This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.
Friday, January 11
Stubbornly Irresolute
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!)
Remind me not to eat that much turkey in one day ever again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:36 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 14 words, total size 1 kb.
Wednesday, December 19
Christmas Avoidance
Didn't really want to go shopping today; the stores are full of people and I never did like people very much.
Then I thinks to myself, I haven't used the home delivery service for a while. It's great for stocking up on bulky or heavy stuff like soft drinks (soda) when they're on special and (checks web site) they're on special right now.
So that's that dealt with.
Also, I'm on holiday as of twenty minutes ago.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:20 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 80 words, total size 1 kb.
Wednesday, October 31
Trickle Treat!
Had a few groups this year, about 15 kids in all, ages ranging from about 3 up to 14 or so. Got rid of about half my candy so far. Only ate one piece myself.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:50 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.
Saturday, October 13
Tap Tap On My Window
More of a thud, really.
Opened the door expecting to scare off a raiding possum, but found a rainbow lorikeet instead. I think it my have flown into the window and dazed itself. It was skittish but not panicked when I approached to check on it, so the neighbours may have been feeding it.
It wasn't obviously hurt, so I put out a little dish of peach slices for it and left it to recover. Not sure what else to do, and calling the local wildlife rescue volunteers seems a bit excessive given that they not exactly rare hereabouts. (They flock in the trees near the railway station, and the collective noise at sunset in summer is astounding.)
Update: Lori was still there this afternoon, so I called WIRES, the Australian wildlife rescue service. Sadly, Lori passed away before a volunteer could arrive to help. I donated $100 in her name. Well, in my name, since lorikeets can't get credit cards, but in her memory.
My dishwasher and washing machine have both decided to play up.
Meanwhile, though, in Happy Abstract Concepts Land, I've been playing with Pandora. I'm late to the party, but I'm not sure how long it's been available in Australia. (Answer: About two months. So not that late.)
The user interface is very nicely implemented - clean, simple, and functional. The one feature I really wanted, though, was a button to tell me why it chose to play a particular track.
Oh.
Why this track?
California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features acoustic rock instrumentation, folk influences, heavy use of vocal harmonies, acoustic sonority and call and answer vocal harmony (antiphony).
Why this track?
I'm Happy Just To Dance With You by The Beatles
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, rock & roll influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping and major key tonality.
Why this track?
Message To My Girl by Split Enz
Based on what you've told us so far, we're playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, acoustic rhythm piano, major key tonality, a vocal-centric aesthetic and many other similarities identified in the music genome project. Also you listed Split Enz in your station preferences, you goof.
Well, I might have elaborated slightly on one of those.
I'm impressed, and I do this kind of thing for a living.
So I went to download the Android app, and promptly got friendzoned.
So I thought I'd try out Spotify as well, and installed the app, and checked on the essentials (do they have Big Pig's second album? Nope.) and settled for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.
And then I noticed that it was importing my iTunes library. Well, good luck little app, that's 1.26TB of data. iTunes chokes on it regularly; let's see how Spotify copes....
Better than iTunes it seems. Both iTunes and Spotify are showing all four years worth of audio files* but Spotify is using one-third the memory to do so.
* As in, four years of listening time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:22 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 367 words, total size 3 kb.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 11 2012 12:56 AM (PiXy!)
4
I know I'm going to come off as an iconoclastic weirdo focused on the wrong things, but how the heck do they dance in those heels? I mean, I wore three-inch heels when I lived in Minnesota, and I could barely walk let alone dance...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, September 11 2012 01:24 PM (RZfzj)
I know I'm going to come off as an iconoclastic weirdo focused on the wrong things, but how the heck do they dance in those heels?
We accept him, one of us! We accept him, one of us!
'Cause I had exactly the same thought.
That's the classic quote about Ginger Rogers, though: "Sure he [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards...and in high heels!"
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 11 2012 01:59 PM (PiXy!)
Rare-earth magnets in the soles, and a metal floor?
Years and years of martial arts training?
It only makes sense that angels can dance on the heads of pins?
(Do I want to know why being in Minnesota causes one to wear three-inch heels? I've been here 26 years, and haven't felt the need to wear them yet...)
Posted by: Mikeski at Wednesday, September 12 2012 08:10 AM (1bPWv)
7Gangnam Style is in the Duck U Bookstore's in-store music system. I didn't realize that until this afternoon; I'm afraid I freaked out my assistant manager by cracking up for no obvious reason when it came on.
Mikeski, one has to be in theatre to have the compulsion. Pray you never do... back then, it was very hard to find red-sequined 3" heels in men's size 14-wide (Pixy, Amazon suggests that's a 13-1/2 in Australian sizes).
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, September 15 2012 04:11 PM (yqnY1)
8
Oh, and if someone doesn't do a Gundam Style AMV, I'd be VERY disappointed.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, September 16 2012 08:45 AM (yqnY1)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, September 08 2012 01:56 AM (+rSRq)
2
Pixy is a brony, so it's understandable. But I observe that they all belong to Adobe products. I'm wondering if Adobe licinsed it from Hasbro for an official icon set.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, September 08 2012 04:33 AM (RqRa5)
3
I was hoping to find the icons so I could use this link, but there's just so many that you have to say this.
Posted by: RickC at Saturday, September 08 2012 08:21 AM (WQ6Vb)