efaardvark
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Was checking out a recent snapshot and found the following in my logs. I didn't know parrots could imitate. Now I wonder if they can imitate things like skeletons and zombies. Phantoms? Endermen? Missing sound for event: minecraft:entity.parrot.imitate.panda Missing sound for event: minecraft:entity.parrot.imitate.polar_bear Missing sound for event: minecraft:entity.parrot.imitate.wolf
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Finally got my village the way I want it. Well, for now anyway.. are these things ever "done"? Yes, that's rhetorical. Ready for the next raid group at any rate. With this latest build I think I should be able to handle almost everything defensively. I can handle the first few groups of illager raiders. It is when we get to the last couple groups with evokers and illusionists things get a bit dicey. (I'm on "hard", so no supereverything diamond equipment with a supporting 4-tier beacon. Not yet anyway.) I still don't know what to do about the vexes summoned by the evokers however. A good bow and a good set of armor helps, as can hiding behind the golems. But things can still quickly go bad if I'm not real careful.
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Stranded on a Deserted Island... What would you bring?
efaardvark replied to Seshi's topic in Chit Chat
Some are. I'd go for a solar powered one. That or a PLB. One of my friends has one for when he goes hiking. -
And now I log in to AF to find my reputation is "666".
Yeah, that's about how my day's been going.
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Thanks. That or change the "honored" to "horned".. just to see if anyone noticed. Hey! AF could make that a thing. Who has access to the site source code?
(I know, probably not a good idea. Some people have no sense of humor where those sorts of things are concerned. Probably complain and/or claim that AF is a satanist site or something. Party poopers.)
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Stranded on a Deserted Island... What would you bring?
efaardvark replied to Seshi's topic in Chit Chat
Shortwave transmitter. -
Spent some time in minecraft playing with the latest snapshot. Found a good place to go fishing...
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Got to sleep in late today, but also working until midnight on a Friday.
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Yeah, too bad about the lander but they still have the orbiter, which has most of the science instruments on it. It would have been great to have the lander (and rover) to ground-truth things, but it isn't the end of the mission by any stretch. ESAs MEX lost Beagle, but years later were still tracking them every day.
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What’s a common myth about anime? Can you debunk it?
efaardvark replied to Seshi's topic in Anime Discussion
I can debunk this right now. I keep none of my perversions secret! -
Sure, I've probably already seen most of them. As a paying CR customer I'll go out on a limb and say I'm at least as informed as most on the subject. Nobody outside the company has seen any part of the final product however. Personally I have my doubts if the show even exists yet in final form, especially given the lack of any news on its progress for many months now, including not a single reference at Anime Expo 2019 or even CRX. There's not even any reference on the crunchyroll site itself. At least not outside the forums. Maybe they're just keeping a low profile after being sniped at so much. I don't know. Last rumor I heard had them trying to sell it to HBO. I can see (parent company) AT&T trying to do that just to get rid of a controversial "asset" that might negatively impact their corporate image. Or not. Whatever. Like I said, that's all beside the point as far as I'm concerned.
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Possibly, though it is hard to say since it doesn't actually exist yet. That's kind of beside the point however. I mean, it isn't like there haven't been political anime before, right? The bigger problem, IMHO, is that a distributor like CR is skimming - overcharging customers and/or underpaying producers - enough to do something like that themselves in the first place. Even if I agreed with the message and/or it was an awesome anime I'd consider that the main problem here.
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That's a problem with the industry and copyrights. If I could make one change to copyrights I'd make it illegal to do exclusive deals. All they do is balkanize the industry and drive up costs to the consumer. I wouldn't want to set prices, but I would require that content producers would have to allow all distributors to have equal access at whatever price the producer sets. That way the distributors would have to compete on things like efficiency and customer service. Just as important, new distributors would have easier access to the market if the bigger players started playing games and trying to screw their customers or the producers. If I could just go to Funimation if I didn't like CR, and still be guaranteed access to all the same content (or customers, if I'm a producer) that I had on CR, then the problem would take care of itself. The rules should be encouraging free markets like that, including competition. Right now the rules encourage monopolization. It is a fight over who gets to monopolize the most marbles and it sucks. Because of that it is way too easy for the big players to start doing silly things like CR's attempt to produce their own anime that waste their customers' money and/or divert it from the people it should be supporting. And get away with it. If you don't like what CR or Funi or Netflix is doing then as a customer you don't have many options. You HAVE to subscribe to every distribution network - even the bad ones - if you want to make sure you have (legal) access to all the content. To be sure, CR isn't alone. Look at Netflix, google, apple, etc. also producing their own content for example. Like I said, it is an industry-wide problem. Everybody is doing it because they want to ensure that they at least have access to -some- content for their distribution network. That wouldn't be a problem if everyone was guaranteed equal access. Chalk it up to another failure of "leadership" (aka Congress).
