August 29, 2010
Getting paid not to blog
No, I'm not getting paid to blog. Actually, I've been asked not to blog about the stuff I'm working on these days (which is at least partly to blame why I haven't been keeping up... most of the interesting stuff I've got to say is about that!)
Not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I'm doing well enough with the day job that the money I make subtitling isn't that important anymore... so it's kind of, if I'm not enjoying it, why do it? (And a lot of enjoying it is sharing it, as it were...)
Fortunately, I'll have this project wrapped up soon...
Not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I'm doing well enough with the day job that the money I make subtitling isn't that important anymore... so it's kind of, if I'm not enjoying it, why do it? (And a lot of enjoying it is sharing it, as it were...)
Fortunately, I'll have this project wrapped up soon...
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July 27, 2010
Dictionary of the day
Discipline. (di si plun) n.Playing the first two missions of Starcraft 2, then coming to work on time.
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July 24, 2010
Political Philosophy and Dr. Pepper
So, while out at the grocery store last night, I see on the shelf... Dr. Pepper made with pure cane sugar. Apparently it's their 125th anniversary and they're doing it as a gimmick.
This is not the first time I've had the true Elixir of Life. They've always made a small amount of the stuff, though they didn't market or ship much of it. But every so often, Dad would find himself out near the plant in Sweetwater and he'd bring home a 12-pack of the stuff. The idea of having a whole 12-pack to myself is purely luxurious...
But I got to thinking... everybody knows that the cane sugar version tastes better than the corn syrup version. But it's the corn syrup version we got, because of high sugar import taxes, which were designed to protect the corn market. Even though agriculture is a tiny percentage of the nation's product, and the effect of the tax on the corn market is pretty minimal, and practically everyone I've ever met has drunk a ton of cola in their life... we still get the corn syrup version.
All because Iowa has their caucus first, and the momentum that gives a presidential candidate is worth a good amount (or, at least, is reckoned as worth a good amount...)
And that's why I'm in favor of small government.
It's not just things like health care, immigration, and military spending. The more the government does, the more opportunity it has to choose one interest over another - and usually the narrow interest is going to win out over the public interest. If you don't understand why that's important, go find a can of the real Dr. Pepper, drink it, and think for a second. Every cola you have ever had, your whole life long, could have tasted that good, should have tasted that good. They didn't, because someone in the government thought that buying someone's vote was worth stealing that happiness from you, long before you or I was born (well, maybe not some of us, heh.)
And that's just the Dr. Pepper. There's plenty of issues of broad national concern to worry about, but how many little, everyday ways is your life not as good as it can be? Ways that aren't mysterious, ways that we know well, but for some reason or other aren't followed, because someone got a law passed. How many of the little laws, the inconsequential little regulations, the unanticipated ancillary effects, are keeping our lives from being Dr.-Pepper-with-cane-sugar good?
This is not the first time I've had the true Elixir of Life. They've always made a small amount of the stuff, though they didn't market or ship much of it. But every so often, Dad would find himself out near the plant in Sweetwater and he'd bring home a 12-pack of the stuff. The idea of having a whole 12-pack to myself is purely luxurious...
But I got to thinking... everybody knows that the cane sugar version tastes better than the corn syrup version. But it's the corn syrup version we got, because of high sugar import taxes, which were designed to protect the corn market. Even though agriculture is a tiny percentage of the nation's product, and the effect of the tax on the corn market is pretty minimal, and practically everyone I've ever met has drunk a ton of cola in their life... we still get the corn syrup version.
All because Iowa has their caucus first, and the momentum that gives a presidential candidate is worth a good amount (or, at least, is reckoned as worth a good amount...)
And that's why I'm in favor of small government.
It's not just things like health care, immigration, and military spending. The more the government does, the more opportunity it has to choose one interest over another - and usually the narrow interest is going to win out over the public interest. If you don't understand why that's important, go find a can of the real Dr. Pepper, drink it, and think for a second. Every cola you have ever had, your whole life long, could have tasted that good, should have tasted that good. They didn't, because someone in the government thought that buying someone's vote was worth stealing that happiness from you, long before you or I was born (well, maybe not some of us, heh.)
And that's just the Dr. Pepper. There's plenty of issues of broad national concern to worry about, but how many little, everyday ways is your life not as good as it can be? Ways that aren't mysterious, ways that we know well, but for some reason or other aren't followed, because someone got a law passed. How many of the little laws, the inconsequential little regulations, the unanticipated ancillary effects, are keeping our lives from being Dr.-Pepper-with-cane-sugar good?
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June 28, 2010
32 and all's well
Turned 32 today. Woke up and found that the Supreme Court had incorporated the 2nd amendment. Thanks, guys! Boy, that's a hard present to top.
(Not that my Texan rear was short on protections for that sort of thing, local law being what it is. But I still approve!)
Spent the weekend playing Just Cause 2. A little repetitive but still good shoot'em'up fun. Essentially a Grand Theft Auto-esque sandbox game, with the added joy of playing on a tropical island. Terrible writing, of course (and I mean it; this thing is offensive to everyone, and just poorly written and acted). If I was there for the plot, I'd be greatly disappointed. On the other hand, it's not so bad doing missions for different factions when they're all completely terrible people that you, in fact, are planning to screw at the earliest available opportunity, and the main villain is essentially a Kim Jong Il clone, so hooking cables up to statues of him and pulling them down is satisfying.
