Author: Karel Kerezman

Bodies R Grate (No Fun Allowed)

Can I just take a moment to gripe about the general entropy of human existence? Oh right, this is my website, I’m free to do as I please. Good.

When I got the diagnosis, among the things I immediately lost from the acceptable treats list was orange juice and that saddened me. What I “gained” consisted mostly of “more things to keep track of” in the form of daily pills that are supposed to help keep me aboveground for a while longer.

We worked out a way to keep hot cocoa in my life, and that worked for a while… until recently, when I think my body has decided that it doesn’t like something about the process. For most of this month I’ve been getting more and more ooky and uncomfortable. (I’ll spare the details, but you might be able to guess.) I’m still trying to work out if it’s the milk powder part or the chocolate part… and it’s not looking good for the latter. I went several days without cocoa or my ChocZero snacks, and started feeling better. So I’ve had one (1) cup of cocoa this week (Tuesday morning) and only one serving of ChocZero squares per day after… and the ookiness is back.

More science is required at this point. I am not hopeful for a happy result.

Y’all, if I lose the ability to enjoy chocolate at all? My gloomy life’s gonna get twice as gloomy. Where’s the fun of being a person who has to eat food to stay alive if none of the foods are allowed to be enjoyable? Breads and potatoes and rice to a bare minimum. No fruit juices. And now possibly no chocolates?

I protest in the strongest possible terms.

31 October, 2024
Satisfactory: Power Control Building

I had some time off this week and… ended up not spending much time in Satisfactory because we had trouble with the furnace and then I had trouble with my internal systems. (We’ll just leave it at that.) This evening I eked out a couple of hours of progress, though, including the revival of an idea I tinkered with in a previous save but never implemented: A power control building.

The asymmetry is deliberate. The other design choices remain as haphazard as ever, of course.

I’ll be clear, this is a slightly ridiculous creation. If I want to put a power control switch in charge of a building’s state of on/off-ness there are much, much easier ways to go about it. Simply putting the switch by the main doorway and making sure that’s the only point at which power enters the factory building would do the job.

But… I have a Blueprint Designer and so far all I’ve done with it is create railway structures and light fixtures. Clearly I’ve been limiting myself. Why not have some fun?

Using the 5×5 Mk2 Designer space I set out a 3×3 bed of concrete foundations, then created “stairways” where the front/back doors go. For purely silly aesthetic reasons I walled the interior with the “half-pipe” foundations making a floorway bounded by curved floors that become walls. Just off-center inside the building is the point of the exercise, a power control switch. I perched it atop a small piece of decorative steel beam for “didn’t just want it sitting on the floor” reasons.

I ran a set of concrete pillars horizontally along the “wall” closest to the power switch as a way to hide most of the power cabling. This gives me a power wart at each end of the building, easy to reach.

This was taken about ten seconds before I realized that I could make those floors shiny by switching to the coated concrete foundation pieces.

Then, through the power of nudging, I surrounded all this with windowed walls and slapped some glassed roofing on top. To finish it off I put steel walls all around, used some more beams (regular and painted) for trim, and saved the blueprint for later deployment in the field. Huzzah!

I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t terribly practical. It eats up nearly as much space as a two-platform railway station. But it’s fun and that counts for a lot when you’re busy making factories for your corporate overlords. Don’t we all need a bit of self-indulgent fun in our lives? And hey, it doesn’t look too shabby:

The two concrete pillars on the “power” side of the building simply get extended (“zooped”) down to ground level, and on the other side I chose to use a huge support pillar to give the illusion that this structure looks like it belongs here.

25 October, 2024
Satisfactory: The Game Outside The Game

Once you hit a certain point in your progress in the game called Satisfactory you find yourself in need of a way to track things outside of the game. The game gives you several tools such as the equipment codex and the mathematics calculator feature and the To Do list and the Notes sidebar but those can only carry you so far. You’ll see jokes online about how you’re not a real Satisfactory player until you start making spreadsheets and… well, that’s not wrong, honestly.

Maybe just not in the way you might think.

This image has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but by golly it looks neat, so here you go.

Let’s get into the note-taking aspect, the part of the game you engage with outside of the game.
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20 October, 2024
Case Opened. Case Closed.

In February I ran into a tricky problem having to do with tracking the movement of agents in our RMM (“Remote Management & Monitoring”) system. I opened a ticket (01916099 just for the sake of record-keeping) with the vendor.

I updated the ticket in April asking if anyone was going to get back to me.

I updated the ticket in May asking if anyone was going to get back to me.

Along the way I pinged our account rep who insisted someone would get back to me.

Today? More than eight entire months later? Someone got back to me.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. I will be closing this case now.

Fern, from the FREIREN anime, eloquently expressing the same reaction I had, only far more calmly.

Fine, fine customer support they’ve got over at [redacted]. Lovely. Their ticketing system won’t even let me reopen the ticket, despite a button being labeled for such. And they wonder why clients are jumping to other vendors’ products.

15 October, 2024
Satisfactory: Concrete From Hammerspace

Satisfactory 1.0 introduces an entire game mechanic that wasn’t in any of the Early Access versions. And I don’t mean the (erstwhile) storyline.

We’ll address all of the stuff around the Dimensional Depot Uploader shortly. Please be patient.

Meet the Dimensional Depot Uploader, which allows you to dump materials into a kind of Hammerspace. Neat, huh?
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9 October, 2024
Noah Lefevre: Century of Song

“101 Songs that Shaped American Music”

There’s an old line which goes something like, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s hard, incredibly hard, to convey one’s thoughts and information about one medium in a whole other, wildly different medium. Just ask any of those YouTubers trying to get their takes about film and song across, I imagine they’d agree.
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7 October, 2024