efaardvark

Reira Ushio / Clover

Fought a few phantoms..

This is our spawn city, Cathair, as viewed under the influence of the Sulkan shader using Vulkan. Unfortunately somebody broke the OpenGL side of things in 26.3 by switching to SDL so now my fav combo of Iris and the Complementary shader doesn't work. As a result I'm spending more time in the Vulkan branch. This sucks at the moment because not only is Sulkan far inferior to Complementary but it also breaks Distant Horizon's render pipeline. Under Vulkan you can either have shaders but nothing beyond Minecraft's built-in render distance, or terrain rendered out to 4096 chunks but no shaders. Eventually Vulkan will allow the devs to do amazing things in vanilla minecraft but for now the situation is kind of a mess.

Hot and dry here. A bit windy too. Yesterday it got to 102F/39C. Today they're only forecasting 94. So of course there's new brushfire. The "Bouquet Fire" in Angeles National Forest, northeast of Santa Clarita, was about 1,000 acres as of yesterday afternoon when it was discovered. There's some wind but so far winds have been light, and of course the FD jumped on it immediately. Some evacuation orders have been put out but containment was at 40% this morning and the reported area had only expanded by about 50 acres. The fire is close to the Bouquet reservoir so the aircraft have convenient nearby access for water dropping sorties. Not an immediate concern for me personally but the heat and winds are also forecast to go up later today while humidity is going down so this is something I'm definitely monitoring. I'm right next door to the forest and if the fire gets back in there with all the trees and brush and the winds start pushing it my way then that could get serious. https://inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-information/caanf-bouquet

DH v3.3.4 now has the option to generate only surface features. This means that you can vastly expand the (DH) render distance even on relatively low-powered systems. I've read of people on monster machines setting their render distance to over 100,000! Of course it does take a while to generate the terrain, but the playable limit now seems to be more about how much HD/SSD space you have to cache the LODs. The new setting is "Distant Generator Plan". A single-player game with the render distance set to 2048 and the Plan set to "SURFACE_ONLY" only took about an hour on my older system. The built-in/vanilla render distance for these screenshots is 10 chunks. The DH mod is rendering everything from 11 to 2048 chunks...

In 1981 I was a junior in HS. (A 2nd year student for those unfamiliar with US customs.) "Stagflation" - a new term back then - was in full swing, with high unemployment, high inflation, stagnant wages, and the world economies still reeling from the second big oil shock in 79-80. In July '81 the US officially entered the deepest "recession" (depression) since the end of WWII even as Treasury yields went over 15%, and mortgages over 18% Even the official numbers were dismal. Inflation at over 12%. The prime rate over 20%. Unemployment over 9%. “Reaganomics” and its “trickle down” policies were promising budget cutbacks in most government social safety-net programs even as the breakdown in détante brought higher “defense” spending to the US and other NATO countries in Europe. Oh, and don't forget the deregulation of the bankster industry. All in aid of Joe Sixpack and his family of course. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. The rest of the world was doing even worse. Cold-war tensions were at all-time highs. A common topic of conversation at lunch was what "number" your city was. New York had to be number one, but Los Angeles had quite a few high-value military targets due to its concentration of aerospace/defense industry, naval facilities, air bases, and logistics infrastructure. It had to be in the top ten as well. Heck, it might get several slots. The "number" of course being the position in the list of targets for Soviet ICBMs. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 79 and were fighting a war of attrition there. Polish workers, united in their "Solidarity" movement, challenged Soviet control of their country and were harshly repressed by their own puppet government. The brutal Iran-Iraq War continued. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. Israel took over the Golan Heights. Someone tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II. I bought the "Escape" album with "Don't Stop Believin'" on it just before I graduated in '82. Welcome to adulthood. Livin' on a Prayer - Bon Jovi Somehow I/we survived until late 1990 when The Scorpions released their "Wind of Change". Appropriately enough for the time the album was called "Crazy World". In 1989 the Berlin Wall had come down. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, essentially ending the Cold War and making this song an instant chart-topper.

Looking Glass - Brandy

Continuing California's streak of weird weather this year, now we're being warned of "Polo", a category 5 hurricane following along behind last month's "Marie".

Animusic - Heavy Light Taking music appreciation to a whole new level.

Distant Horizons 3.3 released. support for MC v1.12.2 is now included - among other things. This is also the first release version considered feature-complete. (Though of course development / enhancement is ongoing.)

Threshold - Critical Mass Very Floydian.

Got a few moments to play more MC this weekend. Almost finished an enclosure that's going to eventually be an automatic farm for melons, bamboo, sugar cane, bees, and whatever else I can put in there. It's enclosed because it will be tended by allays. The glass dome / roof is allay-tight and I have a note block periodically making noise to direct their attention to some hoppers where they can drop whatever they collect but I haven't quite made a final decision on the materials for the walls and the glass "frame". The red bit is just wool as placeholder. I think I might replace it all with arches made of birch stairs, shelves, and trap doors. Maybe. Also thinking of just making the whole dome glass with maybe a pillar or two as "support". Then I'll have to put in the actual farming / automation stuff and breed up some allays. There's an underground storage / sorter sort of beneath the structure as well and I'm going to set up some sort of transportation gizmo to get the items dropped off by the allays over / down into the sorter's intake. We have tons of iron left from that iron vein that we found a while back so it would probably be simplest to just run a line of hoppers to it. The sorter / storage area. We just finished it so it still needs some interior decoration. But the golems are doing their thing in the background and the whole thing is functioning as intended. In other news, my SIL's parrots have apparently formed a dance group..

I agree. Even AD3. I'll probably at least start to watch it but often by the 3rd season things either get repetitive or the story goes off the rails somehow. We'll see. Lots of other stuff going on in the world these days that I have to prioritize above watching anime too.

Starting to get some effects from hurricane "Marie". Hurricanes in southern California feels a bit surreal ngl. It won't hit us directly like some of the models predicted but the storm surge means the surf is up and the rain is already reaching us here in the foothills. The beaches are going to see the worst of it I think, with the storm surge coinciding with the regular astronomical(*) high tides causing considerable concern for coastal areas. Crews are working to shore up sand berms and make sure all the drains are working properly ahead of tonight's expected high tide but places are already having the work that's been done so far washed away. Higher than usual tides are expected through tuesday at least. Only the surfers seem happy, except maybe for the ones having to get rescued after being washed out to sea by the rip tides. *"Astronomical" here does not necessarily mean huge. In this context it just means the normal tides caused by astronomical bodies such as the moon and the sun.