The gameplay's entertaining, mostly because it's quite kinetic. Between your never-ending supply of parachutes and your forearm-mounted grapple claw, you're what the Bionic Commando wanted to grow up to be. At the top of a cliff and need to get to the bottom? Just base-jump down! At the bottom, need to be at the top? Just grapple up, or parachute-climb using the grapple to keep pulling you along. Soldiers get tired of taking assault rifle rounds to the face, and call in a chopper? Rejoice - it's like they're delivering a gun platform to you via FedEx! (I hijack more choppers...)
Even the cars handle a little better (and it's very easy to leap from car to car to car, just by pressing a button, like you were starring in The Matrix...) Though honestly, I don't jack that many cars - their need to stick to roads cramps my style, and they're only a little faster than a parasail run.
(Not that my Texan rear was short on protections for that sort of thing, local law being what it is. But I still approve!)
Spent the weekend playing Just Cause 2. A little repetitive but still good shoot'em'up fun. Essentially a Grand Theft Auto-esque sandbox game, with the added joy of playing on a tropical island. Terrible writing, of course (and I mean it; this thing is offensive to everyone, and just poorly written and acted). If I was there for the plot, I'd be greatly disappointed. On the other hand, it's not so bad doing missions for different factions when they're all completely terrible people that you, in fact, are planning to screw at the earliest available opportunity, and the main villain is essentially a Kim Jong Il clone, so hooking cables up to statues of him and pulling them down is satisfying.
The gameplay's entertaining, mostly because it's quite kinetic. Between your never-ending supply of parachutes and your forearm-mounted grapple claw, you're what the Bionic Commando wanted to grow up to be. At the top of a cliff and need to get to the bottom? Just base-jump down! At the bottom, need to be at the top? Just grapple up, or parachute-climb using the grapple to keep pulling you along. Soldiers get tired of taking assault rifle rounds to the face, and call in a chopper? Rejoice - it's like they're delivering a gun platform to you via FedEx! (I hijack more choppers...)
Even the cars handle a little better (and it's very easy to leap from car to car to car, just by pressing a button, like you were starring in The Matrix...) Though honestly, I don't jack that many cars - their need to stick to roads cramps my style, and they're only a little faster than a parasail run.
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June 21, 2010
Railgun and the "technocratic nightmare"
From Ani-Nouto:
Watching Index and Railgun, you can't help but get the feeling that not all is right in Academy City. For such an advanced techno-capital, with darned near panoptic observation and super-powered anti-crime units, there still seems to be an awful lot of crime going on. Spoilers below the fold...
more...
Watching Index and Railgun, you can't help but get the feeling that not all is right in Academy City. For such an advanced techno-capital, with darned near panoptic observation and super-powered anti-crime units, there still seems to be an awful lot of crime going on. Spoilers below the fold...
more...
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June 13, 2010
On Global Warming
I've been meaning to do a post like this for a while...
When people talk about global warming, the legitimacy of the science backing it, etc., they're talking about several different issues and questions all rolled into one. They are these:
1) There are difficulties with temperature measurements. We don't have the luxury of being able to directly measure temperatures from a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. (Or even five minutes ago, though we do a pretty good job of direct observation these days, so our recent records can be taken as essentially accurate.) Early temperature records were often taken inconsistently, with poor-quality instruments, over only a fraction of the area we might be interested in. Beyond that, we're forced to rely on proxies, such as ice cores and tree-ring data, that don't correlate all that well with actual temperatures.
2) On top of that, the data sets that we've been using for global warming analysis have been normalized in processes that are, well, shall we say not entirely transparent and well-documented? Now, this isn't necessarily instant evidence that they were falsified by crazed global warming activists who want to seize control of all industrial activity (they won't show up for a few sections!) But it does limit the usefulness of those data sets when it comes to analyzing the climate. We're studying a very complex system with relatively poor tools. We know that there are cycles that we only poorly understand, and we suspect that there are additional cycles that we don't understand at all (and we are absolutely sure that there's one big ice age-temperate cycle that we can't even describe properly). Data that's been normalized, especially data that's been normalized by hand, reduces our ability to accommodate questions regarding these cycles. Oh, we need to take into account El Nino-based warming? But do we need to apply that correction across the board, or have some of our observations already been Nino-corrected? Double-correcting is as bad as ignoring it; worse, because then we may think we have reached a solid conclusion when we have not.
3) There are limits to the resolution and utility of computer modeling of a complex system. I'm regularly astounded by encounters with individuals who believe that the computer models are modeling actual, physical processes that are understood in their entirety by the scientists creating the model; in short, they don't understand the difference between the sort of observation a physicist might make in a lab, and the output of a statistical model that takes topographical and temperature data as inputs to approximate weather processes that we can't model in the micro sense, much less the macro sense. In this sense, the models' failure to correctly model the relative temperature stability of the last decade should at least be troubling. Yes, okay, I'm willing to grant that the last decade might be an anomaly in the context of a gradual increase of temperature, but it's not like the models were predicting the anomaly; even now they can't really account for why the expected warming didn't happen, without applying a pretty big fudge factor to account for it without actually explaining it. To the extent that reality doesn't conform to your model, that suggests your model is faulty!
4) On top of that, the models that predict catastrophic warming in the next century do so mostly through the assumption of certain positive feedback loops (event A promotes B, B promotes A, A promotes more of B, etc.) The problem that you run into here is that positive feedback loops don't tend to result in broadly stable systems; if warming tended to suddenly result in a lot more warming, we have to explain why things haven't spiraled into disaster areas when those events have occurred in the past. (Yes, we've been warmer in the past. One can argue that we haven't had as much atmospheric CO2 in the past to go with that warmth, but the CO2 isn't generally involved in the feedback loop. Rate of change arguments don't really have a lot to do with this either - those have more to deal with habitat than climate.)
