When you’re a world-famous perfectionist weirdo, you can probably get away with a two-decade break between full releases of new material, right? Well, Peter Gabriel’s certainly finding out.
Over the course of this year we noticed that some of Vyx’s potted flowers on the deck were attracting hummingbirds. I hadn’t even considered that any of those lived around here, but sure enough, they became our most frequent guests. When the flowering plants ran their course going into autumn, we replaced them with a flat hummingbird feeder and waited to see if they’d appreciate our offering.
It took them a week or so to realize what was up, but once they did, hoo boy! I’d start hearing their clicks and clacks and seeing them darting between the rails to sneak a sip or two all through the day. After a while they got to the point of just hanging out for up to half a minute, chilling out and sipping that tasty, tasty sugar-water.
This weekend I realized, oh hey, I have a GoPro HERO9 Black. And it can record 240 frames per second in high definition. A project was born!
I rolled out of bed after a rough night of bad dreams, threw myself together as usual, took my meds, and as I realized I’d put on one of the two Captain Marvel t-shirts in my closet then thought about things for a moment, a plan emerged for my day: I’d go see The Marvels.
On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.
I took this screenshot within the first two minutes of enabling Lumen while at the Final Destination site. Just a purely random view and it shows off the new lighting so well! Dang this game’s pretty.(more…)
I suppose I should say a few words about the other new record I picked up last week:
Filter’s The Algorithm has a few songs I mostly like (and even “For The Beaten” almost loses me in places) but overall is not my cuppa tea. That’s not to say it’s bad, just not-for-me, not an overall style I like. A bigger fan of the band than I am would probably like it just fine, as it is definitely more-of-that.
To be fair, nearly every Filter album I’ve heard (other than the nearly-flawless Title Of Record) is like this for me, where I end up with two or three songs in rotation and a whole bunch of “nope, don’t want none of that” tracks. So take this with the grain of salt it probably deserves.
Did you know that the Double D boys released a new album a couple weeks ago? I sure didn’t! Luckily, a coworker mentioned it in passing yesterday. That was probably the best part of my entire day, if I’m honest.
