Veiva

Going to see it pretty soon. The whole "does it feel like Star Wars" thing is something I have been nervous about because of the Director. This is the problem I have with his Star Trek movies. I've not bothered to even watch the second one, but the first was a good sci fi movie, it just wasn't a Star Trek movie, and for that, I hate it. I am optimistic though, since my definition of Star Wars is much broader than my definition of Star Trek. I'm also a bigger Star Wars fan than Trekkie, so I probably have some awesome mental blinders to get me through any rough patches :D I can't find my Boba Fett baseball hat though, and that's made me a little mad. There are so few chances where it's totally appropriate to actually wear that thing. I'm hoping I left it in the car. Abram's Trek movies were/are Star Wars with a Trek theme, in my opinion. I watched The Force Awakens today (afternoon showing) and think it's absolutely amazing. At least a 9/10. It is on par with the any one of the originals, perhaps even superior. I'm going to watch it again in January, I think, since I have a free ticket.

Rust has a pretty neat process API: http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/index.html Seems to be much better than, say, .NET's process API. Abstracts arguments and piping and so on pretty nicely. From previous experience, .NET's process API is incredibly cumbersome when you want to process console input/output, among other things.

Not accurate. Gambling is not investing for retirement when you are otherwise able to. Or it's pursuing a less desirable degree without putting in the necessary work to counteract the undesirability. Or it's absolving yourself from your civic role in society and letting the most powerful garner more power. Proper investing is incredibly reliable. If properly diversified investments become worthless, there's probably a lot more to worry about that your bank account at that point because money is most likely worthless and the world is on the verge of anarchy. A perpetual Great Depression on a global scale.

Soooo I made a neat program to help me customize my terminal theme. Wrote it in Rust, since I'm trying to learn it for another project. First complete worthwhile Rust program. Tomorrow I hope to begin customizing other theme-related stuff on my FreeBSD install. I started with the terminal colors (still in a work-in-progress with the contrast/palette). Also, zsh is such a nice shell. Still customizing it. I have the current working directory on the right of the prompt, so nice. Had it on the left, before the "$" symbol, but changing directories made the alignment jump around when the directory names had different lengths. Looks great, I think.

Water-damaged stuff is already taken care. All the stuff in the boxes is safe, but I have sort through it. Spring-cleaning-of-sorts... In December.

Good catch. At least it's not in your main basement (depending on what your drainage is like down there), and lucky about the construction workers. I have to applaud how dedicated your water company seems to be to not caring too. That's pretty classy. It seems to be a thing water heaters do from time to time. My basement got turned into a full on sauna last year after the pressure safety valve decided to phone it in (fail). Luckily we don't have a basement. Basements are scary, and I have enough to worry about. To be honest, my ideal house (negating my fears and stuff) would have to be built like a containment wall for a nuclear power station. Would also have to be incredibly fire resistant, like a submarine or modern seafaring ship. And would have to have a faraday cage sort of deal to negate doppler tools. In short, a multi-million dollar fort, ha. Anyway, I spent the last 6 hours watching the final 7 episodes of Doctor Who with my brother. Spoilers: edit: well the post shouldn't suck now.

She managed to have a new water heater installed. Had hot water by 5:00 pm. Going to have to clean up soaked stuff tomorrow.

Woke up around 8:00 am. Went to take out my chihuahua... and heard running water. There shouldn't have been any running water. I checked throughout the house, nope, no running water. Checked the outside water faucets, nope, no running water. Then I checked the carport utility closet. Water pumping out of the top of the water heater. Bullshit. There were some construction dudes down the street and one of them helped turn off the water to the house (valve was stuck, didn't have the strength or tools). Called the local water company before then, though. Let slip the account holder (my mom) was deceased, so it's more important the account switches from my mom to me. They'll require a deposit, too, I bet, stupid corporate spastics, despite the bill being paid on time on my part (since she's been deceased over a year now). Oh, and they'll try and have someone turn off the water in the mean time. Lucky for construction workers! Landlord is going to be out here shortly, I hope. Probably wasted upwards of ~500 gallons overnight. Ugh.