5) The computer models use pretty loose statistical standards of evidence (mostly 90% confidence levels). Granted that it's not like they can fire up their office mini-Gaea to run experiments. But if you move the error bars up to 95% or so, your error bars get big enough to include the null hypothesis (i.e. they suggest but don't prove warming). Keep in mind that those error bars have nothing to do with the previous sections - they reflect the chance that, if the underlying models are sound, that the statistical analysis is just flat wrong.
6) CO2 emissions can't be limited by country; they call it "global" warming for a reason. Emissions which occur in China or India have the same effect as emissions from your backyard. Thus, taking action country by country to limit emissions is worthless - to the extent that industry can relocate to regions without a CO2-emission legal limit, it does. This has certainly been the experience of Europe under the Kyoto treaty. In fact, arguably it could even make the problem worse, if the industry that relocates is then powered by less-efficient hydrocarbon-burning plants, characteristic of developing nations. (Does nobody remember the fuss with Beijing, smog, and the '08 Olympics?)
7) The chances of getting India or China to agree to an international system of emissions control is significantly less than zero. Well, it's no surprise. India and China have tremendous populations still mired in subsistence farming; these populations need access to energy and industrial goods in order to modernize. For them, the worst-case scenarios presented by global warming activists aren't nearly bad as "just do what you're doing now for the next 50 years". (Subsistence farming -sucks-!) Should we come up with a magic-bullet solution, that allows us to generate the power we need without setting fire to a hydrocarbon, doubtless they will agree to go along (probably asking for significant subsidies to help them make the conversion, but meh.)
8) It's not a magic bullet, but we do have a method of producing significant electric power without burning hydrocarbons; it's called nuclear fission. It works with current technology, it has a good safety record (especially if you discount Russian engineering design, and if you compare it to the radioactive emissions caused by, say, coal plants). France has embraced nuclear fission as a source of the majority of its domestic electricity and had no problems for decades. The failure of global warming activists to embrace nuclear energy is, well... illustrative, and has a lot to say about the objectives of a lot of those who fall under that umbrella.
ALL of these segments are independent of each other, more or less. We could perfectly resolve the political situations, but if the original data is sufficiently crappy, so too the science based on it. The data could be perfect, but fed into statistical models that just aren't up to the modeling job. The models could be predicting today perfectly, but the positive feedback mechanisms that they've posited for the future might simply not work that way. The science could be 100% flawless, but good luck convincing a Chinese peasant that because of that, his family should starve in the next famine.
Sorry that I went on a bit of a political/scientific jag there. Holiday from Haruhi DVD subtitle formatting (damn you, Minoru Shiraishi!)
When people talk about global warming, the legitimacy of the science backing it, etc., they're talking about several different issues and questions all rolled into one. They are these:
1) There are difficulties with temperature measurements. We don't have the luxury of being able to directly measure temperatures from a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. (Or even five minutes ago, though we do a pretty good job of direct observation these days, so our recent records can be taken as essentially accurate.) Early temperature records were often taken inconsistently, with poor-quality instruments, over only a fraction of the area we might be interested in. Beyond that, we're forced to rely on proxies, such as ice cores and tree-ring data, that don't correlate all that well with actual temperatures.
2) On top of that, the data sets that we've been using for global warming analysis have been normalized in processes that are, well, shall we say not entirely transparent and well-documented? Now, this isn't necessarily instant evidence that they were falsified by crazed global warming activists who want to seize control of all industrial activity (they won't show up for a few sections!) But it does limit the usefulness of those data sets when it comes to analyzing the climate. We're studying a very complex system with relatively poor tools. We know that there are cycles that we only poorly understand, and we suspect that there are additional cycles that we don't understand at all (and we are absolutely sure that there's one big ice age-temperate cycle that we can't even describe properly). Data that's been normalized, especially data that's been normalized by hand, reduces our ability to accommodate questions regarding these cycles. Oh, we need to take into account El Nino-based warming? But do we need to apply that correction across the board, or have some of our observations already been Nino-corrected? Double-correcting is as bad as ignoring it; worse, because then we may think we have reached a solid conclusion when we have not.
3) There are limits to the resolution and utility of computer modeling of a complex system. I'm regularly astounded by encounters with individuals who believe that the computer models are modeling actual, physical processes that are understood in their entirety by the scientists creating the model; in short, they don't understand the difference between the sort of observation a physicist might make in a lab, and the output of a statistical model that takes topographical and temperature data as inputs to approximate weather processes that we can't model in the micro sense, much less the macro sense. In this sense, the models' failure to correctly model the relative temperature stability of the last decade should at least be troubling. Yes, okay, I'm willing to grant that the last decade might be an anomaly in the context of a gradual increase of temperature, but it's not like the models were predicting the anomaly; even now they can't really account for why the expected warming didn't happen, without applying a pretty big fudge factor to account for it without actually explaining it. To the extent that reality doesn't conform to your model, that suggests your model is faulty!
