Virtual Illusions

From Aric’s Sig:

Sadly, there are times that even my lucky rocketship undies are no help.

Quote

Everyone will be happy to know that with 1.5 gigs of ram CoV runs decently again. Yeah.

Gaming, Tech

I’m having two minor issues I hope the UPS man delivered the solution to one.

City of Villains: On my windows machine I can’t seem to play CoV with any pep. During beta I figured, “Hey, its beta,” but the released version seems to have the same problems. The main one is about zone loading taking forever rending the game fairly unfun to play. I’m going to have to guess that it’s the half gig ram that is the problem. Everything else seems up to spec: Athlon 2800+ XP, GeForce 6600 video card, clean OS install, etc.

Well anyway I got a gig of ram to add, Hopefully that will fix the problem.

Xine: On my Home Theater PC since I installed the new version of Knoppmyth, xine has had these little sound skips every few seconds. Last night around 2am it worked fine. I’m pretty sure that was because nothing was being recorded or commercial flagged. This problem doesn’t occur when playing the video with mplayer or ogle but they have other issues that make them less attractive for playing dvds.

CPU is around 20% and spikes to about 50% so it doesn’t seem to be CPU bound. Most likely scenario is that it is IO bound. Something is touching the dvd causing a delay or the dvd is trying to use the hardware en/decoder which is now busy with the recording of TV shows and it causes “issues.”

Not really sure how to tackle this. First step is to make sure xine is using software decoding, there’s probably a switch to force that somewhere. After that I’m not sure. The dvd and the harddrive of on different IDE buses so I’m not sure what else I do about IO bound problem.

It is possible that mythtv is checking to see if someone has changed the dvd every few second and that is causing the problem. I’ll have to make sure that option is disable. I thought that was a front end option and I’ve run tests with the front end disabled, so I’m not hopeful.

Anyway I’m going to see what 1.5 gig does for CoV now.

Media, Tech

So for the last weekish I’ve been walking a mile when I got home from work. I was fairly certain it would only last until the night it was too cold or raining. Well it was raining tonight and I seemed to have still done the walk anyway, so that’s cool.

Life

It isn’t a secret or anything, but I just wanted to mention PostSecret as one of the most profound sites on internet. While I can talk about the things that lie beneath masks and illusions, PostSecret catalogs those things.

I recommend everyone read/look at what’s there. It’s what I look forward to on Mondays.

Culture

[This entry should probably be edited later, given that I am entering it while TUI (Typing Under the Influence). I went out today to see humanity, it is of course a younger, different humanity than I am, but that is okay, because it is the writing... the "what I do" that is truly important. Here is the transcription*. It comes in two parts with a separator.

*What is unclear if you haven't gone out drinking with me is that I wrote this while in the bars, the typing is the afterwards of the event.]

I let myself be hurt again. It wasn’t her fault. As always it was hope. I keep my hope buried deep, deep down, behind walls, a moat and sentries. It’s not that I fear an enemy will steal it. It’s that when I let it out it leads a rebellion and it hurts me.

Hope isn’t evil or anything, in the right place and time it’s beneficence is unparalleled. But I’m not blessed enough to be in that place. I’ve never really been blessed with that place.

[semi-break]

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks. Hope is always followed by the crushing lack of humanity. The acknowledgment that I will always be apart from the rest. There are the circles that I touch, but it’s always at arms length. On the best of days, our fingertips will touch, but most days it is only memory.

I want to cry, I want to feel the tears and let it out, but I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have let it hurt me.

Hope always begs… and even asks, why am I always alone?

====== [Full on break] ================

Why do those who seem the least decent always claim: “I am so tolerant.”? [In this case it was a woman who he ignored and mistreated yet still had the audacity to talk about something that wasn't him... The nerve.]

====== [Another Break] ===============

So I’m left to wonder do I have a friend anymore? Or did I lose that when hope came out? Those things that caused hope… Those things that I wanted… The ones that allowed/made me feel again… I would give them up for my friend again, but I just don’t know if I’ve lost her already.

I don’t want to lose my friend.

