Categories
Uncategorized

The Little Death

I have been growing the neck beard out lately, much to the chagrin of people
who know me. I must confess it does look awful, all scraggly and unkempt. Some
people grow nice full beards, but all mine ever seems to do is grow down, not
out. Still, I have got to make out for my losses up top somehow. I do this
about once a year, partly to see if it looks better (it never does), but mostly
just to prove a point to myself: that I still am myself and not what others
want me to be.

To be a part of a society is to conform to that society. To uphold a common
set of rules and standards. In many ways this is a good thing, you probably
would not like to live next to someone who thought arson was ok. This gives
rise to the good side of society: our laws. There is an inverse side though, an
insidious side: the drive to create automata. Automata (singular automaton), as
Wikipedia defines, is “a
self-operating machine, or a machine or control mechanism designed to follow
automatically a predetermined sequence of operations, or respond to
predetermined instructions”. What is an automaton as it relates to a person
though? It is a person who has lost their identity, who has become what society
expects of them. It is a person who gets married, has 2.5 kids while working 60
hours a week. It is a person who works 40 years and retires at 67, who owns a
house, likes football, and vacations once a year. Yet, despite how negative I
have made this all sound, there is nothing wrong with this if that is what you
want. Not surprisingly, If you were to look at the things I like (football),
and the the things I want (a house), you would see the automaton reflected in
me. Is that what I want or am I just playing along because that is what
everyone wants for me?

This is the the little death. It is the slow subjugation of yourself as you
integrate into a society. Each time you think to yourself, “Well, it is just
what people do.” or “That is what everyone else is doing.” a little part of
yourself dies. A unique piece of the multifaceted color of you goes gray. Make
no mistake, this is what some people who know you want. They want you to be
like them, they want you to like the things they like, to have the same goals,
the same aspirations. They are not evil for trying to do this, it is just their
nature. If that is what you to want, great, but if not, do not suffer that
little death.

So too do I often wonder if the things I like and want our my own wishes or
simply my desire to be part of society. How can I prove otherwise? How can I
prove I am my own man. Simple, do the things society shuns, do those things
that are frowned upon, relish the embarrassed laugh you get when you surprise a
person. Cherish that look of disgust and disappointment. This is not an excuse
to be a bad person, but an excuse to be you. So yes, my neck beard is awful,
but it proves I am me.

Categories
Uncategorized

Review: Star Trek Hidden Evil

Star Trek has never had the video game pedigree other Sci-Fi properties,
like Star Wars or Warhammer 40k, have enjoyed. For every well received Elite
Force or Bridge
Commander there are a dozen more Away Team and Borg waiting in the Briar
Patch. Sadly, Hidden Evil, a 1999
Presto Studios game, joins this unremarkable bunch. It is short, difficult to
control, and forgettable.

Story

You may be forgiven for forgetting the great contribution Insurrection made
to the Star Trek canon. A film in which the best scene involves Data acting like a life preserver. To
be fair there is probably a decent
episode’s worth of material in the film, maybe a two-parter. Yet it loses
its way somewhere between Picard and crew becoming leather clad action heroes
and the enterprise being maneuvered by a joystick. Thus, it may surprise you to
realize this game is a sequel to that masterpiece. Our main character is Ensign
Sovok, a human raised by Vulcans. He joins Picard and Data on the planet of the
film to investigate a hitherto undiscovered alien artifact the Son’a and Ba’ku
found while constructing a colony. There is not much story to ruin as the game
is quite short, but suffice to say the Son’a still do not like the peace loving
Ba’ku, Romulans are evil, and the alien artifact is actually really dangerous.
It ends up being pretty well traveled territory, both by Star Trek’s and other
show’s standards. It is enough to move the plot along, but it will never
surprise you.

Gameplay

This is not an action game, despite what the publisher’s screenshots may
tell you. This is an adventure game in the same vein as Grim Fandango. Walk
around, collect items, solve some light puzzles, move the story forward, etc.
Fans of Fandango will find a similar awkward control scheme at work here. Sovok
controls much like that of a high schooler’s car: poor maneuverability, slow
acceleration, and no speed. This is a troubling foundation on which to base a
game that requires a fair amount of phaser shooting. There is some light
auto-aiming going on, but you still have to slowly rotate to face enemies. Your
best tactic is running in circles until they miss then trying to get a quick
shot off. This is if you can remember the key to select your phaser. All your
equipment (tricorder, communications badge, phaser, nerve pinch!) is accessed
via the number keys. This is functional, but every time I wanted to get at an
item I hit the wrong button. Most of these items end up being useless anyways,
occasionally you have to scan the environment, but it rarely tells you anything
interesting. Nerve pinch sounds cool, but it is ridiculously hard to get in the
right position to use it, and the enemy has to be unaware for it to work. Most
of the time you will be blasting away with your phaser. Occasionally you can
pick up a hypospray for healing or another equally powerful weapon, but for
most of the game what you start with is what you got.