4) On top of that, the models that predict catastrophic warming in the next century do so mostly through the assumption of certain positive feedback loops (event A promotes B, B promotes A, A promotes more of B, etc.) The problem that you run into here is that positive feedback loops don't tend to result in broadly stable systems; if warming tended to suddenly result in a lot more warming, we have to explain why things haven't spiraled into disaster areas when those events have occurred in the past. (Yes, we've been warmer in the past. One can argue that we haven't had as much atmospheric CO2 in the past to go with that warmth, but the CO2 isn't generally involved in the feedback loop. Rate of change arguments don't really have a lot to do with this either - those have more to deal with habitat than climate.)
5) The computer models use pretty loose statistical standards of evidence (mostly 90% confidence levels). Granted that it's not like they can fire up their office mini-Gaea to run experiments. But if you move the error bars up to 95% or so, your error bars get big enough to include the null hypothesis (i.e. they suggest but don't prove warming). Keep in mind that those error bars have nothing to do with the previous sections - they reflect the chance that, if the underlying models are sound, that the statistical analysis is just flat wrong.
6) CO2 emissions can't be limited by country; they call it "global" warming for a reason. Emissions which occur in China or India have the same effect as emissions from your backyard. Thus, taking action country by country to limit emissions is worthless - to the extent that industry can relocate to regions without a CO2-emission legal limit, it does. This has certainly been the experience of Europe under the Kyoto treaty. In fact, arguably it could even make the problem worse, if the industry that relocates is then powered by less-efficient hydrocarbon-burning plants, characteristic of developing nations. (Does nobody remember the fuss with Beijing, smog, and the '08 Olympics?)
7) The chances of getting India or China to agree to an international system of emissions control is significantly less than zero. Well, it's no surprise. India and China have tremendous populations still mired in subsistence farming; these populations need access to energy and industrial goods in order to modernize. For them, the worst-case scenarios presented by global warming activists aren't nearly bad as "just do what you're doing now for the next 50 years". (Subsistence farming -sucks-!) Should we come up with a magic-bullet solution, that allows us to generate the power we need without setting fire to a hydrocarbon, doubtless they will agree to go along (probably asking for significant subsidies to help them make the conversion, but meh.)
8) It's not a magic bullet, but we do have a method of producing significant electric power without burning hydrocarbons; it's called nuclear fission. It works with current technology, it has a good safety record (especially if you discount Russian engineering design, and if you compare it to the radioactive emissions caused by, say, coal plants). France has embraced nuclear fission as a source of the majority of its domestic electricity and had no problems for decades. The failure of global warming activists to embrace nuclear energy is, well... illustrative, and has a lot to say about the objectives of a lot of those who fall under that umbrella.
ALL of these segments are independent of each other, more or less. We could perfectly resolve the political situations, but if the original data is sufficiently crappy, so too the science based on it. The data could be perfect, but fed into statistical models that just aren't up to the modeling job. The models could be predicting today perfectly, but the positive feedback mechanisms that they've posited for the future might simply not work that way. The science could be 100% flawless, but good luck convincing a Chinese peasant that because of that, his family should starve in the next famine.
Sorry that I went on a bit of a political/scientific jag there. Holiday from Haruhi DVD subtitle formatting (damn you, Minoru Shiraishi!)
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May 24, 2010
Endless H8 continues
Leaving aside the issue of the commercial wisdom of Endless Eight, they're actually doing interesting things with the cinematography.
One of the manifestations of this is in the wardrobes. Not only did they re-animate each episode, but the characters aren't wearing the same things - and that's something that takes some extra work, since you have to build up a new character model for each outfit. As it is, it adds to the believability if outfits are largely determined by what the character happened to grab out of the closet that day.
However, they overdid it a little. It makes sense that the day-to-day wardrobes are going to vary. It makes sense that Haruhi's taste in yukata choice is somewhat arbitrary and can turn out differently depending on what she had for breakfast that day. But while we can assume some variety in the closets and in the yukata store, the characters shouldn't have that many different swimsuits. How many bikinis does Haruhi own, anyway?
It's also notable that they've gone to the trouble to throw in some Kyonservice for the ladies; he's posing like a shirtless Calvin Klein model at a couple of points. Dunno, personally I don't swing that way, but maybe someone's enjoying it.
The episodes are still a pain in the butt to work on (too much similar dialogue...), but eh, what can ya do?
One of the manifestations of this is in the wardrobes. Not only did they re-animate each episode, but the characters aren't wearing the same things - and that's something that takes some extra work, since you have to build up a new character model for each outfit. As it is, it adds to the believability if outfits are largely determined by what the character happened to grab out of the closet that day.
However, they overdid it a little. It makes sense that the day-to-day wardrobes are going to vary. It makes sense that Haruhi's taste in yukata choice is somewhat arbitrary and can turn out differently depending on what she had for breakfast that day. But while we can assume some variety in the closets and in the yukata store, the characters shouldn't have that many different swimsuits. How many bikinis does Haruhi own, anyway?
It's also notable that they've gone to the trouble to throw in some Kyonservice for the ladies; he's posing like a shirtless Calvin Klein model at a couple of points. Dunno, personally I don't swing that way, but maybe someone's enjoying it.
The episodes are still a pain in the butt to work on (too much similar dialogue...), but eh, what can ya do?
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May 22, 2010
Endless H8
Sigh... I don't know what's worse, the repeating episodes, or working with MP4 video.
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May 05, 2010
Note to self: post more than once a month
April turned out to be busy. A wedding to attend in Mobile, lots of car repair stuff, etc. Molars are all healed up, though, so that's one less thing to worry about. And I finished painting another squad of orks... so that's 20 down and well over 100 to go. Heh.
