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Looks like a beautiful place. Those desktops are nice, too, but of course I am contractually obliged to use only space-themed shots for my wallpapers.
Posted by: Mrs. Peel at June 24, 2009 03:32 PM (kTwMy)
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So I need to some how get some astronomy into my next set of pics? I'll need a tripod, but I think I can manage that.
The lake is really popular with eagles. There are a bunch of trees with giant nest set into the tops. I thought about putting up a lot more pictures of the dam, but I was honestly surprised how little (none, really) security consideration there was.
Campsite Scouting - Hazlet Hollow
Not quite one year ago, we went camping at Hazlet Hollow, one of the campgrounds in the Horsethief Basin Rec Area near Crown King. Just a few days after leaving, some dipshit got lost, set a signal fire, and proceeded to burn half the mountain down. We had heard the campground was spared, but much of the area around it was burned. This last weekend we decided to head up there and see how bad things looked.
Road Trip (not by design)
So this morning I and a couple friends arranged to take a short drive outside of town and hike Four Peaks, a local geographic landmark northeast of Phoenix.
However, when they saw the weather looking like this...
Ok, maybe it looked a bit more like this...
Suffice to say I quickly found myself on my own. So I decided to at least drive up and see how things looked (but I'm not dumb enough to do the full hike alone).
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Beautiful pictures, Will! I secretly wish I lived in Forks, WA. I would have never known it was the rainiest city in the US if not for the Twilight series, lol.
Are you going to be at Steve's tomorrow?
Posted by: Kerith at May 23, 2009 10:22 PM (JmylO)
What ever happened to the art of Fisking?
It's not to say no one does it anymore, but the concept and use of the term seem to have dropped out of the blogging lexicon.
Every once in a while you'll come across something that resembles a good 'ol fashion Fisking, but the ruthlessness and bile just isn't there like it used to be.
There was a time in my life when I really wanted to do stuff like this. I wouldn't say those days are completely behind me, but I know now that I don't have nearly the patience for the kind of detail required in top-tier scale modeling. It may come to pass that someday I'll have the resources, but I see myself trying to push performance limits more than detail.
Ever since I quit the job at the hobby shop in early 2002, I've been hauling all my old RC airplane equipment around with me from house to apartment to house hoping that some day I'll have the time to really get back into the hobby. I have several engines that have had little to no time put on them. Most of my balsa airframes are dried out by now, and who knows if my radios still meet FCC specs.
For years AM was the "standard" mode used by most radios. Only the really rich guys could afford FM radios. When the FCC doubled the number of channels occupying the same frequency space in 1991, FM became the new default mode (AM being too prone to bleed-over from other now very-much-closer channels) and PCM became the new hot-ticket mode. I haven't checked in on the market for a while. I suspect PCM is far more common than it used to be.
Not Dead, Just Busy. Might as Well be Dead, but Too Busy for That.
Hoe-lee-krap, has it been one of those fortnights... Don't let those poor bastards in the housing market know that commercial construction is going balls-to-the-wall. It could mean we get a break around here, heaven forfend.
I haven't watched a single episode of the spring anime season. As a matter of fact, I haven't watched any anime in the last month, not since finishing Shingu (a show I just can't seem to find anything to get riled up about, good or bad). I get home and all I want to do is veg out watching a baseball game, where I don't feel inclined to use my brain.
Blew through Medal of Honor: Airborne in a couple nights. There used to be several distinct differences between the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series. Now they play almost identically, and I suspect it's because they're both being consolized. It used to be MoH played as a more "realistic" depiction of WW2 battle situations, while CoD seemed geared more towards placing the player in cool action sequences. But in a rather bizarre twist, CoD4 pushed realism as much as possible, while MoH:A started to look like Wolfenstein in the latter levels with it's Nazi super-soldiers and preposterous "Flak Tower" level design. I fully expected to run into Mecha-Hilter sporting fire breath and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Gag.
When does "Inspired by" become Plagiarism?
Here's a good example of how I hope to use "Random Debris" from now on.
There are only so may ways to arrange notes. Repetition is inevitable. So when I first played through the third episode of the Xenosaga franchise, one track in particular tickled that portion of my brain I mentioned previously that gives me (annoyingly selective) Rainman-like ability to remember a bit of music.
You can only take "inspired by" so far. Hans Zimmer caught flak for his heavy-handed use of Holst's Planets when composing tracks for the Gladiator soundtrack (I've heard them both, and I'm much more on the side of the Holst foundation than the article's author). I like Yuki's music, but this sounds a bit suspicious.
