| Company of Others...cancelled or something? |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|07:54 pm] |
2x edit. Well, who knows what's going on. Looks like Company of Others got cancelled due in part to limited attendance. There might still be something going on at Lewis & Clark, and I still hope to do Stuff with People on that weekend--but whether it's a long trip down there will depend on how many other folks are still in for it. I'd still like to do camping, and I've got the time off, anyway.
More posts when I get more info. I'll try not to edit this one anymore. |
|
|
| Misfile |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|03:27 pm] |
Webcomics eat my brain.
http://www.misfile.com/?page=1 first strip
I caught up like a thousand pages in three days or so, and now I feel compelled to modify my car. :x But still. Misfile probably appeals to anyone who likes El Goonish Shive (though it's a tiny bit more serious). Or cars, though it's surprisingly readable to the car-apathetic. Also a pretty unique take on FTM transgender, without taking it either too lightly or too seriously. Yay.
There's a shortage of professional-quality webcomics out there. This one counts. |
|
|
| |
[Jul. 3rd, 2008|01:50 am] |
Thunder and lightning something truly amazing tonight. The sky knows that tomorrow night, there's going to be fireworks... and it's putting on a show of its own, just as a reminder.
Sitting and reading an Orson Scott Card graphic novel while the world outside lights up in bright blues and oranges. I like this.
It's been hot and dry, and for most of the day it was overcast and dusty with the kind of clouds you just don't -get- over here. It seemed for a bit like I was south...or over on the east coast, maybe. I don't remember the last time I saw Seattle with this kind of weather. Ran outside on my break at work and danced in the rain and laughed. |
|
|
| |
[Jul. 1st, 2008|03:37 am] |
Something's missing. Thought a nice quiet weekend alone would help, and working out in the heat has been great for me, but I'm not getting anywhere.
Work is dragging lately, and I'm unproductive. I need an escape. I don't have much lack of things to do, there's some coding I've wanted to do and there's always more working out...but spiritual life is lacking and I've lost my sense of being at home anywhere. Two months left, but already this house is no longer home for me.
Beats me. I had to be in bed five hours ago.
My phone is almost always on. Give me an SMS or a call sometime! I'm craving contact. Feels like I don't get enough these days. Well, sleep now. |
|
|
| Cheap whiteboard! |
[Jun. 20th, 2008|08:27 pm] |
I'm going to get some cheap whiteboard material in the next day and a half (coincidentally, right before D&D). Looking for quick advice if anyone has gone whiteboard-hunting before!
Here's a nice useful discussion on the subject I found: http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Shower_Board_as_a_white_Board
Right now it looks like I'll be snagging some shower board, and any of various cleaners.
Bonus to cheap whiteboard: I'm going to see if I can't make some permanent grid-lines on (half of) it. And maybe someday I'll try a metal backing so I can get a handful of colored magnets for the player characters.
Tabletop? Wallside. |
|
|
| Fractalicious |
[Jun. 16th, 2008|03:38 pm] |
I dunno how many fractal or graphics geeks read my journal, but I'm looking for some specific ideas that maybe someone could help me out with (or be fascinated by the very concept of).
Fractals. The Mandelbrot set is 2-dimensional. (Wikipedia will tell you about Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimensions and I don't care about them. When you look at it, it has an X and a Y axis but no Z axis, and that's what I'm referring to here.) I want to find a 3-dimensional one. I could rotate Mandelbrot around its X-axis and get something pretty, but I was hoping for something with tubes that snake around--not vast arcing swaths cut out of space. And I can't just easily port Mandelbrot to three dimensions unless someone makes some really fascinating changes to math sometime very soon, because it's an iterative algorithm that puts the X and Y coordinates in the real and complex part of a number. There's nowhere for Z to go, and it would REALLY not look good if Z replaced the power of 2 in that equation. I think.
So, I need a nice 3-dimensional, or at least natively 3-variable fractal.
Even more demanding: It'd be nice to have an escape-time fractal instead of an iterating fractal. Yes, yes, Sierpinski is very nice, but iterating fractals really don't work for the specific application I have in mind. Specifically I want an escape-time fractal because you can calculate the value of any point to arbitrary depth in a vacuum. You don't need to calculate the rest of the fractal to do it, like you do for Sierpinski. Mandelbrot is an escape-time one, and it's pretty nice.
I'm -considering- doing this with Julia sets... except that Julia is FOUR-dimensional. Each Julia set is a 2D picture, and you define a Julia set out of two more variables. I could always set one dimension constant, or I could try doing something really bizarre with time travel, I guess. Holding one variable constant is an effective, if unbeautiful, solution. At least it allows for multiple maps to explore.
