how cool!  Guild Wars was nominated by GameSpot for Best Graphics (Technical), Best Graphics (Artistic), Best Multiplayer Game, Most Innovative Game, Best Roleplaying Game, and Best PC Game for 2005.

a great way to introduce your un-enlightened friends to the demo scene is with trixter's mindcandy dvd. just make sure they understand the context or they'll be all like "uhh i don't get it.'  this is especially true with the old school side of the dvd.

the selection of demos in mindcandy is pretty good, but a demo i really want on dvd is tribes.  when i saw it for the first time it burrowed deep into my brain and created a home for itself there.  i don't think i've seen anything else as magical or brilliant.  i actually never got to see the ending until many years later because it always crashed on my old pc.  fortunately an emulator was made so you can watch it in windows (you need to do this now if you've never seen it before!).  i think it's too late to get it onto the second demo dvd, but here's hoping for volume three.  :)

the new korn album is killer.  if you're a fan of good music (who isn't?) give it a listen.

well i changed blog software.  i was using betaparticle, but got fed up with its bugs so i switched.  it was nice to be sure, but i kept having to manually fix the database and was finding too many problems with content in comments or posts.  blah.  i still haven't updated all the templates and styles for this new one yet so stuff might be crazy.  who knows.  oh the rss url changed so if you have some fancy software you might need to update that.  :)  oh but check it out.  a comments rss feed.  oooh it's so shiny and cool!

i'm in love with maxscript. if you don't know, it's the scripting
system for 3dsmax. i had some good times with it like five years ago,
but we parted ways when when i started using maya. maya has its own
scripting system called mel, but i never really hit it off with mel and
instead just stuck with c++ plugins.

one nice thing with maxscript is that you can write quick exporters
with it. it is also incredibly simple to build ui to make using your
script easy. but the best thing is the bizarre language itself and how
that maps to dealing with 3d objects and animations. for example:

in coordsys world rotate obj angle [0, 1, 0]
in coordsys local move obj [100, 0, 0]

that rotates the object obj angle degrees about the y-axis then
moves it 100 units in that direction. it's a joy after spending many
hours in c++ to write some maxscript and sprinkle in these domain
specific keywords among the usual for loops and if statements.
another fun example is animation:

animate on (
    at time 0 move obj [0, 0, 0]
    at time 15 move obj [100, 0, 0]
)

anyhow, to make some objects or meshes in c++ and animate them in some
interesting way takes an obscene amount of code. doing the same thing
in maxscript is just a couple dozen lines and along with a sandwich and
cup of tea makes for a great evening. ;)