efaardvark

and an F3 shot for those interested in the gory details. System summary: game: MC1.21.4 mods: Distant Horizons 2.3.0-b-dev (nightly build), Sodium 0.6.6, Iris 1.8.5 shader: Complementary Unbound 5.4 resource pack: Faithful 64x CPU AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8/16 core 32GB RAM (6G allocated to java/minecraft) 8GB Radeon RX 6600XT GPU

I followed an ass through the nether.

Wet and rainy. 45F / 7C so a bit on the chilly side for SoCal too. Last week everyone was worried about fires, this week it's mudslides.

Wind / fire weather. Again.

That guy sounds like a Crazy Eddie straight out of a Niven novel. Unfortunate for you but good thing he’s only in charge of a classroom. Idiots like that will be the downfall of civilization. You have my sympathies. Today I’m spending the day in my car so I can get some work done on my laptop while the power is out in the house. For some reason SoCal Edison (my power company) would rather pay dividends to shareholders and bonuses to C-suite execs than invest in equipment maintenance and upgrades that would let them keep the power flowing to their customers when it gets a bit windy.

What a year this week has been!

Thanks. Up until a couple hours ago I was under an evacuation warning (meaning, pack the car and be ready to go, but ok to stay for now) but it has been lifted now and the electricity is back so I'm taking a breath while I can. More "red flags" - high winds plus ultra low humidity - in the forecast for this weekend but for now I'll take what I can get. My boss lives in Pasadena only a block or three from the "Eaton" fire. His mom's was one of the houses burned down in nearby Altadena so he may not be in next week. (She's ok but the house is gone.) JPL had been evacuated like everything else in Pasadena and completely shut down but now that the evacuations have been rescinded they're rebooting and dusting everything off to get things going again. I'm not sure if things will be ready for us to go back to work next week or not though. Got a text this afternoon saying that people who are able should plan on working remotely for at least next week. Rather difficult to do without power and like I said, there's likely to be more "red flag" weather over the weekend and into early next week. Considering calling my aunt over in Ventura and visiting her for a week. Still quite a lot of recovery to do on many fronts. I spent the last few hours after power came back cleaning the ash and soot that's covering everything like a layer of snow. Not complaining tho. At least I still have a house to clean.

Not much. Kind of nervous + bored. Work is closed. Power is still out so no internet except for my phone. Outside it’s smoky and air quality is extremely poor so even physical exercise is out. Mostly keeping my batteries charged and listening to the radio reports on the “Eaton” fire.

Smoky, with a chance of high winds and fire. Hopefully not so much as a couple days ago. I have next to no experience with such things but my brother in Wisconsin says that it has to be close to freezing to make a good snowman. Not too cold, because It has to be a little wet. Like when building a sand castle at the beach. In fact, he says that driving on really cold, freshly-fallen snow is a lot like driving on sand.

The snow is not sticking around but apparently the low-pressure system driving these winds came from up north and brought some very cold air with it, cold enough to create snow at higher elevations. Not sure about the fire. It all depends on the winds. The wind fell off a bit this afternoon but it has been picking up again this evening. Strongest winds are supposed to be tonight and into the wee hours of tomorrow morning but they're not supposed to fall off completely until Thursday morning. Until they go away and air drops can be made safely fighting the fire will depend mainly on ground forces. Overnight they'll probably have to ground the aircraft completely due to darkness, terrain, smoke, and winds making flying too dangerous for water drops. Without water drops the ground troops won't be able to reach the parts of the fire that are in the mountainous brush areas away from city streets and fire hydrants. Right now the firefighters are in structure-protection mode with the fire 0% contained. The fire has the initiative and the firefighters can only react to whatever it does. If the fire goes into the hills they'll just have to let it burn where it will and hope the wind doesn't drive it back into the inhabited parts of the city somewhere else.

WINDY! So much wind! Bits of rain and even snow too, even though temperatures are in the upper 60s. Very strange weather. Work sent out a text this morning for everyone to stay/go home today and plan to do the same tomorrow. The weather people are saying it's the worst wind situation for SoCal in decades. Edit: and of course with the low humidity windy weather is fire weather

Used up a whole stack of TNT blowing holes in the nether looking for netherite. Found 22 ancient debris. The nether looks awesome with the Distant Horizons mod and Complementary Unbound shaders btw. But then I got back to base and discovered that a zombie had been molesting my librarians and had converted several of them! Fortunately the golems that had spawned to protect the villagers were not able to reach them after they were zombified and I was eventually able cure them.

Did a bit more exploration in minecraft. Still looking for a decent-sized pale garden. Or at least one that has a creaking heart in it.

Goofed around in minecraft with my SIL building a sniffer enclosure and breeding sniffers after hatching a couple eggs that we found while exploring an underwater ruin. The adults are huge!

Dynamic trees has been updated to 1.20.1 and Distant Horizons now works with neoforge. So now you can get both mods working in the same game. Pretty cool.

Finally got a chance to play some more minecraft after work this evening & found another trail ruin. Hard to spot these things. I almost walked right past it. Fun to excavate however. Good place to find pottery sherds. Usually a couple armor trim templates mixed in as well. I may dig into it this weekend. Found my first pale garden too, but only a small one. Maybe a couple dozen trees, some of which burned down as I got there due to a nearby lava pond. No creaking or hearts in the ones that were left. Took a bunch of pale wood, saplings, and moss bits back to base. I like the doors made from the wood.

The Ravages of Time - Threshold

Got a new ornament for the Christmas tree. .. and a poster..

Foggy earlier in the week but then the winds came and blew it all away. Not so bad in the immediate area where I am but over in Ventura county where my aunt lives it is apparently blowing pretty good. And of course here in SoCal wind means fires. This time it is Malibu getting hit. At only a couple thousand acres it isn't a big fire (for around here) but lots of high-value real estate is at risk so it's getting a lot of attention. Some property destroyed already and evacuations of a couple thousand people have been ordered.

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!