efaardvark

Shocked, bummed, and more than a bit angry. Found out that a friend of mine got killed in a hit-and-run auto accident early last week as he was riding home from work. I've known him since forever. He was a fellow science geek, played trumpet and marched in the HS band, was a motorcycle rider, a classmate in several classes in middle- and high-school, and part of the crowd that I used to hang out at lunch with in school back then. Crazy, but in a good way. He and another friend built a Tesla coil in his garage in HS, then used it to scare off the trick-or-treaters at Halloween. Partner-in-crime to numerous "loud chemistry experiments". (This was long before Google and Youtube btw! Back then we had to actually go to the library and read books to get in that kind of trouble!) After we graduated HS he went on to fly helicopters in the Army. (WOCS, MOS 154C, UH-1 / OH58A/C / CH47 pilot.) He had a wife and son. Way too sudden. And such a senseless way to go!

So I added bundles to my single-player/test game. I haven't really experimented with them before this but I'd heard some people loved/hated them so I decided to see for myself. I think I like them. They're kind of like a poor man's shulker box. You make them with 6 rabbit hide and 2 string so they're clearly an early-game item. Shulker boxes are supposed to be a late/end game item so they're super powerful. Bundles just seem to be designed to combat the problem of filling up your inventory slots with stacks that only have a few items in them. You can take those 1- or 2-item stacks of sticks, cobble, iron ore, coal, etc. that seem to accumulate in the early game and put them all (well, up to 64 items per bundle) in a single bundle that only takes up one regular inventory slot. The mechanics are a bit weird, but I think it is intentional. Even using bundles you can still only put up to 64 items in a single inventory slot, so bundles don't actually give you any more inventory space. Items in a bundle can be different items however. 2 sticks, 3 bread, and 2 wooden planks normally takes up 3 inventory slots, even though by themselves these items all stack up to 64 items/slot. Seem like they should all fit in a single slot, right? Well, with bundles you can put them all in a single bundle that does only take up one regular slot. Makes inventory management a lot easier. The weird bit is that you can only put one stack in the bundle at a time and there's a last-in, first-out constraint that makes items in the bundle harder to access than items in your regular inventory slots. If the item that you want is the first one that you put in a bundle then you'll have to remove all the other items from the bundle before you get to the one that you want. This means that items that you want to keep ready access to you'll still want to put in regular inventory slots. On the other hand, items that you won't be needing to unpack until you get back to base might be good to put in a bundle.

Remix of Ayreon's Dawn of a Million Souls.. (From their Universal Migrator saga/album.)

Looks like both the booster and the launch stand survived the static-fire test. Musk tweeted that one engine was disabled by command and one was shut down by the vehicle software but the remaining 31 would still have been enough to get to orbit. So I guess next up is launch and, hopefully, orbit. There's still the question of, "just how do you land this thing?" however. The "chopsticks" seem to work well enough for stacking and unstacking, but the choreography of snatching flying things out of the air is going to be on a whole other level.

Threshold - Falling Away Love the imagery in this one.

Got a few more stickers from work..

YKYITFW CNET gets taken over by a chatbot. (Not exactly, but I can do clickbait too. ) Seriously though, I find it interesting that the company execs seem not so much worried about the poor-quality AI-generated articles being published without attribution as about Google's possibly finding out how to detect them and reducing their prominence (and thus ad revenue) in google searches.

AMD just announced X3D versions of some of their high-end Ryzen CPUs Ryzen 9 7950X3D - $699 Ryzen 9 7900X3D - $599 Ryzen 7 7800X3D - $449 These should be out by the end of this month for the Ryzen 9s and by mid April for the 7800X3D. It also looks like they've dropped the price of the 7600 by ~$100 when I wasn't looking, based on a quick window-shopping spree. It is now $230 on Amazon vs $320-ish last time I checked. The 7600 is currently my leading contender for CPU when/if I get around to building a new AM5-socket build sometime later this year so price drops there are appreciated. (Now if they could just do something about those GPU prices.) I'm also interested in these "X3D" versions of their Socket AM5 series CPUs however. Perhaps not so much at these prices but maybe they'll drop a bit by the time I start actually buying / building my rig.

Same here. I was born in ‘64 so one of my earliest memories is watching the moon landings on our family’s first TV. (Side note.. the TV was a Heathkit that my dad built. It was b&w for the first moon landings but later he upgraded it to color for the Miss America pageant. )

First job- computer operator Current job- data processing systems engineer dream job- asteroid miner Fav food- Donuts. No, pancakes. No, donuts after all. Fav ice cream- raspberry with dark chocolate chunks Fav game- Kerbal Space Program Tats- 0 Age in minecraft years- 4208 Zodiac sign- (Wood) Dragon in the East, Virgo in the West. (But of course being virgo I don't believe any of that nonsense. )

YKYITFW the Earthlings send 184 rockets of 37 different designs from 9 different launch complexes to orbit. In one year. That's over 3 launches per week. All but 8 launches successfully delivered their payloads. It's even more amazing when you realize that most of them were multi-payload launches. Every Starlink launch carried at least 41 satellites for example. Also, several F9 launches were Dragon / CRS missions, 2 of which were Crew Dragons 4 and 5 carrying people as well as cargo to/from the ISS. This doesn't include any of the sub-orbital rollercoaster joyrides from Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin. We also have SpaceX's Starship prototype's first orbital launch attempt coming up in "a couple months" (Elon time) to look forward to. Largest rocket ever, over twice the thrust of the Saturn V, capable of getting 100 tons to orbit in a single launch, and totally reusable. We're not living in the Apollo era anymore, that's for sure.