Been watching a real mix of anime lately. Rewatched most of Moyashimon the other night. Been keeping up with Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou for silly, and finished Hanamaru Kindergarten, but I haven't really tucked into anything new lately. Still need to finish the back end of Railgun, too...
Been watching a real mix of anime lately. Rewatched most of Moyashimon the other night. Been keeping up with Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou for silly, and finished Hanamaru Kindergarten, but I haven't really tucked into anything new lately. Still need to finish the back end of Railgun, too...
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April 02, 2010
The Power of Positive Painkillers
Against all expectations, I'm not hurting. It probably hurts less now than it did before I got the teeth cut out...
Of course, I'm also just a little loopy (not tremendously, but maybe two drinks short of sober) and I'm really not up to eating anything crunchy, heh. But I was braced for much worse than this - the last time I helped someone out after they had wisdom teeth out, he was literally pounding the walls because of how much he hurt. I've always had a good pain tolerance, though, thank goodness.
Update: Was loopy enough not to hit "post" above. A few hours later, pain medication still doing the trick pretty well. Spent a lovely evening with my dear mother, working on a jigsaw puzzle.
Should be back up and running by Monday
Of course, I'm also just a little loopy (not tremendously, but maybe two drinks short of sober) and I'm really not up to eating anything crunchy, heh. But I was braced for much worse than this - the last time I helped someone out after they had wisdom teeth out, he was literally pounding the walls because of how much he hurt. I've always had a good pain tolerance, though, thank goodness.
Update: Was loopy enough not to hit "post" above. A few hours later, pain medication still doing the trick pretty well. Spent a lovely evening with my dear mother, working on a jigsaw puzzle.
Should be back up and running by Monday
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March 31, 2010
Tooth or dare
Going in Friday to have my wisdom teeth removed. One of the buggers came in crooked and is busily cutting up my cheek every time I open my mouth wide... This weekend will probably be spent uncomfortably healing.
As if I didn't have enough hobby stuff going on, Steven reminded me that Civ 4 was a load of fun, so I got it reinstalled. I had always backed significantly off the video quality in order to get everything to run smoothly; with the new hardware, I can set it "max everything", -windowed-, and it runs completely smoothly.
Diplomatic strategy plays a much bigger role in Civ4 than it did earlier on in the series. Technology trading is still important, to be sure, but the religion aspect throws a monkey wrench in traditional strategies. You can help pacify otherwise-aggressive neighbors by spreading your religion to them. More problematically, most civs will declare the first religion they get as their "state religion" - there's benefits to having one, especially early on - and they hang on to that one like grim death. It can be easier for you to convert yourself to their religion instead!
Interesting week in EVE, as a new large-scale conflict kicks off; a motley group of alliances is conducting an offensive against the Northern Coalition, mostly for the crime of being steeenking rich and out of boredom. Hostilities weren't due to start until tomorrow, but the attackers were moving their main capital fleet as a single unit (and essentially unscreened - there's a limit to how many ships you can have in a single system in EVE before the server hardware starts screaming).
Somehow, either through infiltration or just good scouting, the NC got wind of the move, and dropped a strong attack fleet with a full support element on the capital convoy. Only five percent of the attacking capitals were destroyed before the overloaded system node crashed completely, and the attackers (they need to get some clever name so that it's easier to refer to them!) wisely stayed logged out rather than attempting to log back in to a busy node chock full of attacking capital ships and screen.
A note about EVE combat - since every ship in the game is fitted with short-range faster-than-light drives for in-system travel, one of the major challenges in combat is to keep your opponent from using that drive. (It's not instantaneous, and you can't maneuver in mid-jump, but by the time your opponent figures out where you went, you can be on your way somewhere else...) The necessary modules that create warp disruption effects or fields are rarely mounted on capital-class vessels (which are huge and slow and expensive as hell), since usually capitals operate in conjunction with screening elements which are more suited to that role. Without interdictors and heavy interdictors in their screen, the attacking fleet couldn't prevent the NC capitals from breaking off action when heavily damaged, whereas the NC attackers had the necessary vessels to lock down individual attacking capitals and pound them until they popped.
The corporation I'm a member of is a client of one of the major NC members, so this is cause to celebrate. It's also one hell of a morale hit for the attackers - even before things got underway, they were already faced with system overload, un-fun levels of lag, significant casualties, and a big disruption to their timetable. Morale's important in these things, because large-scale wars tend to turn into grinding attritional battles; both sides are wealthy enough to absorb big losses, but the power to continue the offensive is also largely based on the ability to keep pilots showing up on a regular basis... bored or frustrated pilots find other things to do with their spare time.
As if I didn't have enough hobby stuff going on, Steven reminded me that Civ 4 was a load of fun, so I got it reinstalled. I had always backed significantly off the video quality in order to get everything to run smoothly; with the new hardware, I can set it "max everything", -windowed-, and it runs completely smoothly.
Diplomatic strategy plays a much bigger role in Civ4 than it did earlier on in the series. Technology trading is still important, to be sure, but the religion aspect throws a monkey wrench in traditional strategies. You can help pacify otherwise-aggressive neighbors by spreading your religion to them. More problematically, most civs will declare the first religion they get as their "state religion" - there's benefits to having one, especially early on - and they hang on to that one like grim death. It can be easier for you to convert yourself to their religion instead!
Interesting week in EVE, as a new large-scale conflict kicks off; a motley group of alliances is conducting an offensive against the Northern Coalition, mostly for the crime of being steeenking rich and out of boredom. Hostilities weren't due to start until tomorrow, but the attackers were moving their main capital fleet as a single unit (and essentially unscreened - there's a limit to how many ships you can have in a single system in EVE before the server hardware starts screaming).
