efaardvark

Dang, none of them MacLaren. With that and the red hair...

Threshold - Swallowed

What were you doing when you were half as old as you are now? If you are 10, what were you doing when you were 5? If you are 30, what was going on when you were 15? This topic started a lively lunchtime discussion at work so I thought I'd drop it here and see if it has similar effect... I'm coming up on 60 (in September) so to keep the math simple I'll go with that. That means I was 30 in '94. All I can remember offhand from that year was Commodore International going bankrupt and NASA crashing the Magellan spacecraft into Venus at the end of that mission. My first computer was a Commodore AMIGA 1000 and I'd just upgraded (at considerable expense) to an A3000 model when I heard the news about Commodore so I was a bit bummed. Magellan I remember because I was working on the Ulysses project at the time. They were just starting the first of their fast scans of the mission so they had some years yet ahead but I knew a few people on the Magellan project who were going to be looking for work soon. Those two lawyers inventing spam with their "Green Card" mass-marketing scam on usenet I think was around then as well, give or take a year or two. Likewise for Amazon and Yahoo going public. Mid-90s in general were growth years here in the US, which was a welcome change after the economic disaster that was the 70s and 80s*. The 'Net was just getting started. The WWW as we know it had only just been invented in '91 and we hadn't yet hit the dot-com bust so everyone was still upbeat and trying to cash in on the boom. I seem to recall the first pizza was ordered over the internet in or around '94 as well. Must have been over a dial-up modem connection because things like DSL were still a few years in the future and 'Net-connected smartphones didn't exist yet. So what was going on when you were half as old as you are now? * a note on the 80s.. People complain about mortgage rates popping above 5% in the last year or so. How about the standard 30Y, fixed-rate mortgages ABOVE 10% for 7 straight years, from '79 to around '86. The peak was over 18% in '81! Even higher if your credit wasn't so hot. Even t-bills were pushing 20% yields. Great if you had cash left to put away. Not many did. Massive inflation and rampant layoffs and corporate cutbacks had taken their toll in a failing economy. The word "stagflation" was invented to describe that era of high inflation combined with a stagnant economy. I graduated HS in '82 so that was the world the newly-minted adult me started out in.

Video captured by the Perseverance Mars rover..

We're supposed to get another big storm this weekend but for now it's sunny and Spring(ish). The pear tree out front has gone from leafless sticks last week to full-blossom mode this week, and you can smell it from a block away. So can the bees apparently. There's a continuous hum coming from the tree during daylight hours.

Iris shader support in Distant Horizons is awesome...

Diggy Diggy Hole - Gawr Gura cover ( Know Your Meme )

Turned to Dust - Threshold

I prefer to pay in cash. The ATMs around here still only give out $20 bills however, and most places have a $300/day withdrawal limit. That's ridiculous with everything costing so much these days. Just driving past the grocery store can suck $100 out of my wallet! Even if I could get past the daily ATM limit that would mean carrying around a huge wad of cash everywhere. And ever try to pay for anything with a $100 bill? They look at you like you're a drug dealer. They smell the bills, hold them up to the light, call the manager over.... If I pulled out 4 or 5 to pay for groceries they'd probably call the cops. Takes way longer and more trouble than just using the CC so that's what I usually wind up actually doing. That or my phone. I use the card only as a convenience tho and I don't carry a balance. I don't spend money I don't already have in my checking account and I pay off the whole CC balance every month. Credit card companies probably hate me.

So I thought I'd experiment a bit with Litematica. Litematica is a fabric mod that lets you place virtual builds in your world. In survival it doesn't build them for you but in creative it will actually place the blocks. Pretty handy and since I already have fabric installed for Iris/Sodium and the Distant Horizons mod installation of Litematica is just dropping 2 files in the "mods" folder. As an experiment I decided to add an area to a town I'm building / fortifying as a base in a survival game. The newly-created area looks like this in stock MC: For the test I copied an existing house (the one whose roof is barely visible at the far right under the BetterF3 overlay) into a Litematica schematic, then pasted two of the copied schematics into the world. (Below) As I said, Litematica won't build things for you in survival, but it will let you place and orient "ghost" copies like this. The two buildings with line-boxes around them and with a greenish glow to them are the copies. I rotated one copy around 180 degrees to get the doors on the two copies to face each other. Once the placement is as desired you can lock the image in place. The images are slightly transparent and completely virtual. I mean, everything in MC is virtual, but you can walk through the walls of the placed schematics in-game. (note this means you can't do things like open doors or climb stairs.) Then you can go back and place the blocks to "fill in" the schematic with actual blocks. This mod looks like it'll be pretty useful. Especially since you can import / export builds from the game. You can save a schematic, which then appears as a file in the computer. You can upload this file online just like any other file. You can also download other peoples' schematic files for placement in your own worlds. Of course you can also do stuff like build something in a single-player, creative-mode game then save the build as a schematic, and load it back in to a survival world game to recreate it there.

