efaardvark

I once asked my grandmother this exact question and she replied - without hesitation - "potable running water.. and antibiotics".

Way, way too many to list them all, but my childhood memories of Saturday morning cartoons - yes, we had TV back then - include at least ( though in no particular order)... Any and all Warner Bros.: Animaniacs, Pinky and Brain, Loony Tunes, Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner.. the original uncensored are still a hoot to me even today. (Chuck Jones was amazing.) Space Angels (See avatar) Felix the Cat (the wonderful wonderful cat...) Cecil and Beanie Boy Atom Ant Casper (the Friendly Ghost!) Mighty Mouse Tom and Jerry Heckle and Jeckle Underdog ("Speed of lightning, roar of thunder, fighting all who, rob or plunder.. Underdog!") Dangermouse (Oooh ickI Oh crumbs! Crikey!) The Tick (Spoon!) Scooby Doo! Ren and Stimpy (gritty kitty litter, the Happy Helmet) Rocky and Bullwinkle ("Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat", "What? Not again!")

Since I've already got the nice CPU I might just go for it on this system. 32GB RAM. x3- or 470 chipset w/dual M.2 slots so I can RAID a couple NVME SSDs. Water cool it and see if I can get the CPU to 5Ghz and memory to 3200Mhz (maybe even 3600). CrossFire/SLI a couple GPUs. That sort of thing. It has been a bit cold around here lately. I could use a space heater. I be hating it when summer gets here though, and lately I haven't had any time to enjoy such a system. Certainly not cheap either, though I did get a ton of hours in the last couple months, and our group got a performance bonus on top of that. It's only money, right?

It took me a while to get into it too, but by the time I got halfway I was liking it. I didn't like the ending much though. I kept wondering why the Second Earth people kept trying to recolonize Earth. I mean, they could literally go anywhere but that one place, but they just kept wasting resources trying to go back, and eventually.. well, I won't spoil it, but they were idiots. There's apparently a version out there with an alternate ending that I've tried (unsuccessfully) to find. Maybe I'd like that one better. And yeah, I found the hair thing amusing as well.

Got an AMD 2700X for Christmas! Yeah, my family is like that. OTOH, that's ALL they got me. Just the CPU. Yeah, my family is like that too. I can't use the AM3+ socketed motherboard or the DDR3 RAM from my old FX system, so it looks like I'm going to be spending some money. Anyone have suggestions for a nice AM4-socket MB/RAM combo? I'll be running my usual Linux (tho maybe an Arch-based distro like Manjaro rather than the Ubuntu I've got on here now) and some development stuff for work, but secondarily I want to make the new system a good place for VR and gaming as well. Extra bonus points for having a full PCIx4 channel for an NVME SSD (I compile a lot) and/or being able to run 2 GPUs so I can dedicate one to a virtual machine for testing. TIA....

I don't think you'll get many takers on the selfie thing. For myself though I don't mind. I'm doomed anyway. All my data - including fingerprints, bank account info, SS #, name, address, phone number, etc. - was in the US government's Office of Personnel Management's database when it was hacked by "the Chinese" (or whatever hacker(s) were using those IPs at the time). Just like we told them it would be. What's another selfie pic more or less? I'm lazy though so I'll just reference one I already have online from a couple years ago...

Shopping for parts for a new system. Been thinking it was time to upgrade my old FX system anyway, and someone got me a 2700X CPU (only) for xmas so I figured it's time for some stone soup.

Yes, we did. I watched it live, along with most of the rest of the world at the time. Save your pennies, Musk says a ticket to Mars will cost about as much as a house. Bezos's price to the Moon "will cost less", though he doesn't give an actual price tag. Probably not much less though, since both Branson's Virgin Galactic and Bezo's Blue Origin are charging $200k for just a 20-minute roller-coaster ride to the edge of space, without even reaching orbit. Of course moon or Mars doesn't really matter if there's no there there. Wait until Musk's Big Fu.. er, "Falcon" Rocket gets built. If nothing else liftoffs of something that big will be impressive just to watch. Actually riding one up will be awesome. Musk described BFR launches as being "quite tectonic". Be that as it may, I still have hopes of ending my days running icebergs between O'Neill's out in the Oort cloud. (Fox Cluster or bust!) Gotta make sure my PDF and mp4 collections are in order tho. As things stand now the world's fastest (at the time) unmanned probe took over a decade just to reach Pluto at 39AU out. Of course, that's all unpowered coasting. Still, Eris is at 68AU, and Sedna's at 486AU at the moment. The Oort cloud extends to 120,000AU. Nuclear power and ion engines (and no fantasy physics) can cut travel times drastically, but even if they get travel times down from decades to years or months there's still sure to be a lot of idle time between ports. A LOT of idle time. On the other hand, that would mean a trip to Mars would only take maybe a week, and the moon a day or so. Like I said, save your pennies. You might get your chance in a decade or so.

Merry Christmas!

Hmmm... I don't know of any exclusive "Christmas" anime - though quite a few have a Christmas-themed episode (Valentine's and summer/beach episodes are similarly popular) - but the shows you've mentioned get me thinking of shows like Log Horizon, Kamisama Kiss, Natsume's Book of Friends, Toradora, etc. Ghibli movies like Totoro, Whispers of the Heart, Spirited Away, or Kiki's Delivery Service aren't "christmassy" in and of themselves, but they're feel-good movies that might work with the Christmas vibe. Just throwing out ideas. Hope this helps!

I made Roing, Jebsel, and Jendan pass out, as per contract terms.