Lengthwise You are looking at 9 missions, for about 5 hours of ok to
frustrating gameplay. Everything is pretty easy, except for the last two
missions which have you navigating corridors that look very similar. With no
minimap except for the weak imposter they use with the tricorder in the last
mission. Most of your time in these last two missions will be spent trying to
remember what is where.

Graphics

An unexpected high point. Despite being released in 1999, the game looks
pretty decent. Backgrounds are static in the style of Myst and are suitably
detailed. Actual characters and objects are 3d models which, though rough, are
pretty good for the time in terms of detail and animation. It is a bit of
mishmash putting 3d characters in 2d paintings, but it works.

Music, Sound Effects, and Voice Work

Nothing egregious here, Christopher Gorham, voice actor for Sovok gives an
unremarkable performance, backed up Patrick Stewart (Picard) and Brent Spiner
(Data). The actual plot does not give them much to work with, but you will not
be clawing your ears out either. The music is forgettable, but all the sound
effects from TNG are faithfully replicated. Phasers and transporters sound like
you would expect.

Summary

Overall, its a short game that is occasionally frustrating, but has a
decently moving story and some of your favorite TNG characters. I give it 5 Lt.
Cmdr. Datas out of 3 Stargazers.

Notes

1. If you are going to play this, I recommend this walkthrough. 2. This game
does run on Windows 7, but you must install the packaged version of Quicktime
player and install a NoCd crack. It also helps to run it in Windows 95
compatibility mode. 3. There is no quicksave, it was a 90s thing.

Categories
Musings SciFi

The Doctor Who Problem

Doctor Who is back for a new season and having seen the latest two episodes
it is right back to having the same problems that have dogged the new series
for years. Before we get into it, some background first. I do not claim to be a
super who fan. You will find plenty more knowledgeable folks than I. That said,
I have watched a number of the old serials, and all the new series, and there
is a distinct difference between the two. More than just the clunky special
effects the old series approached its stories and characters in a fundamentally
different way. Some spoilers incoming, so you have been warned.

Lets start by comparing the very first episode I saw of the classic series,
Pyramids of Mars,
to the most recent two episodes: The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s
Familiar. At the start of Pyramids of Mars an outside force surprises the
Doctor and his companion (Sarah) and the Doctor stops to investigate. They then
start to uncover a mystery while avoiding malevolent unstoppable mummies. It is
all very fun and engaging. In The Magician’s Apprentice in the first scene we
encounter a younger version of an antagonist to the Doctor. Then we spend the
next 30 minutes or so (in a 45 minute episode) trying to find where the Doctor
is and what he is up to. Everyone is all concerned about having him solve their
problems, or they want to talk to him about this and that. In my book, that is
a problem. The new series has always been focused on the Doctor. How he impacts
the worlds he goes to, his past, his motivations. The old series was never that
concerned. Who cares why the Doctor travels around, who cares where he comes
from. Let us go someplace exciting and different and have an adventure. The new
series is obsessed with the Doctor to the detriment of the story. In the
Whoverse there is no one more important, and that is a problem. I may sound old
and crotchety here, but the older serials had the right idea. Doctor Who is an
anthology series that happens to have a few recurring characters.

The second problem in play is the characters. Lately Doctor Who has just
been a factory for tumblr memes. Sure you are allowed some funny lines from
time to time, but all this off beat, look at me I am so random, twitter chaff
is just distracting. Especially guilty is this Missy character. Every other
sentence is trite “I’m evil so I speak in stream on conscience style and it
only makes sense to me. But you know I am serious because I kill people from
time to time.” I admit to having a special loathing for this character. She has
added so little to the series and it is just awful to hear her lines.

Next up we have some serious worldbuilding issues. Nothing is ever final in
the Whoverse. People die and come back. Planets are destroyed and come back.
Whole races are killed off and then miraculously reborn the next season. In the
series 8 finale Missy dies. She is literally disintegrated. Series 9 starts,
shes back just fine. Just a simple hand wave and no respect for the continuity
of the series. When your universe has no consequences there can be no suspense.
At the end of The Magician’s Apprentice, Claire (the companion) and Missy are
both disintegrated by Daleks. It is supposed to be a great cliffhanger, but you
literally brought a character back from death at the start of this episode, no
way I believe these main characters just bought it. And of course at the start
of the next episode you drop some contrived garbage for how they survived. Take
some risks, kill some characters, have some actual consequences in your show or
else no one will ever trust you when a main character is in peril.

Speaking of the Daleks, that nicely highlights another issue the new series
has. It keeps going back the well. Star Wars has this same problem. Everyone
likes the old characters, the old races, let us just roll them out again
instead of creating a new idea. I am so sick of the Daleks showing up every
series for a few episodes. Seriously,
look at how many races we have to play with! You can use them too we do not
have to have the Daleks be the big bad again. Maybe then we can have the Doctor
use something other than his sonic screwdriver to get out of a jam for once.
Maybe then someone other than the Master can be the Doctor’s big nemesis.

Let us summarize, the new series: 1. Revolves around the Doctor instead of
the adventure. 2. Loves to fill dialogue with jokes and upstart memes instead
of contributing to the plot. 3. Prefers to constantly fiddle and retcon the
past instead of having something they did be final. 4. Loves to go back to the
well instead of creating new things.