Finally got some more time to play minecraft. (Albeit with laundry going in the background, but hey, I'll take what I can get. ) Used the time to cure my zombified merchants. They were apparently very happy to get back to normal. I got some really nice trades out of the deal, especially for the librarians!

So there's a spacecraft named JUNO that's in orbit around Jupiter. There's a camera on the JUNO spacecraft called (strangely enough) "JunoCam". JunoCam images are downloaded and made publicly available on a web site almost as soon as they reach the ground. The public is encouraged to download these images, process them, and re-upload their creations to share with the rest of the world. "We invite citizen scientists to explore new ways to process these images to continue to bring out the beauty and mysteries of Jupiter and its moons." The spacecraft is primarily interested in the main planet so of course there's tons of detailed pictures of Jupiter. Recently the spacecraft had a close encounter with Io, one of the larger, volcanically active moons of Jupiter. The spacecraft passed within 900 miles of the surface so now there's a bunch of good pictures of Io on the site as well. for instance:

I’m a night-owl too. I hit my stride around 8-9pm. Left to my own I will stay up until 3am. And then get up at 10.. I don’t get along with mornings too well.

Local stations are reporting that the current storm made today the wettest day in 20 years for downtown Los Angeles. The record to beat is 5.5 inches in 2004. The current stalled front has dropped 4.1 inches (10.4cm) on us in the last 24 hours and it’s still coming down.

It's raining.

Had one of those !^$@!^%@ baby zombies somehow get into a town I'd fortified! No idea how he got in. I thought maybe a glitch in the wall I put up around the town. I was pretty careful putting it up and I went around and checked again but still couldn't figure it out. Must be a patch of darkness somewhere inside where he can spawn. Worse, it managed to zombify a cleric and two librarians that I'd leveled up before I managed to find and kill it! Between them the librarians had trades for enchanted books with Silk Touch, Unbreaking, and Mending, plus a couple others. Fortunately the newly-zombified are all enclosed/covered so I can keep them safe and away from me and the rest of the villagers. But they're not going to be trading anymore any time soon. I don't think they'll despawn either but I gave them all books to make sure. Going to have to cure them somehow.

Just tried the Voxlands demo on Steam. Had to run it under proton on my linux box but it seemed pretty solid for a demo. Played a couple of levels and a bit of the crafting tutorial. Looks promising. Definitely be interested in seeing how the full game turns out.

This isn't exactly about my recent gaming activities. I've been too busy to play (or post much) lately but I have to comment on that SLIM landing. It was so Kerbal! I don't know how many times I've gone for a landing in KSP where something happens and the lander I'm piloting winds up on its side or top - usually after rolling/sliding down the slope of a crater - instead of upright on its landing gear as designed. SLIM is real life imitating typical KSP game play. The KSP load screen even reflects this (pretty much central) aspect of game play. In KSP things often don't go exactly according to plan. If you're lucky and things don't simply blow up then you can wind up in some pretty silly situations. Compare.. (screenshot from my computer) .. with.. (Pic from JAXA site.) Too perfect! Well not really, but you get the idea. Been there, done that. In game at least. So here's to JAXA successfully completing the mission. Even if not exactly according to plan.

They finally sentenced the guy who set fire to Kyoto Studios. Sentenced to death! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68090388

Before... ... and after...

Looks like the tip of one of Ingenuity's rotors touched the ground as it was trying to land. These rotors need to rotate at almost 3,000rpm to keep the vehicle aloft in the extremely thin Martian air. They also need to be extremely light because they had to be launched from Earth and every ounce adds to the cost of the launch. Accordingly they're made of carbon fiber. As you might expect, when such a rotor contacts the ground at that speed the result is severe damage to the rotor and the loss of the ability to fly.

Threshold - Don't Look Down Another for the "election season" playlist.