​ Your wish is my command.

They'd die every quickly in a DM, but they would probably be able to tank and run warbands style for a few minutes. Really though, they'd want a real shield if they were trying to survive. How so? Assuming all everything is BIS, full Achto with a defender is ~82% DPS of power armor (​edit: actually, the difference should be less when considering other bonuses like levels and potions, I think). The superior damage reduction of Achto (assuming PvP) makes this difference less significant, however (as well as the decreased accuracy due to superior armor bonuses, though that's probably not too important on its own). And at the end of the day, a defender still enables defensive abilities, while although less effective, are still dramatically better than the defensive abilities of an opponent without them. I'm certain, assuming otherwise BIS and equal player ability, Achto with defender would handily beat an otherwise DPS-centered opponent... ​ ​Actually, I see the mistake. Blutters (and by extension, your reply) were talking about a single tank vs multiple DPS roles. Nevermind.

Today, I was inspired by this common repost, so I decided to have some adventures on OmegaRuby to make some pieces of art. "Blood for the Blood God." "Skulls for the Skull Throne." "Water." "Earth (or Fire, or both, who knows!)." "Air." "The Avatar State." And my pinnacle... "Getting a Perfect Clefable with Soft-boiled in Gen 3 is Painful." edit: Fixed typo.

On a whim, I looked for "I Feel Sick" on eBay a few days ago. Found a listing for #1 and #2, new condition. Was relatively cheap, and $22 and two days later I got it in the mail (today). Excellent condition, and I've read the first one so far. Just finished, in fact. And I just found out by creeping Vasquez's Wikipedia page that he began making sequels to Invader Zim in comic form this summer. Is it the end of the world, ha? Also, my phone (a Lumia 635) developed a damaged power button as of Thursday. Friday I could no longer use the phone because the button simply did not work. So stupid. ​

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzIxLwVwtiQ His Dark Materials being made into a television series by BBC, Digimon reboot post-Adventure, and now Samurai Jack. Invader Zim being finished would signal the end of the world, as far as I can tell. Though it seems the creator of Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez, is working on a Disney show called Very Important House. I'm wondering if Disney is making the same mistake Nickelodeon did... Speaking of Vasquez's previous works, I can't find I Feel Sick anywhere. I have Squee!, which is very nice (and have read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, but would not want a copy for myself at the end of the day), but it seems I Feel Sick isn't printed anymore. Oh well.

I made some preparations for Thanksgiving yesterday. Made cranberry sauce, deviled eggs, and mac & cheese. Funnily enough, I didn't plan mac & cheese, but when I was making yesterday's dinner (mac & cheese with beef), I decided to make slightly more and reserve half for Thanksgiving. I'm about to get the turkey breast in the slow-cooker. Will take upwards of 8 hours, so it should be done around... 4:00 pm EST. Going to make green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and roasted broccoli, as well, but that's all pretty easy and will only take about 2 hours total, most of which will be spent doodling around while the food bakes, har. I'm expecting there to be at least two days of leftovers. Upwards of four is likely...

Ugh, woke up around 5:00 am. Went to bed around midnight, and as usual, took some time to fall asleep. Maybe four hours of sleep, if that. Horrible, exhausting dreams... There's a type of dreams I have that are completely surreal, like thoughts without content. There's little imagery or detail and rarely are there any interactions or events--simply thinking. Some of them involve pseudo-mathematical concepts that are not only wrong but make no sense whatsoever. Others involve a hodgepodge of concepts... Last night I had one that can be only described as installing politicians and other government officials via source control. It's still better than nightmares, I suppose! I spent the morning prepping to work on the vector graphics library. Mostly sketching the "native API" shim I'd expose (Rust can emit functions compatible with calling conventions used by C compilers, and in turn can be embedded in any C-compatible environment... just about everything!). I took a closer look at triangulation libraries I've collected and I think I'll port this nifty project to Rust. Funnily enough, it's based on the SGI implementation of the GLU tessellator. Looks solid and the code is much easier to follow than SGI's implementation (C written in the 90s with minimal documentation is very hard to grok, to put it lightly). Proper polygon triangulation, especially if the polygons are self-intersecting or concave, is incredibly complex. There are so many corner cases that crop up due to computational inaccuracy and other quirks. However, the rendering method I'm implementing makes using an existing triangulator relatively painless, which is good. My only issue I can think of would be a self-intersecting polygon with a non-solid (e.g., gradient) fill--it could cause discrepancies if the exterior curves overlap. But this corner case still has an easy (and moderately fast) solution if I explicitly separate drawing such niche paths into a masking step and a paint step. This solution is already used for standard clipping, anyway! May head to bed soon as well. It's only 11:00 am, but I'm getting tired real fast. I perform poorly when tired, often screwing everything up, so it's better to avoid that. :P