And yet, after all that, I am still going to tune in next week, because when
everything works the show really is something special. When they go somewhere
wonderfully new and meet a new race and have a rip roaring trek it is magical.
It is worth all the awful. Each time I hear that music I hope this will be the
episode all sins are forgiven. Sometimes I am right.

Categories
Projects Review

Lets Get NASty

I want to talk a bit today about my storage setup, specifically my NAS or
Network Attached Storage. I have been running my system for a little over a
year now and have had no issues so it is a good time to give a brief half
review, half description of setup. I started considering a longer term storage
setup when the available space on my desktop began to dwindle. I am a bit of
“digital hoarder” if you will, constantly butting up against my limit. When
space is so cheap and ubiquitous why throw anything out? The problem with this
is you always need to be increasing your capacity. At the time I was getting my
NAS my several year old external drive had failed, another drive in my desktop
was faltering, and the rest of the case was already filled up with other
drives. I did not want to get rid of my existing drives and I also wanted a
better solution than continuing to lock data to my desktop. Enter the
ReadyNAS 104.

The first thing you need to know about NASs (NASes?) is that there are a ton
of models on the market featuring wildly different prices and sets of features.
You will need to determine what you want out of your NAS before you consider
purchasing one. For me I had just two requirements:

1. Four drive slots. This allows for a ton of storage and is very flexible
when it comes to determining your RAID setup. 2. Minimum computational
performance, I do not need my NAS to be a file server or another computer. I
need to put files on it and get files off, that is all.

With those requirements you can pretty much be satisfied with things at the
low end of the market, hence the ReadyNAS 104. Your real cost on the low end
here is going to be in drives. I went with four of these
drives for a total capacity of 16 terabytes. Total (including the NAS) this
ran me $1045.94. You could cheap out here and go for smaller drives or slower
drives. From what I read 5600RPM drives work just as well, albeit slower. I
went max size and max speed because I wanted a long term solution. There were
at the time some rebates, but I do not remember how much they were for. As far
as quality of drives this particular brand came recommended, but other brands
are just as well regarded.

For setup I configured the drives in RAID 5 (~10TBs of space). Take a moment
to read up on the different RAID options here. In my opinion
RAID 5 gives you the best space efficiency (you lose about 1/4 of the capacity
compared to 1/2 in some other configurations) and reasonable fault tolerance
(you can lose one drive and not lose any data). I do not want to lose data, but
then again it is not exactly mission critical. Actually formatting and
configuring the drives takes about a full day so sit tight. After that there is
not much other configuration to be done. Plug it into your router and it should
assign itself a local IP address automatically. It would be wise to configure a
static address in your router’s control panel so its not always changing on
you, but this is not required. You can access your system via its IP and (at
least on Windows) it will appear like one giant network drive.

Of course since your NAS is basically a low powered computer you can run any
number of programs on it. The ReadyNAS people helpfully have a site with some options. I myself jun run
qbittorent for my torrenting needs, but there are some useful apps to be found.
If you are handy with the command line you can SSH into your NAS and do
whatever you want since it runs Linux.

For daily use a NAS is pretty helpful. Transfer times can be slow since I
connect through mine wirelessly, but its not terribly slow. Think a few minutes
for a couple GBs. It is certainly quick enough to stream video from itself to
your computer which is what I primarily use it for. Although when initially
transferring all your files to it I suggest hooking up an external drive. There
are a few USB ports on the back so it can mount drives, but I could not figure
how to connect it physically to my desktop.

In regards to configuration you can mostly roll with stock settings. I
suggest disabling file snap shots, which
can be a bit of a pain, but will save you a lot of space. I also recommend
enabling SSH access (so you can fiddle with things yourself) and enabling “Disk
Spin Down” to both conserve power and the life of your drives.

Overall a NAS is a little pricey, but it is a convenient way to get a lot of
storage you can access from anywhere in the house. It also allows you to sleep
safe knowing your files are backed up. Granted its not off site, but if your
house burns down you probably have bigger things to concern yourself with.

Categories
Anime Projects

My First AMV

It is true here it is spoilers and everything: view here, download
here.

For a while now I have been thinking of doing one of these and I mentioned
it as a goal for this year.
I recently finished the main anime adaptation of Legend of the
Galactic Heroes and it was very disappointing to me the series has such
little visibility amongst English anime viewers. Granted its age and its MIA
English localization probably play the largest role in its lack of popularity.
That said I wanted to do a little something for a show more people should
watch, to that end my first AMV.

For those not familiar with the format, an AMV is a series of anime clips
set to music. Sometimes they tell a story, or showcase some
action,
or are just funny.
I wanted to make an AMV that covered roughly the events of the first half of
the series (episodes 1 – 53 to be exact). I did not want a flat retelling of
events though so I themed it or focused it around the relationship between
Reinhard (blonde hair) and Kircheis (red hair). To those not familiar to the
series, they are childhood friends who set out to conquer the galaxy.

