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).

Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.

"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).

Quick tutorial in add_meta_box – the way to add custom fields to WordPress forms.

More clever stuff with dedicated post types in WP3; notably, adding custom fields to custom post-type forms.

Oh boy. Espgaluda on the iPhone; authentic bullet-hell for your fingertips. I have a feeling I might end up with this.

"Why would we want to play around with custom fields, or add stupid meta boxes in the Edit Posts page and then teach our clients and/or content managers to use them? Why not just get rid of all those stuff and have them seperately in your main menu, and the meta boxes are customized to match the exact needs of certain post types." Which is exactly how I use WordPress in commercial installations, and every time I hack around this, I long for proper Top Level Things. This is a great feature, and it's going to make my life considerably easier. Let's hope they don't screw up the 3.0 release.

"Better alternatives [to the RAILS_ constants] have existed for a while in Rails core (some since 2.1.0), and it’s about damn time you start using them properly. There’s also some other helpful methods on the Rails module we’ll explore in this post." That was handy.

"As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service."

"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management." It's a detailed strategy, but well thought-through; I'm certainly going to bear some of this in mind in future (and, indeed, the way the release branches are handled is familiar).

More brilliant data-analysis and writing from OkTrends – perhaps my favourite data-blog out there, and one of my favourite discoveries in 2010 so far.

"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.

"Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette

"The premise is simple – it's the 1920's, and you're a guy on a decadent cruise liner, one of four you can pick from the outset. Something goes wrong, of course, and the ship begins to sink. You have one hour, in real time, to escape the ship, while rescuing as many survivors as possible. Halfway through the game, the ship begins to sink and floods with water. If the time runs out, you're dead." Wonderful sounding Clock-Tower-y survival game for the SNES.

"This is my Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform."

Dan interviewed Tale of Tales for Wired; this, published on his blog, is the full interview, and it's got lots of great stuff in it. I'm really not sold by them – indeed, I'm less sold by the firm than I am by their work – but it's interesting to hear something from the horse's mouth, as it were.

"Use and create Delicious bookmarks from the Safari web browser" – with a single keyboard shortcut. My main reason for sticking with Firefox was its Delicious integration, but if this is any cop, I think I'm save from terrible memory leaks for the future.

"I tend to see them as having much more in common with the approach of an architect or landscape designer in terms of shaping and creating flows, confluences and possibilities for enjoyment… As a result I really do think that critical appreciation and commentary from the world of architecture and design could be illuminating and progressive." Jones on the lack of perception – outside games criticism – of games as design objects (rather than media objects). It is excellent; I agree with it all.

Card-based dungeon-crawling game. Basically: card-driven roguelike. Should print it out and take a squint sometime.

"Taps is a temporary web service you run on a server that has access to the database you want to export. You can then run the client to connect to that service and pull data out of it in chunks. It works through firewalls, doesn’t require a direct ssh connection, and – best of all – it’s database independent. So you can export from a MySQL database and import to PostgreSQL, or vice versa."

Vast, detailed CHUD article on an older treatment Cameron wrote for Avatar, which does sound more interesting than the version we got; sadly, it also sounds very sprawling – there's even more world-building going on. Still, some elements cut from it – notably, Hegner – seem like a real shame to have lost.

"…the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist." Fantastic, dense, Wired article on DNF from Clive Thompson

"For 16 days I lived with it strapped to me as I climbed through the valleys of central Nepal up to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,200 meters." Wonderful review of the GF1, framed as a travelogue, with real photographs. I'd be quite happy if all camera reviews looked like this.

"Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action." Mark Lynas on the reality of China's actions at Copenhagen. Worrying.

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"After some delay I am now proud to announce that the complete Permanent Death saga is available for download. This definitive PDF version of the story, novel, machinima, whatever you want to call it, is something I am immensely proud of. I feel it eclipses both the scope and quality of anything I’ve ever produced before." It was a lovely endeavour, and still one of my favourite games – certainly of the decade, and perhaps ever.

"AquaPath is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you to evaluate XPath 2.0 expressions against any XML document and view the result sequence in a dynamic, intuitive tree representation." It is really good, and has already saved my bacon today.

Spotify playlists of videogame soundtracks, and links to soundtrack albums as well.

Photoshoot for Empire; actors pose in pastiches of scenes for which they are famous. But with the emphasis on looking hot. Some are weak, but Christian Bale and his fireaxe, and Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins, are great.

"Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." Oooh.

"Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less… but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed."