efaardvark

Hey all.. This has absolutely nothing to do with anime but I was just wondering if anyone else here is doing the Folding@Home thing, and if so are you on a team? I'm currently contributing my points to the PC Master Race but I'm a vagrant and occasionally switch teams just for the heck of it. If anyone else here is on a team that needs points/WU let me know. AWS I'm not so don't expect too much. All I have is my desktop system but it does have an 8/16-core 2700X in there. It averages maybe 50kppd if I just let F@H have my background cycles and up to 150k if I let it use all of it (and it is a cool day). If you want it just send me your team # so I can tell my FAHclient where to send the points.

Looking at Craftopia on steam.. looks like something to keep an eye on.

A friend sent me this amabie pic so I thought I'd use it to bump the topic. Now is not the time to be hoarding amabie pics to oneself after all.

I do. I don’t play many of those super-linear games anymore because then I feel need to play it “perfectly” to get a challenge out of it. Probably not explaining that well but it is just a personality quirk in my head that makes me endlessly replay games that I feel I finished too quickly or too easily until I get a perfect score or all the Easter eggs or all the bonus loot or whatever. I also do things like “speed running” a game and trying to beat the clock. If I’m playing (for instance) a game like sudoku on my phone that doesn’t have a score or a time limit I still feel like I didn’t successfully solve the puzzle unless I beat my old best time, or at least “within a minute” or some such arbitrary, self-imposed extra criteria.

I asked my grandparents A similar question once & they said the same thing. Hot and cold - and potable! - running water, indoors, just by turning a lever was basically right up there with fire according to them. No more hauling water from the creek or pumping from a well for cooking, washing, or bathing. No more outhouses. Baths whenever you felt like it...

I guess I too will miss being able to stream everything on-demand from services like Apple, Spotify, Crunchy, or Amazon if the 'Net goes out. At least until the servers come back and the network gets rebuilt. (If it even needs it given services like Starlink getting built out these days.) But even if the 'net goes out and doesn't come back your player should still work for mp3s and such if you have local files and can charge it. Personally I never trusted "the cloud" in the first place. Stuff tends to disappear from streaming sites even now, pre-apocalypse. Anything I really like I've always bought so I'll still be able to watch or listen to quite a lot of stuff, even if I have to build my own player. I've got a whole bookshelf full of music CDs, and every time I get one the first thing I do is rip it to mp3s. Same with video.. I have tons animes and movies on DVD, all of which I've ripped and put on my Plex server (Synology NAS FTW) and backed up to flash off-line. As long as I have access to power then access to my music/video library should also not be an issue. And I've got solar panels on my roof so...

I can do without most things. I spend a lot of time on computers but I'm older than both the Internet and PCs so I can remember a time without. Our family didn't even have a TV until my dad built one from heathkit. (It was color & I remember him rushing to get it done in time for the first color Miss America broadcast. ) IIRC I did a lot of reading back then. I'd love to have a chance to try that again without all the modern-day distractions. If you're talking about being bombed back to the stone age by asteroids or the Russians or aliens then I think the question is irrelevant since we'd be dead or too busy surviving to worry about such things. Anything less & there will be computers and networking for me to work with. The Internet itself was designed to survive damage from a nuclear war after all, and my electronics parts bin in the garage is metal - aka a Faraday cage - so I'm set there. My major in college was electrical engineering so if I have the parts I can build computers or electronics gizmos from scratch if necessary. Literally. One of our class projects back then was to build a computer completely out of NAND gates. (I even know how to build a NAND gate out of transistors.) Tedious for sure, but possible. I doubt it'll come to that however. I have at least 2 Raspberry Pis, dozens of Atmel AVR microcontroller chips, quite a few Arduinos, an old laptop that I use for programming them, and large numbers of other assorted component-level electrical bits out there as well. There's also a couple/few computers-worth of parts in my old/spare PC parts bin .. old motherboards, assorted PCI cards, etc. One of my hobbies since my "tweener" years was buying surplused old circuit boards, desoldering the parts, and building new electronics gadgets out of those scavenged parts that tested good. In any post-apocalyptic scenario I'll probably wind up being that weird old tech dude with the half-working robot working out of a tiny office/lab/shop in the shady part of town. The only thing I can think of that I'd definitely miss would be levothyroxine, since I'm missing a thyroid gland. Not exactly in the "fun" category but that's the only thing I can think of offhand. Kind of complicates my leaving-for-mars ambitions as well.

Got a mini-pc assembled and attached to the den TV. Tiny little thing.. about 6" tall by 3" wide. Came barebones so I've had a pile of parts sitting in the den silently staring at me for the last couple days but I finally put it all together and got it booted into an OS. I put system76's Pop!_OS (basically rebranded Ubuntu 20.04) on it for now since I had a USB stick with the .iso on it already. Might upgrade to 20.10. We'll see. Been too busy to actually do much with it yet but it boots & with just a web browser it can connect to the household Plex server, youtube, etc. This is the last "TV" in the house, in the sense of old-school cable/broadcast TV+tuner. Been doing the cable-cutting thing for years now & this is the last hold-out. Note the blue glow. Can't get away from the blasted RGB blinkenlights these days but the default display mode is understated enough that I'm not quite motivated enough - yet - to get into the BIOS and see if I can change it.