For the music I wanted something that fit the feel of the series. The show
makes extensive use of famous classical music, mostly Beethoven. While not
classical I went with Time To Say Goodbye,
sung by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli. I like the mournful nature of the
song and the interspaced use of English. I did not want to go with a poppy
contemporary piece as it would be jarring with the visuals of the series.

Scene Breakdown

Now that I have given a brief summary I am going to provide some commentary
on parts of the AMV.

00:00-00:22, I wanted to start big to give a good scale the series works
with. A shot of the galaxy to begin with and with each strum I narrow the shot
until we focus on the ship of our two main characters and then the characters
themselves. The preceding shots show a vast battle taking place until we fade
out to the end result of the battle, lots of ship wreckage. Not a huge fan of
the fade, but it does its job. These scenes are mostly from early episodes so
we see a very young Admiral Reinhard.

00:25, Shot of the Odin, the capital of the Empire. Its not important that
you know that, but series fans probably recognize it.

00:25-00:31, I wanted to establish that Reinhard is important within the
Empire, but still not the leader. The scene shows him being honored for the
battle we saw in the beginning.

00:32, Start of the flashback. Need to establish the long relationship
between Reinhard and Kircheis that started when they were young.

00:38-00:46, This scene with the bully helps establish both Reinhard’s
aggressive nature and how Kircheis is always there to help Reinhard out. The
rock beating scene also nicely matches up with the music. At times I think it
is a bit humorous, but I resisted changing it.

00:47-00:58, These are some scenes set after the bully time frame, but still
when Reinhard and Kircheis were young. I wanted to convey Reinhard ambitious
nature and I like the imagery of the gun shooting into space that fades into
his ship in full action. As you can tell I like fades. There is an important
subplot to the series involving Reinhard’s sister that these scenes are
important to, but it is not important for the story I am telling.

00:58-01:12. Easy call here to tie Kircheis’s death to the first “Time to
Say Goodbye” lyric. It is perhaps a bit quick setup after the flashback, but it
is really important that death and lyric are timed up well. This is a pretty
big spoiler for people who have not seen the series and arguably the most
important event in the entire series.

01:22, I went back and forth on including this somewhat gratuitous death
clip. It is a bit jarring, but I think it works. Kind of quick flashback that
Reinhard is contemplating.

01:25-01:43, Second flashback showing a bit more of Kircheis interacting
with Reinhard and doing his own thing. As a side not we can really see the jump
in quality across some of the early episodes in these flashbacks. After the
series came out some episodes were remastered so the quality can be all over
the place.

01:45, Its debatable if we need this shot of just the gravestone as the
earlier scene basically covers what we need to do, but I like lingering here a
bit.

01:49, The locket is a very important item to the series so I had to get a
shot of it here. You can see it also includes his sister who is important to
the story, but I ignore here.

01:50. Kircheis in the stars may be too cliche, but its from the series and
bookends this section of the AMV nicely.

01:53-01:56, The music changes and I need to jump a bit chronologically and
show how Reinhard has increased in power in the Empire. The scenes with the
crowd accomplishes this.

01:57-2:01, This scene is a bit clunky. I want to convey again how in charge
Reinhard is and setup the rest of the AMV, but we linger, perhaps too long, on
planning screens.

02:05, I love this shot of Reinhard and all the ships engines. As a side
note that is Mariendorf next to him. She becomes pretty important around the
half way mark of the series.

02:06-02:13, This is the planet Fezzan, a planet not in the Empire nor the
Free Planets Alliance (FPA). The two major antagonists in the show. It is one
of the first planets Reinhard takes on his campaign. It is a relatively quick
battle which I used to convey the size of Reinhard’s fleet in action.

02:14-02:19, Some of the most well drawn scenes in the series. Bookends
Reinhard’s conquest of Fezzan.

02:20-02:25, Maybe the cheesiest part of the AMV. That is an actual scene
from the anime so I went with it. Also you can see the locket again which is
super important.

02:26-02:45, Lot of ships again. Start to show some large battles with the
FPA, but nothing decisive.

02:52-03:19, Again we return to Reinhard’s ship and then show his decisive
involvement in a battle. Lots of FPA ships blowing up climaxing in a nice large
explosion. I cheat a bit and take a lot of battle clips from across the series,
but we need a lot of different shots here and frankly a lot of these battle
shots look the same.

03:20-03:23, Good scene to show after Reinhard’s great success. You can see
how lonely he is on the empty bridge and it contrasts well with the first shot
of him and Kircheis from the beginning.

03:24, This is Heinessen, home planet of the FPA, after being captured by
Reinhard.

03:26-03:27, This is a shot of Yang Wen-li, Reinhard’s counterpart in the
FPA. He is super important, but not covered at all in this AMV. I wanted to at
least give him a quick showing and I think these two rapid beats help introduce
him as the adversary nicely.

03:28, Real cool shot of both of their massive fleets converging.

03:28-03:41, Start of the battle, lots of fireworks to show the scale, but
nothing to show who will win.

03:41, Maps again! Its hard to convey how the battle is going so I went with
maps (which the series likes using too) to show things going against Reinhard.
This shot also has Yang in the middle.