Toujours été plus dans les jeux de console. Vérifiez mon avi pour mon jeu préféré.  Cool! I speak French! Learn something new every day! I used to be big on consoles too, and I did have SC on the Wii. For a while the only PC games available were for Windows, with a few on MacOS. I've never owned a Windos system however, and the only macs I've had are MacOS X laptops that didn't really have the resources to run games. My brother uses Windows though and games there seemed to be just a hell of instabilities, driver conflicts, etc. Consoles were the only way to really enjoy games without wasting all that time configuring and fixing stuff. (I keep busy so being able to just sit down and get right into the game whenever I have a few minutes is extremely valuable to me. At the same time, my work environment on my computer has to be stable so I can get work done. It can't be compromised by random game weirdness.) There's a few games for Linux, with more (hopefully) coming now that Vulkan is a thing. I'm looking forward to having the best of both worlds when/if that happens...

I stream pretty much everything I watch. Crunchy's my main source, but I've used Funi as well, and I occasionally use another family member's netflix and hulu account. Pretty much the only time I'll download anything is when I can't find it streaming somewhere. If I find something I really like then I'll buy the DVD(s) and rip it to my plex server, then stream from that.

So there's this guy, "Colonel Cbplayer", who's built actual working mecha fighters based on the Macross franchise using my fav game, Kerbal Space Program. When I say "working" I mean everything, including flying, fighting, and transforming. (Sometimes all at once!) He's even got a video on his youtube channel of the YF19 and YF21 fighting. Pretty insane, especially considering that the base game doesn't have weapons, or even real hinges. I'd love to try this myself, but with the old GPU and FX processor in my system I'd be lucky if I got single-digit frame rates. Not that I have the time for it anyway I guess. This post instigated by a recent Kotaku article... https://kotaku.com/kerbal-space-program-can-do-transforming-macross-fighte-1831242407 His youtube channel is here:

I guess this falls under "quirk". Normally peoples eyes automatically focus on what their eyes are pointing at. That helps the brain come up with a 3d model of the world that makes some things look closer or further away than other things. My eyes & brain do that too. Unless the background is repetitive. In that case my eyes have a tendency to point at adjacent/nearby repeats of the pattern instead of the same point. This feeds bad info to my brain, making other (non-repetitive) objects appear in a different place than they should be, at least relative to the background. Normal people can apparently do this too, but they seem to have to work at it. For me it tends to happen even when I don't try to make it happen. This basically means that I can see the "hidden" image in those random-dot stereogram images really, really, quickly. It takes me only a second or two at most to sort out any of those sorts of images. Even autostereogram videos (like this or this) are no problem at all for me. Unfortunately, it also means that any repetitive pattern - a tiled desktop background for instance, or a striped wallpaper pattern, or even a checkerboard-tiled floor - tends to make things appear really weird to me unless I make a special effort to point both eyes at the same point in the pattern. On a desktop background it means that the windows usually appear to be actually floating at a different level than the desktop, either in front of or behind the level of the screen's physical surface. The windows can even appear to change their size from moment to moment, perceptually speaking, even though they obviously don't really change size. (It is like they drift towards me while simultaneously getting smaller so they maintain the same apparent size, or away while getting larger. If that makes any sense.) I always use (non-tiled) pictures for my desktop wallpaper so I can avoid the distraction this causes. Worse, it can actually be dangerously disorienting when it is something like a tiled floor. Imagine that the level that you appear to be walking on is NOT the level where the floor actually is. Not as fun as it sounds! And before someone asks, no, I don't do drugs. Things are weird enough in here without adding artificial distortions.

EA isn't the only one, but they're where I personally drew the line. Them and Sony (for the rootkit fiasco) are the only gaming companies that I outright boycott, but most of the other big companies are on my shit-list too for one reason or another, including MSFT and Bethesda, among others. When a big-name company releases a title (or even an "update") it is always a money-grab, first and foremost. After a while the content and game play even begins to look & feel the same among the top brands. (Which makes sense, since there's only one top-grossing formula to converge on after all.) The most fun I've had in gaming has always been with the smaller-company titles, and in my experience it has never been a good thing when an indie/small company title gets bought by one of the big names. (A moment of silence for my KSP, now owned by Take Two. ) Steam is the best thing to come along in years IMHO, but even Valve has their (growing list of) controls and limitations that they impose on the developers they support. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.

I've been stressing. Work can be intense and very competitive even in normal circumstances, but in addition to that we have several critical events coming up through New Year's that we have to be ready for. First one is Monday night! One of our 8 realtime people is brand new - literally only been there a month - and another just doesn't give a shit because he's retiring come January so we're basically working a 2-person, 24/7 schedule with a crew of 6 plus me, my boss, and one other guy. We've just come off a major hardware/software upgrade cycle to move all of our servers onto virtual systems so there's bugs and training to get used to the new systems to deal with too. We're in a configuration freeze for Monday's event, but after that comes upgrading all our monitor-and-control systems, including all of my software that runs on them, so I've got that to look forward to. Somewhere in there I need to squeeze in some Christmas shopping too. Yeah. Fun times. But right now I don't care about any of that because I took some vacation time off. This week I'm just gaming and watching anime - or whatever TF else I want to do - until Monday. Except for Thursday when I have to drive half the family to get together with the other half for turkey day. (On top of everything else a tree fell on my car about a month ago and totalled it, requiring the purchase of a new one. Everyone wants a ride in the new car so naturally I got volunteered to drive. I'm not a people-person and I think SoCal driving is just a PITA so... )

It was kind of slow in places. Might have worked better as a short-form series with maybe 10-minute episodes, a-la Tonari no Seki-kun.

Just watched Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san. Cute comedy/slice of life. Poor Nishikata didn't stand a chance. https://anilist.co/anime/99468/Karakai-Jouzu-no-Takagisan/ Also dropped Chio's School Road. Too goofy, and I didn't find the jokes all that funny. I hope this and Asobi Asobase aren't the start of a trend.