efaardvark

Wheel - Fugue

13 hours ago, Wild Emotion said:

Jalapeno bread

Too strong for me - tends to drown out other flavors - but around here we do the milder chipotle bread which is yum for sandwiches and such.

Some relatives from out of state are visiting and one of them brought me a 3d dragon.  It is fully articulated; each segment, including the head, tail, and legs, are moveable.  It was probably printed as one piece because the segment links are solid.  Post-print cleanup & detailing must have been a PITA but as a result the finished product is solid and pretty impressive, though there's still quite a bit of 3d-printed artifacting when you get up close.  (I might try brushing it lightly with a bit of acetone to see if it softens and blurs out that last a little.)  It has some heft to it too.  No skimping on the infill here.  Props on the choice of color filament too.  Not sure if it was all from one spool or not (multicolored spools are a thing) but either way it worked out nice.

Nomy - Cocaine

Welcome back.  Not a big DBZ fan here but I won't hold it against you.   

What happens when you turn ChatGPT loose in minecraft?
 

Got another sticker for the collection..

Found a couple rabbits in a meadow up on the hill near the new site & decided to build a cage & farm them.  Not exactly sure why I'm doing it since rabbits don't drop anything but fur and an occasional rabbit's foot.  The foot can be used to make a potion of leaping but the fur can only be used to make leather and it is a lot easier to farm cows for that.  Too bad bundles still aren't in the main game.

The nearby "Ralphs" supermarket (owned by Kroger and the market share leader here in SoCal) has a decently-stocked "asian" isle that includes actual Glico Pocky in several flavors.  I occasionally snag a box of the matcha green tea flavor but I've seen chocolate banana, strawberry cream, cookies and cream, and of course chocolate there as well.

Sheltering Sky - Threshold

Oceanbound

@Kleiner
LOLed at the cardboard box.

Extra points for it being an orange box.    Is there a snake inside as well? 

56 minutes ago, viruxx said:

"It's easier to stay out than get out."

I have a friend that uses this quote when anyone asks why he never got married. 

Threshold - Complex
 

朔の贄　

Sounds like Samsung and Micron are starting to announce GDDR7 and/or HBM3 memory.  Hopefully that means better-performing GFX cards will be along shortly.. assuming it doesn't all get snagged by the AI crowd.  And of course pricing would be another likely problem area.

Niehime to Kemono no Ou

Beauty and the Beast comparisons are a little off but definitely in that direction.  Might even be better than that tale.  I'll see.  Too early to tell for sure; I just started but I've made it to ep 3 and plan to keep going.

Hot, overcast, and humid.  On my patio it is currently just over 100F, or almost 40C.  (It just feels worse.)  Blech.

Now that new minecraft content won't be coming out for a while I decided to start a new base in a new chunk out on the frontier.  My original/main base is only about 2k blocks from spawn and is quite old.  It is still quite useful because it has several farms for generating resources and is part of a town with fully-leveled villagers so I'm not abandoning it but the scenery is kinda boring.    This is on my brother's Realms server which we've been playing in for quite a while now.  It was generated in 1.7(?) so the nearby chunks aren't terribly exciting either.  The new site is in a fresh 1.20 chunk with some useful, modern biomes nearby.  It is in a river valley and looks pretty awesome with the shaders on too.  Liking the new(ish) terrain gen algos.

I also did a bit of searching online for examples of what the new armor trims look like when applied.  Of the templates/trims that I have found so far I think I prefer "Raiser", but ultimately "Vex" is the one I'm probably going for on my main set of netherite armor.

Unfortunately netherite isn't the best-looking base to build on.  The patterns really pop on the gold or diamond armor base.  Gold armor might be a bit hard to maintain, even with "mending" and "unbreaking III", but I may build myself a set of diamond armor for looks and keep the netherite as the working set. 

Found a "trail ruins" site while exploring for a location for a new base.  Upon excavating it I found it was a lot more extensive than I was expecting.  There were only about half a dozen blocks visible above ground but it went down about 20 blocks, then branched out in several directions, one of which went horizontally for about 3x that.  

