Hello everyone in goodtimes land! after a very,very,very long hiatus, I’ve decided to start writing again. although not much has been happening in the world of professional skateboarding lately, there is some new news. The major shoe company DC is planning a new video with new additions to the team.These include, Mikey Taylor, Steve Berra, Grant Taylor, Chris Cole, Evan Smith, Matt Miller, Mike Mo Capaldi, and Nyjah Houston. Now, with that being said, Nyjah Houston has been killing it in the skateboard industry lately! After winning 3 of the 4 Street League contests( the new compitition being held by DC’s Rob Dyrdek), he has won over $300,00 in less then a summer……And, he just dropped one of the biggest, baddest pro video parts skateboarding has ever seen. I’d love to post the video for you, but it’s only available through itunes at the moment. so, I will leave you with one of my favorite video parts since my last post. This is Brandon Westgate’s B-side part from the new Emerica video, Stay Gold. This video just goes to show the amout of abuse and determination that goes into filming a video part. Enjoy!

Thanks to bLeW for finding this one

Redditor Vidzilla has been posting daily pictures of the Zombie Apocalypse to the /r/zombies subreddit to show the disaster unfold in all it’s social glory. Could this Vidzilla be posting from the future to warn us of our eventual demise? More than likely. Now read on and enjoy this photo-documentary as I’ve posted in chronological order for your viewing pleasure.

It was mid afternoon, cars were going from point A to point B faster than point C could ask them what all the fuss was about. People ran back and forth across streets carrying black briefcases full of processed trees and loud noises filled the air with confusion. Ted and Sam huddled into the corner of a large brick building while plotting their devious plan to steal them enough food to last them for days.

“Alright Ted, all you have to do is jump into the middle of the road and start dancing, just dance like you’ve never danced before.”

“That should be easy, I’ve never danced before. Should I sing? I’ve never sang before, I’d really like to sing.” Ted was getting very excited now, which worried Sam, but he kept on with the plan anyways.

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This is more nerd than geek – but this is the slow season.

Another seminar upcoming for the Department of Computer Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

David Churchill

PhD Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Alberta

Build Order Optimization in StarCraft
Department of Computer Science
Tuesday, January 3, 2012, 11:00 a.m., Room EN-2022

Abstract

In recent years, real-time strategy (RTS) games have gained interest in the AI research community for their multitude of challenging subproblems – such as collaborative pathfinding, effective resource allocation and unit targeting, to name a few. In this paper we consider the build order problem in RTS games in which we need to find concurrent action sequences that, constrained by unit dependencies and resource availability, create a certain number of units and structures in the shortest possible time span. We present abstractions and heuristics that speed up the search for approximative solutions considerably in the game of StarCraft, and show the efficacy of our method by comparing its real-time performance with that of professional StarCraft players.

The gang over at Goodwill Gaming in St John’s are currently running an epic gaming marathon to raise money for the Janeway’s Childs Play charity. They’re on an 80 hour run which will finish up December 19th at 8:00 pm. If you’d like to donate to these awesome gaming geeks for a good cause, head on over to http://www.goodwillgaming.org and donate a few dollars.