"Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire."

"In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means." Rands helps you discover what the words actually mean. As usual, he is right.

A game about protest, conflict, and shades of gray. Worth playing through to the 'end'; certainly made me think, and unlike any game I've played in a while. Not sure how this passed me bay.

"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.

"Finally, if one can wrap a game around a complex issue like the national budget and engage that many young people, we should be able to do the same with other important policy issues, from climate change to health care. The budget was about the most boring issue one could take on compared to Lost, Heroes, World of Warcraft, or playing Moto Racer on the iPhone." Really interesting set of conclusions from a large-scale serious game.

"There was once a world of living robots. But one day a bad accident occured in the main power generator. The world fell into a deep sleep. Bring life back to the world!" Wonderful animation and art design, and a charming little game. It'll take you about 10-20 minutes. It's brilliant.

Dustin Curtis didn't like the American Airlines website, and complained on his blog; a UX architect from AA gets back to him and explains how things are; Dustin responds. I need to write something longer on this, but in a nutshell: I understand Dustin's position, but it feels naive, and I think he confuses corporate culture with business practice. I want my airline to have a corporate culture of conservatism and fustiness, just like I want my bank to be severe and serious. That doesn't meant their website has to suck, but it also doesn't mean that their sucky website is their CEO's fault.

"ART & COPY reveals the stories behind and the personal odysseys of some of the most influential advertising visionaries of our time and their campaigns, including Lee Clow (Apple Computer 1984, and today’s iPod); Dan Wieden (“Just Do It”); Phyllis K. Robinson (who invented the “me generation” with Clairol); Hal Riney (who helped President Reagan get re-elected); and George Lois (who saved MTV and launched Tommy Hilfiger overnight). Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, HYPE!, SCRATCH), ART & COPY captures the creative energy and passion behind the iconic campaigns that have had a profound impact on American culture." Sounds good – Scratch was excellent.

"I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come." Meanwhile, Anil Dash drops the awesome.

"This is what Tim O’Reilly warned about in his definition of Web 2.0. He said that one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace." Chris Messina, being thoughtful about the Facebook Usernames issue…

"'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"

"…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.

"When the glasses are in the tray, the eye chart appears in focus. When the glasses are removed, it appears blurry. Concept by Fiona Carswell for an eyeglass tray using thermochromatic ink and a pressure sensor."

A technique page from a working photographer with quite a few useful tips and technique articles linked off it.

Lots of great stuff in this talk from Mike Kuniavsiky from this year's ETech. I like this explanation of (the confusingly-titled) "avatar", and some of his points on service design are excellent. Lots of meat in here; make sure you get the PDF.

This is ridiculous.

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.

"…kids are utterly, utterly obsessed with fairness. It's the most important element in any game. And human rule-enforcement is automatically deemed unfair. There is no referee, umpire or god-like grandparent that can escape being seen as unfair at some point, for some decision. But the commanding voice of Cosmic Catch escapes all that. The relentless, ineluctable judgement of the RFID machine brooks no argument, is prey to no human frailties and biases and is immediately seen as fair."

It's more cursor*10, and it's as fiendish and entertaining as ever. The impaled-cursor is particularly cute.

"Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture." Which puts it nicely, but god, this is depressing.

Very, very good – reminds me a bit of Galcon, but it's much more resource-driven and less twitchy. Nice and simple, and well-executed.

"Arrrr me harteys. Thar be a meatship ahead in the oven…. Floating high on the 17,000 calorie seas, made with Bacon, sausages, pastry, mince, it's all meat, and it's coming to rape and pillage your arteries! Har har!" Uh-oh.

"The key point, it seems to me, is to recognize that gameplay has tonality. Just as music, a non-representational medium, can evoke certain moods and emotions, game mechanics can elicit emotional states." Some good thoughts here about games as Gesamtkunstwerk.

"The only difference between the end of Pownce and the end of Magnolia was that just one of those pieces of plug-pulling was planned. From the perspective of the people running those services, that’s a huge difference. From my perspective as an avid user of both services, it felt the same."

"The game's hook is quite simple: upper-case Helvetica words fall slowly from the top of the screen, and you drag a missing letter from each to its properly kerned spot. The closer you are and the faster you manually drop the word, the better you do. Miss your goal by an inch and you lose a life… errr, ligature, which you can gain back by being right on the spot." Hah! Must try that.