Nachimir

It was given four out of five cosmic vibrations by the Woo Woo Institute. -- Today has been the first Monday for weeks I've not had a mashed up face. It's nice I've also finally got to the end of a grueling sequence of events in London and Nottingham. October is usually quite busy, but the last few months in particular have consisted of one thing after another. GameCity was the peak, and now it's done I can go back to not skipping sleep. Phew. The laser assault course ran well, though there were hardware and software bugs we'll be ironing out for future versions. It looked even better than we thought it would, with some of the lasers really bright and visible from all over the room.

If you sleep submerged in water, it becomes homeopathic sleep and you need a lot less of it.

(A lot of sleep science seems to be "science". Or at least, it's yet another part of academic and commercial research that is besieged by PRs and journos waiting or willing to blow anything out of proportion). Last I heard was 7 hours. It seems to vary for everyone; one of my housemates seems to get by fine on five every night. If you're waking and feel fine, then you're probably okay, but if everything seems frayed and you're tired all the time, maybe you need more.

Kingz, Jennoa, and myself were blowing stuff up last night near Patters castle. We thought we should totally come up with turn based rules for some people to besiege the castle with TNT, and some people to defend.

Wasn't there simply "Dizzy" before Treasure Island Dizzy? I remember having to use a mucky greasegun on a minecart, and a really tricky puzzle involving one chance to collect a silver lining from a cloud. That one puzzle really fucked you if you got it wrong. Fantasy World Dizzy was the peak for me. Amstrad magazine published a really excellent map someone sent in, done in felt tips

Oh, that's in there of course! Along with songs from The Pink Panther, Batman, Predator, etc., and stuff like this: http://open.spotify.com/track/4bZ59NDxuKD8eFPNobuxpT Stuff like this: http://open.spotify.com/track/1esFCXKW7Ysxc0TXqCjke2 and stuff like this: http://open.spotify.com/track/4H9KsfvjMmw6nffR1ozsZ7 We have about 4 hours worth of playlists, and are looking for more. If anyone has any suggestions they think would be appropriate, I'm all ears.

Well, mistakes were made. There was also a weird server bug where it blew up, then everything reappeared (I guess the client played through something it shouldn't have before the server caught up). It was successfully blown up on the 4th attempt or so; video to follow

Likewise, was wiring up the gravel pyramids, and had to pause the game. When I clicked on "Return to game", a TNT block was behind it and started flashing. Whoops. Edit: Oops, also just blew out the floor of my tower while attempting to pack the tree with TNT.

I love that he's wearing a little captain's hat, and most of the crew punctuate their status reports with long pauses, interruptions, "um" and "like".

We're totally going to make some people do it to the Beverley Hills Cop theme

Well obviously it's a satellite phone... Seriously though, what Kingz said. It doesn't even look like there's anything in the hand. Maybe she was holding her coat collar up against a draft, or hiding a zit, or a bit camera shy, or whatever. All you can see is that she has a hand near her face; there could be many reasons for that, but nowadays we tend to interpret that as cellphone usage because it's the most common cause for that pose.

A lot of what I built is obsidian. Suppose I could at least blow the glass out and set the tree on fire

Bah: I cornered too fast and my bike crossed the road in traffic without me this morning. Luckily just grazes and it wasn't a particularly busy road, but my glasses got run over by the car behind, thankfully not me. A truck stopped in time to not crush my bike. My fault. I'm learning a lot about autumn weather and my tyres; I'm used to only riding in dry or warm and wet conditions, when you can push things quite far :-( Woo: I'm building a laser assault course for GameCity on Friday. I prototyped it with working code, three red lasers and a smoke machine on Saturday, and it worked amazingly. The smoke lingers and (in the dark) makes perfectly visible beams for about 30 minutes. Breaking one of them makes this sound and knocks 5 seconds off a countdown. I'm pretty excited about building the whole thing; we have a stock of about 40 lasers if we need them.

I love that the uploader left the buildup on this. Also that someone actually put that sound effect in an apparently serious film. Twice: d7Dfi-b-qns This little rant about the UK governments drastic spending cuts makes me piss laughing: rhwEmfXMvMw

I thought you could reskin Trillian? I used to use that when I still had a windows box, and you're absolutely right about the default looking like something off a driver CD.

Cool, sent a little and will do it monthly. I take it that URL still works to connect to the server in Minecraft too?

I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to DDoS and blackmail.

That's quite similar to this animation bug in Dragon Age too: VDanX-beShQ

I'm fine with people not liking pixel stuff. It's the dismissing it as "easy" or "lazy" that I'm not cool with. Working out how to do it in a first person interface was fun and as difficult as any other structure I've made. Basically, what I'm saying is that if elmuerte were my kid, he'd be up for adoption, and if I were his kid, I'd be legally divorcing him. Thanks!

That's absolutely fantastic

I think it's a bit less above the clouds, and a bit more below. My tower is built as high as it can be, and only the top sticks through them. Clouds have a uniform height of around 4 or 5 blocks too, and don't quite align with the blocks in the world.

Well done. How many entries? If yours was a short, that's pretty good going for getting an honourable mention out of 18 million words!

Incredible Not *quite* the game it's aimed at, but close: Im at the end of disc two in Valkyria Chronicles.

Yeah, apart from the cognitive effort of working out the grid, colours, and how to build it out of blocks in a three dimensional space while working against gravity, then the time to do it. Only a little bit more than CTRL+C CTRL+V.

Why?