efaardvark

Today I found a lizard climbing the curtains in the livingroom. (He probably got in yesterday when I had the door propped open for a while so I could temporarily move furniture outside to the patio and clean the livingroom rug.) Now, I don't generally have a problem with creepy crawlies like bugs, spiders, or lizards. However I do believe it is good policy to not share living spaces with them so I removed him from the curtains and reintroduced him to the great outdoors.

(wrong topic)

Why did the invisible man turn down the job offer? He couldn't see himself doing it. Rick Astley will let you borrow any movie from his Pixar collection except one. (Wait for it.) He's never gonna give you Up.

My dream job would be to clean mirrors. I could really see myself doing that.

Maybe time to revisit the idea of a discord server? Is the old one still around?

My favorite genre is SCIENCE fiction, hands down. However, I feel I must explain because in my view there actually aren't that many science fiction stories out there. See the "science" word there? If the plot doesn't work in this universe without resorting to impossible physics then it is simply fiction, or maybe outright fantasy. It also has to have science or technology as a central plot element. Clarke and Niven are a couple of my favorite authors because they were able to create incredible stories based on the rules of science and engineering as we know them. Star wars to me is sword-and-sorcery rebranded. Star Trek is better but it still has things like warp drive, transporters, and FTL comms that depend on fantasy-physics yet are central to the plot(s). (To me Star Trek actually works better as a morality play, especially the original series.) Planetes is science fiction because it takes place in a future world where the rocket equation reigns supreme and space garbage is a real problem. GATTACA and I, Robot (even the Will Smith version) are SF. I do make allowances. Ghost in the Shell is almost SF, except that we don't have a way to quantify or transfer "ghosts". Science doesn't know everything. and that's enough to let GitS pass as SF for my purposes. Provisionally. More than one or maybe two such lapses however and the questionable elements have to be explained well in terms of extending known limits WITHOUT conflicting with known science and engineering. You can get as creative as you like without crossing that line. In fact I encourage it. That's part of the fun. I subscribe to Clarke's laws, especially the 3rd, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". 99 times out of 100 I'll find a show extremely interesting if it can honestly say that it is science fiction with a setting and plot that could actually exist. Show me the magic, but make sure it works in this universe. Having said all that I should also say that I'm not against everything not-SF. If nothing else such "real" SF shows are obviously few and far between. By necessity there are other genres that I watch far more often, many of them quite entertaining on their own terms. I do tend to like comedy and slice-of-life, though being older myself I also try to avoid the shonen/shojo type in favor of more mature characters and themes. Beyond that/those I'll give pretty much anything a watch, at least for the first few episodes.

Just finished the 1st 3 eps of The Too-Perfect Saint. Kinda meh. Not bad, but not great either. Worth putting it on the watch list at least.

Good movie! That's going back a bit though.. maybe mid 80's? If you liked it then you should try St. Elmo's Fire. It's kind of "The Breakfast Club goes to College". They both came out at about the same time and had the same people in them so in my mind they've always kind of gone together. I even saw them both back-to-back in the theater when they came out.

Moved a bunch of stuff that was slowly returning to nature from the back yard to the trashcan area in preparation for trash pickup day. Some of it was inhabited. (don't click if you don't appreciate creatures with many legs.)

We collected the state quarters too! We even got a book with slots for each state's coin and filled it up. Not sure where the book is now. Probably my brother took it with him when he moved out. I think the penny is probably the oldest item in the box. It's pretty worn and probably not worth much but yeah, kinda cool.

This was kind of a one-off, though I do have a small collection of other coins.. more of an accumulation than a formal collection really. Just a minute.. <<pulling out the coin box>> There's quite a few modern(ish) coins from around the world that I got from my grandmother. She and her crazy roommate used to travel all over the world and they always gave the coins they had left after they got back to us grandkids. Most of them wound up in here. My dad did buy an actual Canadian maple leaf back in the early 70s. That's in here. It's a gold coin so it's probably worth quite a bit today but that's the only one. Other items of curiosity would be a copper penny from 1818 that was also my grandmother's and several pre-1964 silver coins of various denominations that were saved by my parents in the 60s and 70s as all the silver coinage disappeared from circulation. No rhyme or reason to the pile really though, just mostly random stuff. I do collect space-themed items however. (I think I've previously posted my collection of lapel pins for all the projects I've worked on/with over the years.) There are three "rounds" or medallions in that vein here as well. One that my dad got for working on the project commemorates the Viking mission(s) to Mars. Similarly there's another one that I got for working on the Voyager project during their Neptune encounter. That was my first job at NASA and Voyager's last planetary encounter before the spacecraft headed out into interstellar space. A third item commemorates the DSN's 50th anniversary. Everyone working in the DSN at the time got one of those. They're just brass "coins" so probably not worth a lot in terms of $$$ but the personal connection makes them special. Viking mission medallion .. Voyager's Neptune encounter.. DSN 50-year..