Somehow, either through infiltration or just good scouting, the NC got wind of the move, and dropped a strong attack fleet with a full support element on the capital convoy. Only five percent of the attacking capitals were destroyed before the overloaded system node crashed completely, and the attackers (they need to get some clever name so that it's easier to refer to them!) wisely stayed logged out rather than attempting to log back in to a busy node chock full of attacking capital ships and screen.
A note about EVE combat - since every ship in the game is fitted with short-range faster-than-light drives for in-system travel, one of the major challenges in combat is to keep your opponent from using that drive. (It's not instantaneous, and you can't maneuver in mid-jump, but by the time your opponent figures out where you went, you can be on your way somewhere else...) The necessary modules that create warp disruption effects or fields are rarely mounted on capital-class vessels (which are huge and slow and expensive as hell), since usually capitals operate in conjunction with screening elements which are more suited to that role. Without interdictors and heavy interdictors in their screen, the attacking fleet couldn't prevent the NC capitals from breaking off action when heavily damaged, whereas the NC attackers had the necessary vessels to lock down individual attacking capitals and pound them until they popped.
The corporation I'm a member of is a client of one of the major NC members, so this is cause to celebrate. It's also one hell of a morale hit for the attackers - even before things got underway, they were already faced with system overload, un-fun levels of lag, significant casualties, and a big disruption to their timetable. Morale's important in these things, because large-scale wars tend to turn into grinding attritional battles; both sides are wealthy enough to absorb big losses, but the power to continue the offensive is also largely based on the ability to keep pilots showing up on a regular basis... bored or frustrated pilots find other things to do with their spare time.
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March 21, 2010
Had to check my calendar again
It's snowing. It's technically spring. I'm just a little disturbed. (I did, however, go outside and throw a snowball, just to have done it.)
I've been having a hobby overload lately. Plenty of games to play (between EVE, Crysis, FF13, and the Dawn of War expansion, I'm spending a lot of time playing). I've got a pile of books to read. I've got a small army of orks to paint, build, and otherwise fool with. There's... not actually a ton of anime to watch this season, but I've been letting it build up, and there are several series I want to go through yet haven't found the time to.
Add to this about 10 hours of overtime a week, and my schedule is loaded fairly heavily.
I enjoyed EVE well enough back in the day, but quit when I got tired of puttering around in high-security space (where there's not much to do but mine and run fairly-uninspiring missions) and getting shot at by pirates in low-security space (a nearly-deserted ghetto where players can hunt other players but not claim territory). A friend got me back into it, and I resolved this time to attempt to play in 0.0 space (the "way out there" territories where there are no laws or rules but those enforced by players). Good decision - joining up with a 0.0 corp gives even some of the boring stuff like mining or shipping goods around an extra frisson of excitement. And the profit margins out there are high enough that you can absorb the occasional ship loss, so long as you're not some kind of Norse berserker pilot.
FF13 is interesting so far, if very firmly set on rails. The characters are somewhat hit and miss (Vanille I would happily drown, for example), but Lightning is working for me, precisely because she is not nice. Extremely not nice. She doesn't like the other characters and lets them know it (sometimes with rejoinders that aren't so much jerky as "downright hurtful".) But she's not some kind of super-tsundere, just an unhappy loner. I was worried that Hope was going to be a Shinji all game long, but he pulled his head out long enough to decide on something to do (even if it's extraordinarily stupid, but what hey, even he knows that). Sazh is just fun.
Enjoyed a few episodes of Hanamaru Kindergarten; it's shocking how you can take a creepy concept like Kodomo no Jikan, throw in some Potemayo, and get something good out of it. Think I'll watch some Railgun next, even if it has less Misaka than I might otherwise prefer...
I've been having a hobby overload lately. Plenty of games to play (between EVE, Crysis, FF13, and the Dawn of War expansion, I'm spending a lot of time playing). I've got a pile of books to read. I've got a small army of orks to paint, build, and otherwise fool with. There's... not actually a ton of anime to watch this season, but I've been letting it build up, and there are several series I want to go through yet haven't found the time to.
Add to this about 10 hours of overtime a week, and my schedule is loaded fairly heavily.
I enjoyed EVE well enough back in the day, but quit when I got tired of puttering around in high-security space (where there's not much to do but mine and run fairly-uninspiring missions) and getting shot at by pirates in low-security space (a nearly-deserted ghetto where players can hunt other players but not claim territory). A friend got me back into it, and I resolved this time to attempt to play in 0.0 space (the "way out there" territories where there are no laws or rules but those enforced by players). Good decision - joining up with a 0.0 corp gives even some of the boring stuff like mining or shipping goods around an extra frisson of excitement. And the profit margins out there are high enough that you can absorb the occasional ship loss, so long as you're not some kind of Norse berserker pilot.
FF13 is interesting so far, if very firmly set on rails. The characters are somewhat hit and miss (Vanille I would happily drown, for example), but Lightning is working for me, precisely because she is not nice. Extremely not nice. She doesn't like the other characters and lets them know it (sometimes with rejoinders that aren't so much jerky as "downright hurtful".) But she's not some kind of super-tsundere, just an unhappy loner. I was worried that Hope was going to be a Shinji all game long, but he pulled his head out long enough to decide on something to do (even if it's extraordinarily stupid, but what hey, even he knows that). Sazh is just fun.
