efaardvark

Oh no.. I'm hearing it.

Today I celebrated my 21st birthday.. for the 40th year in a row!

Boston - Rock and Roll Band Hard to believe this was the 70s. The skill of all involved really shines here. Remember, this was before digital became a thing. Those instruments had to be PLAYED. Any guitar (or organ) players in the audience? Who can do this? (Don't feel bad, I definitely can't either. ) The singing is Freddy Mercury level. The producing - and writing, and playing, and a lot of the rest - was done by a MIT engineer.. literally. Tom Scholz is an amazing, many-talented person. I bought the original "Boston" album when it came out and I still find the whole thing mind-blowing all these years later, not least because it was done in Tom's home studio. Again, this was before the digital age and things like Pro Tools. They don't make them like this anymore, that's for sure.

Explored a bit more in MC and found this town next to a river in a savanna-ish area. Not sure if it's Lithosphere or Still Life that's responsible but I do like the scenery.

I haven't played a hardcore world in minecraft 1.21.8 so this weekend I decided to try one with the lithosphere, still life, and Distant Horizons mods. I really like what lithosphere does with the terrain. Forests are a lot more varied and interesting for one thing. Rivers are a lot better as well in that they actually follow the terrain and make using boats for exploration a lot more practical and rewarding. (At least they tend to lead to interesting places without all the random chaos that rivers tend to come with in vanilla.) Having a render distance of 512 chunks with DH also makes for some awesome vistas of the terrain. Once it gets generated.. the down side is 512 chunks takes several hours to generate on my ancient 8/16 core Ryzen 2700 CPU. Impressive that it is still playable even using "aggressive" CPU usage in DH settings however. OTOH, I haven't yet added shaders to the mix either. Sodium, Iris, and Lithium are also there for performance but I wanted to save the CPU cycles that shaders would require for terrain generation at this point.

Haven't seen Grevil "Pointy Head" de Blois (Gosick) posted yet. He's definitely a contender.

I remember everything you list from my own early years as well. I did take a bit of a break from anime in the late 70s, mostly due to lack of access, but one of the lunch crowd in HS (class of ‘82) was doing voice acting and that was motivation enough to get me seeking out and watching stuff she was working on. Fortunately I’m in the Los Angeles metro area so it has always been possible to find material if you looked hard enough, even in the pre-internet days. Eventually Blockbuster, CD-era Netflix, and then later streaming sites made it easier to maintain the habit through the 90s to today.

"Where there's a Whip" I actually had this whole soundtrack on vinyl back in the day...

I don’t like it when they leave things hanging either. An ending is what often makes or breaks a story. Not achieving some sort of closure really means there is no story, just a bunch of random events strung together with no meaning.

I went up on the roof to reconfigure some of my PV panels. Why did I do this on a day like today with the temperature hitting triple digits, you might ask? When you figure it out please tell me because I'd like to know as well I might need to have my head examined.

Getting a bit on the high end of tolerable here. And by “tolerable” I mean thank the gods for air conditioning!

Harry Chapin - Cat's in the Cradle I miss the singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s and their story songs. Cats in the Cradle, Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald", Cash's A Boy Named Sue, Brandy, You're a Fine Girl, The Devil Went Down to Georgia.. They're still out there - Threshold's Man Who Saw Through Time for instance, but it seems to me that I don't hear that kind of thing nearly so much in newer stuff anymore.

Got a couple more items for the solar power setup. I decided to get a second battery and to make this one a 48V battery. The first one was a 24V because that's what my solar panels put out. This operation being something of an experiment however I decided I'd like to have a higher-voltage battery to play with as well. There's some tradeoffs due to the different voltage levels so I wanted an opportunity to try both. With the new battery I needed another charge controller because my 24V controller can't boost the 24V panel voltage to the ~50 volts the new battery needs to charge. So I got one of those too. The battery came a couple days ago but the new charge controller just came today and by the time I got home from work the sun was already too low to see how that part works. This evening I read the manual, installed the app (there's always an app), and got the unit physically wired up and waiting for tomorrow's sunrise. If I did that right then by tomorrow evening it should have the battery fully charged. This weekend when I have more time to play I'll put the thing through it's paces.

