Fantastic, all of it.

Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.

"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.

"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."

"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.

"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.

"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.

"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.

I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.

"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.

"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.

That's sad; he was a fount of statistics since I first listened to TMS, and long before that.

"By wrapping and extending Flash 8's sound API, SoundManager 2 brings solid audio functionality to Javascript." Dark voodoo. Dark, clever, voodoo.

This was actually a pretty good tutorial for the jQuery UI Slider control, if only for illustrating how much code – notably markup/styles – you have to provide before the slider works.

Kyle Gabler of 2D Boy gives the first Global Game Jam keynote. Seven minutes, seven tips, packed with goodness. He's not wrong.

"I’m much more interested in automated nostalgia than automated presence – data feeds that gradually acrue in your wake, rather than constantly dragging your focus on to the next five minutes." Yes.

"Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag." Entertaining explanation of the changes in the White House in the style of World of Warcraft patch notes. No, really.

"News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period."

"Drop7 combines the easy fun of casual drop-and-break games with the smart, brain-stretching enjoyment of simple number puzzles." Chain Factor as-was hits the iPhone. It's very, very good. It's also $0.99 or 59p right now, so you should buy it.

"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!

"Obama Says: Yes We Can is a Simon Says game based on Barack Obama's New Hampshire Primary speech, as later turned into song by will.i.am. Watch the game create a pattern of button and direction presses, and repeat that pattern correctly to score! The more you get correct, the harder the patterns become – can you keep up?" Oh blimey.

Lots of good stuff in here I didn't know about, all for your DS, and all not illegal. Hurrah for homebrew.

"With DS Reader you can read any e-book (or text file) on your DS. It even has a great little bookmarking function to keep track of your progress." Ooh.

"Game Trivia Catechism is a multiple-choice trivia game, testing your knowledge of video gaming. It can be played as straight trivia, or as part of a story that follows Al and Sally as they compete in the King of Game Trivia Tournament." Looks awesome.

"Current mass-market games present simulations of incredible fidelity. Many of these titles also push genre boundaries and offer new mechanics to players. The problem, argues Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding (FAR CRY 2), is that these two developments are disconnected. Game output appears information-rich, but how much of that information can the player actually use to play better, and how much of it is just there to be spectacular or cinematic?" I would pretty much kill to see this. Gah.

For those of you who might not be aware of its size, James has put the size of Gaza in context through comparing it to maps of other cities. Simple, effective communication.

"As editorial director of Ladybird Books, Douglas Keen, who has died aged 95, was responsible for the first experience of reading of millions of children." Myself included; I learned to read with Peter, Jane, and my Mum, sitting on my bedroom floor each morning.

Amazingly, a few in here I didn't know – "move selection" and "delete only whitespace" for starters.

"I call this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. Covering both commercial and non-commercial games from the earliest arcade games through contemporaty titles, I look at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and education. The book reflects both theoretical and game-design goals." Add to cart.

"I won’t rant about how our tax dollars pay for these images and how we deserve better. But what I do find alarming is that these documents are used to brief major decision makers. These decision makers may know a thing or two about policy and politics, but if decoding and understanding the armed forces budget is the goal of these documents, then there is a huge failure here." Datafail and slidecrime, all under one roof.

"The true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal – whose rhetoric, far from empty, is the deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels the state forward safely and wisely. This is clearly what Obama, too, is aiming to embody: his project is to unite rhetoric, thought and action in a new politics that eschews narrow bipartisanship. Can Obama's words translate into deeds?" Nice article on rhetoric and oratory. Cicero really is quite the writer, you know; ages since I've read him, but this brings it all back.

"When the mechanics are broken there – no matter what great ingredients or designs you had – the dish disappoints. Execution is very much part of the analysis there – as is service, mis-en-scene. Food is never evluated (in the Guide Micheline sense) out of context… but the mechanics are fundamental to everything else." Robin Hunicke on another parallel to games criticism; I think she might be onto something, and it's another good contribution to the mound of Mirrors' Edge coverage.

