I happened to preview this album, and it’s the xianxia style I fell for on the very first listen. Why did 《相思引》 sound so familiar? Turns out a friend who plays 诛仙 had played it for me before. That reminds me — some of Liu Fang’s covers of classics are great too, and they really hold up. For a while I even had her version of 《青花瓷》 as my phone ringtone.

On September 4, 2009, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (http://blog.sina.com.cn/kaifulee) left Google. The Creative Factory site surfaced. This should have been a great thing, but it kicked off an argument on a few IT blogs. http://initiative.yo2.cn/archives/642502 That post blew up. Just in case it gets “harmonized,” here’s a copy: http://www.innovation-works.com/New.asp 1. ASP — is that innovation? 2. In English, “news” and “new” are two completely different words, right? New.asp shows just what a knockoff job the outsourcing firm that built the site did. 3. I won’t even mention the td-based page layout; the real kicker is content=”text/html; charset=gb2312” — that alone deserves a good rant. 4. Under Media Contact, there’s actually a .doc file. Honestly, I can’t be bothered to install Word these days, and if it were installed I couldn’t be bothered to open it — I just drag everything into G Docs. Good thing it isn’t .docx. 5. Fine, the English version is UTF-8, but http://en.innovation-works.com/new.asp?page=1‘ throws an error.

These past two months, what I’ve been watching wasn’t movies — it was loneliness… Finally, though, I watched something with a bit of substance — last night I saw District 9.

I remember it only officially came out yesterday, and today there’s already a download… I’d like to play it too, but I never imagined a pirated copy would show up this fast. Is this game getting a lot of attention?

Last night I got to that mission, can’t remember the exact name. It’s the one you pick up from Playboy X — head into the construction site and kill a few gang leaders. I died a ton of times. Every restart meant driving for ages just to get back to the site, and I don’t even want to talk about how much time that wasted. Sigh… The combat in this mission is great though — lots of enemies, plenty of cover, outdoors, and it doesn’t show you where all the enemies are, so it feels pretty realistic.

It’s been a long time since I last played an RTS. Yan asked me how to deal with the aliens in Kane’s Wrath, which got me reminiscing about Red Alert 3 and Tiberium Wars all over again.Along the way I remembered a one-line tip I once gave to a newbie — let me share it:

Been swamped lately with a few websites, running myself half to death, but my resource pool is finally about to free up. Recycling worker thread 0… recycled successfully, resources released. Recycling worker thread 1… recycled successfully, resources released…

Plants vs. Zombies won over a lot of players with its adorable art and casual style — I’m one of them. Recently, while digging around for games, I found another management sim with the same cute look: Farm Frenzy 3. I never played the earlier titles, but judging from the description and screenshots, it’s a small, neat, thoroughly entertaining casual game too. Game overview: A farm simulation game, similar to QQ Farm — except this one is level-based. You keep completing tasks to move on to the next level, and the more money you make, the better farm equipment you can buy. You build five types of farms across the world’s five continents, i.e. five major levels, and each level yields farm equipment with different functions.

Requires Flash Player 10 code:

I was just testing the site and ran into a problem with Flash image loading. I found that when loading a nonexistent file, Flash still reports progress info, and after reaching 100% it shows nothin...

ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds Book Overview The demand for multiplayer games and virtual worlds has exploded over the last few years. Not only do companies want them for site stickiness through social networking, but developers have tremendous interest in exploring this niche area. While developing multiplayer content is challenging, it isn’t as difficult as you might think, and it is fun and highly rewarding! ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds explains fundamental multiplayer concepts from connecting to a server to real-time latency hiding techniques. In this book you’ll learn: How to connect users to achieve real-time interaction When to make decisions on the server versus the game client Time synchronization techniques How to use dead reckoning smoothing to hide network latency About tile-based games the isometric view Techniques for customizing and rendering avatars in a virtual world In addition, you’ll learn everything that goes into building: A real-time multiplayer tank battle game A real-time multilayer cooperative game A virtual world

Today I placed an order on Taobao for the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks. I actually wanted to pre-order back in July, but I was short on cash at the time… Official website: http://dnd.zongheng.com/main.shtml Also came across this video online: hardcore TRPG players running a live tabletop session:

I put together a World of Warcraft arts expo blog, dedicated to collecting material about Warcraft culture http://www.flashj.cn/wow/ It mainly covers character biographies, books, diaries, letters...

Thoughts inspired by a cat Half a month ago, a cat came scrambling in off the balcony. It lives with me now. At first, its demands were simple: just a place to crash. So much so that on the first day it refused to leave — even though I had nothing to feed it. I opened the door and carried it out; it darted straight back in. I carried it out and quickly shut the door; it stood outside yowling at the door, dead set on getting back in. Later I got it some food, gave it a bath, bought cat food and kept its bowl full every day, bought cat litter and set up a toilet.

Yesterday I heard from Fenix that Blizzard had registered a new trademark. At the time I figured it was a new game. And I thought to myself, pfft — with Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 delayed this long, any new game has to be at least 10 years out.