Sounds like a good (in the sense of dutiful, positive, helpful) job! Compiled Rust 1.4.0 and Cargo 0.6 with minimal fuss on FreeBSD. I didn't use the packages available for FreeBSD since they're older versions (Rust 1.3.0 and Cargo 0.4). Ran into a tiny problem caused by GNU make, but that was an easy fix (the error was pretty self-explanatory: GNU make invoked the native FreeBSD make when executing other Makefiles, a simple "gmake MAKE=gmake" fixed that). Some test programs of varying complexity all compiled and ran fine, so it seems I'm good to go! Onwards to developing something I've been itching to do properly for a long time: a portable 2D vector graphics library for real-time rendering. There's seriously nothing notable that meets the portable and fast requirements in existence currently. For real time applications (like games and interactive GUIs), you have various half-baked open-source solutions with too many quirks (various OpenVG implementations) or Direct2D (not portable and even still poorly supported by Microsoft). For portable libraries, you have many quality, but exceedingly slow libraries, in abundance, but have fun rendering a 1080p scene of moderate complexity at even 30 FPS, let alone 1440p or 4K at 60+ FPS... When factoring in the distinct features I've implemented in a proof-of-concept library (resolution-independent curve rendering using Loop-Blinn, a novel sorting algorithm permitting group transparency without an intermediate framebuffer, and efficient resource management fit for the GPU), there's nothing that would be comparable.

While compiling Rust, I'll keep you in my thoughts. Can't promise anything more than that. Good luck! What type of job is it, by the way?

It would not be hard to connect my username used throughout the web with my real name. However, I don't feel anything I'm posted is harmful--at most, it's embarassing my earliest internet conversations, haha (due to childhood naiveity/ignorance/innocence; I've been doodling around on the internet since 11 years-old). Though I do worry that certain views and opinions I've expressed could be used against me by law enforcement or social activists, in very possible situations involving a regressive path towards an authoritorian government or influential and pervasive extremist social/political/religious/etc groups sprouting up, but I hope that thinking is as a result of parania and such a future is only a possibility, not a reality...

Posting from FreeBSD! I ended up having the Nvidia drivers load after boot via rc.conf. Running Mate as the desktop environment. Prior to that I have a small login manager called Slim, rather than the default terminal login prompt. Installed Firefox and set it up with uMatrix, Adblock Plus, and switched the search engine to DuckDuckGo. I made the Firefox profile from scratch due to legacy cruft from my other computers, so I set up all the passwords and set up a nice, organized bunch of bookmarks. Going to install some coding stuff, like Sublime Text and Rust compilers. May also doodle around with Wine and test out some games and Windows software to see how well that works. Once I get settled I'm going to begin customizing all the things... I want to be able to render OpenGL stuff to the desktop so I can have spiffy animated backgrounds and customize the theme (icons and windows and all that) to fit. All together, pretty sweet! FreeBSD is awesome.

Ethernet cable got here yesterday, almost finished setting up my FreeBSD install for now. Only major issue is the Nvidia drivers fail to load at boot up, but I can run "kldload nvidia.ko" after I log in from the shell and and it works just fine..? I also can't get the boot splash set up, but that's not a big issue. Overall, still impressed. FreeBSD is pretty spiffy.