This one ought to be good for a few dramatic moments, including the landing and launch from Mars caught on camera by the rover. https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/

I got to skip school - legally, my mom even wrote a note to the principal - for the Viking landings. Both of them! Otherwise, yeah.. not a good idea.

Isekai about the future is called "science fiction". SF has been doing alternate dimensions and time travel since before the genre was recognized as such. Even "normal" science fiction is often isekai by another name. Captain Kirk traveling in his spaceship to someplace not-earth or HG Wells time-tripping to a far future setting for their adventures is a classic SF trope.

Thought I'd try the "Alacrity" texture pack in minecraft. I'm not really into fancy textures, preferring my old "Steven's traditional" x64 pack that basically keeps the original esthetic only at a higher resolution. The alacrity pack got some good reviews however and has a few interesting features so I thought I'd give it a try.

Welcome!

Yes, I'm sick of it. That said, Sturgeon's Law applies to anime the same as to everything else. BTW, the part about "the majority of anime nowadays just caters to pervs" is also what they said about comic books in the 40s and 50, science fiction back in the 50s and 60s, and several other other genres and formats before they became mainstream, including the internet itself. It might even be true. But the second part of Sturgeon's Law says we should judge things by the better 10%. I don't have time to watch it all anyway. At least it makes it easy to decide what to watch and what to avoid.

I saw that v1.19 minecraft had dropped so I had to log in - just to test/update my shaders you understand - and did a little poking around the scenery. Found a deep cave that I just had to explore. I really like the new(ish) terrain generation. This kind of cave would not have been generated with the old algos. In this screenshot I'm standing at about y=5ish.. just at the level where the deepslate starts to poke through. There's another 60 blocks below this. The rim of the cave above is at about "sea level", or in minecraft terms 63(? I think that's right) so this whole area could be hidden under another ~200 blocks if this were a biome with high mountains! Also, what's worse than an upset enderman chasing you through the nether? An upset enderman on fire chasing you through the nether! I don't know why he's upset. He's the one who teleported into the lava, not me!

Hardware Unboxed has a decent roundup of early AM5 /X670 motherboards. Looks like Gigabyte is currently the leader in terms of features & price. My preferred ASUS also has some nice offerings but has pretty much priced themselves out of my budget. Not interested in $500+ motherboards. To paraphrase Dirksen.. $500 for a motherboard, $300 for RAM, $800 for a GPU... next thing you know you're talking real money.

Just going through my usual routine 3 episodes into a new season to see which shows I want to put on my to-watch list and noticed Fruit of Evolution got a second season? Really? I was pretty underwhelmed with the first season. I tried to watch it but tbh I don't even remember if I finished it or dropped it. I don't remember the ending at any rate. I don't think I'll put this season on my list either... maybe a rewatch of Shangri-La instead.

Watched a KSP2 tutorial on how to miss the ground, aka getting to orbit. Getting to orbit was a big-boss problem for a lot of new players in the original KSP so it is good to see them explaining it a bit better in a tutorial for KSP2. BTW, this is actually how it works irl as well. It isn't so much about how high your rocket goes, it is more about going fast enough sideways that by the time you would have hit the ground you instead miss it and sail over the edge of the world. If you can keep doing that - without hitting a mountaintop or sinking so far into the atmosphere that it slows you down and causes your spaceship to fall to the ground - that's called an "orbit".

Threshold - The Man Who Saw Through Time

I like all forms of animation because it gives the content creator(s) more freedom to share their vision than a lot of other forms of media. It is also cheap enough that more content creators can share their visions. Visual media such as animation is also more accessible to content consumers than other media, such as books/text. (I love books too, but text does require that people know how to read, and have an imagination that can animate the story internally.) That said, I typically dislike content from companies like Pixar and, especially, Disney. Their stories are like something put together by committee, filtered through political-correctness focus groups, greenlighted by the accounting department, etc., etc. Certain topics, characters, and situations are forbidden, even if they add value to the story. Their content is always, always more concerned with the bottom line and corporate image than telling/sharing a good story. I often get the feeling that the only reason that there is any entertainment value at all is because if there wasn't any then there wouldn't be any profit to be made either. The best that can be said for a lot of it is that it is technically well done. Not to say that I think all anime is great of course. In fact, I'll put it on the record here and say that most of it is not. A lot of it is crap and not even worth the time to watch it. A lot of it is low-budget, and it shows. But when it is good it is really good. The best anime is not something that would have ever even been allowed at someplace like Disney or Pixar. With anime I don't feel that there's a lot filtering/distortion (aka censorship) going between me and the author(s) like I do with a Disney production.