I hate learning curves. In this case, a modified version of the Crysis SDK & tools represents a learning black hole. That having been said, I was able to make this with the Blue Mars City Editor.
It's Northern New Mexico geography in a 2048x2048 "city", so the scale is actually realistic. It remains to be seen if realism will look good from the ground.
Lawrence University just built a very nice, new student union on the hill overlooking the Fox River.
I think this says all that needs to be said about the subject, in the general sense. From the bio page of my Eve Online corporation’s security director (Hooligan McFiend)
I’m transgendered. Sue me. I used to be one particular gender, and I changed it physically and socially, and legally changed my name (yes, in court). I didn’t change it on my SS records, though, because I still like the gender that would now make me homosexual in my social gender, so this way I get to beat the system for getting married, having benefits, etc. I love ontology.
Wow. We hopped in the car to grab some dinner and got pulled over, with me driving M’s car, owing to M’s failing to install the front license plate as required by the law here.
The result was that I was hassled for an hour by Appleton police because they were looking in the wrong database for my name.
"Ah think this is wunna them thair fakes Ah-Dees,” says supervisor Eroooo*?.
Office Doghearsajoke* seemed confused by the endless (30 second) saga of getting my name changed but not my gender. Takes the license back to her car. Comes up to accuse me of carrying a fake NM driver’s license. With holographic imprinting. Right.
"So you're a woman but your ID says 'M'?"
"Yep. For tax and marriage purposes."
"Errooooooooo?"
They were mostly polite and the Lt. ended up apologizing profusely when they figured out that they'd screwed up badly. Plus I didn't get a ticket for someone else's failure to renew their car registration, or for not being from Wisconsin, which they really wanted to do.
"So you have addresses in 3 states?" (2)
"Yep."
"Which one is the real one?"
"They're all real. Don't ask me, ask the IRS, they're the ones who make up these nonsensical rules."
"But you’re a woman?"
"Right, but 'legally' a guy. I beat your system. I can marry a woman. I win. <PhilKenSebben>Hah-hah</>"
“I can haz look at your pee-pee?”(3)
Oh, and sure...like I’d spend $17,000 on a holographic printer when I could buy two 3d fabrication printers for the same amount and make fake eyeglass frames and my own Green Army Men.
Cops in small towns *really* need to get out more. Oh, and it really was an hour, in the cold, with no jacket. Was just waiting to be arrested so I could hear an argument over who had to do the intake exam at the jail.
*So-called only because that was the expression on the officer’s face after about 30 seconds, that is to say, like a dog listening to a joke. The officer was polite, other than normal patrol officer attitude, but her supervisor wasn’t, until he’d figured out how badly they’d screwed up, at which point he was effusively polite.
(2) Yep. I work in multiple states, and have legal home addresses in three of them, because I pay for lodging and bills in each of them. I live in one of them slightly more than the others. This point alone was a source of massive confusulation. It’s a big ol’ goofy world, huh?
(3) Ok, I made up this line, but you can always see it someone’s face. They look at your crotch when they think you’re not looking. So, yes you can have a look, but you have to pay for it, ideally in some kind of metals or artwork. I’m not cheap.
Photos processed by adding defocusing gradients, bumping up the intensity of the colors, and deepening the shadows. The result makes them look like photographs of dioramas or models. Usually.
Meadow near Jemez Springs, NM
It even works for pictures taken in virtual worlds, in this case a swamp I built in Second Life to benefit the American Cancer Society. Really.
A railroad bridge across the Fox River in Appleton, WI.
The dam next to our apartment building, also in Appleton.
Various shots of our apartment complex taken from the Oneida Skyline Bridge, in Appleton.
Well, we’re moving. Only a couple of blocks, but as someone pointed out, it’s pretty much scale-invariant. You still have to have the same lists, do the same packing, etc. At least we’ll have a lot more space.
Yet another way to subtract time from one’s life:
Yep, that’s my first book ever. Published. On Amazon. By Amazon, actually. It was a test, but an interesting one. I just opened Microsoft Word, dragged and dropped a couple flower pictures, saved it, and uploaded it. Ta-da! A two-page book.
I’d already signed up with the Amazon Kindle publishing service here:
It’s a dollar because that’s the minimum price I could set. Or rather, I set it to $1.00 and Amazon repriced it to $.80, for reasons I don’t understand.
Christmas eve, 2008. I glance out the office window and see two bald eagles, one adult and one juvenile, perched on a bare tree on the breakwater island a couple hundred feet away, in the middle of the Fox River.
After a couple minutes, I realize that there are 3 more in another tree. And another one in that tree. Total: 2 adults and 4 juveniles. Some days, this apartment is the greatest. This was one of them.
These shots actually are in color, but I was shooting from inside a dirty window, through driving snow.
A good dog, with a long goofy name, “Private Stoc’s Fire Dancer”, bestowed by Pam, the very nice and responsible breeder. Her sister is “Private Stoc’s Red Skye at Morning”, but they just got called Fire and Skye. Occasionally, rarely, they’d both be named Dammit!
A natural herder, she’d go from room to room trying to get everyone together so she could keep an eye on them. I’m guessing that, to her, we were particularly clever sheep with the keys to the food cabinet. She convinced the neighborhood cats that hunting our ducks was a bad, bad idea.