Enjoyed a few episodes of Hanamaru Kindergarten; it's shocking how you can take a creepy concept like Kodomo no Jikan, throw in some Potemayo, and get something good out of it. Think I'll watch some Railgun next, even if it has less Misaka than I might otherwise prefer...
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February 15, 2010
Starting: Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu
Three episodes in, and I'm enjoying it so far. Fairly standard unlikely-romance story... male lead bumps into impossibly-perfect female lead while the latter is doing something embarrassing, doesn't make a big deal about it, and cute romance blossoms. The "embarrassing thing" in this show is anime fandom, but at least so far, it's more of a prop than anything else (not to mention license for the show to do some thematic validation pandering to otaku, but oh well.) It could have been motorcycles or sumo and the show would still be cute.
Few more panty shots than... well, I'd be lying if I said "comfortable with", since goodness knows I'm inured to that sort of thing by now. But as usual, I wish they'd refrain from the little sister ones! Come on, guys, you've got plenty of attractive older characters to show off (and this show does, heh); could we skip the loli-service for once?
I don't have a deep reason to keep watching, but I enjoyed it enough to keep going for a few more episodes. (Well. It has maids... But that's not a deep reason!) From what I've heard, the writing took a downturn in the second season, but there's still plenty of episodes before I get that far!
Few more panty shots than... well, I'd be lying if I said "comfortable with", since goodness knows I'm inured to that sort of thing by now. But as usual, I wish they'd refrain from the little sister ones! Come on, guys, you've got plenty of attractive older characters to show off (and this show does, heh); could we skip the loli-service for once?
I don't have a deep reason to keep watching, but I enjoyed it enough to keep going for a few more episodes. (Well. It has maids... But that's not a deep reason!) From what I've heard, the writing took a downturn in the second season, but there's still plenty of episodes before I get that far!
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February 11, 2010
Home! And it's still snowing
Even now, big clots of the white stuff are falling outside.
Frankly, it's a little nicer here than in Chicago. It never really got deep in downtown Chi-town, mostly because they have a fairly efficient snow-removal system - the offending flakes were melted on heated sidewalks, plowed from the road, and stomped into a filthy slush on a minute-by-minute basis. Here it's just piling up. (Though not on roads - it's not cold enough to stick there.)
Frankly, it's a little nicer here than in Chicago. It never really got deep in downtown Chi-town, mostly because they have a fairly efficient snow-removal system - the offending flakes were melted on heated sidewalks, plowed from the road, and stomped into a filthy slush on a minute-by-minute basis. Here it's just piling up. (Though not on roads - it's not cold enough to stick there.)
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February 08, 2010
Chicago!
I'm in Chicago, Mon-Wed, on business; we're going to be offering Relativity hosting for clients, so it's off to the Kcura headquarters for training.
Not much to say so far. Our flight stopped in Kansas City, where the snow was really coming down (not enough to stop us from taking off, but enough to make 'em de-ice the plane). It's freezing in Chicago, but there's not actually any snow hanging around downtown; I'm assuming that the heat island effect warmed things up to melt it off, because there was plenty still on the ground coming in to the airport. We're supposed to get a couple of inches tonight, though, so that ought to be fun to trudge through in the morning. (Fortunately the hotel's only a block away from the training site, and we've the promise of good deep-dish pizza to keep us interested...)
Don't think I'd want to live here, though. Urban downtown doesn't do anything for me. Hard to drive in, hard to park in, and I can't imagine walking everywhere in the winters they get up here.
Not much to say so far. Our flight stopped in Kansas City, where the snow was really coming down (not enough to stop us from taking off, but enough to make 'em de-ice the plane). It's freezing in Chicago, but there's not actually any snow hanging around downtown; I'm assuming that the heat island effect warmed things up to melt it off, because there was plenty still on the ground coming in to the airport. We're supposed to get a couple of inches tonight, though, so that ought to be fun to trudge through in the morning. (Fortunately the hotel's only a block away from the training site, and we've the promise of good deep-dish pizza to keep us interested...)
Don't think I'd want to live here, though. Urban downtown doesn't do anything for me. Hard to drive in, hard to park in, and I can't imagine walking everywhere in the winters they get up here.
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January 21, 2010
Video card fall down, go boom
The 5770 card I'd placed in the new machine didn't survive 24 hours; it choked and went stone dead. It has been replaced... with a 5870. The store didn't have any of that model of 5770 when I went back, so I figured, eh, why not spend a little extra for a much better card? (Well, because it's not just a little extra. Guess I should put some overtime in this month... or more like, I already did.)
Today's Supreme Court decision was pretty interesting... the court essentially tore the throat out of McCain-Feingold, so now campaign finance is up in the air again. Interesting stuff, really, opinions all over the place. Take a few minutes to read up if you've got an interest.
Today's Supreme Court decision was pretty interesting... the court essentially tore the throat out of McCain-Feingold, so now campaign finance is up in the air again. Interesting stuff, really, opinions all over the place. Take a few minutes to read up if you've got an interest.
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January 18, 2010
Time for an upgrade
The home PC is ill. Trying to keep WinXP running and trojan-free is getting ridiculous - even being properly cautious and keeping everything updated isn't enough. It's time for a wipe and reinstallation.
...and if I'm going to go to the trouble of wiping everything, I might as well install stuff on completely new hardware, right? So I went down to the local Micro Center and dropped quite a bit too much money on some nice gear. I'll get the old machine working one last time, long enough to get any data I haven't already backed up off and onto the external HD, and then it's format and forget for that box.