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I recently got a "Boox" reader. It has a tablet built into the display and a notebook feature that allows you to take notes and draw on the display like you do with a tablet. Drawing on glass or smooth plastic does feel different. I'm not an artist, but I can see how it would take some getting used to if someone were used to paper. It isn't a big deal though (IMHO anyway), and you do get the other benefits of drawing/writing digitally. There's also screen protector films that are made to feel more like paper that might help. For me the bigger issue with a tablet was the disconnect from where my hand/pen was - on the tablet - and where the line I was drawing showed up - on the screen. I don't have a problem with a mouse because it is a relative thing, but when I was trying to put the pen down on the tablet to draw a line at a particular point on the screen... that was when I had problems. I could never seem to put the line just where I wanted it to go. It isn't an issue on a tablet-type device like my boox were the tablet is integrated into the screen, but it was a problem for me on a tablet on my desktop PC with the screen separate from the tablet.
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The fact that CR is taking so much money from me that they have enough to waste like that annoys me too. I want my money to go to the creators of the anime that I watch. CR can keep enough to do business. That's fine. Someone has to pay for bandwidth and drive space and CPU cycles and all that. Even beyond that, I have my own list of improvements that I'd like CR to make to their service to make it better for me. (Full disclosure, I am a CR subscriber.) Enhancements take money. Somebody has to pay the programmers too. That said, if CR (or anyone else in the distribution chain) has "extra" money then they should lower their price, enhance their service, and/or give it to the creators of the content that I like. Doing anything else is getting into pretty sketchy territory as far as I'm concerned. CR says that they want to give back to the fans. That's fine. The best way to do that however is to let the fans keep their money in the first place, or give it to the people with a track record of producing good content, ideally so they can produce more such content.
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Well, except that the ads (or your subscription fees) are what is paying the animators to make the stuff you're watching "for free". Ain't nothing for free. Sure, you can get away with it. You can skip out on the check at a restaurant too. Far be it from me to pretend the current system is perfect, but "getting away with" not paying the people who pay the people who produce the content you enjoy is a pretty good way to make sure that said content isn't produced in the future. And that would be a shame.
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Just thought I'd poke a bit at an entry-level threadripper system. I know, that's kind of a strange thought when all the gamers are still salivating over a i9-9900k for the single-core performance, but it turns out that a low-end 1900X CPU, 2 sticks of 16GB, 3200MHz DDR4, and a really (like, really really) nice motherboard can be had for less than $1k. The motherboard is totally overkill for the initial RAM and CPU, but with AMD it should be upgradable for many years. Maybe in a year or so - when the bleeding edge has moved on - you replace the 8-core 1900X with a 16-core 2950. At some point you buy another couple sticks of RAM. Did I mention the MB supports quad-channel?
If you already have a decent case, power supply, etc., then swapping out the guts for an 8-core system (that would have been considered a monster just a couple years ago in the old Intel era) might make sense. With that MB you could go all the way up to a 32-core/64-thread CPU and 128GB RAM. It also has *3* nvme m.2 slots, not to mention dual network ports (one of them 10Gb). For games.. ok, maybe not so much. (Yet?) But if your workflow includes things that might benefit from a lot of cores..... maybe. It is also quite possible I'm just a tech geek looking for new toys.
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Sure. I don't mind advising, and I like planning new builds, though do I tend to spend way too much time obsessing over little details. I'm also not a "cheap at any cost" advocate. The systems I build for myself tend to be a bit on the pricey side. (My current system, for example.) Unless I'm building a system for a specific task I like giving myself a bit of elbow room. Consider yourself warned?
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That looked like a nice unit.... actual arcade-style joystick and buttons, and even a second set for another player. I was thinking of getting the "coffee table" version myself, but I'd probably play with it too much! The last thing I need is another way to waste time!
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My brother lives in WI. I know exactly what you're talking about. Sometimes you don't even have to wait for the next day.
