efaardvark
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Everything posted by efaardvark
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I can see how it might take quite a while to learn to speak any of the Celtic languages fluently if you didn't start at a very young age. I'm a native English speaker. (Well, American... you'll find our boots on our feet not in our cars and our pants are outerwear.) My multiple-great grandparents on my father's side immigrated from Scotland however and my Highlander ancestors (Creag an Tuirc!) spoke Gaelic, another Celtic-family language. Once or twice I've tried to learn Gaelic but unfortunately failed utterly. Part of the problem for me learning Gaelic was that it is not widely spoken, so finding good teaching materials or even just someone to talk to for practice was a bit of a challenge. Languages like Spanish, German, Chinese, or Japanese are a lot more common for economic or cultural reasons so you'll often find those languages being taught in grade schools and materials for learning them readily available in public libraries. For Gaelic you're usually out of luck unless you want to go for university-level classes aimed at literature or linguistic anthropology majors. It also seemed quite difficult for me to parse. It didn't really map well to anything I already knew. Additionally, the few remaining native speakers don't all speak it the same way so there were numerous dialect differences. Not a trivial undertaking.
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I hereby apologize to the rest of the world for the sorry state of US politics. I've tried my best. I have not voted for either the Dumbos or the Repugs for the last several decade now but I live in a republic and there's not much more I can do. Trying to vote rationally in the US is a lot like swimming against a tide of rabid lemmings determined to be the first over the edge.
Two takeaways from the "debate" from my point of view...- First, unless they really, really, really want Trump to win, the Deez need to find a new candidate immediately. At this point even they realize that. Probably. Of course knowing them they'll probably pick Clinton again.
- All Trump really needed to do for the win was to keep his mouth shut and let Biden speak whatever was on his mind. Amazingly, he actually managed to do it. (For the most part.) WTF?? Maybe he's had a lot of practice holding back in court recently and that has carried over into his political speaking in public outside the courtroom. Maybe the age of miracles is not over. Whatever. I still think he's beyond hope as a human being but after last night I'll allow that there's a real chance he could be reincarnated as a cicada instead of a bedbug in the next life.
Not that I'm endorsing either camp, just to be perfectly clear. Overall the "debate" didn't change my views on either the parties or the candidates. If anything the opposite in fact. I was sure going in that there was nothing good that would come of the event and it did not fail to fail to be something the nation could be proud of. At this point even if you held a gun to my head I'd pick the guy with the boot on his head over either of the candidates on stage last night. The most succinct post-commentary remark that I've seen online so far was: "The winner of yesterday's presidential debate was the Voyager probe, currently in interstellar space and headed away from Earth at 17 miles per second." I wholeheartedly agree. Personally I'm still hoping the Starship works out. And the sooner the better.
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Looking across from the other side of the pond I agree with @Sakura in having trouble believing that Trump and Biden are the best candidates that America has to offer for its top job. But then again I have the same problem with the candidates for the job of Prime Minister in our election this week. But at least both are under state retirement age.
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@Animedragon & @Sakura I'm absolutely sure that these are NOT the best candidates for office. No question in my mind. Going by the Constitution there are literally hundreds of millions of qualified candidates in the country. Two of them have GOT to be better that the ones the parties have picked for us to choose from. That's why I say at every opportunity that both the Democrat and the Republican parties are utter failures, and have been for years now.
Not that anyone listens. I'm sure I'll be throwing my vote away again at the next vote but at least I can claim it isn't my fault.
Looks like I'll be breaking out my "Jack" sticker again...
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I think a lot of people here in the UK won't bother to vote on Thursday, and I can't really blame them. Years ago at General Elections the three main parties told us all the good things they'd do for us if we voted for them, nowadays their message is more along the lines of telling us all the bad things that will happen to us if we don't vote for them.
It seems that the choice is no longer to vote for the party we think best, but to vote for the one we think is the least worse.
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3D "fly through" of the PoC using IR and visual data from Hubble and Webb to create the scene.
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I watched that a while back too. Kind of slow and there was a lot of strange stuff that was never adequately explained before moving on but ultimately an entertaining series.
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Another Falcon Heavy launch. (This one for the GOES-U weather satellite) I love watching the two side boosters come back and land. That never gets old.
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State of the art visual experience in MC these days..
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Found a cool lush cave in MC that had an oceanside entrance that made it easily accessible by boat. Very nice visuals, courtesy of the "bliss" shader.
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It's kind of the other way around over here on the left coast. Where I am here in Southern Calif it's a hot, dry desert. As you go up the coast it gets generally wetter but colder as you go past Portland, Oregon until you get to places like Seattle, Washington where it is cold but always raining. They don't even see the sun for years at a time. All of our air comes down the coast from frozen places like Alaska or Canada so it isn't like the east cost that gets the warm tropical moisture coming up from the south. We don't really have too many places that are both hot and humid at the same time until you're well across the southern border into Mexico.