New machine will be an Intel i7 860 on a Gigabyte motherboard, 4 GB RAM, Radeon 5770 video, 1 TB HD, and the usual bells and whistles (notably, I don't usually do much in the way of audio.) New case with a nice external SATA port if I ever need to go in that direction, and boy don't I wish I had some of those for the office.
I may configure the old box as a file server, but honestly, I don't know if I have the need for one. Another possibility is as an HTPC in the living room, which might be interesting...
I've opted to pass on the Blu-Ray drive on the new box for the moment. I hardly have any of those now, and I've got a perfectly functional player in the PS3.
With any luck, when I get home tonight, I'll be able to get the new box up and running, with everything moved off the old box that needs moving. The real question is... what to name it...
Edit: Especially when it's glowing an eldritch blue! Darned quiet for as many fans as it's sporting, though. I'm posting from the new box now, which needs about three tons of software installed, and I'm still working out getting Win7 configured up.
...and if I'm going to go to the trouble of wiping everything, I might as well install stuff on completely new hardware, right? So I went down to the local Micro Center and dropped quite a bit too much money on some nice gear. I'll get the old machine working one last time, long enough to get any data I haven't already backed up off and onto the external HD, and then it's format and forget for that box.
New machine will be an Intel i7 860 on a Gigabyte motherboard, 4 GB RAM, Radeon 5770 video, 1 TB HD, and the usual bells and whistles (notably, I don't usually do much in the way of audio.) New case with a nice external SATA port if I ever need to go in that direction, and boy don't I wish I had some of those for the office.
I may configure the old box as a file server, but honestly, I don't know if I have the need for one. Another possibility is as an HTPC in the living room, which might be interesting...
I've opted to pass on the Blu-Ray drive on the new box for the moment. I hardly have any of those now, and I've got a perfectly functional player in the PS3.
With any luck, when I get home tonight, I'll be able to get the new box up and running, with everything moved off the old box that needs moving. The real question is... what to name it...
Edit: Especially when it's glowing an eldritch blue! Darned quiet for as many fans as it's sporting, though. I'm posting from the new box now, which needs about three tons of software installed, and I'm still working out getting Win7 configured up.
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December 28, 2009
Home from the holidays
A very good Christmas in Houston this year. The whole family was able to get together, along with Jeff's new wife Manesha and her brother Manesh. (Uh. I almost wanted to ask their father "why did you hate your children so?" But my dad's first name is Aubria, so I guess it's not unique...)
Picked up the Carcassonne tabletop game (played it with the folks, and it's quite fun, while not taking too long), as well as novels by Pratchett, Banks, Erikson, and Hamilton. Biggest gift was a nice adjustable easel table, which turns out to have had a broken pen tray for the bottom... except I'm going to be using it as a hobby desk for painting 40K figures, and thus wasn't even going to put it on anyway. Funny how those things work out sometimes. There's also a nice magnifier/light for when I'm doing really finicky detail work. (And, of course, I can plop the table down in front of the TV and catch up on painting and football at the same time, though I don't think I could manage subtitled anime that way.)
And clothing, of course, but I actually asked for that; I'm getting old enough that getting clothing for Christmas is pretty nice (and my hobbies are esoteric enough that sending Mom out to get stuff for them is kind of a crap shoot. "Uh, I need a... stomper? And a DVD of Spicy Wolf?")
Picked up the Carcassonne tabletop game (played it with the folks, and it's quite fun, while not taking too long), as well as novels by Pratchett, Banks, Erikson, and Hamilton. Biggest gift was a nice adjustable easel table, which turns out to have had a broken pen tray for the bottom... except I'm going to be using it as a hobby desk for painting 40K figures, and thus wasn't even going to put it on anyway. Funny how those things work out sometimes. There's also a nice magnifier/light for when I'm doing really finicky detail work. (And, of course, I can plop the table down in front of the TV and catch up on painting and football at the same time, though I don't think I could manage subtitled anime that way.)
And clothing, of course, but I actually asked for that; I'm getting old enough that getting clothing for Christmas is pretty nice (and my hobbies are esoteric enough that sending Mom out to get stuff for them is kind of a crap shoot. "Uh, I need a... stomper? And a DVD of Spicy Wolf?")
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December 20, 2009
What do you mean, I won?
Went down to the local comic store today for a 40K tourney. They called it on fairly short notice, and Sunday's not their regular tourney day, but ten guys still showed up with a thousand points and a few dozen dice. Three games later, I, uh... I won!
I'd like to say "well, it's because I read my Clausewitz," or something pretentious like that, but there was a lot of luck involved. (I mean, I did read my Clausewitz. I actually enjoy military history. But Clausewitz had very little to say on the subject of orbital insertion as a factor in squad-level combat...)
If anyone's interested, blow-by-blow is below the fold. Sums up easy, though - I had a great time, I won about $60 in store credit (spent, heh), and I'm definitely coming to the next one.
more...
I'd like to say "well, it's because I read my Clausewitz," or something pretentious like that, but there was a lot of luck involved. (I mean, I did read my Clausewitz. I actually enjoy military history. But Clausewitz had very little to say on the subject of orbital insertion as a factor in squad-level combat...)
If anyone's interested, blow-by-blow is below the fold. Sums up easy, though - I had a great time, I won about $60 in store credit (spent, heh), and I'm definitely coming to the next one.
more...
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December 13, 2009
More boyz pictures
Second batch is complete. Below the fold...
more...
more...
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