bad; the bit when it starts the comparison against GPU word length is a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise: fun!