... Voxels. A voxel is a volume-pixel, for the uninitiated. An MRI is a collection of many slices of pictures of your brain, so each picture has X and Y, and the location of that picture in the stack of pictures is Z. Voxels are a different way to do 3d rendering...you just divide space into a bunch of cubes, instead of using polygons. You shoot a ray of light into the scene, and look at which cube(s) it hits, in order to determine the color of the pixel to draw on the screen. Very very good for simplistic, non-reflective raytracing.
Are these two things coming together yet? I want to render a fractal in voxels. I want to render it in variable depth, so when you get close to a wall, it scrapes more detail out of it--but far away, it doesn't bother to calculate things yet. I know this part is very do-able. Maybe even 'easy'.
The hard part is making it interesting to LOOK at! See, the problem with escape-time fractals is that they define a monochrome set--either a pixel/voxel 'escapes' after a bunch of iterations, or it doesn't. That means all the walls are just one color. In order to make it interesting, I want to do something with the SLOPE of the volume, and have reflections. I might be able to puzzle out my own way to calculate the slope of a surface at a given voxel, but I'd really like it if anyone reading this has any experience with that (or knows someone who does / can point me at a paper on the subject).
Besides that, pixels are colored based on how far away from the camera they are, like it was in a foggy place. It'll take work to make this good.
Yeah this is a pet project I thought a lot about over the weekend. My last 3d fractal renderer (it's OLD) just made a height-map out of Mandelbrot with some interpolation, and rendered it with polygons...that was a disaster for a LOT of reasons. Time for a different approach. And for those of you who are boggling at all this, um...sorry? |
|
|
| :D |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|03:17 pm] |
Evolution is awesome. Show this article to your favorite denier. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html
Also, as a follow-up to last post. I'm thinking of running some D&D at my house in Woodinville! It wouldn't be for long, as I've only got a few months before leaving to Portland...but if anyone's willing to come to Woodinville for gaming with me and Karla, let me know.
(And for you portlanders, there will -absolutely- be some gaming once I'm down there, too.) |
|
|
| D&D 4th Edition: A positive review |
[Jun. 9th, 2008|03:50 pm] |
I've read through the three new D&D core books. As someone who's owned some of every D&D generation from the original, first three tan books...even if I've only played in a few campaigns... ( I am content with 4th Ed. )
I want to play. (or run something...and for people who know how GMing has gone for me lately, that's a huge change.) It's nothing like 3rd Ed., and people who want 3rd Ed. will be disappointed. Instead, it's a wargame with loot and experience points and an emphasis on cinematics and heroics. And I LIKE that. |
|
|
| |
[May. 28th, 2008|09:27 pm] |
I'm thinking of making or obtaining a coyote mask.
This is just a spur of the moment thing, but it seems like it'd be nice for rituals and for festival-things. I don't know what materials I want to use, but I'm thinking of something that's more symbolic than it is realistic or cartoony. No fur, for one thing, but shaped somewhat. If I end up making one I'm thinking of making it red on white, or red on brown...but I don't know if I trust my artistic abilities enough to distinguish it from a kitsune mask or something. No experience.
Does anyone have links to good mask-making pages? Or people who do masks? |
|
|
| |
[May. 26th, 2008|10:38 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  lightning! | ] |
Oregon...awesome as usual.
Met a lot more otherkin in the area. And I swear Portland is like living in a sci-fi book that's set ten years in the future. Finally ran into ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) snowcoma, too!
Had to use my super sneaky coyote powers to get into the Portland house after the key broke off in the lock, also.
Memorial Day... I've got a few military and ex-military folks on my friends list. You have good motives and you're some of the strongest people I know. Thank you. Come back in one piece. |
|
|
| |
[May. 23rd, 2008|06:44 pm] |
Once again, I'm scared about moving down to Portland. It's only been recently that I've discovered how many people I really do have up here in the Seattle area...They're my family, really, and they're the people I know best.
I guess if it was an easy decision, it wouldn't really be much of a decision, now would it?
My mind's made up, but it's just harder now. It took the prospect of losing them to discover all the things I have up here. Moving is an unknown.
I can always come back. And...life needs suffering and tests of character, even if it's happy (bittersweet) suffering, and entirely voluntary tests. I still like where I'm going.
...This LJ entry is really just for my own benefit to write. But hey, it is a journal, right? Two posts in one day isn't too many? |
|
|
| That didn't go as planned. |
[May. 23rd, 2008|01:04 pm] |
Yay! Up bright and early at 6 AM, so I can go to work early, to the gym, and head down to Oregon--er, why is my housemate screaming in pain?
Five hours later, after a trip to the emergency room, a diagnosis of a pinched nerve or something, a prescription of pain pills and orders not to carry heavy things for a week...and instead of coming in three hours early, I'm now an hour late to work. That sort of thing really messes with your whole day. Poor Karla though, and I'm glad it wasn't anything serious (as if screaming pain wasn't serious).