03:44-03:51, Might be asking too much of a person not familiar with the
series, but I need to convey the battle turning in Yang’s favor. Showing the
map of a fleet disintegrating, FPA ships firing, and a lot of Empire ships
exploding hopefully conveys this. It might be difficult to get if you cannot
distinguish the different sides ships at this point.

03:54, Great scene of the Empire ships moving to defend Reinhard’s ships.
Hopefully conveys how desperate the battle is going.

03:55, Another really excellent scene of Reinhard having the ships guarding
his front explode.

04:01, And here we are end of the AMV. This shot is the best in the series
and what motivated me to do this AMV. I love the giant imposing FPA ship
bearing down on Reinhard. Its awesome and in my opinion, a a great ending with
the sudden cut to black.

The thing about that ending scene is, its a massive cheat. The very next
second that ship gets blown out by the timely arrival (in true anime fashion)
of Admiral Muller’s fleet. I admit its deceitful, but I really just wanted a
nice cliffhanger to end on to motivate people to watch the series.

Tools Lets wrap up with a quick tool discussion.
All of my editing was done with Sony Vegas 13. I like it a lot since its
relatively simple to use. I am sure other editors like Final Cut are just as
good, but I have been fiddling with Vegas for a bit now and I know how to do
what I want. The only real issue I had was the video sources. I was using files
in MKV format and Vegas cannot handle those files. I had to convert each
episode I wanted to use from MKV to MP4. I did this using Handbrake which is dirt simple. It was a tedious
work around, but it got the job done. I will leave you with a shot of all the
clips in the editor. You can see I like to have a lot of clips lying around so
I can mix and match and see what works.

LOGH AMV Editor

Categories
Future

The Grand Unified Plan

I recently mentioned the grand plan I will be pursing these next few years
in my yearly Oracle post. I
want to provide a overview of that plan in a bit of detail. The main goal of
this plan is to retire AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. This is not because I hate work,
but because I want to have the time to pursue other projects. To provide some
context to that idea, I like to think of my life as split into three
portions:

1. Ages 0-23: Education, the time of my life when I was mostly focused on
learning. Learning how to be of value to people who know me, future employers,
and to the world.

2. Ages 23-40: Work, the time of my life when I get my living and finances
in order so I can retire early. The learning has not stopped, but my focus is
more on producing things of value. Either for a company or for people who know
me.

3. Ages 40-Death: Retirement, the time of my life when I can take my
accumulated knowledge and produce something. I hesitate to call this the
“Legacy Building” period, but I do want to use the time for some long spanning
works and projects.

Now how can we achieve that? The short answer is, predictably, lots of
money. Right now I have started a small investment with Betterment, an online investing service. I
give them money and the make more out of it. Investing (either through
Betterment or something more hands on) is the key here. Now, I am going to
start the math talk explaining how this is going to work. If that sort of stuff
bores you skip the summary section.

If you look at some of
Betterment’s returns you can see they averaged 11% a year. Lets round that
down to 10% to make calculations easier. That means if you had $100 invested in
2013, when 2014 starts you have $110. Now if we scale that out to say half a
million dollars, 10% of that yearly would be $50,000. Plenty of income to live
comfortably. So the goal is have half a million dollars invested as quickly as
possible.

Now that we have a number, how long will it take to reach it? First we have
to consider expenses. I have got two big ones in the future: a house and a new
car. The house will probably be around $260,000. This number represents the
remaining mortgage including interest and not the total cost. I arrived at this
be assuming a $100,000 down payment and a loan with a 3.75% interest rate which
I predict paying off in under 15 years. I predict the car will cost around
$15,000. Since
some sources estimate your car will last on average 10 years, it seems
prudent to budget for at least one. So now we pushed the goal back a bit as it
is $775,000 (rounded to $800,000). This represents the predicted expenses
($275,000) and the necessary investment ($500,000).

Based on my records from last year I spent $9230.94. I do not expect that to
change greatly, but let us round that up to $10,000 a year in personal
expenses. I will also be on the hook for around $4,000 in housing taxes and
$1,500 in
heating costs. So that puts us at around $16,500 in yearly expenses. Let us
round that up to $20,000 to make life easy and account for unforeseen expenses
somewhat.

Now what about income? If I take my current salary, add in a 6% raise each
year (the average so far), and then calculate my total income after 10 years
that puts me at $995,990 or almost a million. However, this is before taxes and
expenses. If I subtract my average tax burden (26% of income) and $200,000 (my
expenses over 10 years) I get $540,000 to put towards my $800,000 goal. Close,
but not there yet. If we do the same calculation out to 15 years we get
$1,761,362. Now if we subtract taxes and expenses for that period we get almost
exactly a million (total income: $1,761,362 minus taxes at 26%: $457,954.12 –
minus expenses for 15 years: $300,000 = $1,003,407.88). That puts me well in
the range of my goal with plenty of buffer. Now if you look at the above age
range and know I am 25 this year you can see how in 15 years I will be 40 and
just hitting the retirement age and retirement investment I want.

