hooray it’s a weekend of early access to the Guild Wars expansion! but with 150 new skills will i ever be competitive in PvP again?? at least with over 4 million people with the game there’s gotta be some i can still pummel… time for a lot of careful skill description reading and forum trolling. 
oh and of course no release would be complete without a swift kick in the nuts from misbehaving graphics drivers. oh my poor nuts!! why god why??
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ack i’m finally feeling better after getting sick my last day in Finland and spending the last two weeks with mucus and blood pouring out of my major orifices and my brain acting like meat sauce all while trying to catch up on everything from work! ohhhh it’s been miserable. those Finns sure have some crazy powerful viruses.
anyways… day 4 of assembly was quite cool since with the demo submitted we finally had a chance to explore Helsinki and more of the party place. it was especially cool talking to preacher about his demos and coding tricks. then came the compos. the browser demos were quite amazing. i never expected flash to be capable of what everyone is doing with it these days. if adobe can keep optimizing the runtime i look forward to saying good bye to Win32 forever. the short film compo was also very nice and i especially liked Realtime Demo Wannabe. the 64k compo was a bit disappointing since there were only three entries this year.
finally the demo compo. and this deserves it’s own paragraph. 
this year’s demos at assembly were EPIC! there really should have been 3 or 4 1st places awarded because there were a lot of deserving prods. the best of course was ASD’s Life Force. this is one for the history books. i look forward to telling my grandchildren that i was at assembly the year this monster was released. for me it’s up there with second reality, heaven seven, and the product as something everyone will look back on as a defining production of the demoscene. yeah nice work ASD! my other favorite of the compo was Conspiracy’s f07 which has so much great energy to it. there was also the demo trace, neurokin, and i threw together sokuseki which didn’t hold up at all on the big screen and sandwiched between high energy behemoth productions haha. it was still cool to see it on the big screen in front of so many people though.
after the party i caught up on some much needed sleep only to wake up crazy sick and suffer through the long flight home. doh!! at least when i got back i found out Scratchy also had a great vacation. apparently he found a girlfriend at the boarding place and played with her every day while i was gone. usually it takes him a couple days to get back to his normal insane self but this time he was immediately bouncing off the walls when we got home.
Life Force |
F07 |
Sokuseki |
Sokuseki |
Sokuseki |
Realtime Demo Wannabe |
it’s assembly day 3!! wow, where have the days gone already?
i was pretty much a zombie on thursday after so many long hours of travelling. i did manage to keep my eyes open long enough to attend the funny demoscene outreach panel though. it was an hour or something of gloom, sir garbagetruck, gargaj, and waffle attempting to explain to non-sceners what the demoscene is about. i’m not sure they made it so clear though – especially with some hilarious attempted analogies by gloom!
friday from early in the morning until 5am trace and i spent working on our demo. we thought the final deadline was 8pm but thanks to preacher we found out we could continue updating it after the submission deadline which helped a ton. it’s been very fun working on this one. it’s so much simpler collaborating on a demo when you’re sitting next to someone than over instant messenger and e-mail with an 8 hour time difference!
friday night the 4k intros were shown and there are some amazing entries this year! my favorites are northern dragons’ step back and rgba’s stiletto. now i can’t wait for tonight to see the 64k intros and demos. i’m especially excited to see the xna entries and also asd’s latest which i got just a peek of and my jaw dropped!