Métro. Boulot. Dodo. (Metro, Work, Sleep)

C'est Paris :)

walking down the road, with the cool fresh rainy wind billowing my long sleeves, with the light drops of rain sprinkling on me, with a jaunt in my step and no bag to restrict me, with my brain still half in french after studying for the tests, it delighted me to smile a real happy light-hearted smile, at a time when so many people are so stressed and busy.

here's a low detail screenshot of a nuclear missile. it did lag my laptop considerably.



as you can see, it obliterated almost all of the buildings, which is more impressive than previous nuclear missiles. but the construction yard is still standing, as can be expected. one nuke doesn't end everything. it does leave behind this lovely scar on the ground.
one thing odd about Easy AI is that it didn't repair the construction yard, bizarre. it did rebuild many buildings though. and i was harassed by its planes. what a bother.



anyway Waypoint mode is now so user-friendly, i love it.

and BlackHands are really cool at shooting flames out of buildings, very very funky.
use of flame is very tricky though, it leads to a considerable amount of collateral damage and friendly-fire (pun not intended).

if u didn't know, they're going to introduce vanity car number plates 'soon', those where you can put words and such.

anyway so it comes to my mind, i have absolutely no idea why i thought of it, that there will have to be someone in charge of approving the number plates, weeding out the vulgarities and obscenities and political incorrectness or anything. so it means someone is going to sit in the office, all day looking at number plate names! perhaps i exaggerate and he doesn't spend all day doing it, but he will be obliged to spend a great part of his time doing that. which equals to laughing at silly number plates and having a ball of a time. so isn't that a great job? and it must be a person of decent caliber to decipher all the ridiculous names and acronyms, which means decent qualifications and remuneration

anyway there was a nice article in Straits Times on Sunday:

First, some definitions: Abbreviation refers to any shortening of a word or phrase. For example, 'flu' is an abbreviation for 'influenza', 'plane' for 'aeroplane' and 'maths' for 'mathematics'.

Portmanteau words - derived from combining the meaning and sounds of two words - are special cases of abbreviations. For example, 'Oxbridge' blends 'Oxford' and 'Cambridge', 'motel' combines 'motor' and 'hotel', and Singapore's own 'Mindef' melds 'ministry' and 'defence'.

The most famous examples of portmanteau words in literature are in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass. When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain ''Twas brillig, and the slithy toves...', Humpty Dumpty tells her: 'brillig' means 'four o'clock in the afternoon - the time when you begin broiling things for dinner', 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy', and so on. 'You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.' It is likely that Singapore's Ministry of Defence is known as Mindef - not, thank goodness, MOD - because a highly literate man, Dr Goh Keng Swee, was the minister when it acquired its abbreviation.

Initialism or alphabetism is yet another special case of abbreviation, formed from the initial letters of names or expressions, each letter being pronounced separately: for example, PIE, CTE, AYE, CPF, HDB and EDB.

And acronym is a special case of initialism, where the abbreviation formed from the initial letters can be pronounced as a unit: for example, Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) and radar (radio detection and ranging) - the last being an example of an acronym containing non-initial letters.

i am determined to try to make everyone get it right

seen this? really odd trail that they've got there. i would estimate the dotted line to be 10km long, since running to haw par villa is alr 7km. i wonder who will actually walk this trail.

one of the RVR residents
saw Mr. Squirrel the other day too.

one of those days when it's really sunny, really hot. as you can see the shadow was rather sharp. from the exact angle you can even calculate the time of the day, since sg is so close to equator.






need a proper photoshoot one day

i am irritated with the army who keeps calling me back. pah.

perhaps i've been playing too many missions at Normal difficulty but they're getting rather boring. one or two retries to get the hang of the mission and where to defend and then it's just a mass build order to get tons and tons of powerful units. shielded annihilators and warships are just too powerful.

then again, there's this mission using the Scrin Mastermind, which was very frustrating until i discovered the trick to it. i did waste alot of time and patience though. you'll understand when you get to the mission. shall refrain from spoilers.

yeah im still mad on it. doesnt make it better than jx keeps playing it on my laptop and i have to watch
so here's a lovely picture of High Detail, with terrain textures and tyre tracks and sunbeams and smoke and whatnot. yeah i had time to admire the scenery coz it was becoming a relaxed mission. found out a way to just sit back defend the base and collect Tripods cheaply.



an hr later. many tripods and avatars of mine walking all over the map. and i finally got hold of energy shields for the tripods, u can see the oval fields


oh here's a brighter picture. the brightness comes and goes


and i've got lovely powerful Scrin ships, coz i captured their buildings, bleh


and they've got this Stasis Shield power to temp protect units. tho they cant shoot or move. but useful in a battle, or before a nuclear missile


Scrin mothership is insanely slow and powerful, and it comes with a big shadow on the ground, the circle on the left. the shadow moves nicely over ridges and such, very pretty


Scrin Rift Generator. evil superweapon. it's like a blackhole

omg i looked at the new blogger templates (to try to see if i can grab the code to RSS comments), and i realise it's all in XML, freaking unreadable to me. time to do a core code revamp of this blog. dratz, so outdated. which also means that blog layout is going to change, more or less.