Dinner was pork loin and a salad wrap. I was going to make lunches out of it for next week but it was so good I already ate half of it! <burp>

Bought a 1oz silver “dollar” from a stacker friend. Currently about $33.35 in terms of actual silver content according to spot prices. Not sure why I bought it. We were talking about how worthless the modern coins are in terms of actual metal content and it just sort of happened. Seriously tho, I remember buying a loaf of bread for about a US quarter back in the early 70s. They’d stopped minting quarters out of 91% silver in ‘64, the year I was born, but this was before the stagflation of the late 70s and early 80s so prices were still thinking we were on the gold standard. Anyway, a silver quarter from back then would be worth about $5.94 today. IOW, still worth about 1 loaf of bread. Makes you wonder why the powers that be decided to do away with gold- and silver-backed money.

This is probably an easy one. If you've seen the series you won't forget it...

I've felt that too. Like the world isn't quite behaving as it should? I've felt something similar after getting off a ship after longer trips on the ocean. I think I get my "sea legs" as my brain and body get used to the motions (or apparent motions in VR) and then when I stop it feels a little odd until I adjust to normal again.

I tried previewing Kowloon Generic Romance today. Three episodes and I still have absolutely no idea what this one is about. Can someone tell me if it's worth it to keep going? Without spoilers of course.

I've encountered a bit of that during "long" (>1hr) VR sessions. I've been told that it comes from underpowered setups. VR is pretty demanding. You need 2xHD displays running at a minimum of 90 frames per second and the head-tracking needs to sync up with what's being shown on the displays on the order of milliseconds. 50 milliseconds is considered to be the maximum latency for head & eye tracking but certain sensitive individuals can get dizziness, headaches, or motion sickness with as little as 20 milliseconds latency. 20ms would correspond to roughly 2 frames at 90fps so that means that if you move your head then the computer needs to detect that movement and incorporate it into the video being displayed in less than 2 frames. This is over and above any compute / display power the game or whatever app needs for itself. Apparently when your brain sees an image with motion in it it will try to predict where the things in motion will be in the next frame(s). If it doesn't see them where it expects them to be then it takes the differences as you moving, but then your ears and body give your brain a message that they're not doing that and things get confused. Too much of that and you start getting dizzy or even motion sickness. That or the people trying to sell me the gear are trying to upsell me. But I do believe that's at least part of it. For me it hits the worst when I'm trying to play a game and things start lagging. Even a tiny amount of lag that I'd normally never really notice when playing on a monitor can bring on a bit of dizziness in VR. On the other hand I've never had a problem when I'm just wandering around in one of those museum-type 3d walk-through setups where the scenery is mostly static and I'm just walking around looking and not making sudden weird head motions dodging things and shooting back.

Yeah. I haven't seen anything past that yet. I'll have to see how it turns out. It wouldn't be the first that made it past 3 only to be dropped by 9. Endings are a big deal for me and can easily be a make or break thing for the season as a whole. I have to say that nothing has really grabbed my attention this season or last. Some of it's been entertaining (Aharen-san) but most of it is clearly aimed at younger and / or fantasy-phile audiences while I'm an older SF guy. Can't remember the last time - what I consider - a good SF was released.

BTW - speaking of VR - I heard a creepy SF plot idea the other day. Embed an AI in a VR setup. At first the AI just monitors your interactions through the VR gear and uses the input to generate a shadow you that (ideally, eventually) can respond exactly as you do in the VR world. At first it just pretends to be you at your direction if you get sick or when you're unavailable for some reason but when you die the AI takes over and nobody knows the difference.

I'd like to do that too. I've tried it and liked it (for the most part) but I'd like to get a system set up with it here at home. Not a high priority given the expense but something I've been watching and wanting to get into for a while now.

That's just this season on crunchy. Not even all of it. If you haven't already you might want to check out the MyAnimeList site. Crunchy's site is ok for streaming but it leaves something to be desired in terms of creating a watch list, discovering new stuff, or keeping a list of what you've already watched. (And of course it only has what's in Sony's catalog.) I'm horrible at keeping my own MAL list up to date but the site is a good resource for getting an overview of the anime and manga world and has good tools for plan your viewing / reading schedule. MAL is also good for finding new-to-you anime that's similar to others that you have liked.