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Happy Landing Day! My dad worked on Viking back in the day so I got a day off from middle school (or "junior high" as they called it back then) to stay home and watch the second pictures ever from the surface of Mars come back. Line. by. line. The first pictures were from Viking 1 which landed a couple weeks earlier, but as that happened before school started during the summer break and I didn't get the day off from school I don't count it.
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I'm in s. california so regionally we're known for earthquakes and seasonal brushfires. Earthquakes aren't a big deal IMHO. There's been about half a dozen 6- to 7-point earthquakes within 20km of here that I've been around for. I don't wake up for any earthquake less than a 5 or 6 any more, and I don't even notice anything less than a 3. At this point everything that was going to come down has done so, and new buildings are built to stay up. As some point we'll get an 8 or a 9, but those are extremely rare. Zombie apocalypse or major earthquake... either way we're as ready as we can be. I've got solar panels on the roof and food and water in a shed out back. The house is bolted to the foundation, and there's an auto-cutoff on the gas line in case the shaking gets too bad. I'm not going to worry too much about it. My thing is wind. I'm also in the foothills and in the path of "Santa Ana" winds. These are winds that start in the high deserts and get funneled downhill through the canyons at us. As they come the air compresses and speeds up, which means warm/hot, dry winds moving at up to 70mph/110kph. Sort of like a mini-hurricane, without the water. In fact, these things suck the moisture out of everything, and can make for an extremely dangerous situation during fire season. We've had far more damage in my neighborhood due to high winds over the years than due to earthquakes. The worst is wind AND fire together. The worst natural disaster I've ever been in in 47 years living at my present location was back in the '70s when the hills behind the house caught fire and the high winds drove a wall of flame, smoke, and embers down the hill at us at ~50mph. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, when the rainy season came a few months later the now-bare hills couldn't hold onto the water and turned into mud, creating secondary disaster of mudslides and flooding. Not fun.
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I've been "working" on my computer today, just cleaning up and doing some file maintenance. Found some *OLD* text files from an online game called Dragon's Gate. DGate was a text-only multiplayer game hosted by GE's "GEnie" online service back in the early 90s. Pre-internet. Pre-MMORPG. Dialup-only. It may have even predated Compuserve and AOL. One of the files shows a 2400 baud connection at the beginning.
I think this may have been the first multiplayer online game I ever played.
Not for long though. Long distance phone calls cost around $0.25/minute so playing for an hour was like $15. This back when gas was like $1/gallon so that'd be around $50/hr at today's prices. I knew a trick to call through a chain of "local" BBSs to pay about 1/4th that, but it was still expensive. Especially for a lowly student whose only regular income was a monthly allowance!
Blast from the past...
Welcome to... ...........|\...................../|............. ........./ \..|\__..__/|......./ \........... ........./ / \.\ _ \/ _ /....../ \............. _ .........../ / / \.(I)\/(I)....../ / \ \........... (_) ..........| | | / \\/(oo)\/...../ // |\ \ ............. ..........| | | | \|V,,V|\... / / | || \|........... ............| | | | / |A^^A| \../ / || || ||........... ......../ / / | | TTTT__ \/ /| || || ||/\ /\ /\..../ / / / / |______/ /| \ \ || || \/ \ /\ /\ /\ /\/ \../ / / / / /\_____/ |/ /__\ \ \ \ \ / \ / \ /\ / \ \/\ / / \.| | | / / /\______/ \ \__| \ \ \ \/ \/ \/ \ \/ \| | | | | |\______ __ \_ \__|_| \ / \ / \/ | | ____ /\______ ____ \_ \ | / / \ | |/ /\_____ / \ \__ \ | \ |/ | |\______ | | \___ \| D R A G O N ' S | |\______ | | \_ _ ___/| |\______ | | /\ \ ___ G A T E / \_/ \ \________\_ _\____/ / \__\_| \ ___/ __ __/ / __/ /__ \__/ __ \__ _/ / \ / ___/ / ___/ \ / \ |__ | / |/|/ |/|/ \__ \ \ | Usage charges started -
I'm close to Universal Studios' Hollywood & they always go all-out for Halloween. I'm already seeing ads for Knott's Berry Farm's yearly "Knott's Scary Farm" event too. Magic Mountain and of course Disneyland LA (original) also get into the "spirit". Lots of options around here.
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It was probably inevitable.
happy birthday
I just changed it...
