The Unseen University

I really wish - and yes, I know I'm a couple of decades too late for this to actually happen - but I really wish Yes would have decided whether to be infuriating or awesome, and then stuck with one of those things. They sort of bounced between great prog rock songs and the most annoyingly repetitive vocals this side of a political debate, and it's a bit like a minefield when you're about to listen to a Yes song you haven't heard before.

One of my friends recently showed me a video of a song from a live performance Metallica did in San Francisco in December of 2011, citing it as evidence that Metallica has "a breakthrough on the way". Intrigued, I listened to the song, and found myself gravely disappointed.

From the beginning, the song failed to sound noticeably different from other songs Metallica has done. Now, I'm not expecting them to suddenly become an entirely different sort of band, or for James Hetfield to pull a flute out of his pocket, but some innovation would have been nice - anything present in the song to suggest that Metallica still has new ideas would have refuted some of what I've said for years about the band.

Instead, what I heard was the same performance in the same old way, and in a world that has Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, Buckethead and Joe Satriani, I have no time for Metallica's stale, recycled riffs, simplistic, unchanging basslines, and disappointingly unsubtle lyrics. The only good thing I can say about this song is that Lou Reed was nowhere to be seen.

RIP Metallica
1981-1988

I don't recommend it. It makes you look like an awful person, makes everything that moves think you're an awful person, except for that one guy in the corner telling you that yes, they are all out to get you, and when you calm down he just ends up looking and feeling awkward.

Yes, yes, I know. I'm a lazy sod and should be shot on sight for so terribly neglecting the Spotlight for this month. I know.

On the plus side, I have great (if stupidly delayed news) for you all.

On April 2nd (3rd in the States, aka where I'm at), Ian Anderson, frontman for Jethro Tull (you might recognize them as the legendary band behind albums like Aqualung, Thick As A Brick, and Stormwatch) released a sequel to Thick As A Brick, forty years after the release of the original. Owing to, from what I've heard from a couple ill-remembered sources*, a certain disinterest on the part of guitarist Martin Barre (who is doing his own solo tour and album, so fret not about him!), this album was released as an Ian Anderson solo album, but, with a full cast of other musicians assisting him, including a couple of full-time Tull members, Ian has managed to produce an album that is every bit as powerful as the original, if a little bit less nostalgic.

Unlike the original Brick, TAAB2 is split into multiple tracks, each one outlining a different possible past for Gerald Bostock, whom you might remember as the fictional boy credited, on the mock-newspaper album sleeve of the original, with writing the lyrics to Thick As A Brick. The premise of this sequel album is, essentially, a musing on what might have become of the 10-year old boy, forty years later. It's an interesting question, and one that is answered in four different ways - he either ended up homeless, a corrupt banker, a preacher, a soldier wounded in action, or a shopkeeper with a fondness for model trains.

If you enjoy progressive rock, or just liked the original Brick, I suggest you buy this album, as its feel is much more like classic Jethro Tull than Ian Anderson's solo albums in recent decades.

Some of you are probably aware of the Minecraft server that caters, in part, to BZP members. Most of you who are aware of that probably frequent the Minecraft topic in COT, and thus may be aware of the recent server crash.

What you might not be fully aware of is the reason for this crash.

A small group of players, led by Madufruit42 (The Invisible Noob) with some assistance from myself, MTMerrick (thoron) and a handful of others, were working on building a railway from Ga-Koro (not an exact reproduction of the Koro, mind - just a village based on it) to a planned train station that would connect Ga-Koro, Ta-Koro, and Ko-Koro. A moderator on that server - a non-BZP member - showed up, and began helping hollowing out the mountain for the train station. The problem has its roots in this - he decided, or so he told us, to use the World-Edit power-tools to hollow out the mountain faster, and warned us that this would cause some lag.

We agreed to this, thinking that the lag would be moderate, and the net result would be beneficial.

The server promptly crashed.