“Anime” is like “books”. There is no typical age. Over the years the biggest determinant as to how much anime I’ve watched hasn’t been my age so much as how busy I’ve been with everything else in my life. Recreational activities like books, games, or anime has to get a lower priority than things like job and family commitments. The only thing that has changed over the years is the type of anime I watch, books I read, or games I play when/if I get the chance, not the desire to watch/read/play them itself.

Ok, so not a lot of astrophysics or science in this one but I thought it was cool nevertheless...

Looks like they’re finally done with remodeling of the lobby of the building at work.. You can’t see it too well in the pic but the ceiling is kind of trippy. The ceiling tiles are black and have hundreds of LEDs in them, making the ceiling into a starry sky overhead. Some of the LEDs are rigged to flash in a sequence that makes it look like a meteor occasionally flashing across the sky.

Lately I’ve been getting into a space-themed first-person sandbox game called Empyrion. It is on Steam and just came out of alpha and still has a few rough spots but it has a lot of potential. Not as ambitious as something like space engineers, but not nearly as buggy either. It also works well with Steam’s proton on my Linux system. Also waiting for the “cliffs and caves” update for Minecraft and still playing my old favorite, Kerbal Space Program, as well. When I just want to relax and not be shot at or use my too much I’ve also been known to spend time in Stardew Valley.

56 here. I think I actually got started just watching saturday morning cartoons. I watched stuff like Mazinger Z, aka "Tranzor Z" here in the US, back in the 70s without really realizing it was "anime". Those were my middle-school days and I'd kind of grown out of cartoons by the time I got to HS in the early 80s, but by then I'd seen "Speed Racer" (Mach GoGoGo) and "Star Blazers" (Space Battleship Yamato) and movies like Nausicaä. That might have been the end of it but as it turned out one of my classmates in HS started doing some voice acting that kind of got me started again. She was in the lunch crowd I occasionally hung out with and we all kind of got in the habit of watching anything she'd been involved with. By then I knew what anime was of course and even after school when we all went our separate ways I continued to follow and be interested in anime. It was kind of hard to get "real" anime at times pre-'Net but I've been lucky enough to live in west-coast metro areas like Los Angeles where it wasn't impossible to find the occasional niche store. I was always into the science-fiction-y stuff and a lot of anime tickled that part of my brain so I've maintained the interest since then. I've also been into computers since before MSFT and AAPL were listed and there were BBSs that carried anime forums even back in 300-baud modem days so that was another source. (Anyone remember fidonet? GEnie? Compuserve? Probably not.) Of course after the Internet came along it got a lot easier to maintain an anime habit, especially once PCs were powerful enough and broadband available enough to make things like streaming and downloading realistic options.

Looking at the specs for the just-announced AMD GPUs and I'm just not feeling it. People are thrilled that the top AMD card is competitive with the top nV card at $500 cheaper. Sorry, $1k for a GFX card is still a non-starter. Is it just me? And the new "low end" card is still $600! Somewhere, somehow, things went horribly wrong in the GPU market. My "old" RX480 needs 150 Watts to give me a G3D Mark of 8523. The RX590 takes 175W to give me 9487. That's a 16% power increase for an ~11% performance increase. (And let's not talk about the higher price as well.) Fail. For a while it looked like the new cards were trying. The RX5700 requires even higher power - 180W - but gives a benchmark of 14458. I'd have bought it if the power were equal or less and the prices weren't almost double what I paid for my RX480. It is the same story on the nvidia side, just with slightly different numbers. The "mid range" rtx 3070 is 220W for a benchmark of 21617 at a price of $600. (Assuming you can find them in stock.) Now the new cards are up in the 300W territory! Not only that but the murketing is obfuscating the true power draw behind terms like TDP or thermal design power. (Though I have to give props to AMD for talking about the TBP, or total board power, of their new GFX cards in Su's presentation. You have to dig several layers down in nvidia's product web sites to find that information on their cards.) The top card out there, nvidia's 3090, is $1500, requires a full 350W, and for all that only benches at 25343. 350W?? $1500?? My 480 is sli-capable. If I'd bought 4 cards for $220 each instead of just the one then I'd have spent "only" $900 for a benchmark of around 34,000 and a power requirement of 600W.. a "solution" only slightly more ridiculous than what I'm seeing the industry offer me today. This is electronics we're talking about here. Where's the better-performing option at a cheaper price? Just give me a board that costs less than $200, requires 100W or less, and benches at better than my old RX480. For discussion's sake let's shoot for double the benchmark, or around 18000. This is nearly 5 years after my RX480 was released (June, 2016) after all. They ought to be able to manage that much at least but if you search a GPU database that card simply does not exist. In my mind a GTX1660 or a RX580 from 2 or 3 years ago is still the better buy. edit: seems like most of the gaming world thinks the same, at least according to Steam. Steam's hardware survey page shows the top GPU slots still mainly occupied by nvidia 10-series and AMD RX500-series boards. The top slot is the GTX1060 with 10.37% of Steam users using it. After that there's the 1050ti, the 1050, 1070, and 1650. Then there's the first 20-series board, the 2060, at 2.9% of users. The %age of Steam gamers using things like the RX5700 or the 2080Ti - combined - is in the single digits. Too early to see anything like nvidia's 30-series in the list and AMD's RX6900 won't even be available for a few more weeks yet but I think it will be quite a while before very many gamers are using those either.