After digging it all out the final tally of loot was mainly large amounts of various colors of terracotta but also quite a few pottery shards and even some of the new armor trim templates.  I found so many "suspicious gravel" blocks at this one site that I went completely through the durability of one brush and had to craft another one.

The collected items even overflowed a double chest!  Everything in the pictured chest was embedded in the hillside, including the profession blocks, the glass panes, the candles, the dyes, and the fancy terracotta.  The most interesting stuff is here.  The rest is in another chest.  (Pretty much more of the same but mostly just additional bulk stuff like mud/stone bricks and gravel.) 

The 5 sherds I found were all new: "friend",  "heart", "danger", "howl", and "burn".  Added to the 4 that I already had that's 9 of the 20 different sherds so far.

I also got "shaper", "raiser", and "host" smithing templates.  Not sure how to use them yet, and I may cheat and look up the patterns online before I try to apply them to some armor.  Apparently it takes 7 diamonds, a solid block particular to the trim, and the template that you want to duplicate to make another one.  A template is consumed in adding the trim to a piece of armor so a full set of decorated armor can get pretty expensive, even if it is only iron armor.  I'd like to see how they look before making that sort of commitment.

I haven't played the disc yet.

Found a pic of Truck-kun.  
 

Found a hidden valley in the mountains.  Keeping the location in mind for a future base.

Quote

“We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars – trillions of worlds wandering alone,” said David Bennett, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of two papers describing the results. “This is the first measurement of the number of rogue planets in the galaxy that is sensitive to planets less massive than Earth.”

Full article here (nasa.gov).

This is something that I've been thinking for a while now, ever since Mike Brown at Caltech started coming out with his data on dwarf planets in our own solar system. We have already observed hundreds of potential dwarf planets there, and given the difficulty of making such observations and the fact that the volume of the space we're talking about there is so huge then there may very well be thousands of such planets, many of them Mars-sized or even larger.

Thing is, at such huge distances from the sun the orbits of those planets are only very loosely coupled to our star. Even here in the inner system there is ample evidence that the orbits of even Jupiter, the largest planet, have been disturbed at some point(s) in the solar system's history.  It would not take very much of a disturbance to knock planets both 100s of times smaller and further from the sun than Jupiter loose entirely and turn them into rogues.  Over the billions of years our solar system has wandered the galaxy there must have been many opportunities for such disruptions. It may even be that -most- of the planetary real estate in space is not in orbit around a star.

It will be very interesting to see what Roman comes up with.  Before Kepler we only knew of a few extrasolar planets.  Kepler found thousands more, but its search method could only find planets orbiting stars.  (And even then it was biased towards very large planets.)  Roman gives us a whole new method for finding extrasolar planets.  I can hardly wait to see what it can tell us.

Edit:  Here's a 'tubie on the same subject..

1 hour ago, Metro said:

Got back into minecraft but unfortunately having to play the bedrock addition so I can play with some friends, god is it awful compare to Java, it's no lacking in content, just doesn't feel right but hell it runs alot better.

I've tried bedrock a couple times but I too did not like it.  It is designed for smaller, less powerful devices and that does have advantages but I really, really prefer java.  Java takes more resources but desktops have a lot more resources - and then some - and I like the bigger screen and better performance on my desktop system.  Playing MC on a phone to me is like trying to build a ship in a bottle. 

Cooling off.. today it only got to 94F!  Whew!  For a while there I thought I was going to melt. 

The weatherdude says it'll get hotter again this weekend though.  "95-105" in the graphic he was showing that covered my area.  Even hotter in some nearby areas.  Oh, and some increased humidity as well.  Joy.

8 hours ago, Bulleje76 said:

I assume you have seen the latest Dr Stone episodes?

Not all of them.  Maybe about half so far.  But that doesn't really scratch the itch for me.  That show is basically several seasons about catching up to where we are and I know where we've been.  Science fiction is at its best when it shows a plausible future. 

Personally I'd prefer it to be upbeat as well - especially these days there's plenty of bad news - but a dystopian warning is also valuable if it is based on actual science.