The best part of this is I suspect the numbers will get even better. If you
look at the goal, some of that is just lost/non-interest generating cash (the
house and car or $275,000), but the rest goes into my investment account (some
$500,000). And that amount will grow year to year, so if every other value were
to remain consistent I would get to my goal earlier than predicted since every
one of those dollars contributed to the $500,000 goal will be working for me
earning cash.

Now it is a bit dangerous to assume all these numbers will turn out as
expected. It does seem unlikely to see a 10% growth on investments each year or
that my income will rise each year, despite some anecdotal
evidence. It could very well fall. You will notice I took some cheats here,
like assuming my expenses, taxes, etc stay constant. You should not see this
plan or a prediction, but as a guideline with milestones. I have an objective
and I have a path to get there. I know the numbers I need to hit on that path,
and as I walk it, I can adjust as the path unfolds.

Summary

Through low spending and high savings I hope to have enough invested in 15
years to live of the interest and pursue fanciful goals. I cannot predict the
future, but hopefully being thrifty will get me to a retirement earlier than
the US
average of 62.

Categories
Musings

Two Years at Oracle

Today is the second year of my full time employment by Oracle. Studious
readers will remember a similar
article exactly one year ago on this day. There is nothing particularly
important or auspicious about this day, but it is a good milestone to reflect
upon the previous year.

What Did I Learn This Year?

1. Buying a house is hard when you are picky. At this point I have looked at
around 20 houses or so. I have come close to making offers on two of those, but
ultimately decided against it. The benefit to this is a growing down-payment
which will make the purchasing easier. The downside is a a kind of purgatory
where I wait for something to happen. I am going to give it a few more months
and then consider more seriously a place less optimal than I would have liked.
The thought of another winter, house less is decidedly unpleasant.

2. I do not have to do everything. For a few month I have been helping to
oversee a project at work. It has been tough, but I am growing more accustomed
to delegating things to be fixed instead of just doing myself. It is tempting
to try and be the guru who knows and does everything, but this leaves no room
for the team to grow and become empowered themselves. It also serves to
centralize knowledge which can make maintainability troublesome in the
future.

3. I have a better idea of my long term life plans. Expect an article on
this to come, but I have a much better sense of how I want my career to go and
how (hopefully through good planning) I can retire early and pursue a second
less profitable career.

4. Investing is a big large monolithic subject, but easy to do once you
clear that first hurdle. I started a small account with Betterment and I am up $10 last I checked.
With continual investments every month this service (or some other endeavor I
run myself) will greatly contribute to my long term goals.

5. As you remember from last year I wanted to find old friends who I had
been out of contact with for some time. The good news is, in this digital age,
finding old friends is easy. The hardest part is starting to talk to them. It
is a lot like pulling out the knife from deep in the peanut butter jar, slow
but once you finish you get a sweet reward. I have had some great success
rediscovering what made us friends before.

What Am I Looking To Explore This Year?

1. Interested in doing some more metal working projects. With the great success of my foundry I
want to try actually making something useful with it. Maybe a butter knife. The
real problem now is making a good mold so my research will focus on that
next.

2. More puzzle hunts. We have done two so far with a vast increase in
success with the second one compared to the first. Hopefully we can do some
more and maybe even finish one.

3. Film projects of the small variety. I really like AMVs so I want to try
making a few to see how difficult they are.

4. Improve my technical skills. I said I would do it last year, and I am
recommitting to that again. I learned a lot of web2.0 frameworks this year such
as knockout, angular, some of the new java 1.8 enhancements
(like lambdas), and a fair amount about our build tools like ant and rpm.

Things I Failed at This Year

1. Buying a house.

2. Doubling down on costuming. I did do a little work making a helmet, but I was nowhere close to making
the two costumes I thought I would. I am just less interested in this than I
used to be.

3. Historical reenactment. I did nothing in regards to this during the year.
It is on hold until the house thing is settled.

4. Contacting my old friends. I had some success, but there are still some
who elude me.

Overall, an enriching year. 6 more years to retirement? 16 seems more
realistic.

Categories
Cosplay Projects

Melting Metal:Attempt 2

When last I attempted this I was met with a decided lack of success. Whether it
was a faulty microwave or a generally bad plan I will not pass judgement.
Luckily, I was groomed to be stubborn and one failure was not going to dissuade
me from my dream of controlling intense heat.

