efaardvark

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.

Found a good place for a new base in my single-player minecraft. This instance has the "tough as nails" and "serene seasons" mods so there's climate to consider. This has mountain highlands close to a savanna so there should be a "goldilocks" region somewhere between the two where the temperature is reasonable. The nearby snow-covered mountains can supply snow for cooling in the hot season and there should be decent rainfall at the lower altitudes for drinking water collection. The nearby ocean also has "coral sea" areas for interesting building materials without having to worry about hypothermia while diving. And of course the town means trading and relatively easy access to equipment and xp once the place can be protected and a few merchant villagers leveled up. (Using Vulkan API and "sulkan" shader.) This is a moonrise shot from my previous base. (Same game but back when I was using OpenGL and the "complementary" shader.)

I had jury duty all this week. I'm in the unincorporated are of Los Angeles county so I always have to go downtown. It's not too far away - maybe 20 miles as the crow flies - but it is all on freeways that are old, narrow, and very crowded during rush hour. My first day the commute was stalled by a semi that flipped and landed off the freeway on the metro rail line. Welcome to L.A. Then it rained. WTF? Who ordered rain at 94F?. And this is California. Californians don't know how to drive in the rain, especially on road that are slippery with oil stored since the last rains. I can't even remember the last time it rained. Just shoot me now. On the plus side the "Stanley Mosk courthouse of the Los Angeles Superior court" is literally across the street from the Disney Concert Hall, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and the Ahmanson Theater. If it cools off a bit before my term of duty ends I might walk around and play tourist a bit. As it is it is still too hot. It is barely tolerable in the courthouse. Going outside in the sun risks combustion. Today's temp in downtown was 96F when I checked at lunch, with an Extreme Heat Warning from NOAA. High was supposed to be over 100F. At a guess I'd say it was a comparatively chilly 80F in the courthouse. Forecast for next week is only in the mid 80s. I took a couple pics from the patio of the cafe on the 9th floor of the courthouse looking across 1st street. The Disney Concert Hall is at 1st and Grand. (Parking reserved for jurors is actually underneath the WDCH in the underground parking structure there.)

Mining an iron vein is probably not a good idea when one is surrounded by skulk in an ancient city.

10 years already...

Found a spider spawner, but the entire side was open to a large cavern. Felt like there must have been hundreds of them. (If you're phobic don't look.)

"... like if Animusic was made by Aperture Laboratories"

I have a hard time doing a few dozen episodes, never mind a few hundred or a thousand. It all starts to feel the same after a while, and I need to have the closure that an ending provides. Good or bad. A thousand episodes isn't a story so much as a way of life.

And now the local weather guy is saying that we'll have triple-digit highs all this week as well. Probably getting even hotter over the next few days too. Headed for 8 straight weeks of temps 5-10 degrees above average.

Triple digits all week here. It’s a desert after all.

Did a bunch of dodging. You would think that at least one of them would be usable. (Same problem with skellys.. they can shoot hundreds at you, but you can't pick them up, and if you do manage to kill one they always drop 2, or none. What's wrong with this picture?)

I made an approximately round thing in a square game. (It's a honey farm.) Closeup.. In context. We did some other work on the town near the stronghold this weekend as well.

Regarding the ridiculous prices of both flash and DDR memory lately I think (hope?) that the situation will improve in the next couple years. Unless you've been living under a rock you'll know that the cause of the nosebleed pricing is due to datacenter buildout for the AI crowd. There have already been quite a few datacenters built and operating. (Actually less than you might think given the media hype, but that's another topic.) A huge number are still in the planning stages. Before a datacenter can go online the parts must obviously be bought and installed. Lately, for NIMBY and other reasons the parts get purchased but then stored in a warehouse while the process of finding and purchasing land, going through the legal / permitting process, actually doing the construction, and contracting for long-term supply of water and electricity completes. So basically there's a lot of processors, power supplies, network switches, and other bits of kit that have been bought but that are currently just sitting in warehouses. And yes, this includes memory chips and SSDs. Now, if you do a bit of research into how many datacenters are already in the planning or building stages and add up all the power, water, land and other resources that will be necessary for them to actually be completed and powered up you get, literally, more than can possibly be supplied. For instance, just to power them all would take terawatts of electrical power. A typical commercial nuclear reactor puts out around 1 Gigawatt of power. A single terawatt is 1,000 Gigawatts. Clearly not all of these datacenters can possibly be supplied with even just the necessary electrical power. There would have to be literally over a thousand new nuclear reactors built to supply them with power. It takes decades to build a single nuclear power plant. A coal-fired plant can produce anywhere from several hundred megawatts to a gigawatt of power. The Hoover dam can supply 2 Gigawatts of hydro power if filled to capacity. The world's largest hydro power plant, the Three Gorges dam in china can "only" produce around 23GW of power. The world would need over 40 new Three Gorges hydro power plants to power the number of datacenters currently being planned. Speaking of which, water (for cooling all that electronic gear) is another resource that simply can not be supplied at the required levels to all those datacenters. So I think that in just a couple / few years the AI crowd will realize that their current plans are doomed to failure. Already several states have put moratoriums on building new datacenters. Land will not be available to build all of them on. Power will not be available to power them all. Water will not be available to cool them all. And the electronics in the warehouses will be old and obsolete. Even the bits that have managed to get installed in completed datacenters will be old and in need of upgrading to remain competitive. I predict that a lot of memory will be dumped on the market, much of it unused and at fire-sale prices by companies either going bankrupt or by ones trying to upgrade their inventory of gear that they hope to someday install in their datacenter(s). One can hope anyway.