well the supreme commander beta ended this weekend and now i have to wait until the end of the month to play again.  i don't know if i can make it.... yeah i got pretty addicted.  :) 

there are so many great new things supcom introduces to rts games.  i really like seeing the rate of change of resources.  it definitely changes the way you think about your economy.  i love how good the action queuing is.  it's great to queue up 10 minutes of work for some engineers and go off and micro some battles letting your base build itself up without so much attention.  having units assist each other and even buildings assist each other is great.  being able to zoom so far out works really well for coordinating large armies and ordering around fast moving planes.  the sci-fi setting is awesome and the tech 3 buildings and experimental units are a blast. 

it does have its flaws though so i hope they spend time tuning it after release.  it took something like 16 patches to warcraft 3 before i really began liking it so supcom is starting in a much better position.  plus it has the same initials as starcraft.  this one could be huge.  :)

i might have slept through all of friday, but a UPS dude woke me up to give me a copy of mindcandy volume 2.  how considerate!  it totally made my day.  massive respect to trixter and everyone else who put it together.  i'm sure my poor 360 is going to be completely sick of it soon though as i have it on non-stop random repeat.

oooh now that all my internets are working again i should mention an exciting development for russian speakers.  an old text i wrote about packing lightmaps into texture sheets has been translated into russian and posted on www.gamedev.ru!  you can check it out at www.gamedev.ru/users/coriolis/articles/Packing_Lightmaps

russian letters are so cool! they've even got a backwards N.  that's perfect.  :)

thursday night coming home from a company christmas party there was a crazy windstorm and i had to dodge branches and such that littered the roads (which didn't seem all that odd because the party was at an arcade so i had already spent a couple hours driving crazy in rush and other games).  i came home to find the electricity was out and after fumbling around in the dark for some time trying to find my flashlight i gave up and went to sleep. 

there was still no power friday and it turns out over a million other homes in the area were without electricity.  fortunately there was power at work so i stayed very late that day playing starcraft with jonathan (pro), isaiah (gosu), and some chobos.  at home i found my flashlight but the batteries were dead and that set me off on a quest across the dark surrouding cities looking for a store with power and batteries.  it seems a million other people were busy doing the same so i found nothing but loooong lines and empty spaces where the D batteries and non perishable foods should have been.  it was actually rather fun being in this weird post apocalyptic setting and i was half hoping i'd run into some zombies.

so, saturday was more of the same stuff with no power, crazy lines for everything, hanging out at work for hot water and starcraft, and still no zombies.  now it's sunday and the fun of the whole event has kinda worn out and i can't wait for the power to come back on.  i'm looking forward to a hot shower, warm food, and not having to wear half a dozen layers of clothing to keep warm.

oww my brain hurts from switching between c++, lua, ruby, and maxscript.  does everyone really need to define different syntax for the same stuff?  look if you're going to make a language with if, for, while, etc just use the c syntax ok??  thanks.  :)

pat introduced me to gruff the other day (it's a nice library for ruby to make pretty graphs) and now my brain can't stop thinking of all the fantastic uses to put it to (99.999% of which are completely unnecessary of course!)  gruff's very easy to use but has its quirks.  like it'll explode if you give it an empty string ("") sometimes and doing horizontal bar graphs is rather more difficult than vertical bar graphs which is odd. 

completely unrelated to this, i finally broke down and succumbed to the google invasion.  now i've got gmail, calendar, and goofy web docs and spreadsheets going on.  oh my, it's a googlification!  dearest google, enjoy mining my data and if you find something interesting please let me know!

and speaking of candy, halloween in guild wars this year was sweet.  i was quite fortunate to have been chosen by the mad king for a round of paper scissors rock.  i selected rock but the mad king beat me with paper which was all quite shocking because i'm generally really good at paper scissors rock.  and now to please the cookie thing here are some screens from the event:
kamadan got spooktacular, psr with the king, one too many drinks, chillin with my bro in candy corn form (it's important for you to know that i'm the one on the right).  this may all seem oddly familiar but this time it's 2006.

if you're clenching your fists while reading this it's because i still owe you a copy of nightfall.  don't fret, i should have the rest of my copies real soon now.