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I lived in Alabama for about a year when I was a kid so I know that feeling as well. Sometimes I wondered if having gills might work better than using lungs.
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I know the feeling. Not that bad here (yet) but hot enough that I took a few minutes this weekend to change the air filter and clean the leaves and critter leavings from the air conditioner, just in case. Fortunately around here the humidity is usually very low if it gets that warm. Sometimes even single-digit low. In that case I'm good to about 95F/35C if I have a fan, a cold drink, and some shade. I did get a little melted on the way home from work today. The parking lot at work has no real shade so the car was f.. quite warm after sitting there all day.
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This is not my KSP game.
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Had to dust ashes from a brushfire off my car this morning. I guess 3 days of >80F temps and low humidity means it's now fire season?
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I jinxed it. Killed in my own house even!
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Phenomenon - Threshold Phenomenon is a great song to lead with, but the rest are right up there as well. Fragmentation for instance, or I love the imagery in Falling Away.
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Still alive in my mc1.20.6 hardcore game. Gotta be some sort of personal record.
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Ayreon - Age of Shadows The Age of Shadows Has Begun..
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Oh no! Ed Stone just died! Dr. Ed Stone was a former Jet Propulsion Lab director and chief scientist for the Voyager mission. He was the only scientist to have worked on both the spacecraft that flew closest to the sun and the spacecraft that is furthest from it. (The Parker Solar Probe occasionally flies so close to the sun that it flies through the upper part of the Sun's "atmosphere". The Voyager 2 spacecraft, one of two that the mission launched in the 1970s, has left the solar system and is now over 24 billion km / 15B mi from the Sun in interstellar space.)
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Gotta get yer steps in! No I'm not one of those people. I prefer a good trail any day, and the only time I look at my phone on a trail is if I need help from GPS!
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DH 2.1 & Iris 1.7 are officially out for MC1.20.6. This is with released versions of both, plus the Bliss shader.. I'm going to have to re-tweak my settings though. The released versions are much better performers. With my current settings tweaked for the dev versions I'm allocating too much memory to Java for instance.
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Just saw an announcement that next official version of Distant Horizons mod for MC has dropped.. Clearly the devs have been working on efficiency for this release, based on the reduction of memory and database (hard drive) resources necessary. And now that this version is out we should shortly start to see much broader shader support as well since the API has been bumped to 2.0.0. Only thing missing now is a server version so low-LOD (level of detail) versions of terrain that is distant but visible can be provided to the client without the player having to actually go there. That will be tricky to implement without potentially bogging down the server with generating terrain. I'm not holding my breath while waiting but I'm glad that the devs are working on it. Something to look forward to anyway. Also this version is dropping Forge support. Only NeoForge and Fabric are supported going forward. Not going to get into the whole Forge vs NeoForge thing here but I expect we'll see more of this sort of thing going forward.
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Baked “grilled” cheese sandwich. (And yes, that’s the last of the popcorn from last week.)
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Been super busy this week but I finally got enough of a sit to watch the entire Starship reentry. Quite a show! But the vehicle held together and accomplished the mission perfectly. I'm sure they got plenty of extremely valuable data from the intense reentry portion of the flight envelope, which was pretty much the entire point of the test flight. Booster did it's thing quite well too. SpaceX says they might have up to 7 test flights this year, including a ~70-80% chance of an attempted booster catch with the "chopsticks" back at the launch tower!
I have to add that I am also (almost) equally amazed at the quality and continuity of the real-time video feed. I am old enough to remember the live video of the Apollo flights. 4k HD all the way through (well, most of the way.. it did cut out for a bit here and there) reentry was amazing.
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A moment of appreciation for the camera (circled in red in the X pic) and the starlink antennas that played a critical role in providing the video downlink. The two rectangles in the unshielded part of the main fuselage to the left of the flap are the starlink antennas. There's actually 4 of them, the two visible and two on the other side. (Maybe a thin sliver of one is just visible around the curve of the fuselage in the pic.)
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I've always assumed that strawberries were created by the same drunken deity that created the platypus and the hallucigenia. The strawberry used to be a perfectly ordinary berry but one day for some unknown reason this deity twisted the poor berry through another dimension and suddenly it found itself with its seeds on the outside You can, just not for long. Maybe about half a second. Ask me how I know. Hey, at least I didn't try to lick my elbow! This time. (I'd heard that one before.)
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Some popcorn. Lots and lots of popcorn. <まんぷく> And a soda. (This is my contribution to a potluck at work tomorrow but I got an early start.)
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Same here. I have to go out of my comfort zone to get loud, or even interact with new or unfamiliar people. I can do it when I have to but it has taken me years of self-training to get to this point. I'm technically still "fifty-something" but I'll be 60 in Sept. which I'm pretty sure puts me -><- this close to "old person" territory too.