hikari no sumika (光のすみか)

Yes Crunchy's catalog is huge, though with quite a few shows having big gaps due to missing seasons, and some popular and/or notable titles missing entirely. But Sony (still) needs to do a major overhaul on the UI. Searching for instance. Ever try finding something by the original title? I'll allow you to use either Japanese kana/kanji or Latin (rōmaji). More often than not I can't find a show unless I look up the English title somewhere else first, then use that to search on Crunchy. Who ever heard of a streaming site where one can't find content based on the content's actual title?? Do they or do they not want us to find/watch the shows available? As a post-season binge-watcher I'd also like to be able to limit listings to shows whose episodes have all finished airing for the season, and optionally omit from the list shows that I've already watched. And what the heck is that "more like this" recommendations section? I have no idea what the the criteria are for "like this". Basically random as far as I can tell. I'd disable the section and replace it with something based explicitly on my own preferences if I could. But of course that's not an option either. I could go on about things like how a show's synopsis is usually unreadable due to the bottom half being cut off, and the shows' metadata not even including things like actors' names, number of episodes, or even the original air date. (Not that the metadata is searchable even if it did.) Or how about being able to create an evening's watch list containing 2 or three hours-worth of individual episodes from a couple of different series? Can't do it on Crunchy. TL;DR... Usually I plan my viewing outside of Crunchy entirely and only visit Crunchy for the actual content. MAL works well since that site is usually pretty good at making shows easily accessible with their "Streaming Platforms" section's links. Still doesn't help for the "evening watchlist" thing though. edit: Sorry.. didn't mean to make the whole post about Crunchy's poor UI.

Same here. There were a few things I forgot this week. I even had a list. One of the items was sugar for the coffee club at work. Had to stop on the way to work this morning to grab just that one item. I did manage to get away with only 1 carton of ice cream and no pastries.

Got the carpet in the living room, dining room, and hall professionally cleaned. Something I do every few decades whether it needs it or not. For the record, it needed it. Desperately. Fortunately my brother took the animals with him when he moved to Kansas so this time it should stay this way for a while.

I just had a conversation with Grok and apparently it is now possible to get: Distant Horizons Lithosphere Still Life Sodium Iris Lithium Dynamic Trees Conquest Reforged (refabricated) .. all running together on the same server using the Fabric loader. This would be amazing if it actually works. If you've ever seen the ArdaCraft server, Reforged is the mod that enables such detailed builds. Even if you've seen ArdaCraft, modern mods like Distant Horizons and shaders like Bliss take it to a whole new level. Everything in Arda is hand-crafted. Lithosphere and Still Life provide the same sorts of sweeping vistas and 'realistic' terrain in computer generated worlds. This sure isn't vanilla minecraft anymore! With Dynamic Trees trees even fall over when you chop them down, making floating canopies impossible!

It's just the opposite around here. If the earthquakes stop then everybody starts getting really nervous and the tinfoil hat crowd starts in with the "repent, the end is near!" stuff. Earthquakes release stress on the faults. If they stop then the stress just keeps building until something big breaks and all of that stress gets released at once. It's better to have a lot of little quakes over a period of time than a lot of quiet time between big quakes.

Just got home from the grocery store and found this lady in the way when I went to transfer the goods from the car to the house. (hidden out of consideration for the spider-squeamish)

I want dinner! Unfortunately I have nothing in the house so I'll have to go grocery shopping first. Shopping while hungry is usually a bad idea. I just hope I don't come home with 12 gallons of ice cream and a bunch of pastries from the bakery section.

Cleaned out the hall closet and found all our old Wii stuff. Included were both generations of consoles, a WiiU portable, and a Wii-fit balance board. A box full of games too. Too bad none of it is likely to work anymore with the Nintendo servers shut down.

I like that they are finally doing something useful with copper. Now I just need to find some time to play. :(