The less I remember about the Big O, the better. I caught a couple of episodes on Toonami back in the day (which is why I've never seen the factory-installed OP/ED, until just now). It was enough to convince me I did not want to see anymore Batman with mecha.
Posted by: Will at April 29, 2008 11:39 AM (WnBa/)
Which version of the Big O's theme? There was also one lifted from the old UFO series.
Have to actually finish the Xenosaga trilogy. It's my favorite, which is why I have been spending too much time building up my characters rather than advancing the plot.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 04:57 PM (zM0D5)
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Well this is the one I found immediately (and it does have that Queen sound).
Xenosaga is my favorite RPG series, with Xenogears taking top honors in the stand-alone category. It's a shame they had to truncate the plot of XS. There's plenty of room for a continuation. Unfortunately, Monolithsoft is now owned by Nintendo while the XS series is firmly in Namco-Bandai's grip.
I've been thinking of going back to work on my own translation of Perfect Works (I did a few pages for class projects back in in college). It is not light reading material and is a mother to translate.
Wow, you want to translate Perfect Works? And you got a copy to do that from? Wow. I mean, just wow. There were some other people doing it, back when the Zenosaga website was still up, but that effort seemed to have disappeared.
Last time I checked, though, Namco-Bandai was not platform specific (After all, they gave the world Idolm@ster for the XBox 360.). And given Nintendo's history of letting subsidary development studios get bought out by other parties (Cough-Rare-Cough)...Well, we did get Xenosaga on the DS. Since Xenosaga is my favorite video game series (Never played Xenogears though.), I still hold hope that we shall see something come from it again one day.
Funy thing you mentioned it, since over at AOD, there was a conversation on whether Yoko Kanno had done the same thing, or was simply a case where certain taste and styles produces similar results.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 09:32 PM (zM0D5)
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I've had my copy of Perfect Works since about 1999/2000. Even at that point it was hard to get. What was supposed to be a 2-4 week ship turned into 3-6 months. I have a few of the translated PDF pages "int" put up on zenosaga.com. I'd like to do something similar, but I'd have to wreck my only copy to do it (and they're getting $200 for copies on amazon). It was a damned shame when he decided to shut the site down (of course I'd been through the same thing a few years prior when Dark Warlord shutdown xenogears.org.). There's a fairly complete history of things here.
Nintendo bought up Monolith specifically to make them RPGs (Batten Kaitos was one of the few on the Cube), but given the poor sales of the XS series, I don't see them making the effort to work out a deal with "Bamco" to re-ignite the series. Tetsuya Takahashi has now tried twice to tell this story, and both times he's run up a huge tab and taken too much time getting product on the shelf. He needs to just write a novel or three and get it over with. I just don't think he has what it takes to develop video games. And given the way Soraya Saga was treated by all parties involved, she certainly won't be getting involved again.
Shrug...Well, given the dearth of games available for the Wii, you would think something might be worked out. In any case, that is water under the bridge now, and I have been waiting for both Gust and Tri-Ace to release their latest titles. Tri-Ace, especially, since Star Ocean (The only reason why I would touch a PS3) and Valkyrie Profile have titles under development. As an aside I thought it was Tri-Crescendo who developed Baten Kaitos?
Anyway, I would not be eager to rip apart the copies of the Japanese books I have either, given the scarcity value of some of them. I think I might had read seen some of the translation you had for Zenosaga if I remember right. Never really could understand them, even after they were translated, probably because I never did get into Xenogears. Thanks.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 07:50 AM (zM0D5)
Wikipedia says both were involved, but I don't know how the work was split between them. Monolith's name has been the one I've always heard linked with the BK series.
I never submitted any of my translations to Zenosaga. Those PDFs were all done by them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but as I recall, they were only slightly better than Babelfish quality in places. It looked like they fed the text to a machine then cleaned up the output with mixed results. The book is also full of technical jargon that is really hard to translate. It took me a half-hour working with my Japanese instructor (who had little to no science background) to work out the differences between the three words (elevation, absolute altitude, and AGL) the Nelson dictionary translates simply as "altitude."
If you can find Xenogears for anything less than a small mint, get it. There is so much going on in XS that hearkens back to XG that I've always thought people without the extra background weren't getting the full experience.
Ah, that clears it up then. I never did see more than a handful of scans on Zenosaga so I probably was not missing much.
