No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
Sunday, January 27
Kotoura-san
Wow. Talk about mood whiplash. This show flip-flops between cheap sight gags and a brutally honest and realistic depiction of how people in such a (admittedly far-fetched) situation would respond.
I'll keep watching for sure, but it's leading the pack for most uneven show of the season.
1
From what I'm reading, this show is one I shouldn't watch. It would give me flashbacks to how I was hazed in grade school (for being the "smart kid").
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, January 27 2013 11:41 PM (+rSRq)
2
Yeah, it can get uncomfortable, given that it's a realistic treatment of an unrealistic situation. That part of it is handled quite well - so far, anyway - but as I noted, the tone of the show is extremely uneven, so I don't know how well it will hold up over the season.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 28 2013 12:16 AM (PiXy!)
Reading Shards of Honor and Barrayar after having read the rest of the Vorkosigan cycle is a very different experience to reading them for the first time. I couldn't help but keep a tally as characters were introduced: She survives, he gets his central nervous system fried, he dies peacefully in his sleep (something of a rarity), he gets his peripheral nervous system fried, he gets his central nervous system, if not fried, then at least scrambled, he gets his throat cut in about five more pages, all of these guys die in battle, she gets shot by her captors, he gets shot by his captors, he gets his head chopped off, he gets his bones melted, his internal organs mulched, and his tissue taken over by a genetically engineered super-plague.
Much easier to list the characters who survive. Which actually includes that last one. Well, he dies at least once, but it doesn't take.
Cordelia - survives
Dubauer - alive when last seen, but near vegetative
Aral - dies peacefully in his sleep
Clement - peripheral nervous system fried, survives
Simon - central nervous system scrambled, survives
Korabik - dies in battle
Ges - throat cut
Serg - dies in battle
Ezar - dies peacefully in his sleep
Piotr - dies peacefully in his sleep
Negri - dies of plasma arc injuries
Kareen (the original) - dies of nerve disruptor injuries
Padma - dies of nerve disruptor injuries
Alys - survives
Konstantine - dies of tripartite karmic rebalancing, also nerve disruptor injuries
Ludmilla - survives
Evon - executed
Carl - executed
Vidal - dies in a freak shopping accident
Arde - (assuming it's the same character) survives
The kids (Gregor, Elena, Ivan, Miles) - all survive, more or less
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, January 27 2013 03:25 PM (rITYa)
3
Well, if you don't mind spoilers, go to the TVTropes page and search for "shopping".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 27 2013 06:42 PM (PiXy!)
4
Forgot one (I think, I've never been clear if it was just a name collision):
Arde - survives, despite a hazardous boss
Posted by: ReallyBored at Tuesday, January 29 2013 05:34 AM (HRMe/)
5
Oh yeah, I completely forgot about that. He only shows up for a moment, but my guess is that it's the same character.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 30 2013 10:32 AM (PiXy!)
6
Who, Mayhew? Yes, it's the same character. The two books were written within eight months of each other, and LMB isn't the sort to miss the chance for that sort of re-weave. One generation incidentally destroys his career, the second generation redeems the family's honor and the victim, unknowing.
His later career isn't detailed, I have to think that he got put into the future-plot-stubs box of odds-and-ends and she never found any way to weave Arde into a complete theme in some later book. She doesn't really write Dendarii Mercenary books anymore. Her most successful books since the "Borders of Infinity" novella have stuck pretty close to the Imperium, look at how weak Cryoburn was, for instance. It turned into a homily to socialized medicine. Well, sort of. A rant against evil space HMOs, more like.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Thursday, January 31 2013 06:11 AM (jwKxK)
7
Cordelia accidentally wrecked Arde's career while fleeing Beta Colony's excessively universal health care. I think it's a wash.
Also, I rather like Cryoburn. The plot makes perfect sense given what's already been established about the technology and political systems involved, and we see Miles defusing a crisis so smoothly that hardly anyone gets their head blown off. Which has got to be harder to write than the chaotic military action of some of the earlier books.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 31 2013 06:12 PM (PiXy!)
Today in Sydney it was precisely the melting point of Ice-9*, thus averting global fictitious ocean freezy disaster.
It was also, apparently, precisely the melting point of my network switch, because it did. This proved quite inconvenient.**
Fortunately, we've now had a "cool change" come through. They call it that because it's shorter than "not technically a hurricane".***
* 45.8C / 114.4F. In other words, far too hot.
** Probably not the only thing that melted; my internet access went out, and then my local network started having problems. Now that it's cooled down, both are fine again, but it made for a frustrating day.
*** Wind speeds of 72km/h gusting over 100km/h - and the temperature where I live dropped from 38C to 24C in three minutes.
1
25 degrees F in three minutes? That's a fairly decent temperature gradient, yeah. I've experienced similar, but I live in the midwestern US... we'll go from 95 F to 75 F in a few minutes a couple-three times per summer.
Always involved is a massive relocation of dampness from sky to ground, and occasionally accompanied by tornadoes.
I don't recommend it, m'self.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 19 2013 10:59 AM (cymHZ)
After a week, I'm up to F on my GOG downloads. Currently fetching Fallout Tactics, which is a lot of fun albeit non-canonical. (You can recruit deathclaws.)
I trundle bravely onwards.
Meanwhile, I have a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro on the way. At up to 100,00 IOPS and 540MB/s, it should speed things up a bit on Shana, my new Windows (7) box.
Now please excuse me; I have a bit of Minxing to do for Ace.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, January 11 2013 06:19 PM (vp6an)
2
How the heck many games did you buy there, anyway? Good Grief!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 12 2013 06:28 AM (+rSRq)
3
Brickmuppet - true, but that was a unique case. In Tactics, it's all of them, which is just wrong. But fun. But wrong.
Steven - um, about three hundred. Well, total, not just this Christmas, but I'm redownloading everything using the new downloader so that I have the whole lot in a nice safe place.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 12 2013 08:15 AM (PiXy!)
So many classic games...So little time. And I only have a fraction of your total.
But I also remember you have Fate/Stay Night, based on the screenshot of your desktop from a long time ago. A very eclectic mix.
Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 14 2013 09:55 AM (eI1xe)
5
I don't think I have Fate/Stay Night at all. Well, some fansubs, unwatched, but nothing else.
I do have the Fate series of games, though - that's a different thing, done by one of the guys who created Diablo and went on to do Torchlight. And as I recall, they were on my desktop until Torchlight came out and redundantised them.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 14 2013 04:35 PM (PiXy!)
43º turns out to be not so bad after all. (That's 109º American.)
Um, Pixy, you turned on the air conditioner yesterday to cool the house down in advance.
Well, that too.
(Actually, as at 3PM it's only 40º here, and that's likely to be as high as it goes. The top floor of my little townhouse isn't air conditioned, and will keep heating up until after sunset, until it's way above ambient. At the end of a hot day you could run a Stirling engine on the temperature differential, no problem. On the other hand, it gets hot enough to kill bedbugs.)
1
I hope when summer comes again around here, that I'm recovered enough physically to be able to do ice runs to the store. If not, I'm going to be miserable on those few days when it gets blazingly hot.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 08 2013 02:44 PM (+rSRq)
2
Are you OK? How close are you to Dean's Gap and all that mayhem?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, January 11 2013 11:15 AM (vp6an)
3
Fine here, though there are a lot of fires burning around the state. Where I live right now is relatively safe; there's a nature reserve at the end of the street but it's small and any fire would probably be controllable.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 11 2013 01:48 PM (PiXy!)
Neither the 3G version of the Nexus 7 nor the Kindle Fire (in any version) are sold in Australia... Officially.
Unofficially is a different matter. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 looks nice, but is out of stock at this etailer. Of course, the Nexus 10 looks nice too and is out of stock everywhere, so I can't hold that against them too much.
Given how much I use my Nexus 7, that 32GB 3G version is very tempting. Of course, if I buy one it will likely be superseded the following week.
I had a 4TB Seagate USB 3 drive sitting around doing nothing, because when I plug it into Nagi (my Windows box) it works for about 15 minutes and then falls asleep. And since Nagi only has USB 2 it's not very fast anyway.
I don't have Shana (my new Windows box) up and running yet, though all the pieces are put together, but Lina (my new Linux box) has USB 3. So the questions are: Does USB 3 work at real USB 3 speed on CentOS 6.3's kind of old kernel? And will the Seagate drive work if I plug it in?
And the answers are yes.
I wrote a 40GB file in 350 seconds. I'm currently trying a 400GB file, and it's settled down to a steady 135MB per second. That's not shabby at all for an inexpensive external drive. Actually, that's amazing for an inexpensive external drive if you're used to USB 2.
Also did some Samba file transfers from Nagi to Lina; that delivered about 60MB per second, which is pretty decent, though not amazing.
Update: 3015 seconds to write 400GB, from start of write to having the disk synced and unmounted, so an average of about 132MB per second. Not bad at all.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:29 PM
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Wednesday, January 02
Wire, The, Down To
Last year Me:
I think this one will make its goal comfortably.
Weeeeellll, I still think it will make its goal.
Actually, right now it's climbing at about ten thousand squid an hour. Looks like it will make its goal comfortably after all.
Wow! I did not look at the Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter page too closely before, because I would have notice the tier level where they offer a sequel to 'The Dark Wheel' novella that shipped with the original Elite.
Hmmm....That makes me dangerously eager to pledge, though how Kickstarter will handle the different currency from the dollar is another matter....
And finally - RIP Robert Holdstock.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 04 2013 03:06 PM (or2/m)
I can now deploy a complete Minx development environment - Python, Ruby, Lua and LuaJIT (for scripting), MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Riak, CouchDB, Neo4J, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, PhantomJS, and about 240 Python and Ruby modules, with a single command and in just under 3 minutes.
Building a new version of the environment from scratch has also been reduced to a single command, but takes nearly an hour, even parallelised. The build directory is 1.4GB, and that's when I install a majority of the components from binary packages.
Update: Added support for Cassandra, Kyoto Cabinet/Tycoon, Qpid, Nginx, Varnish, Pound, NodeJS and Luvit. No Hbase / Hadoop, at least, not yet; that's a whole 'nother kettle of worms.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:51 AM
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