OOO had a Bling party to celebrate adding money (called ‘Bars’, which can be bought for ~ 9 cents USD) to Whirled. We’re also doing some exciting contests which have generated a little media attention and swathes of new visitors to the site which has been fun to watch. The bling party was a ton of fun, and I got to take my soon-to-be wedding dress on a trial run. My first corset ever, so sexy and comfortable! Ladies, you need to check out Damsel in this Dress and get yourself one. :D

This morning we attended a Proposition 8 protest rally which was energizing but not totally directing. Some speakers talked about love and the importance of accepting people of faith into the movement, others emphasized the fact that this was an amendment based on hatred and pointed fingers at the Mormon church, whose members were the primary funders of the Yes campaign. The Yes advertisements focused heavily on the impact it would have on our children. Particularly, people seemed to be worried about “confusing” their kids by teaching them about LGBT. And we wonder why education is so terrible in the US: I guess math and science could “confuse” kids as well, let’s just take those out of the curriculum to protect the little darlings.

Last night we watched the election results roll in at the 21st amendment brewpub. There was much cheering and rejoicing when the westcoast polls closed and they immediately announced Obama as winner. There wasn’t much doubt in my mind that he wouldn’t win, but it was wonderful to see such a high voter turnout for such an important election, and to see him win by such a wide margin (TWICE the electoral votes).

But if all the young liberal kids finally came out to vote for Obama, it wasn’t enough in California. They passed Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution once again banning same-sex marriage in California. On the plus side they did just pass a $10 billion train from San Francisco to L.A. Maybe that’ll help spread our libral influence to all the curmudgonly folks down there who keep forcing their religious views on people they don’t know and will never meet.

Had a good Halloween this year. Colin and I both had costumes for the Three Rings potluck night, to which I contributed “The Stuff” fruit dip and deviled eyeballs. I think the effort spent on presentation outweighed the fact that I can’t cook, and for one reason or another people seemed genuinely frightened by the food I brought. I’m putting the leftover Stuff into milkshakes for Colin.

We spent Friday at a friend’s party in a fantastically decorated house. Our costumes this year were alright: I sewed ping pong balls to black clothes and went as a mocap person, and Colin was a pretty convincing post-apocalyptic space pirate. It’s the beard I think: it’s like he was meant to wear a pirate hat. I’ll post pictures when they come up.

Flywrench: great game or greatest game?

http://www.messhof.com/games/flywrench.php

Flywrench is a game by Mark Essen who also wrote one of my other favorite games: You Found the Grappling Hook

It is artistically sublime.

The music by Jordan Stone is among my favorite tracks to a game ever. Along with the writing and the graphical style this makes Flywrench a game that will reach into your head and caress your brain.

It has surprising depth. The existing levels barely scratch the surface of what’s possible, so the included level editor makes a ton of sense. There is a steepish learning curve but it feels really good learning to manouver and hurl the Flywrench through harder and more dynamic environs. By the end of the game you can feel the depths of possiblity open before you.

Mark Essen should really get this on xBox live and earn some cash off of it. It’s amazing.

Sarah and I are, right now, attending Adobe’s Flash Camp for flash 10.

It’s like a hack-a-thon pre-release thing for CS4. Sarah is writing some code but I’m eschewing the hacka-a-thon thing and just watching the demos of the new flash tools and player.

But they are giving us a copy of the Flash Authoring Tool and Flex builder. So I feel like I should blog about it to pay them back a bit.

They are doing really cool things.

Fantastic Contraption runs about 14% faster on the new player and it cleans up some memory leaks I couldn’t track down. Although some of the animation stuff adds in new memory leaks. I hope those will be gone by the time it hits release.

The FAT is getting a huge update. So big that I’m sure alot of animators are going to have to re-learn alot of what they do. I’m not a FAT expert and I find doing anything in it a frustrating experience. So instead of these sweeping changes uppsetting me and my workflow they just make things work in a much more sensible way. It’s like they sat down and just said “ok, this is stupid. how should it have worked to begin with?” and just made it work like that.

The native 3d stuff is cool as hell. They have two seperate ways to work with 3d. One is the standard import stuff, write code to control stuff, full on 3d workflow.

The other is for animators. So you can define planes with pictures and graphics on them. And then define their location in 3-space and in relation to eachother. And then move them around. Even in the FAT. So this is a quick way to get some 3d effects in your UIs.

Right now a guy is demoing the inverse-kinematics stuff. Which is really cool. You actually define a skeleton and how it bends in the FAT and then you can animate the skeleton really easily.

Which, if I understand it correctly, should make it really easy to make a character walk programatically along uneven terrain and stuff. Which is wicked.

And there are some new API changes to the flash library. Some stuff that Sarah’s company has been waiting with for with baited breath actually.

And the Flex Authoring tool is getting alot better. Like it will intelli-sense your own classes now.

So I like what they are doing. Ties into the graphics card. Opening the SWF format. Very cool stuff.

Lets hope things keep going this way and M$ doesn’t take over the field with Silverlight and then stagnate all innovation. Like they do with everything they touch.