So I successfully installed FreeBSD on my primary computer. Since it has a UEFI BIOS, partitioning the main drive so I could have an encrypted filesystem was pretty involved. After screwing up a few times, I ended up writing a few shell scripts and (after fixing any issues with the shell scripts) got everything set up smooth as butter. But... FreeBSD doesn't support the internal wireless card chipest I have on the desktop. And I only have a single Ethernet cable, because it seems the rest ran off with socks and hair pins and other mythical items to Nowhere Land. And this single Ethernet cable is connected between the wireless router and the modem. The default FreeBSD install is pretty useless without being able to install software. Doesn't even come with sudo (I have to use su, which is more cumbersome to say the least). There's essentially nothing I can do at this point without internet connectivity. So I have to wait for an Ethernet cable from Amazon. Urgh. However, installing and configuring FreeBSD was exceedingly nice. Outside of the small gotcha with my UEFI motherboard and the FreeBSD EFI boot loader not supporting ZFS, it went well. The documentation (man pages and on-site handbook) is simply amazing. Much better than Linux distributions amateurish guides and wikis. I also much prefer the consistency of FreeBSD. Again, Linux distributions feel hacked together... Like a car made out of some decent hobbyist engine, but shoved in some duck-taped hodgepodge of a car trying to be fashionable.

Here's a couple quotes of some relevant stuff I've posted in other places: For the record, dragon limbs are 1:250. Dragon claws are 1:250. Armor pieces or something like 1:300-1:400. I've gotten 166 limbs, 166 claws, and 115 armor pieces in approximately 42,000 kills. Limbs move very slowly between 9m and 15m, with occasional spikes during the process. Right now they're near or at the lower end. Generally it's tied to new PvM or combat content when ascension crossbows rise in demand. Average loot otherwise is ~10k. More often than not, using a legendary pet or some other means to pick up random drops is worth more than even 20% KPH increase, though it largely depends on what prices limbs are at (or what prices you sell the limbs at).

There was a game called Soulfu. Had demons and dragons and all the other typical fantasy tropes. Also had an engineering class ("G'nome") with all kinds of guns. And it had mounts, or something like that. Not multiplayer, though. And it seems to have been abandoned... Aaron Bishop's original releases didn't have saving since it was modeled after Nethack and other roguelikes, but later mods added it. However, I cannot find any of these saving enabled Soulfu mods in some binary format for the life of me. I know it's not really relevant, but your request reminded me of it. I won't bother playing it unless I find or build a version with saving enabled... But oh well.

Yeah, Qatar only wants slaves, not refugees.

I don't either. That's why I very deliberately pointed out the current American Muslim population. At the same time, the reality is there are an exceedingly large amount of anti-Western Muslims in many predominantly Muslim countries, for good or bad. And I might as well give my view. If there were a tested and reliable means of vetting refugees and providing the means for them to succeed once in a country, then there would be nothing wrong. This requires programs no country has (at least on the scale necessary), however. You'd have to objectively determine the refugee's biographical history (most often impossible because of the nature of asylum and war-torn countries) and ensure the refugee would most likely integrate into society. When they're in, you'd need to provide shelter, food/water, non consumable material necessities, healthcare, and education/training until they can support themselves and their families on the same footing as any other citizen. In the case of the United States, we cannot do this for our own people, with millions on the streets, millions more in poverty, millions without reliable access to food or water, millions upon millions without proper healthcare, millions more with poor education or career opportunities... Who do you prioritize? Your people, or refugees? If you don't provide these resources to refugees, you'll create schisms in communities and wind up with the lesson we learned after Lincoln was unable to implement his restoration plan after the Civil War. But if you do provide these resources to refugees, while you are doing nothing for Americans or taking away resources from Americans (resources aren't infinite, and plenty of these social needs are already strained), you create yet another schism leading to xenophobia. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think accepting refugees is a poor choice because, as a country, we cannot even support our own people. edit: removed American population example, can't word it properly, not going to have it misconstrued