Thus we arrive at attempt two (try one):

What are we looking at here? My very own homemade foundry with a hairdryer
for a bellows. Instructions courtesy of this
youtube video. The general idea here is, put a bunch of coals in the
foundry, turn on the blower, and hope it gets hot enough. The results were
again disappointing. After about half an hour the foundry was at about
“hamburger grilling” temperature and the zinc block still resolutely solid. I
needed to get to, “melt your hand” temperature and that did not happen. Another
failure, but an instructive one. This leads us to attempt two (try two):

For the first try with the foundry I had not filled it with coals, using
only a conservative six coals or so. This time I could really amp the number up
so I packed in as many as I could which was 21. I accomplished this by reducing
the size of the crucible from a stainless steel pet food bowl to a tall shot
glass. I also significantly increased the air flowing into the foundry by
replacing the hair dryer with a leaf blower. The results were impressive:

And this was on the low setting. It is hard to see clearly, but there is a
very hot glow from the foundry this time. The difference in heat and noise was
immediate when I turned the blower on. With the hair dryer, the heat was tepid
at best. With the leaf blower there was very much a fiery roar. Looking in from
the top, the coals were glowing with heat within a few minutes. A marked
difference from last time. The heat pouring out the top was, in the words of a
person who never looked at a thesaurus, very hot. Worryingly, I found a part of
glass blown out from the foundry. Regardless, I let the whole thing run for
about ten minutes. After I turned off the blower, the sound died down and I
took a look. Upon removing the lid I came to a few conclusions:

1. The coals looked like moon rocks.

2. I could not find the glass.

Digging around a bit I eventually found what was left of the glass:

Yes it seems I put too much faith in the $2.09 Walmart glass purchase I had
made. Looking online it says glass does not melt until 1000-1500 degrees, but
it could become malleable around 700-900 degrees. Since 787.2 degrees is the
melting point of zinc, the metal I was trying to melt, this was not good.
Lesson learned the hard way, do not use a glass crucible next time. What of the
zinc though? I too was perplexed until I dug to the bottom of the foundry and
saw it had pooled at the bottom as a liquid. Yes, sweet success never felt so
hot. Moving quickly we were able to pour it into a coffee can and then to the
mold. The liquid was so hot it burnt the label off the can, but thankfully the
can was stout enough to not melt itself.

You can see the bottom of the mold was not good enough as the metal pooled
out, but the general shape is there. I would call this a success.

What did we learn?

1. Glass is not a good crucible.

2. 21 coals and a leaf blower is enough to get 800 or so degrees of heat. I
honestly did not expect it to get so hot. I really must get a IR Temperature
Gun to see how hot I can get it. Also would be interesting to see if I can get
the same results with less coals.

3. I need a bigger foundry cover. A number of embers slipped out via the
edges and we had to constantly put out small fires and keep the ground around
it wet. This should not be too hard to do, I can just add on to the cover I
already have.

4. I need a better mold, with a better seal on the bottom. Perhaps
investigate these sand
molds on the same youtube channel.

Overall, it took three tries, but after some tweaks I got it. I look to make
some improvements and give it another shot. You can find a few more photos in
the album.

Categories
Uncategorized

Elsie Roth

Elsie Roth, my grandmother died April 2. You can read the summary of her
life here.

It is hard to know someone when they live far away. What with my Grandmother
living all her life in Pennsylvania and me in Massachusetts (Mass-a-choo-choo
to some), visits were infrequent. They were always an event with her though. A
consummate host, meals were lavish affairs. Difficult logistically given the
cramped townhouse she lived in, but still quite a production. It is a shame our
visits became more frequent only after she moved to a nursing home. It is hard
to pinpoint when she actually died. We know when her body died, but this
occurred long after her mind. I miss the bright cheer she showed when she saw
me. Always present when I was young, but less and less each visit. It is this
image I remember, not of a person robed of humanity by loss of memory.

She is gone now and we will not meet again. That is ok though, I need not a
physical presence to remember her.

Categories
GameDesign Video Games

Unnamed Space Strategy Game

Ideas are cheap, so here is mine.

Lately I have been enjoying Homeworld Remastered which got
me thinking about what would make a great new space strategy game.

There is a shamefully limited offering in this genre, see Homeworld, Sins of a Solar
Empire, Conquest Frontier
Wars, Nexus the Jupiter
Incident for some examples. Limited they may be, but on a whole most of
these games treat space battles like naval battles with extra dimensions. This
is serviceable, but can be visually confusing. In the example of Homeworld, it
is hard to see what is happening once a battle begins. Generally the capital
ships will be separate, forming a rough battle line, but they can be split on
various levels from the z-axis. The fighter craft will be intermixed between
the lines. Given enough ships this can make for a very confusing battle. With
ships all over the place it can be hard to see if your forces are winning or
not. A strategy game should not do that. Good strategy games offer clear
feedback if you are winning, losing, or drawing. If you cannot tell what state
the battle is in, you cannot make interesting choices to try and alter the
state. At that point you are not playing a game, you are just watching. The
spectacle of watching a battle unfold however should not be neglected. Space
battles have their own majestic quality. so there must be a vibrant color
palette in both ship and space.

What are the conclusions I have drawn: 1. Current space strategy games draw
heavy influence from naval simulations. 2. Strategy games need to always convey
the state of the battle. 3. Battles in space must be visually engaging.

