efaardvark

Getting trolled by endermen. Second only to creepers in my book.

Threshold - Hall of Echos

Still employed. Found out today that quite a few of my co-workers are not. My group was hit relatively lightly in the first round of layoffs earlier this year due to several upcoming critical events. (Mainly Psyche and then HERA and Europa Clipper just last month.) The 530 people let go that time represented about 9% of the lab's workers overall but only about 3% of that total were from the group I'm in. This time things went the other way. Of the 325 additional people let go yesterday 93 of them - about 28% - were from my group, including several that I worked with on a daily basis.

Just finished Gimai Seikatsu / Days with My Stepsister. Slow, and seemed like the main characters made things harder on themselves than it needed to be. But they worked it out and the ending was satisfactory. Did I say slow? Perhaps "glacial" would be more applicable. It was a bit hard to stick with it through all 12 episodes. Worth a watch but if you're easily bored then you might want to skip this one.

Welcome!

Threshold - Lost in Translation

Doing a "required telework" today as I wait for notice as to my status on a "workforce action". I should know by noon if I'm one of the ~325 (~5%) of the workforce at the lab who is "affected". I prefer the old days when there was less weasel-wording. I mean, a layoff is a layoff... tell it to me straight. The ones "let go" are not the only ones "affected" either. I survived the last round. Some of my co-workers did not. I guarantee I was "affected" as well. Think of it as getting your steps in.

I heard today that Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, and RocketWerkz, developers of games like Icarus and Stationeers, are working on a "KSP killer". Been here before so I'm not getting too excited but after digging around a little it sounds like the right people are saying - and maybe even doing - the right things to make something worthy of the description. We'll see. Starting by ditching unity and using their own 3d engine to take advantage of Vulkan and mutiprocessing is a very good start IMHO. Having an 8/16 core CPU and still only getting 30fps and 20% GPU usage because the game engine (Unity, for KSP) can't handle anything more than a single thread is a ridiculous waste of modern hardware and one of my biggest complaints about the original game.

I cleaned the bathroom ceiling. My arms are going to be so sore tomorrow. Probably my back as well.

I thought it might be fun to throw a splash potion of oozing at my flock of chickens. Turns out that was a bad idea for a variety of reasons.

Very windy! And of course around here that means fire danger. Currently the "mountain" fire is burning out of control over in Ventura County near where my aunt and cousins live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVoBJ21kgAY&t=337s https://maps.wildfire.gov/sa/#/%3F/%3F/34.2636/-119.0356/11

Got a new shirt from the company store…

Bokura no natsu no yume (Summer Wars ending)

Welcome!

welcome!

I’ve tried a lot of social media. Everything from GEnie and MySpace and Friendster back in the day to facebook and instagram in more recent years. To be honest I never really saw the attraction of any of them. I do have a semi-active fb account that I really only use to keep in touch with some of my younger relatives but by personal preference I mostly just use discord with a small circle of close friends and family, or slack for the work crowd.

Not a neko anime but one of my coworkers named her cat "Nezuko", from Kimetsu no Yaiba.

Watching Planetes. Been a few years but still worth the rewatch. Gotta get my SF somehow.

Got an ESA ‘fridge magnet from some visiting HERA folks.

So there's a.. reboot? of Demon Lord Retry. Sorry, but I gotta ask: why? It's way worse than the first one too. I couldn't get past the first episode.

That "chopstick" landing/capture was on a whole other level than anything that's been done before, including landing F9 boosters on the droneships, which itself was over the top. Also, I have to say that I'm almost as amazed that we got multiple 4k, realtime video feeds from both 'Ship and Super Heavy continuously from liftoff to separation, into space, back down through the plasma heating, and even to the moment of splashdown. SpaceX really made SpaceX look good. I remember the light grey on dark grey, low-res, heavily ghosted video from Apollo days. We've come a long way since then, and not just in rocketry. Yes, the 'Ship exploded after splashdown. The mission for 'Ship was surviving reentry, performing the "belly flop" maneuver, and, well, targeting the landing. Anything happening after the moment of touchdown was irrelevant. The vehicle was designed to be caught by the "mechazilla" arms just like the booster, not land on the water. Unfortunately they only have the one tower at the moment, and this time the focus was on the booster's first catch. There was no intention- or even ability - to recover the 'Ship on this flight. However, given the successful booster catch, the precision of the 'Ship's landing, and the fact that SpaceX already has most of a second tower built at Boca Chica I would not be surprised if SpaceX tries for a double-catch of both 'Ship and booster back at Boca Chica very soon. Maybe even on IFT-6. (Pending FAA approval of course. )) There's so much that still needs to be done however. Their contract with NASA requires a version of Starship able to land on the Moon. To do that the booster needs to first get the moon lander to orbit. I don't see that being a problem. But then they need to refuel the lunar lander in orbit. That would require multiple launches, tower captures, refueling, and re-launches of a TBD "tanker" version of 'Ship. And booster. And of course as amazing as everything SpaceX has done to date seems, from the SpaceX point of view all this is just practice for launching Ships to and landing them on Mars! I'm sure SpaceX still has a whole series of amazing things to show us in the next few years.