efaardvark

It was probably inevitable.

I'd like to see more "hard" science-fiction anime. (And books, and movies, etc.) Stuff about colonizing outer space, or about cybernetics, or medicine, or the singularity, or whatever where the show is actually based in real science as it is understood to behave in the real universe. If you're doing space for instance then no FTL "warp" or "Epstein drives" other fantasy physics for instance, so it would have to be set around building a colony on Mars, or hauling icebergs between habitats orbiting dwarf planets in the outer system, or something along those lines. I get excited when I see a science "fiction" vision in a book or an anime that might actually be made to happen in real life. Stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek is fine too, but I consider that in the same category as GoT or LotR.. just entertaining fantasy. I'd like to see more "SF" with an implicit, solid core of "why not?". For some reason this brought to mind Nausicaä. Thinking about it there was also Mushibugyou, Terra Formars, and Blue Gender. None of it terribly factual unfortunately, except maybe for tiny bits of TF. Thinking a bit more, I seem to recall a couple of Ghibli shorts a while back. One about a water spider and one about a caterpiller. Both contained a lot of anthropomorphism but they might be more in the direction of what you're after. Can't remember their names, but I'm (almost) 100% on the Ghibli involvement. Shouldn't be hard to track down if that's the case. FWIW...

MMmmmmmm.. pancakes..

couple more I found.. This one was during one of our seasonal brushfires..

Hollyweird only green-lights what makes the bean-counters and banksters happy. Art is what resonates with a culture. Unless your culture is that of an accountant then there will be relatively little overlap. Unless the story resonates, unless it has some reason to be remembered, it will be forgotten. Especially given the flood of content in the modern era. How many different (per)versions of the "classics" can people tolerate? How many twists can a plot take before a story loses coherency and simply baffles the consumer? A lot of it is simply silly in the first place.. the result of trying every possible combination of permutations on plot/character/etc with mechanical thoroughness just to see if some of it will make a buck. Again, only the stuff that remains relevant in the broader sense will stick around. Besides which, a lot of it is gated behind paywalls and "protected" by DRM anyway, which means it doesn't get broad distribution in the first place. Certainly I as a consumer can't personally own a cherished copy of my favorite stories in digital form like I used to pre-DMCA. If I can't own it and protect it and promote it then it will tend to lose mind-share and disappear, one way or another. There's already been numerous cases of early content that's simply been lost forever because it was locked in the vault somewhere and the copyright owner didn't think it was worth it to protect. Hopefully digital content will have a longer shelf life than early celluloid or other analog media, but even if it technically survives forever on some obscure bit-storage system somewhere, if it never gets popular enough to make money then it will still fade into obscurity. My own suspicion is that 100 years or so from now quite a lot of recent "blockbusters" and other oddities will have long since served their original purpose and be unknown and forgotten.

Been scanning for KSP info from #paxwest today. Rumor says there will be some new game footage and announcement(s) released, though opinions vary on whether it will be about 1.8 or 2.0. (Already a confirmed rumor that 1.8 will get a Unity bump and performance boost, though at a cost of DX9 compatibility. Personally I'm totally ok with that tradeoff, though some laptop players might think differently.)

Here's something more recent.. the hike in from the parking lot at work: And another oldie.. hiking the hills above my neighborhood: I almost didn't go hiking that day because it totally looked like rain at the parking-lot level. Even while climbing I kept thinking it was a bad idea. The hills around here are decayed granite, and big chunks tend to come off and go rolling down the hillside at the slightest provocation. Parts of the trail are only a few feet wide too.. not much room to dodge, and a good chance that parts of it will be missing. Fortunately that day the worst that happened was a heavy drizzle, and the view once you worked your way above the clouds was wonderful.

Any Minecraft fans who want to take a Spirited Away tour?

Thought you Nezuko fans might get a kick out of this (I wish I had crafting skills like this)....

Update: FWIW, one of my favorite YT game streamers happens to be live-streaming this game atm...

Not a recent pic, but once while hiking I caught a wandering rainbow... (zoomed version..)

