efaardvark

Not a complete list by any measure but for titles that have extremely sad themes (or at least moments) I'll add .... Grave of the Fireflies Anohana Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 Wolf’s Rain Erased Angel Beats! Plastic Memories Made in Abyss Gakkou gurashi! Tasogare Otome x Amnesia

Got some more DSN swag from work today.. a DSN 60-year anniversary poster:

THanks. I think the meds worked. Something did anyway. Sometime in the afternoon I could suddenly breathe again, my ears popped, and the headache almost immediately went away as well.

The "still life" mod can generate some pretty massive trees. This one is 5 blocks wide at the base and easily twice as tall as the vanilla 2x2 "christmas tree" spruce towards the right edge of the pic.

Woke up feeling like I have a bad head cold this morning. Everything sounds like I'm underwater, I have a headache, and my nose is completely useless. Feels like someone stuck a bicycle pump up my nose, plugged up the exits, and proceeded to start pumping. Everything else seems to be working properly however so I'm thinking/hoping it's just allergies. Took some cold meds for the painkiller and decongestant properties and I'm waiting for those to take effect. Also some hot coffee. Stomach is ok so far so if those don't work then maybe I'll try something like a spicy tuna sandwich for lunch.

Got a couple more parts in. This time the CPU and the SSD. I still need a cooler and a GPU before I can start making the soup. Got my eye on a cooler but I may wait until the after-Xmas sales to get the GPU.

So today's the day pre-ordering for Hytale goes live. I don't advocate pre-ordering games. How many times has the gaming industry burned customers with that scam? I'm also a bit concerned about the original devs' plans for the future of the game. I mean, the reason Hypixel got into trouble was the micro-transactions ran afoul of Mojang's EULA after all. I'm totally not interested if they go down the path of pay-to-win and micro-transactions. All that said, I am very interested in the game itself. Maybe they've learned a lesson from that? The devs have said no pay-to-win or MT. (yet?) I will likely be checking it out when it gets to the early access phase if they deliver on the linux version, and definitely when it comes to Steam. From what I've seen of demos this game has a chance to be very popular with the Minecraft crowd. At the least it will be good to give Minecraft some competition, especially given MSFT's ownership and the direction they've taken some of their other software. (Slant-eye at Windows 11.) Anyone else have any interest in this title? ('tubie w/more about the pre-order and EA here)

Made a mostly Monte Cristo sandwich for dinner. Really just ham and cheese, but I had a little bit of egg whites and some croissant bread left and this seemed a good way to use it up.

1.21.11 is out. Spears are now a thing in mainline. There are now husk camels as well, an undead version of camels. And husk camels with husk riders. And husk camels with husk riders carrying spears. And Parched skeletons. And parched skeletons riding husk camels. And since camels can carry 2 riders, husk camels with both husk riders carrying spears and parched skeletons firing arrows of slowness are a possibility. Deserts at night might be a bit dangerous. I like the idea of the Nautilus, though not so much the idea of armored zombie Nautilus with Drowned riders carrying tridents. I'd almost rather deal with laser fish, at least one-on-one. I'm definitely going to try for the new "Mob Kabob" advancement for spearing 5 enemies with a Charge attack.

Welcome back! ======================================== Spent today far from civilization. At work by 5am so we could get on the road before sunrise and avoid most of the L.A. freeway rush-hour traffic. Didn't get home until well after dark. In between stuff happened. It was a loooong day. No burros were harmed.

Got off work early but I have to get up at 4am for work tomorrow for a test out at Goldstone that starts at 7:30am. That means driving halfway to Las Vegas (from Los Angeles), then making a left at Barstow and driving for another 45 minutes straight out into the middle of nowhere. If you still have cell service then you're not there yet. Commute takes about 2-3 hours depending on traffic. Probably won't finish until after 6pm either, which means a long day and driving tired in the desert at night. Not looking forward to any of it, especially the burros.

All part of the “fun” of byo. I’m probably going to change my OS too. Still Linux but I gotta get away from Canonical. I had Manjaro on my last system. I also had SuSE on my LAN’s gateway. First choice this time will probably be another Arch distro. Maybe Manjaro again, but CachyOS seems to be getting a lot of hits on distrowatch and it’s based on Arch as well. I might give that a try first. Haven’t made a final decision on the distro yet. re Crucial, yes. That just leaves Hynix and Samsung. Hope that doesn’t mean supply problems going forward. DDR5 memory prices were already way up. When I checked a few months ago, 64GB (2x32G) were $240ish. That’s already expensive enough but when I looked recently that same memory had more than doubled in price to over $600! To cut costs I’ve already scaled my build back to 32G. Crucial’s exit could mean higher flash memory costs as well. That would hit SSDs, including nvme M.2. So far I’m not seeing that but I don’t want to take chances. I’m getting a nice one now while I have the opportunity.