I’ve played it, though not recently. My main games are Kerbal Space Program or Minecraft. More recently I’ve been into Empyrion as well. (When I have time for games at all. ) There’s one or two other AFers who have talked about terraria from time to time here as well, and more recently than I. I’d say your chances are good.

I’m sure that part of any falloff in forum activity is likely related to all the wackiness of 2020. I know I’m far busier this year than last. I don’t have nearly as much time for things like games, anime, or online forums. I’m sure it is the same for a lot of other people. Also all the cons that tend to generate buzz have been cancelled or postponed, as have a number of animes themselves. Games, movies, lots of other stuff as well. Less stuff to talk about overall. For me specifically I also don’t see the types of anime that I like. I’m into “hard” science fiction like Planetes or Ghost in the Shell, and I’m just not seeing those sorts of stories lately. As a consequence I’m not posting a lot, or if I’m posting it is in a non-anime topic. I’ve posted in gaming, computers, and the astronomy club in this site for instance. Just my anime-related chat in the other topics is likely down. As for Discord, I don’t mind it. I use it a lot in fact, mostly for games with friends as a game coordination tool. It is great for scheduling/organizing things for an online game session with a bunch of friends. Then during the game itself I use it as a communications tool, a-la team speak or similar. The issue I have with discord as a replacement for forums (message boards) is that discord is dialed more towards that realtime interaction. The attraction of forums for me is that I can drop in on my schedule. I sometimes work nights and odd hours but no matter when a moment opens in my schedule I can browse the messages, respond, post my stuff, and move on. To be sure you can do it that way with something like discord as well, but discord is more about the real-time chat thing. Whenever I try to use discord as a forum I get sucked in and wind up spending way too much time chatting, or scrolling through pages and pages of off-topic chat from other people. As a consequence I avoid logging in /unless/ I want and have time to chat. (Which I rarely ever do.) I don’t use it as an information source/sink like I do with a well-moderated discussion forum. The other thing I’ve noticed about discord is that in discord I tend to interact more with people who are geographically near me. I think it is because most people only have time for the real-time thing during certain parts of their workday so I wind up chatting mostly with people on the same schedule. In a forum the posters’ time zone is less of a determinant of chat partner so I tend to interact more with people in other time zones and countries. To me that’s a cool thing, so that would be another reason I might avoid discord as a forum replacement.

I kind of have the same issue with all long anime. If the story hasn't made its point in a season or two I tend to lose interest. More than that and it gets repetitive and boring. I can't imagine taking on an anime like Bleach or Naruto with hundreds of episodes. I've tried a few such over the years and it just never works for me. Clearly they're popular (and if nothing else making someone a lot of money) but in terms of entertainment value for the time investment required ... not worth it to me. imho, ymmv, etc., etc.

Bought a tiny* little computer. Kind of cute actually, in a NUC-ish sort of way. Going to put a Ryzen 5 (4-core, 3400G) in there and make it into a set-top box for the den TV. *6x6x3 inch, or ~150mm for you people with more sense than the US.

Did you buy all that separately or was it part of a set? The Mishy is a nice touch.

“The TAGSAM head performed the sampling event in optimal conditions. Newly available analyses show that the collector head was flush with Bennu’s surface when it made contact and when the nitrogen gas bottle was fired to stir surface material. It also penetrated several centimeters into the asteroid’s surface material. All data so far suggest that the collector head is holding much more than 2 ounces of regolith.” So much in fact that the plastic flap that was supposed to close and seal the sample inside is stuck open, leaking the material that was collected inside the TAGSAM head. There was no hard deceleration on impact either. The surface material at least is extremely loosely bound together. Someone at work said it was like hitting a big, fluffy pillow full of gravel. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-osiris-rex-spacecraft-collects-significant-amount-of-asteroid

That’s too bad. I had hopes for the anime after reading the manga. As for me, I still haven’t progressed past episode 1 on the anime but it is still on my to-binge list. (No judgement here.. that’s just my normal binge-y MO.)