It does look interesting. Pretty sure I won't be playing it tho. For one thing it isn't available natively for linux. For another, Epic is one of the places promoting it, and given their track record they'll likely try to do one of their exclusive deals that makes it unavailable anywhere else. Epic doesn't have a linux client anyway. I'll just pretend it doesn't exist until/unless I see it somewhere like GoG. (And yes, Steam is also advertising it, but I know of at least one person who pre-ordered a game - mech warrior 5 - through Steam and are STILL waiting on a date for their game, even though it has been advertised through Epic for more than a year now, because Epic pulled a last-minute exclusivity deal. Can't get their money back from Valve either because Valve says they will release it on Steam, eventually. If Epic is involved in distribution then I'm not going anywhere near it. Just one of many reasons I don't pre-order games, and think exclusivity deals on content are extremely anti-consumer.)

Experimenting with kdenlive (first time I've used it) on some footage from my KSP play. This clip is from the blooper reel. Everything was going fine until... a very Kerbal moment. Revert! Revert!

More KSP!! Just kind of grinding for cash, but I managed to upgrade most of the buildings in the KSC (Kerbal Space Center) including the tracking station. This means I have maneuver nodes! I always just upgraded the tracking station before I did anything else so I never really realized it, but after trying to get to the Mün without them a couple days ago.. manuever nodes are underrated! Being able to plan exactly where you're going BEFORE lighting the engine .. what a concept! I also did a tiny bit of minecraft. I loaded a snapshot of 1.15 to play with the bees and behives, but I only played for about 10-20 minutes. Found a hive, got stung by the bees. Honey seems like it will be a good food. Couldn't figure out what to do with honeycomb though. Getting it makes bees angry and they'll come after you and sting you, so it must be useful for something, but I couldn't figure out what. The bees died too, just like they do in real life when they sting someone. Kinda sad, actually. There should be some way to get honey/comb without getting stung.

Success! Always nice to see the parachute deploy properly at the end of the mission...

I did it! Well, I landed successfully on the Mun. Currently roving around gathering science. Found one of the special new surface items from the Breaking Ground DLC. First time I found one since I bought it. Unfortunately I don't have the science instruments to get anything from it. Oh well. Now if I can just avoid crashing the rover long enough to find another biome, then take off and make it back to Kerbin. Onward!

No, you don't need an nvidea card that costs more than your computer to do raytracing in minecraft. It is possible even on AMD's "old" RX580 (though the alpha software still has bugs), and their new RX5700 seems to work fine. That said, and while I have to admit that it does make MC look awesome, I'm not going to buy even a $400 GPU just to play MC! Not a big fan of bleeding-edge driver/software bugs either. Maybe in a couple years when the next-gen cards come out, all the bugs have been worked out, and the GPU prices on the now-current get knocked down to a couple hundred $$ because they're now "old"... (Sorry for the delay in in responding.. haven't had much free time lately so didn't see your post.) I'm not sure there's any sure-fire way to make it interesting. MC is a sandbox game so it helps to be able to come up with your own goals and side-arcs. While there is something of a goal in things like the ender dragon and the end cities I find that I get more enjoyment out of implementing the wild ideas I get along the way. I also find that it is more fun as a social thing. You do have to watch out for people who are just into griefing though. If I can find some good people to play it with then I tend to get more enjoyment out of it however. (I actually wish that the devs would work more on this aspect. If they had an in-game voice chat it would help a lot IMHO, especially if they spent as much time on rendering ambient sounds as on - for instance - ray-traced graphics. Imagine caves that sound like caves, monsters in caves, with a bunch of fellow players getting creeped out listening to monsters in caves, in VR... ) I also play on "hard" a lot, sometimes even permadeath, just to make things more interesting. I get that's not an option for people who don't like survival mode.. just my prefs. Some of the new content helps too. I too got jaded and stopped playing for a number of years. I think it was just after horses were introduced, which would have put it sometime around 2013. I didn't start up again until relatively recently with the aquatic update. (So ~2017.) If you haven't played it recently there's a lot of new stuff to discover at least, and the pace of introduction of new stuff seems to have picked up in recent years. Some of the new stuff does make it more challenging, as well as provide more opportunity for creativity. The whole village/raiders dynamic makes finding and protecting a village/villagers a nice side-arc/distraction for instance, if you're into that sort of thing. And of course, newer hardware makes the game better too. The first system I ran minecraft on could barely run it at single-digit frame rates even at a render distance of 4 or 5. Amazing at the time, but MC at that level doesn't have much holding power. Now I can run at 50fps even at a render distance above 30. Combine that with the new biome/content and it makes just wandering around and looking at the scenery a lot more enjoyable. Things like ray-tracing are continuing and enhancing that aspect. (Again, if you're into that sort of thing.) Better hardware also makes the game more responsive and therefore easier to control and less frustrating to people that aren't e-sports gods. I still get a bit of lag occasionally, but nothing like the situation where the screen freezes for a minute and when it unfreezes you're dead sort of issues I had in hardware eras past. Also, it sounds like this doesn't apply in your case but I could never get into the handheld ("Bedrock") version. If you haven't tried the full desktop version then give that a shot before giving up. (The java version works great on linux btw.) hth...