Pulled the trigger on building a new system. Got the motherboard and RAM today. The case I got yesterday. PSU also arrived yesterday. Still shopping for the rest. With all the craziness out there I decided it was time. Crucial (micron) just recently announced they are leaving the consumer memory market for greener pastures. Guess the money's greener making datacenter memory. GPU and memory prices are already way up and with the tariff madness making a mess of business plans and logistics I didn’t want to get in a situation where parts were too expensive, or even unavailable.

If you are having fun then you’re doing it right.

I am happy. Went to renew my subscription to Analog and discovered that they now have a digital version. I have been a subscriber since '72 so I have .. a lot of them. Several shelves in the house and quite a few boxes in the garage are full of all the back issues. Not only is the digital version a lot more compact, it's cheaper too! So now I'm going to have to go look at eReaders. Again. I have an old boox Note Pro but it is showing it's age when compared to things like the new Note Air 4C. The Note Pro's display is e-ink (which is great for reading) but it is monochrome. The newer ones with Kaleido displays are cheap enough now that maybe I can think about getting a reader with color. I'd like better note-taking ability too. The Pro is a bit slow. Feature wise I love its ability to take notes and annotate PDFs but its older CPU means I have to slow down and be a bit more deliberate than I usually am when hand-writing. It's also still running Android 6, which makes security when doing online stuff a bit of a concern as well.

I'm not huge on romance. I also don't really get into "favorites" as my interests tend to change. That said, here's a few that come to mind. In no particular order... The Ancient Magus' Bride Spice and Wolf Itazura na Kiss Clannad: After Story Lovely★Complex The World is Still Beautiful Ok, so I can't count. (I could actually name a few more "favorites".) If you're looking for general-audience stuff to use to introduce normies to anime then you might try things like Kimi ni Todoke or Toradora!, though those are a bit too diabetes-inducing for my tastes, especially KnT.

Played a bit of minecraft with relatives in Wisconsin. Building a large fortified town or some sort of bastide around a village we found. Carcassonne comes to mind, though the design of the walls is straight from the imagination of my SIL. My brother and I were building shops and homes for the villagers inside while she worked on the walls. Going to have probably a couple dozen villagers when we're done. (That's if the lag doesn't get us first. ) Once we get all of them placed and leveled up this is going to be a lively place. We're not strapping the villagers down like you seen in most "trading hall" designs on youtube or twitch either. We're trying to build sectors within the town where the villagers are free to wander and mingle a bit while still keeping the villagers confined enough to not lose track of their beds or profession blocks. Kind of a tricky balance given minecraft village mechanics, but it'll be cool if we can pull it off. There's a trial chamber right underneath where I was standing to take this screenshot too, so there's a "dungeon" to go adventuring in nearby.

OMG.. DDR5 memory is so freeking expensive!

Congrats on the vacation. Going to try to do that 2-week vacation thing myself at the end of the year. For me a vacation isn't a vacation unless it's so long that I forget my work password. I haven't been able to do that for years due to work schedule but it looks like this time it might work.

I liked that one too. I do agree that Ruri was a bit noisy, but I think the other characters were a lot quieter and that helped balance her out, especially Nagi.

With That Particular Shopping Day coming up I thought I'd take a few minutes to update my AM5 build list. I decided this would be a good opportunity to see how X's Grok performs as well. I'd already done the hard work - well except the part about funding the build - so I knew most of the answers. I just wanted to see if Grok could actually be helpful for something like this. I think the answer is "yes".. though with reservations. As usual with AI you don't really know what's going on in there. Is it really considering all the options? Did it not present any information that I might have found relevant or useful? It seemed to be in a hurry to take me shopping too. Could that be a 4th directive creeping in? Anyway, it gave me a link to the Q&A session so you can check it out yourself, if you've a mind to.... https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_24c912e8-5d78-4cae-8b56-96534a9a9e9b It's a nice build too, though quite expensive compared to what I've done in the past. Like double what I've ever spent on any of my builds to date. For reasons, including inflation. But... gak! This is basically why I haven't upgraded my system in about 6 years. Always hoping the price will come down. (Spoiler.. it doesn't.) If anyone does check it out please let me know what you think. I've also updated the page I've been maintaining for the build over on pcpartpicker if you don't care about the AI stuff.