Oddly enough, I have seen Xenogears, back when Gamestop/EB still carried PS1 games, at pretty good prices (~$20). I was tempted to buy it the last time I saw a copy, but I was quite happy with Xenosaga by itself than trying to read too much into a backstory that even Monolith Soft commented had spiritual connections with the Xenosaga series. (Just to complete things - I have no opinion on Soraya Saga/Xenosaga situation. Almost all the stuff I read seemed to be a lot of hysterics and not a lot of facts.)
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 06:43 PM (zM0D5)
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As few as he had done, they were easier in the eyes than raw text. But int quickly locked them away from the general public, limiting access to only those people who put in ridiculous amounts of time in the Z forums and whatnot. Can't say I liked the guy that much.
Oh, so that was it. I always suspected something like that, but my interest in Xenosaga at the time was not that devoted. Now it is much higher (As a quick assessment of the Xenosaga merchandise I own will report.), but that attitude always irked me a bit.
Just as well I was more into naval matters on newsgroups back then. Either everyone could find out about a piece of information, the information was made-up and therefore non-relevant, or you would not be able to say anything about the information you knew because it was classified...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 15, 2008 09:28 PM (zM0D5)
One of the songs I most enjoyed playing during my short time in the junior high jazz band was Birdland (named after the jazz club Birdland, which was itself named after a jazz musician nicknamed "Bird"). It was one of the first songs we played that gave us a chance to improv solos, and when we finally had it down, it was probably one of the fastest tunes I've ever played.
(Somewhere just north of 180 bpm when we were really pushing it. We never performed at that tempo. We just did it to see if we could. It was ridiculous amounts of fun at that speed. The director would have to break in to cut-time so he didn't look like he was trying to take off.)
It's a song I haven't heard in a while, and being jazz, there are about N+1 arrangements and variations out there. This is the cleanest recording I found so far.
The other song that was always a lot of fun was Malaguena. It's also another song with N+1 arrangements and variations (because in addition to being a jazz band favorite, it's also really big with marching bands)
Here's an indoor performance of the song from Blast! (a show everyone owes it to themselves to see)
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Well, only three Buddy Rich recordings came up in a quick youtube search. I can't say the audio quality in any of them is particularly good. This is the best sounding of the three. It is a lot closer to the version we played, but it was only junior high, so we were playing a simplified arrangement.
Posted by: Will at April 18, 2008 09:39 PM (ZhN+Z)
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Obviously you guys weren't going to be playing at his level.
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I have a HQ avi of "Battery Battle" from Blast here at Pond Central; the Phantom Regiment is from Duckford, and has their Tryout Camp at Duck U., so I've gotta be a drum & bugle corps fan.
There's something about walking out of the Duck U. Bookstore and having the Regiment's drumline slamming away ten feet from your car that puts a zip in your step after a long day at work...
Posted by: Wonderduck at April 18, 2008 10:01 PM (AW3EJ)
Little late to respond on this one, but I just remembered something. On the soccer fields adjacent to where we play our city-league softball games, occasionally a local drum corp rehearses in the afternoons. I think it's The Academy, but a buddy's girlfriend was rehearsing with their color guard, and I'm pretty sure she's older than the DCI limit of 22. I can't think of who else it would be.
Posted by: Will at April 23, 2008 05:05 PM (WnBa/)
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That video is the pinnacle of marching band nerdom.
No offense or anything, but really, it's hilarious for that very reason.
Nevertheless that was a really tight song. And then there's birdland being another one of "those" songs we all have to hear. But anyway it's good to find another eclectic blogger who's into anime and jazz.
Posted by: lelangir at May 10, 2008 07:04 PM (iZmZ/)
Life, the Universe, etc. ~ Part Deux ~ Now with More FAIL
Boy, almost a month without anything new here. I didn't have a resolution to keep or anything, but I had planned on every few days getting at least something up.
Settling in is settling in.
The box containing a number of my anime DVDs (including my still-wrapped Shingu boxset) appears to be lost/missing/stolen. The first run of bills are rolling in with all the pain of various "setup" fees attached. As much as I would love to run out and spend the money on the various big-ticket items that would really get me up to speed living in the place, small nickel-and-dime items are what has me running to Wal-mart every other day it seems.
The softball team had a mediocre regular season. We finished 8-4, with those 4 losses came in a row during the middle of the season. We're seeded 4th in the Tournament that starts this week.