Today and tomorrow I'm burning off some comp time from work so I'm finally getting back to my KSP "career" game. Only I think I'm pushing a bit too hard. I just started this game so I don't have ANY tracking station upgrades. No upgrades m/eans no patched conics, maneuver nodes, or encounter indicators. In fact, no planning aids at all, basically just orbit ellipses and flying by the seat of one's pants. Nevertheless I took 4 contracts, 2 of which require going to the Mun. One is "just" an orbit & return. That would be hard enough without the course-plotting aids, but I've done that much before. The other one requires landing. Landing isn't too hard - assuming I can make orbit in the first place - but since the other contract requires returning the spacecraft that means I have to take off again, orbit, transfer back to Kerbin (Earth), and land. That means I can't just land a simple probe to transmit a temperature reading and then leave it. I need extra fuel for the trip home at least. I need to "soft" land in spite of the extra weight/mass. And I need to bring the extra mass of stuff like a heat shield and parachute that are useless for landing on an airless moon like the Mun, but critical for getting back safely on the ground at home. Ordinarily I'd want to break the spacecraft up into sections designed for the different mission phases, or maybe even do two missions, but I think I can do it in one monolithic one. If so then that means all the cost of what would have been the second mission becomes profit! Unfortunately I'm early in the tech tree and don't have things like docking ports and fuel transfers available. I don't even have landing gear! Or at least not the heavy-duty stuff that would stand up to the relatively massive lander I'll have to put down. I do have some rover wheels with good enough suspension to work. That complicates things even more, but there was a contract to test that part and the money was good so why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. Right? It does give me the opportunity to drive around and collect more science points as well. I feel like the game has given me a lot of rope to hang myself with here. That said it actually all seems to be working according to plan. I built a rover/lander with enough power and an antenna to drive around a bit and transmit bunches of science back to Kerbin. Assuming I can land it on the Mun of course. I managed to launch it successfully, and even get a Munar encounter before I had to stop for the night. (Getting too old for all-nighters. ) It even looks like I somehow still have enough delta-v to orbit. land, take off, and come home. I put a hefty heat shield on the part that comes back so I don't have to be too accurate with the return trajectory. (As long as it hits the atmosphere and not the planet I should be ok.) I should get gobs of money for facility upgrades and enough science points to unlock quite a chunk of the tech tree, especially if I can land close enough to the border of two biomes so that the rover can explore both before having to come back. That's a lot of unhatched chicken-counting but we'll see. So far, so good. Hopefully I can finish this mission and retire all these contracts tomorrow before I have to go back to work. (Ugh.)

Kipling was my first thought as well.

All of them. I don't like it when a book or an anime or a game ends, especially if it is a good one. Sometimes I'll leave the last chapter or the last episode for a week or more before I finish it. More of a personality quirk than a difficulty issue tho..