i want steering wheel gear shift paddles

Brake Standby reacts when the driver suddenly lifts off the accelerator, anticipating hard braking, and snugs the brake pads against the rotors. Start-Off Assistant automatically engages the brakes on an incline to prevent the car from rolling back when the driver lifts off the brake pedal to depress the accelerator.

nice features. very useful. especially the Start-Off Assistant. one of the bugs of manual transmissions. it's nice to have the couple seconds of extra brake when it's at the correct time. apparently there are mechanisms to detect if the car is starting off on an incline. it's not that new, can't understand why other manufacturers don't incorporate it. it's a strong enticement to get manual. but i think i would prefer assisted advanced automatic transmission that works so inhumanly fast. apparently it's easy to get the auto to shift up gears, but the cool part is getting it to downshift at the correct times so that you get the extra power when you want to accelerate. hm

guess what brand does this come in. bleh.

link

*gwinz*

I did not, she started it.

hey Blogger now has RSS feed for blog post comments! cool, just what i've been wishing to have for a long time. i think i need to upgrade alot of my blog code after exams.

and all the blogged pictures are available on picasa albums. and and...

disaster mission that has occupied me for the past 1.5hrs. this is actually my 2nd round!, so you can see my insane base defences comprising a money-guzzling power-guzzling and utterly ridiculous row of 8 Obelisks (they're really powerful), and many SAMs (Scrin warships are disgustingly powerful), and >20 Avatars (which is Alot), >20 Stealth Tanks, and 20,000 credits in reserve. and the reason why i had this pile of metal is that the previous time i tried to attack those 3 yellow triangles on the mini-map, all my forces were utterly decimated and i was subsequently overrun by the overzealous AI. in any normal game, it would not be financially viable to build these things, not to mention time needed.


so i tried, so as you can see this is not in the base yet, but just outside the entrance. smart AI likes to overrun me, again. notice that the entire map is filled with their units, many many many Annihilator Tripods. argh. ARGH. so i watched as my Avatars, which were upgraded with a beam cannon, got wiped out. i din get to see much of my stealth tanks nor raider buggies, never noticed them disappear


as the battlefield cleared, it was disappointing to see that there were so many alien tripods left standing, sigh. notice the buttons on the left side, i used my tiberium missile too! i doubt it destroyed much, seeing as the scrin love tiberium that much


oh guess what, i tried flanking too, i attacked the base from two sides, i didn't have any screenshots of the other bunch. they did survive a little longer, but suffered under the ion storms and whatever other base defences, and then truly died when the leftover units here went back in.

sigh. it got rather hopeless, i was too lazy to attempt to build up an even bigger force, so the next time i just went straight for the objectives and didn't bother to have any strategy to get my units back alive. i suppose there might be a proper way of completing this mission. heck, the next time i feel like massing a huge force i'll replay this mission.
anyway this is the Sydney mission, where NOD collaborates with GDI for the first time.

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part2.
i decided to replay it after all, loaded my savegame before i suicided all my units just now, built another 24 Avatars+24 beam cannons, 12 stealth tanks, 6 buggies, And positioned them for attack from 3 sides.


that's the main firefight. the order goes: the suicide bombers went first, died, the stealth tanks and buggies went next, all died. then i realised, hey the avatars din move, shucks, so click. and then this standoff ensues. it's fantastic, two masses of heavy units zapping the most powerful beam weapons in the game at each other. scrin were the blue beams and avatars' were red. i didn't manage to decipher the green beam in there.


but i won the battles this time, finally overwhelmed them.
survivors:
31 avatars, out of about 50
1 stealth tank out of about 40
0 raider buggy out of about 12
0 suicide bombers out of about 10
0 out of 4 Vertigo bombers (planes)
0 flame tanks

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everyone who has are itching to play C&C3, =p, but hey i don't play Dota

did you know that if you live in USA, you can buy a BMW (and some other car brands) through a European Delivery Program, where you collect the car in Germany. it's cheaper than if you get it from a US dealer, you get to fly to Europe, you get to take the car for a spin on the AutoBahn, you get 30 days of insurance and whatnot to do a tour, and then the car is shipped back to US. darn why can't that be done in Sg. blah.

screenshots taken during a NOD campaign mission. well so this is after getting home and playing it on the ultra fast home computer, i finally get to turn all the settings up to near maximum (except for Anti-Aliasing, which i din dare to put to full, but i think i prob can, maybe during the hols when i oc the graphics card). actually the program by default din put to max settings, but what the heck, i did it and it runs perfectly, i can even Alt-Tab with mimimal delays, the game used up 700+mb of ram btw.

so in it's glory, it's got lovely glowing tiberium crystals, and reflective wet roads. gosh those reflections were pretty.


and you can see the exhaust of the Flame Tanks, couldn't get a proper screenshot that does credit to it


ooh and the flames, beautiful the way it fades out. flame tanks are really nice units, but they do lots of collateral damage, which sucks. i still am not used to the NOD style of playing, ack.