Life

So I was at work diligently working away when there was a loud noise. Thunder or an explosion type thing. If I had the lights on they would have gone out. Then the chorus started. Little beep beeps of UPSs. They would harmonize with their neighbors for a moment before marching off to their own drummer.

Then you do the waiting for a few seconds and it stretches and power doesn’t pop back on. And so their is the shutting down and turning UPSs off and then nothing.

We gathered in the rooms with windows and chatted. I suggested starting a bonfire to keep warm but no one went for it. Turns out the emergency generator fell down on the job as well and we didn’t even have emergency lighting. After hanging out for an hour or so the boss sent us home. The hallways and especially the underground garage were quite dark.

Managed to get out of there maybe an hour and a half early, but it took a solid hour for my ten mile drive so I’m not sure I got much out of it.

Power at home was on except for one five second period. UPSs held which is always a good sign. They chirped and beeped and everything.

Life

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17262660%255E1702,00.html

The summary:
Some Australian bloke decides he needs to castrate himself with a dull pair of wire cutters after his rugby team wins. Then he wanders over to his social club and passes them around before passing out due to loss of blood.

It seems he didn’t think he’d win and expressed by saying: “I said I’d cut my balls off if we won.” Turns out they won and while relieving himself in the bathroom noticed the wire cutters and thought his friend had helpfully provided them for his castration. Actually they were there to fix the toilet chain. It’s unclear from the story how drunk he was.

More Quotes:

“The cutters were blunt so I had to keep snipping.”
After picking his testicles from the toilet bowl, he went to the social club.
“I went in and shouted out ‘I’ve done it!’,” Mr Huish said.
“I took my balls out and passed them in the bag to a friend.

I’m not sure I can add anything other than a shake of the head.

News

So this year for thanksgiving its just going to be me and my parents which is very odd. Usually there is my brother and my sister as well and there’s always an added person here or there that gets collected. The immediate family is 5 but thanksgivings are usually 6-9 people traditionally. But this year it is only three. Seems so small. Talked to my parents about whether there was any point or if we should just go out to eat or something.

We decided to give it a try and make some sort of Thanksgiving out in Delaware. Not sure it will feel like Thanksgiving with just the three of us, but going out certainly wouldn’t have.

I’m feeling kind of isolated right now so I don’t think this was the year to try the Thanksgiving symbolized by being abandoned by all the usual players but as is always the case, it isn’t really my choice. I should make it through my list of friend and say hello and have dinner, but I’m not sure that makes me feel any more connected sometimes it just magnifies how far they all are from me. Besides I hate calling friends when I need a feeling of connection, I kind of feel like I’m using them or something.

Hopefully I’ll snap out of it before too much longer.

Life

Started a second group on a Nephilim’s Song campaign. Took longer than I was hoping to get character creation done and really it still isn’t done. I’m not 100% sure what the delay was. It has some elements of built for protection against engineers, but I thought I simplified those as much as possible.

Powers were like a brick wall. Mostly it was about that fact that there wasn’t just one way to buy an ability. The capacity system (i.e. fetish capacity and symbiote capacity) were also a stumbling block.

Some things I’m considering:

* Drop talents and perks. Assume everyone has a wealth of 1. This sort of confuses the idea of the Spirit Mark but I’m not sure much is really gained by those sections and it reduces the number of things that OP are spent on.

* Drop the power costs for Familiars. When your familiar is the correct rating allow them to pick up any power; the mult and spirit pool provide the appropriate limitations.

* Somehow reduced capacity complexity so that it represents the number of items (of any power) of that type that a character could bond to/implant. So for example the character would know they could bond to 3 fetishes and they can expend PP to bond more with a 4-8 mult for increasing the base.

I have to figure out a way to bring strangers into the world in the short term. Provide the RPG equivalent of a preview movie or something that sketches out the major elements/interactions.

Still need to do something about equipment to make it more player friendly.

In play we changed the way initiative works so that a player representative rolls once and a monster rep rolls once at the beginning of each round. Still need to streamline combat more somehow.

Those issues aside we did start actually moving.

I might provide a summary when I’m closer to my notes.

Gaming