"I shouldn't even explain it- you should probably just youtube some gameplay footage if you're interested and watch the insanity." Gerard Way on quitting Force Unleashed – and hinting that he's going to talk more about other games he's given up on. That should be interesting.

Some well-worn tales here, but also some good new ones, particularly when it comes to query-profiling and all forms of caching.

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.

Roo writes up his first experiments with his microprinter. The barcode stuff is particularly interesting.

"Hackers across the country are buying up old old receipt printers and imaginatively repurposing them into something new. We call them microprinters." pbwiki site for gathering resources around microprinters. Nice! Still waiting on mine (from the same load as Roo's) to arrive, though…

"With that in mind, I present to you a gallery of paintings made by one Hoenikker J. Troll, hunter at large and painter at other times. He dragged an easel and paints all around this world. Of Warcraft." WoW screengrabs run through artistic filters. Some are really quite pretty, as, to be honest, is the source material.

"…video games are driven by the player, experientially and emotionally. Fictional content–setting, characters, backstory– is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place– the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking." Some commentary on the scale of storymaking games offer, from Steve Gaynor. Also: I like the word "storymaking", as opposed to "storytelling".

A pretty comprehensive list, I think.

AASM is "a library for adding finite state machines to Ruby classes. AASM started as the acts_as_state_machine plugin but has evolved into a more generic library that no longer targets only ActiveRecord models." And as a result, I might be using it a bit.

A nice post to end the year from Kars – it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.

"Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation." Yehuda Katz weighs in with a great, informative post.

"Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that." No, really. Not an April Fool. It sounds like the architecture changes that are going to be made are going to be a big win for Rails 3. Looking forward to it.

Not concerned with the Javascript bundle, but the Vibrant Ink syntax-highlighting link is lovely.

"Rails Metal is a thin wrapper around Rails’ new Rack middleware support." Which means you can process requests outside of ActionPack, which is useful for the odd performance boost in certain places. Interesting to see concerns separating out within Rails like this.

"I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is – probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with." Blimey.

"Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."

"Losing is an opportunity that individuals deserve, and allowing the state to sweep in and save you from the consequences of your own actions robs you of a certain kind of agency." Fantastic article about the difference between win/lose and quit/finish. Lots of good stuff in here – a must-read.

"The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does not work. Tests are not something that should be left for the inexperienced; tests are the hard part."

"The analysis presented here explores word usage in the 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. The purpose is to explore the structure of speech, as characterized by the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and noun phrases. The speech patterns of opposing candidates are compared in an effort to identify characteristic value and personality traits."

"How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.

"The suits took issue with every brave, authority-questioning page of our Meet the Sandvich script-specifically that there were supposed "similarities" between it and the 1987 action film Predator, and more specifically that it was word for word the 1987 action film Predator."

"Each issue of this unique title is 3,840 half-inch-square panels of nothing but dots talking to each other. The concept is that everyone is drawn so far away that all you can see is a dot. And the dots do stuff. Like smack each other, or give birth, or die. It’s brilliant, it’s hilarious, and it’s mind-blowing."

"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it… you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?

Wonderful.

"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people… Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."

"Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity… Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.

"Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.

"With a recent project, we really started utilizing extensions with named_scope which is very powerful and cleaned up our code considerably." Some really nice examples of using named_scope effectively.

"Nintendo makes money with the hardware alone, which may be a superior business model." What, making profit on units rather than selling them at colossal loss is a *superior* business model? Who would have thought it!

Long thread of patched and hacked 8-bit and 16-bit ROMs, some bringing a vast amount of customisation.

"I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic." Fantastic article about Jim Jannard and his Red digital movie-camera business.

Brilliant, brilliant little advert.

"VideoGamesHero brings you homebrew action at it's best – offering lasting fun and challenging action with over 65 Songs, 5 Game modes, Motion Card and Guitar Grip support, there is something for everyone!" Homebrew Harmonix-style rhythm action game for the ds. Awesome.

"In this extensive interview, Yasuhara outlines his carefully constructed theories of fun and game design, including the differences between American and Japanese audiences, with illustrated documents." Lots of nice things in here, including a section on "tidying up".

"APIdock is a web app that provides a rich and usable interface for searching, perusing and improving the documentation of projects that are included in the app." Handy.

"I think the role of the architecture diagram, user flow, and wireframe belongs very much after the fact, after we’ve sketched and prototyped an experience. Those are tools to document what has been agreed through sketching and prototyping. They are not the best means for solving challenging design problems." That seems like a good way of putting it.

"In this template you'll find shared layers (masters) for a title page, wireframe, wireframe/storyboard hybrid, simple storyboard, and storyboard with notes. Column guides and a regular grid make it easy to use and keep your layout tight." Nice .graffle templates for UX designers.

Timelapse, merged photographs of videogames. Beautiful, especially Tempest.