A couple of hours later, the admin (Nav3taX) got the server back online, but with extreme lag. I happened to be in the right place to see what exactly had been done by the moderator "helping" with the railway.

A giant ball of mushrooms had been placed in the air near the track. No hollowed-out mountain, just a great, pointless ball of mushrooms, which, being rather more difficult to render than, say, stone, lagged the server out and pretty much perma-broke it.

The end result? The entire world had to be wiped, and a build-team is now being assembled to restore some sort of order.

There are two possible explanations for why this happened - either the moderator was ignorant of the difficulties with rendering mushrooms, and was trying to be funny, or the goal was exactly what happened - the complete self-destruction of the server.

So, umm... In some alternate universe, a lot of people are wondering why I'm a spoon now. They're also wondering why and how I developed the technology for gazing through the void, into the living rooms of people living an another universe.

The answer is not available to you at this time, alternate-universe commies. Instead, I leave you with the greatest question ever asked. Why aren't you a spoon instead of some antennae-faced alien hippie?

I no doubt sound pretty daft here, but that's normal, so I'll plow on.

I've noticed that words like person keep getting changed to a word essentially signifying a small horse. A human being is not a small horse. I do not want every mention of a human being to be changed to a mention of a small horse. If someone knows of a way to stop this from happening, now would be a good time to mention it.

DISCLAIMER: I do not hate small horses. I am perfectly fine with small horses, TV shows about small horses, and viewers of TV shows about small horses. There is, however, a time and a place for small horses. All the time is not one of those times, and everywhere is not one of those places.

So I was showing off my grand sand-trap to a friend today - hmm. Before I say what happened, I should probably go over what was supposed to happen.

In a subterranean complex, I built a large domed room with the floor open to the Void. I then went around the perimeter of the room, placing pistons on one long circuit, with Repeaters used as the only direct redstone contact for each and every piston, and occasionally using a Repeater-and-wire loop on the outside of the circuit to extend the energy flow. At the beginning of the circuit, near the switch, is a piston-based door that's closed when the circuit is on, and open when it isn't.

On each of the perimeter pistons, I placed a block of stone and a torch, and then proceeded to build a sand-dome held up by the torches. The plan was for the dome to collapse when the switch was flipped to open the door, barring the way to incautious adventurers.

Instead, precisely nothing happened. The input stopped mattering, because the circuit stayed on even when it was off.

Advice for how to fix this circuitry error would be much appreciated.

UPDATE: Problem fixed via good-old double-inverters, and basically switching things around to get my circuit to bear less resemblance to a waffle. I still am not sure whether the monstrosity I originally created was a true Illogic Circuit or merely an astronomically slow Clock Circuit.

This is one of those times when the fact that I am incompetent to install a moderator for Minecraft, much less make one, really frustrates me.

See, I had what I consider to be an awesome idea for a moderator to use in Survival mode. Basically, the idea is that Creepers would be modified to no longer take fire, explosion, or fall damage, so they explode, then just go ahead and do it again. And again. And so on until you manage to kill them. Increasing their base health to around what Endermen have would also be good for this idea. Giving 1 Creeper in every 10 the ability to teleport like an Enderman would, of course, be overkill, so if I was making this moderator I'd do it.

Sadly, I am, as stated above, incompetent to make or even install a moderator for Minecraft. So this isn't going to happen.

So I guess I'm just venting frustration/giving you a glimpse of the horrorterrors I'm unleashing on an alternate Minecraft-playing universe.

Alright, alright, I know how to take a hint. No response on something generally means it's been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Really wanting. Thus, the other thing has been discontinued.

That being said, I'm still doing goofy things in Minecraft. Finally returned to the home continent, and ended up starting on a fortress that relies oh-so-much on projectile-based defenses. Currently working at a testing range I dug into the permafrost to ensure I've got the splash potions that will be fired from rapid-pulsed dispensers done correctly. This primarily involves putting sheep in a hole and shooting potions into the hole, then checking for dead sheep.