She didn’t like it, but you could balance a french fry on her nose until she got permission to eat it. She didn’t like cats, but never, ever, not even once was aggressive toward any other animals, including our flock of Indian Runner ducks. Given that she was almost 18 months old when she came to live with us, it’s pretty amazing that she didn’t view them as prey. She acted as though they were her babies, and the same with parrots, cockatiels, sugar gliders, rabbits, and very small children.
It goes with saying that I hate cancer. It killed my dad, went after my mom, got me, and has killed at least one rabbit and one koi. Then it got Fire. She developed some kind of brain cancer that manifested itself as a bump on the head, and when the vet opened it up to see what it was, it was clear that she was not long for this world.
She hated getting her feet wet, or any kind of messiness. More like a cat than a dog.
“Make the rabbit stop touching me.”
“Just because I am their guardian does not mean I have to like them”
Shepherds obey better than any dogs I’ve ever known. They weren’t allowed inside until they were standing politely.
This sums it up, the twin kami Goofball and Cautious Concern.
The black sofa eventually developed a dog-shaped depression.
She took her guard duties very seriously, and was very happy when at some point we put a folded futon next to the window.
The wet, inside-out ear means they’ve just finished a comprehensive and mutual ear-cleaning session.
This look actually meant, “I’m reasonably sure that your sandwich will prove to be too large for you.”
Good bye, good dog.
Let me count the ways:
So, yeah, I hate them. They are teh sux0r, no doubt about it. If there were a competitor, I'd try it, but there isn't. As horrible as Apple is, Adobe is worse, and getting worserer.
Barf. Back to the CS4 installation, which I finally managed to convince them to send me. Oh, and I just know it's going to make me reboot my machine, because it's not like this is the 21st century or anything, where we know how to make software that we can stop and start as needed.
You can’t really see it well, but there’s a fogbank on the water about a mile or so offshore. It’s as though a range of hills suddenly appeared.
Living this far north is weird. It’s only September and the leaves on the trees are changing already. We’ve probably only run the air conditioner for a few hours in the last week. And, it’s time for OctoberFest, aka PorktoberFest, a.k.a. SeptemberFest. For some reason, Winconsonites who normally revel in cold weather are very squeamish about it being cold for an outdoor party.
At least they’re polite about it. The Appleton cops estimated 40,000 legally drunk people along College Aveniue, and only made 16 DUI/OWI arrests, even with the state troopers helping them.
Stuff we had to eat
Last, but not least, I finally got to hear some polka music. A little, not enough, but some. Yay!
Will upload pictures. Took some, not a lot, but concentrated on “the look of October Fest in Wisconsin ok”.
I went for my first bicycle ride in over four years, and it was great. Appleton is flat, but I’ve managed to find and live at the bottom of the only hill for 10 miles around. Getting up it was interesting, since I have the racing cogs still on. Might have to get a smaller front chain ring until I’m actually capable of walking across the room without being out of breath.
Pictures of my build (Heroes 34 - Twain's Journey) galore may be seen at my Flickr Relay for Life 2008 picture set
OMG. Relay for Life in SecondLife is over. We raised about US $215,000 (two hundred fifteen thousand dollars in donations. Team Caledon was second in the donation standings and of the top 15 relay runners, 7 were from Caledon.
The second-place finisher, Viderian Vollmar of Caledon Cymru, did his laps with no software assists like power skates, just the normal running pace of a SecondLife avatar. Yeah, it seems weird to have avatars "running" in a relay that only exists in cyberspace, but you try steering anything for 24 hours.
Last year I did a "scenic" build, in the sense that the main road didn't run through my sim. This year, though, I applied for and was given the opportunity to build a full "design sim", with the theme being "heroes". I chose Mark Twain, mostly because I'd been awake too long when asked, and because his stories, including his own, are all about journeys.
If having cancer isn't a journey, then I don't know what is. The sim offered travelers a few options, the easiest being to stay on the road and just walk around the edge of the sim in a few minutes. You could walk through the sim, with some difficulty, or you could receive a free miniature riverboat (designed by the talented Carricre Wind) and navigate the treacherous Mighty Mini Mississippi.
Features of the sim included giant channel catfish (designed by the frighteningly creative Virrginia Tombola) lurking under snags, and a swamp filled with wrecks and a dead man with four bullets in his back. JJ Drinkwater, assisted by Serra Anansi, created another stunning Library exhibit, this one covering quack cures and patent medicines. As if that weren't enough, he updated last year's History of Medicine plaques and pasted one on every large tree in the entire sim. It was scary good. Kamilah Hauptmann loaned a swimming animation rezzer that just spawns parties when you put it out. Tanarian Davies gave me a swamp mist particle generator that made the swamp atmosphere seen above. JJ
Normally, this pier is a couple feet above water, but during the high water of 2008, it wasn't.
The joys of extremely high shutter speeds. No, not really. Really the water stays this way, because it's "slow water", the result of excessive cheese and beer production toxic waste being added to the water.
Well, you’ll probably die anyway, but he’s good stuff.
 | Accelerando by Charles Stross Read more about this book... |
(really. My life is just like this book.)
Dell XPS M1730 Laptop. I have to keep wiping up the drool, it's that good.