"Though few gamers might be interested in long haul trucking, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on a small group of gamers and offering them the best experience they can get within their limited requirements. In fact, the more MMO developers who realize this—that a small group of loyal players is better than a huge group of disinterested players—the better, honestly." Very true – a nice conclusion to Matthew Kumar's round-up of a somewhat niche – but interesting sounding – browser MMO.

"The moisturiser, far from the trusted friend and counsellor of the first reading, is The Picture of Dorian Gray." Alex tries to read that Nivea ad that's all over stations right now. It is confusing.

"We think it's one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century." Awesome. This is why kids go into engineering.

"Maps, databases and other resources that help you dig deeper." A shame the raw data isn't available, but great they're collating this stuff and seeing it as another channel of news they provide.

"A favorite on college Unix systems in the early to mid-1980s, Rogue popularized the dungeon crawling computer game dating back from 1980 (and spawned entire class of derivatives known collectively as "roguelikes"). gandreas software now presents the classic for the iPhone/iPod Touch." Oh god, Rogue for the iPhone. Unusual gestural interface, but it's a perfect port, and brings back memories of being 7 all over again. Needless to say, I installed it immediately.

"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.

"Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish… There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.

"A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again… In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer

"Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.

"SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people… This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."

"At the start it seemed reasonable to think that Mirror's Edge could stand entirely on the merits of its brilliant core concept, and not need to include extraneous and negligibly attractive features to appeal to as many people as possible. But, no, this is the video game business." This is the stuff that's scaring me most about Mirror's Edge.

"…in recent years, [the stage has] moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity… We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids – heck, if we want all of us – to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality."

From Duncan Harris; postcards from post-apocalyptic DC.

Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.

Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine – the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.

Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?

"Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!

"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.

"The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.

This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.

"And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.

"The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."

"Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."

Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).

"Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.

A strong article from Joe on some guidelines, based on experience, for writing RSpec user stories.

Getting around the issues with Rails' authenticity tokens and trying to perform Ajax requests in jQuery.

"I think this is very important. If we limit ourselves to only designing the present then the ‘future’ will just happen to us, and the one we get will be driven by technology and economics. We need to develop ways of speculating that are grounded in fact yet engage the imagination and allow us to debate different possible futures before they happen." Interesting interview with Dunne over at the Adobe site.

Fingerboarding game for the iPod; really delightful, and clearly a fun thing to do with your fingers. Also: it makes sense to play this with the device on a flat surface, which is unusual for the iPod games released to date.

"The winner is Tim Graham who took manual personal data collection to another level. From email spam, to beverage consumption, to aches and pains, Tim embraced the spirit of self-surveillance. He even made his personal data available in the forums." Dataviz overload!

"What are the weird, seemingly unimportant data that can join up the areas we already know, and how do we know where to look for it? In order to be truly useful eyes on the street, we need to be able to take the scenic route, or shortcuts, or any other route that will be fun or illuminating for us and the people we speak to."

"Being able to go back and fix your mistakes is not the same as being forgiven for them. Maybe that’s what all those storybooks were trying to tell us." Lovely.

"If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while." Merlin Mann is very sensible.

"It seems to me that Tim and the nameless characters of the epilogue represent archetypes of some kind. They don’t stand in for every man and woman, certainly, but they’re emblematic of a certain kind of dysfunctional relationship, one where “I’ll protect you” turns into “I’ll control you.”" A smart, sharp reading of Braid, that understands its gameiness.

"The mouse is a continuous pointing device; the finger is discontinuous. That’s a profound difference that I wish I were able to clearly understand and explain." PPK on how MobileSafari responds to Javascript's mouse actions.

"I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think _because_ they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you." John Walker on the problem with BioWare's attitude to morality, and some potential solutions.

"Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player."

"I've heard that Japanese developers, who have traditionally held American game development in low esteem, have a great deal of respect for Bungie, and you can understand why. Bungie has done for shooters what Nintendo did for platformers: they've turned the visceral joys control and motion into the centerpiece of the game."

"Thomas Finchum, an American diver competing in Beijing, describes the view from the 10-meter platform at the Water Cube." Incredible, interactive panorama from the top board in the Water Cube.

"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.

"One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates… It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition."