Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?
Saturday, December 02
Server Migration
We'll be moving servers either next weekend or the following one.
We'll be moving servers either next weekend or the following one.
The current server is kind of expensive, and I've kept it around because moving servers is a pain. Thanks to a post-Black-Friday special offer and account credit with another hosting provider, I've managed to bag a new server with basically the same capacity for just $107.10 for the next 12 months. Not $107.10 per month, but for the entire year. (More thereafter, but still a fraction of what I spend currently.)
I'll get things in gear tomorrow and most likely do the migration next weekend, so that it's all bedded down well before Christmas.
Update: The server is named Mikan, which is one of my roster of anime-schoolgirl-goddess-colour-names.*
I couldn't remember where I took the name Mikan from. I did a quick Google and aha! Gakuen Alice. I haven't thought about Gakuen Alice in years. Now I want to go watch it again.
* That is, the mu.nu / mee.nu / mee.* servers are all named after anime schoolgirls who are also goddesses (or at least magical) and whose names are also colours. There's more of those than you might think.
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Thursday, November 30
What Pixy Is Watching
Last weekend I was bored and didn't have the energy to do anything much, and there was nothing of interest on Netflix* and I didn't feel like poking around the current anime season, so I thought, why the hell not?
I've been going through about four episodes a day since then and just started on Next. Plan to go the whole way through - four full seasons, six OVAs, and five movies. And maybe Lost Universe as well, which is kinda-sorta related.
I've already started having dreams set to the Slayers score.
* Netflix Australia has about one tenth the content of the US version. It's pretty sad.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:52 PM
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Tuesday, November 14
Don't Try This At Home
Not if you're fond of your home, anyway.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:55 PM
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Monday, November 06
Lookit All Them Cores Some More
Since everyone wanted to look closer...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:07 AM
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Friday, November 03
I Think I Should Buy A Cat
Sorry about any site glitches, we're getting hit by a 7.4Gbit DDOS attack. That's not big in the overall scale of things, but is enough that some of the sites on the server are still down and I need to migrate things elsewhere.
Sorry about any site glitches, we're getting hit by a 7.4Gbit DDOS attack. That's not big in the overall scale of things, but is enough that some of the sites on the server are still down and I need to migrate things elsewhere.
Possibly not directly related:
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:35 AM
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Friday, October 27
Lookit All Them Cores
All busy doin' stuff.
All busy doin' stuff.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:24 AM
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Saturday, October 14
Free Bees
As happens sometimes, I have a few duplicate Steam keys to give away:
As happens sometimes, I have a few duplicate Steam keys to give away:
- Fallen Enchantress (complete with all DLC)
- Fallen Enchantress (without DLC)
- Galactic Civilization III (two copies)
- Offworld Trading Company (two copies)
- Pillars of Eternity (yes, another one)
- Crusader Kings II
- Hearts of Iron III
- Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Let me know in the comments if you're interested.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:17 PM
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Magi PokEd
Always loved the ending credits for that series.
Always loved the ending credits for that series.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:38 PM
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Sunday, September 17
Rick And Morty
Alright, I finally watched this.
Alright, I finally watched this.
It's... Good. It's good. It's smart and funny and only about 80% cynical.
And it commits 100% to its premises and stories and characters. Every time you think, "Wait, what about..." they turn the thing you thought they'd forgotten into a plot point or character moment.
It doesn't reset anything out-of-universe. If there's an in-universe science-fictional mechanism to restore the status quo, that's fair game, but when they do that they also play with the consequences of the mechanism. Some of the best stories are entirely about the characters resolving the side-effects of setting things back to normal in the previous episode.
Another thing I like is that it's not just about Morty going on adventures with Rick while everyone else clings desperately to the idiot ball. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Phineas and Ferb.) Not much of a spoiler since the opening credits show other family members caught up in the insanity, though it takes a bit longer than that for it to actually unfold.
If you can take the art style and the fact that Rick is about 90% awful, recommended.
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Dichronauts
By Greg Egan
By Greg Egan
This is perhaps the strangest book I have ever read. The premise is simple enough: Seth and Theo are newly graduated surveyors from the town of Baharabad. Their town has a problem - the River Orico is drying up, leaving them without a reliable water supply, and the next-closest river is already heavily settled and unlikely to welcome a new town. So it's up to the surveyors to head out and find a new place for the people of the town to settle.
First strange thing: Theo is a brain slug.
Second strange thing: Seth is blind to the north and south. He relies on Theo's use of sonar to ping things in those directions. In fact, everyone is blind to the north and south - they can see east and west, and up and down, but can't see anything in the so-called "dark cone".
Third strange thing: This is because light doesn't travel in those directions.
Fourth strange thing: Seth and Theo live on one side of a hyperboloid, infinite in all directions but with finite surface gravity. The Sun "orbits" that hyperboloid, slowly baking everything behind its orbital path to ash, so that all the world's inhabitants - even the vegetation - must continually migrate to new and more hospitable lands.
Then it starts getting weird.
If you read Flatland or The Planiverse, the authors make it clear that they're describing a universe with only two spatial dimensions. With Dichronauts, it's more complicated than that, because their universe is four-dimensional just as ours is; it's just that instead of three spatial dimensions and time, it has two spatial dimensions and two temporal ones.
That is, north and south are a timeline just as future and past are.
And that means, for example, that the people in the book can't turn around - they can't rotate left-to-right, though they can flip upside down and stand on their hands - any more than you or I can turn pastwards and walk into yesterday.
And in the entire book, no-one turns around.
The rest of it pales into comparison beside that, at least for me. Water flowing uphill, our heroes falling off the edge of the world, the sex life of brain slugs... In the entire book, no-one turns around. Everyone in the story is facing east the entire time.
Egan is a mathematician, and has created a web site explaining in detail the geometry involved. Little of this is given directly to you in the story, though the characters do know they live on a hyperboloid, and assumed it was infinite right up until they fell off it. They don't discuss north and south in terms we'd understand, only in terms they understand, and you're left to figure it out.
Oops, spoiled that. Sorry.
Still, recommended if you like weird hypotheticals that play out as relatable stories and not just as mental exercises. If you're new to Greg Egan I'd suggest perhaps starting with Permutation City or Schild's Ladder instead; they're not necessarily better but are more accessible. (The middle part of Schild's Ladder is a bit dry, all research and politics, but the third part where the heroes finally enter the alien universe is a pure delight.)
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