In a recent work “hangout” chat, I mentioned in passing that some day I’d like to get out to the Oregon Coast again. As someone who neither owns or operates a motor vehicle I’m reliant upon tourism services, twice-daily bus service, or the kindness of friends to see the ocean so it doesn’t happen very often. One of my coworkers noted in the chat that, in fact, they had an Astoria trip planned for late July and would I be interested in a lift to & from?
Sure I would!
Thus preparations began and so, yesterday, I went on a little tourism adventure.
This model, available for viewing at the Heritage Museum in Astoria, Oregon, depicts a mockup of a dog-powered wheel used to churn butter. No, I am not making this up.
Commence a lot of walking punctuated by museum visits and stone benches.
When I moved into my new bedroom in the rental house last year I saw that the room came with a neat knickknack shelf right over where the bed goes. How delightful! So I put some things on it.
Please pay no attention to how incredibly dusty that mini Mini has become over the past year.
Then, one night last week, my brain decided it would be fun to ponder what would happen if… oh, let’s say, there was an earthquake. Would I want a solid chunk of LEGO to land on me from that height? What about the gooseneck reading lamp with the metal base? Or the Zentraedi Officer’s Pod?
Why did it take this long to even ponder the question? Because I’m not always terribly bright, that’s why. But once the realization occurred to me at all, I couldn’t let go of it. So I had a rethink. Now the lamp is gone (I rarely used it anyway), the heavy plastic items are in the glass display case (remember that?), and the overhead shelf is populated by much, much softer objects.
The lizard doggo, the Ruan Mei “creations,” and the quaggan should be much, much less likely to do physical damage to me if they fall off the shelf for some reason.
And so I sleep just that little bit easier at night now.
I haven’t been playing Warframe all that heavily lately, mostly just doing Nightwave dailies to progress that reward track and leveling up weapons for mastery. Along the way I’ve slowly accumulated items called “Riven Slivers” which can be turned in to receive something called a “Riven Mod.” That’s basically a mystery mod (item which enhances a warframe, weapon, or other piece of equipment) with randomized stats (usually a mix of some positive and one very negative) that is locked to a given named weapon (any variant thereof).
Earlier this month I got a Riven Mod, and once I revealed its assigned weapon, I was kind of annoyed: It’s for the Sobek, the “normal” version of which is a kind of middling shotgun. I already have a stack of shotguns in my arsenal, do I need another? Probably not, I decided.
Then I noticed this was my 2nd Sobek Riven Mod. Huh. (Mind you, one cannot equip more than one Riven Mod on a weapon. So having two is just pointless… maybe. Kind of. Put a pin in that.)
Immediately afterward during my next mission in the Saturn system, a Kuva Larvling showed up (as they do) and the weapon it offered me if I chose to make that Larvling into a full Lich was…
… yeah, the Kuva Sobek. I guess the game absolutely wanted me to add a Sobek to my inventory. So I went ahead and kicked off the Lich hunting process, more out of a fit of pique than anything else, if I’m honest. But hey, mastery progress is mastery progress, a weapon’s a weapon. It’s all good, baby!
It’s just a quick link this evening to a blog post about the “rise” of genAI slop, coming at it not from the “working with a corpus of stolen goods” angle or the “boiling lakes to make fake pictures” angle, but from the angle of the results of these next-word-guessing programs being basically useless. Which is also super-valid, alongside those other non-trivial concerns. Here, have a pull quote:
My gripes are more of a tangled web that I can only summarize as: the vibes are bad. The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don’t exist.
Now, go read the whole thing because it’s so, so true, top to bottom.
For some reason, when I got to the point of wanting to replace some of my early power plants (coal, maybe some regular-fuel) with nuclear power, I decided to build the biggest plant I’ve ever made in the game, solo or multiplayer. This is my “1.0” save, started when the game officially left Early Access last autumn.
I ran the numbers and decided that 4 uranium fuel rods per minute feeding 20 power generators was exactly the right number to aim for.
What the hell was I thinking?
Please allow me to offer some advice if you want to follow in my virtual footsteps. I made some mistakes; perhaps my hubris will be partly absolved if I can help others avoid them.
