I've got a way to go with Abel yet; I can't do FADCs at all, but the earlier stuff looks useful.

The title sequence to a Saturday morning kids' cartoon series. Of Watchmen. It is not, shall we say, particularly reverent. Probably better for it.

Tom's been poking Heroku, and now, so have I. It's proper brilliant: a rackup file, a tiny Sinatra app, and the Heroku gem, and you're building webapps in ten minutes. It's crazy and brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing of which we need more of.

"It’s new fun in some Russian cities, to jump from the bridge with the rope in a big group, when there is no water under the bridge but raw firm ice, also they use to jump at that same moment when the train is going thru the bridge". The pictures explain it pretty well.

"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.

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.

"When it’s just you, the rooftops and Faith’s slim repertoire of jumps, shimmies, slides and rolls, it’s something like the urban Tarzan game we all hoped Mirror’s Edge would be. Time Trial mode rewards practice and it rewards perseverance, and it’s the only reason to buy Mirror’s Edge." An interesting take on Mirror's Edge, which has a lot of truth in it.

"Thank you to everyone who emailed asking about a World of Goo Soundtrack. This is probably as close to an "official" soundtrack I'll ever make for the game World of Goo. I'm making it available here on my personal portfolio for free." No, thank you, Kyle.

A useful guide, although perhaps more detailed than you'd normally need. Still, clear instructions for handling reverting changes in git.

"Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle."

112 different games1 It's amazing to think that "Moving Shields" and "Zigzagging Laser Bombs" could be counted as different game-types, though, and presumably that number comes from all possible combinations. The videogame industry's obsession with bullet-points on the box is deep-rooted, it seems. (From Simon Parkin's lovely "Box Art" blog).

"Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them." The first of the new snacks was served on March 2, 1971, at Hasir, his restaurant in Berlin. It was called a doner kebab after the Turkish word "dondurmek" which means a rotating roast." So now you know.

Olly Moss has now moved from movies to videogames, pastiching classic Penguin covers; the Goldeneye one is superb.

"Whiskey Media provides fully structured data APIs for the following: Giant Bomb (games) Comic Vine (comics) Anime Vice (anime/manga)". This is a really good page for both explaining what you can and can't do, and explaining what the damn thing is. Wonder how good the data is?

"Have you ever wanted to sink your hooks into a gaming database full of release dates, artwork, games, platforms, and other sorts of related data? I'm going to guess that, for the bulk of you, the answer's probably no. But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use." Giant Bomb really are doing some pretty interesting stuff, alongside their more traditional content.

"Customers seem to respond better to the Sims than all the adventure games ever made combined together. Then there are Bejeweled and Peggle and other game games. Who needs a stink’n story? I prefer making interactive stories." The writer of "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble", interviewed on RPS, drops an interesting one.

"The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one? I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life." Ben, on the details of The Paper. Good stuff in here.

"This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper." Which, right now, is what I need. For a former front-end-dev, I'm a bit behind the curve.

"So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads." Fascinating interview with a smart guy, who at one point in his life, did some bad (if not entirely unethical) work.

"I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on." There is loads in this interview that is awesome; it was hard to choose a quotation. Rigopulos is super-smart.

"On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Perfectly executed.

"The Bop It commands are called out in different tones. These tones differ from version to version as well. In Bop It Blast, distinct tones are employed by both male and female speakers." I did not know that.

"A couple of other examples of this kind of thing we like, are the bookish experimentations of B.S. Johnson, whose second novel Alberto Angelo contains both stream-of-conciousness marginalia, and cut-through pages enabling the reader to see ahead – possibly the most radical act I know in experimental books." Yes! And which I bang on about interminably. I love this stuff.

Daily git tips. So far, they've all been rather handy, and given they're nice and short makes recommending this as a subscription easy.

A "museum" of Flash site loading screens. Not sure what to say, really.

Nothing out of the ordinary, but the take-on-release tip is a good one, and I'll be checking out Pano.

Because I've never known how to spell it until now, and it's one of my favourite words.

Very beautiful, and, so far, very sensible implementation of touch interactions. Looking forward to playing much more of this over the holidays.

"Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based – word-based, even – non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy."

"Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental "awesoments" that compose all good things. The Periodic table of Awesoments can be a very useful tool. It's designed to show the relationships between awesoments, and often one can even predict how awesoments interact simply by their positions on the table."

Very good – some good stuff around how the library works, but also lots of basics around how to optimise Javascript.

Gerard Way reviews Left 4 Dead on My Chemical Romance's (totally excellent) blog.

"Left 4 Dead is out
Friends kill zombies together
Is it worth getting?"
Yes Gerard, it is.

"If you want a recipe for restless sleep, I can give you one. Add one part “what will my wife think” with 3,000 parts Benjamin Franklin; stir in a “beer anytime you damn well please” and top with a chance at financial independence."

"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.

"These concepts are not complicated by Cern standards. We are entering a zone which is weaponised to boggle."

Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.

Yes, this is going to come in handy.

"This javascript function can then read in the current content of the text area, format it using a trimmed down version of textile, and then set the content of a DIV with the resulting HTML. The end result of all this is live comment preview, with textile formatting." Live textile preview functionality.

"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. … Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"It's just an Nintendo in a toaster, but I like it."