With this in mind I want to suggest a different influence for games set in
space. Instead of a naval influence we should instead look to the battles of
Napoleon. With a naval influence the number of ships involved in a battle tend
to skew toward the low end. Maybe reaching a 100 capital ships in a lively game
in Homeworld. These numbers are far too insufficient. I want battles to number
in the tens of thousands. There was near to 200,000 soldiers involved in the
Battle of Waterloo. We should aim for similar numbers of space craft. This of
course brings up issues of controlling so many units at once. If we take
inspiration from games modeling this period such as Empire Total War or
Ultimate General: Gettysburg you
can see we do not handle individual soldiers, but collections of them, maybe
100-300 at a time. In this same way we should organize our ships in squadrons
of a similar number. The games I mentioned tend to only deal with about 30-60
thousand units in a battle, so we may want to increase our unit size to around
a 1000 ships per collection. Now that we have split our army into neat
collections of ships we can have both a large number of ships in an engagement
and we can far more easily move them. In Homeworld you may have to move and
organize around 50 capital ships at any one time. In my model of collections of
a 1000 or more, we can easily have players controlling 25,000 ships and still
moving around less pieces than in the Homeworld example. More ships, easier
control.

To the second point, we need to make sure the game always conveys the state
of the battle. To solve this problem look towards Scourge of War: Gettysburg or
Sid Meier’s
Gettysburg. Both games track how effective a particular unit is doing, both
in dealing damage and sustaining damage. If a unit is taking more damage than
it is dealing it is losing, the inverse, it is winning. So to should our game
always have available this information. Either as a number prominently
displayed, or as some visual element. Secondly, the nature of a Napoleonic
style battle is many units in neat lines maneuvering against the enemy. With
such rigid formations we can avoid the issue of ships intermingling like they
do in Homeworld. This also has the added benefit of always showing a clear view
of the battle which is important for both determining who is winning (the
state) and what moves to make next (the heart of a strategy game).

Finally, we need to ensure our battles are interesting to watch. This is a
bit hit or miss in the examples I have given. Homeworld has a lot of ship
customization, but SIns of Solar Empire and Nexus have little. If we look to
the armies of
Napoleon’s time we can see a great variety in uniforms. Lots of bold
vibrant colors. So to should our ships sport such dashing design. We should
have a great deal of customization of fleet colors and fleets should lean
towards bright colors, instead of dull navy gray.

To summarize: 1. Draw inspiration from Napoleonic wars, not naval ones. 2.
Enforce collections of many ships and rigid formations. 3. Emphasize bright
colors.

Now that we have solved some of the problems of the genre, at least on
paper, let us look to differentiate the title a bit. As mentioned, Napoleonic
battles should be our inspiration. To that end we should emphasis a rock,
paper, scissors balance. In a battle of that time there were generally three
types of units: line infantry, cavalry, and artillery. In this relationship,
infantry is good against all other types as long as they can be kept at optimal
range, artillery beats all other types at long range, and cavalry beats all
types at close range. We should model our fleet on those types. Average speed
ships with average ranged weapons that fight in massed formation (infantry),
fast agile ships with melee or close range weapons (cavalry), and weak long
ranged ships (artillery). This simple balance make it easy to understand how to
place you units to optimize their potential. Most space strategy games do not
have a concept of cavalry or artillery. They tend to focus on ships that all
engage at or near to the same range, but with different weapons. The idea of
melee in space is pretty unexplored. Homeworld: Cataclysm
has a ship that pushes other ships away from a battle, but I know of no other
game that models very close range fighting. It would be a cool idea to explore
some in-universe explanation for this. Artillery in space is also little
explored. Sins of a Solar Empire features long range missile platforms, so we
would probably have ships equipped for long range missile launch in our
game.

Secondly we should consider adding a layer of logistics to our game.
Homeworld tracked fuel for fighter craft, but had no other supply mechanics.
Conquest Frontier Wars did have supply on a ship to ship basis and it was very
important to the game. Lack of supply ships could doom assaults. We should
consider adding similar mechanics to our game. Units should have two needs,
fuel and ammunition. As the battle progresses it would be necessary to ensure
ships do not run out of either or they would be unable to move or fire. This
adds some complexity, but opens up interesting strategic options, like cutting
off enemy resupply in battle.

The toughest point to consider is how to handle z-dimensional movement. Some
space games, like Sins only support moving on the x,y plane. Homeworld and
Nexus have full 3d movement. I think we should do the same. Players expect that
freedom of movement in space and it allows us some interesting strategy, such
as attacking an enemy from above or below. Our new emphasis on Napoleonic
battle helps us here as attacks from the flanks (or above/below) should inflict
additional damage. We should be careful of constraints here though. If we allow
too much z-axis freedom ships will start going everywhere for little gain.
Perhaps we could limit the area of battle somewhat so the units do not get too
separated. This will be tough to justify in-universe. We could set the area
engagement to be so large that we could enforce a communication delay between
ships. May be interesting to increase unit response times the further they get
from the flagship, the unit sending the orders. This would keep units close to
the flagship and make that unit very important. Do you move your flagship with
an assault so that you can relay orders quickly or do you create a complicated
battle plan and hope it is carried out as expected.

Overall It is not so much that we are making a new design, but repurposing
an existing design for a different setting. I want to shift our focus away from
individual ship management to that of a large scale battle of maneuver. To
those of you familiar with anime this setting is not so new, it is basically
how battles are fought in the classic anime series Legends of the
Galactic Heroes. Now if only the games
they made were localized.