This has been a week of very frazzled nerves, and not as much work as I'd like...no simple tasks with immediate results, just some months-old long term things. Vacation is perfect. |
|
|
| Portland on my mind |
[May. 18th, 2008|02:35 am] |
Turned down the fulltime offer. Mental health and personal growth are more important than financial stability, and I'm not doing too badly there anyway. This means I've got a bit over three months to hunt down a tech job near Portland or Beaverton. It's really not a bad situation. I'll have trouble thinking about anything besides the move, though.
I'm so happy that I'll have a place to live once I head down there...That's the one thing that is really making this all possible, or at least, making it possible enough to go through with. (Thank you!)
I've been kind of a ball of stress, but I think I'm back out the other side now.
Downside to having a weird schedule, driving to Portland and all over the place: Didn't hit the gym as much as I've been meaning to. Once or twice a week lately, which just plain is not enough.
Have a couple friends down near Portland that I didn't get to see last time. Worried about one of 'em...You know who you are, sorry I haven't been in better touch.
...I picked up Alan Moore's Watchmen at Powell's last weekend. Lost most of today to it. Wonderful stuff. Also, tabletop Werewolf game tomorrow. I think that means I'd better sleep! |
|
|
| |
[May. 12th, 2008|09:01 pm] |
Life is pretty awesome.
I think I'm praying that I don't get offered this job, in the end. The job is the only thing tying me down to Washington, and the more I see of Portland, the more I'd rather live there. Still, this would be higher paying than anything I could get down there, I bet...and if offered, I can't really turn it down.
Otherwise, it's about 3-4 months until I'm contractually required to take a break from temping here, and I might as well leave once it's done. Along with a few months to get a job and stuff.
Tough one. I really like the job, and the people I work with--but it's more important to me that I live somewhere that I can grow as a person, even if it means a less stellar job. I can't grow here. Washington is not for me, and it's time to leave the nest. If not now, then in a year or two, perhaps...but the time seems right, now. If I stay, I'll work on saving up money.
I don't expect my prayers to have any effect, here. What will happen will happen. There's a couple of paths here, I'll be stuck with one of them, and they're both at least 'alright'.
And...I love Portland. The energy down there is amazing. The tea garden is very nice. It seems like half the people I know are down there, and more are moving all the time. The transit system blows Seattle's away, but then, everyone already knows that.
...Before last weekend, I didn't really have any experience with non-therian otherkin. Now I do, and it's a community I'd like more contact with. |
|
|
| Here's a ramble. Stream of consciousness alert. |
[May. 9th, 2008|09:59 pm] |
I love who I am.
Life has always been about journey and change. For a long time, I felt like I was waiting for something, and I didn't think I was happy. There have been a vast number of bad decisions I've made in my life. But sitting where I am today, I think it's all been worthwhile.
I got an old hard drive back today, and I looked over my life. It was kind of like life flashing before my eyes: A good look at everything I used to be, and the company I used to keep. I miss the old days; I know they're gone. I don't miss the person I used to be, but that person is gone. And when I add it all up, and look at where I stand today...Even with a lot of the more recent decisions I've made, there's just one answer.
( I regret nothing. ) |
|
|
| Yoinked from daikitsune |
[Apr. 28th, 2008|09:20 pm] |
Comment and I will:
₪ Tell you why I friended you.
₪ Associate you with something - fandom, song, color, photo, word etc.
₪ Tell you something I like about you.
₪ Tell you a memory I have of you.
₪ Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
₪ Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
₪ In return you must post this in your journal. |
|
|
| Gym! |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|10:12 pm] |
I wonder if I should start a workout / weightloss journal. Many people have them and they're a good idea. It seems like a little too much work, though, so...
Anyway, my start weight is 255. I'm hoping to lose fifty pounds eventually, and that's while getting some muscle mass. I'm getting a trainer an hour a week for the next month or so. Was in there for two hours tonight, and it felt real good...I like the place. Thinking that Wednesdays will be swimming pool time.
Eh, I'll put this stuff on a filter and keep track of my progress weekly or so. Anyone interested? |
|
|
| Gym membership! |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|09:38 pm] |
This coyote has a gym membership! Oh wow, this is going to do me a -huge- world of good. I'm looking at going three times a week, an hour or more each time.
This coyote also has a free session with a personal trainer...but they are hugely expensive, so I probably won't do much with trainers after this.
This coyote also celebrated with Taco Bell afterwards which explains why he needs a gym membership in the first place, but he is getting better with his eating habits.
I've been working out a lot at home the last few days, and it's amazing how much more physically comfortable everything is now. |
|
|