In a couple weeks comes what amounts to a "softball team" camping trip. I've been looking forward to a little "cold weather" camping, but it's always been difficult getting more than a couple people interested. I'm curious to see how it goes. I need to get a good 0ยบ bag because nothing I've got right now is going to cut it at 7000'.
Shortly therafter comes a wedding to attend. I've got to figure out where my nicer clothes are in this mess. A polo and jeans is not appropriate wedding attire.
Lemme see... lemme see...
Oh, got notice of my ten-year high school reunion in the mail, only to discover they're charging $89 for a ticket. Thanks, but maybe I'll organize a counter-reunion for people not of a mind to waste perfectly good money just to meet people who are rapidly becoming strangers all over again.
Wow. That was bitter. I'm going to blame stress and lack of fresh anime. The winter season has tapered off. I won't even bother with any spring shows until a couple weeks in and some of the chaff has been shaken out.
Well, the big move is finally over. Almost. There's still a bit if stuff in the storage room and garage unit at the apartment to haul over, but otherwise, the transfer is complete.
7 hours after work on Friday, 19 hours straight on Saturday, and another 13 hours on Sunday mean I'm dead tired.
In those three days I feel like I've fallen way behind on a lot of things, anime being one of them.
Things don't look likely to let up in the near-term either. I need to get a washer and dryer pronto, and I need to start cleaning up the apartment for moveout inspection. I've heard so many horror stories about renters trying to screw people over on the tiniest things. It's making me a bit neurotic. The vertical blinds on the backdoor of the house need replaced (and I hear tell that the size I need is going to be hard to find). I don't have much in the way of respectable furniture. The more I look at the situation, the more it looks like I'm going to need to do a lot of side-jobs to get this place up and running properly.
Because of the way the schedules fell, I'm actually getting dinged for a full month of overlap between the apartment and the first mortgage payment. It will be interesting to see how bad things really get at the end of this month.
Oh yeah... taxes... gotta get those filed sometime soon. Suddenly that $230 million Powerball drawing on Wednesday is looking real nice.
God... who knew buying a house and moving would be such a chore?
Well... it's been a long month. Signing is coming up some time next week. I need to get my taxes filed.
But at least I have shows like Minami-ke to keep me sane(?).
There's just so much right in that Nico-Nico... Kana's just loving life and living large... Haruka's a little embarrassed, but otherwise enjoying herself... and Chiaki is completely lost and wondering how she got talked into this little performance.
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Congrats on the new home purchase. The only thing that's more torturous than escrow is 9 months of pregnancy.
Posted by: pajama momma at February 22, 2008 11:49 AM (f3xJa)
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What's made the process more onerous than it really needs to be is dealing with all the extra bullshit involved in an FHA loan. It basically doubles the number of forms you have to sign. Otherwise, I can't say the purchasing process has been all that bad. It's all the secondary stuff like packing and arranging utility transfers that's been more trouble.
Posted by: Will at February 22, 2008 04:36 PM (P2D1U)
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Ok, Will, when do we get to see the house? I'm getting antsy! Nothing like a nice drive to the edge of the earth
Speaking of which, how as the drive to work from home been?
Posted by: TheRightWife at February 26, 2008 06:52 PM (uS+aN)
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I'm not in the house yet. Sellers move out this weekend, then I've got to get my stuff over and clean up the apartment. So I haven't had a chance to really test out my new commute. Unless you're actually referring to my current commute, in which case, it's a hell of a lot better than driving to the West Side.
Posted by: Will at February 27, 2008 01:53 PM (WnBa/)
You posted a couple comments on the other blogs I'm not sure if you posted it on mine or the hostages and when i tried to de-spam them I either deleted them or the got sucked into a blackhole somewhere.
Posted by: pajama momma at January 25, 2008 03:14 PM (f3xJa)
Yeah, when I tried to post this to the comments at Hostages, it went into moderation, but wordpress didn't tell me that. So I tried posting the exact same thing a second time in case it was a fluke and just vanished into the ether. That time I got the "You've posted this already dumbass" message.
Then I thought maybe there was a keyword getting trapped in the filter, so I reworded things and tried a third time. All the while these comments are getting to the moderation que without me knowing. Now the comments are showing up at Hostages (on original submission order no less) after the de-spam. Must be something in the URL that was on the blacklist.
Posted by: Will at January 25, 2008 03:27 PM (WnBa/)
(See what you've done now Mrs. Peel? She went from flirting with me to flirting with you.)
