"If you ever needed a thorough introduction to the series or the new stuff in Final Showdown, look no further. What top American VF player LA Akira teaches in his appearance on UltraChanTV is more than spectacular. More than 4 hours of video goodness fit for beginners as well as more advanced players." So. Much. Virtua. Fighter. (That tip about holding G+P for both blocks and auto throw escapes is a useful one. Throw escapes got so much easier!)

Excellent slides from Paul with some super-solid points, and a few tools I'd not encountered (Papertrail, notably).

Lovely article exploring the various ways of implementing 2D movement in platform games (though some of these tips/methods apply to all 2D games, when you think about it.)

"Hammer.js is a javascript library that can be used to control gestures on touch devices." Very nice. And: it has a jQuery plugin, too.

"As a programmer, we tend to take sysadmins for granted. The few times I've been without a good sysadmin have really made me appreciate what you guys do. When we're venturing into an environment without a sysadmin, what words of wisdom can you offer us?" A good list.

"DAController is a wrapper class for use with the proCONTROLL joystick library written by Christian Riekoff for Processing. It encapsulates the two analog sticks and all the buttons found on a typical dual analog controller." Ooh.

"We'll know we're doing it right when half of the pages are ugly."

"I’m not sure if this is professional or not. It’s very self motivated and ruthlessly lazy, but also requires experience in knowing what will be a pain later down the line." James sounds like he's being entirely professional to me; this is a good post about maintaining services in your spare time, amongst other things.

"Here there are feedback mechanisms that produce more affect and pleasure – for instance the feedback involved in tuning a musical instrument, sound system or a radio. Gardening also seems to be a rich area for examination – where there is frequent work, but the sensual and systemic rewards are tangible." Beautiful work, as ever: I really liked the rewards-for-effort they point out.

Gorgeous: light-painting in space with the Visible Human, its slices reassembled into new shapes.

Simple dynamic site generator with standardised templating tools: certainly looks nice for building those early-stage prototypes before you need a full backend.

"The history of switching power supplies turns out to be pretty interesting." It really does: long, fascinating post about a history of AC-DC conversion and how new technologies affected it.

"Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes." As recommended by Matthew Somerville. Looks useful!

"Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content." Lovely: a camera powered by Mechanical Turk.

"Hacking is disruptive, and whether you code software, write books, or film movies, I believe bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act. By being novel and compelling, the new is likely to replace something else and that something else isn’t being replaced without a fight." Great stuff from Rands.

"Sugar is a Javascript library that extends native objects with helpful methods. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code." Looks nice – and suitably Javascripty.

"Every time you throw in a quick fix for something because it’s Getting Late(tm), stop and see if you can fix it correctly right then. Pragmatism says it might not be possible in the time remaining, and that’s ok; “Real artists ship” and all that but a ruthless artist will fix the problem first thing in the next release so they can keep shipping again and again and again." Unhuh.

"…the definition of a bot seems quite arbitrary, where do we call an application or a string of actions or scripts a 'bot', and where or when do we call it something else? Is the only reason for calling a scripted set of actions a bot, the fact that the script takes the role (and maybe the place) of a human being as a form of artificial intelligence, like they do for instance on wikipedia, in chatrooms, twitter or spamming us through mail (do they really set out to maximize their chances of success? – which is what often AI delineates)?
And what about the new generations of Twitter web scutter that does not seem to be intelligible in any human-sense kind of way, but do follow scripts and try to maximize something (followers, tweets)?" Bookmarked if only for use of the phrase "web scutter".

"I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine." Lovely post from Stamen about the early stages of invention for this project.

Nice post about building your own maptiles in Tilemill. Something to return to when I have a location-specific maps problem to solve, perhaps.

Really interesting post about the architecture at Tumblr, which has changed a lot over the past few years, and is a fascinating selection of tools stacked together. Especially good on the reasoning behind tool selection.