The Unseen University

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.

My new flute arrived in the mail today. I'm already decently good with the penny whistle, so the most difficult thing for me is going to be getting a consistent sound out of that little embouchure. I'll be spending the next week working solely on that, after which I will allow myself to begin working on actually getting a tune out of the thing.

I'll be keeping a record of my progress on this blog, both for the really bored people who, for some reason, actually care about the "progress" some loonie is making on moulding himself into a pale imitation of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, and for the obscenely  bored person who will one day be looking back to fondly(?) remember his earliest experience with the Irish flute.

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.

As of today, I'm starting a little diary detailing odd moments in my Minecrafting experience, from my character's point of view. The first of these will come in a batch, while the rest are likely to come one at a time.


---Entry 1, January 16th

It is now a week since I became sick of the sight of snow, and, in a fit either of brilliance or madness, abandoned the mainland in my small wooden boat - a boat I had not built, much less used, until about an hour before I pushed off from the shore. Fortunately for me, I appear to be a reasonably good shipbuilder, as I have yet to sink beneath the waves and meet my demise in the no-doubt-sincerely-sympathetic embrace of one of the many squid that seem to infest these waters.

I sailed three days before I came across anything remarkable - an island! Sailing towards the little spit of rock protruding from the waves, I very nearly wrecked my precious boat upon the shore of what turned out, in fact, to be a wholly unremarkable island, but when I came upon it, the fact that it wasn't either snow, ice, water or lava had me jumping for joy.

The night after I landed upon this little rock, I realized that I was in need of somewhere other than that rock upon which to sleep. Taking advantage of what is either a hole in the concept of sanity or the fact that I am apparently a wizzard, I eschewed the idea of building a house upon that miserable rock in favor of building a series of ice domes beneath the waves, and making my home there. It is from my house in the smallest of these domes that I write this diary now, though I am thinking that I may soon depart to further explore my world.

---Entry 2, January 21st

Given the difficulty of locating my home beneath the waves by the light of the single candle that, at the moment, isn't even lit, I have shaped the island that first led me to this place into a pair of perfect triangles, the smaller of which points directly to my home. On the opposite side of my sunken villa is another of these island signposts, built up from the seafloor using either crazy-powers or wizzardry, as I have yet to decide which is responsible for the apparent viability of ice as a submarine building material. With these signposts in place, I am now prepared to sail into the east, sailing after adventure, the sun, and maybe something that isn't either a bloody barren rock or a river of fire carving its way through a snowy valley.

P.S. - Why did I decide on ice, of all things? Glass is transparent too. I suspect shenanigans. Whether it is wizzardry or crazy that drives these shenanigans, only time and perhaps an errant luck-dragon will tell.

---Entry 3, January 25th

I am now a few days out from my home, and no significant landmasses have been sighted, though various miserable spires of rock have greeted me. Very nearly wrecked the boat on the head of one of those blasted friendly squid. Nearly ready to call an end to this whole adventure thing.

On the second day after leaving my home, I began to worry that I may not find it again. To this end, I have, using whatever breach in the laws of something or other (leaning towards wizzardry today), constructed two obelisks since then - one of obsidian, because I thought it would look cool, the other from the Glowstone I gathered the last time I got ideas of "adventure" into my head, because I'm relatively certain that a glowing pillar of rock would be hard to miss.

Here's a beautiful thing that seriously just happened in Starscape.

->Discover a Ragnarok-proofed bunker on a recently-defeated enemy's planet.
->Manage to break into the bunker.
->Tick off heavily armored security drones, who start shooting at you.
->Throw a grenade at them. You're in the bunker. They're in the bunker. The grenade's in the bunker.


This is now you.

Rather a big fan of the movie Clue, but I've got strong opinions on the endings shown. Now, I understand it's meant to be truly ambiguous and, really, impossible to discern which is really the ending (the bit where it says one of them really is the real ending can be safely placed in the same category as communism, they're all equally right and wrong), but the third one, while entertaining, didn't convince me. For one thing, "Mr. Body"s motive for bringing them all there if he really is Mr. Body and not, in fact, Wadsworth, is suspect. Were he truly Mr. Body, and wishing to eliminate his spies, he would be more likely to take the option least likely to put himself at risk - not, as we see in the third ending, the one most likely to put himself at risk. Furthermore, what motive would "Mr. Body" if he really is the butler and not Mr. Body as he was shown to be in the unambiguous portions of the film, have to pretend to be Mr. Body, considering he was in a room full of people with perfect motive to kill him? No amount of money from his employer could be enough for that kind of suicide.

Also, I firmly believe that only the true blackmailer could be that much of a sleazeball. He simply didn't have the personality for a butler - not deferential in the least, not polite, certainly not formal in any way. He did, however, have the personality of someone used to pulling the strings.

I will reserve statement on whether I believe the first or second to be more likely. My goal here is simply to state that I believe the third ending to be the least probable (oh, and also to make sure my blog still works).

It may or may not be a well-known fact that I despise rather a lot of Christmas music. Songs about Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Commie-Faced Reindeer, and all the rest never really did much for me. Maybe it's because I've heard the same batch of songs performed by either dead people or dead careers for my entire life, but the whole thing seems tired, unartistic, and, oh my I finally get to use this word, hackneyed.

This is not to say that I hate all Christmas music - not by a long shot. No, it's just that there are three ways to do good Christmas music. The first is an old, truly traditional piece, faithfully played by an orchestra, string quartet, whatever - tunes like the Carol of the Bells, Greensleeves, We Three Kings, all good choices. If you want to put an orchestra in, knock yourself out - better an orchestra than whatever pop "star" thinks we don't look at them often enough lately - but I'm quite happy with instrumental versions, because a good composer can convey any intended feeling through instruments.

Way number two is to take a traditional Christmas song - and I mean real traditional, not baby-boomers-grew-up-with-it-so-that-makes-it-a-tradtion - and interpret it in your own way to make a piece of music that's still good and doesn't sound like exactly the same thing but with a different voice doing it. Look up Jethro Tull's version of Greensleeves if you need an example.

The third, final, and perhaps best, is to just write something new. Now, to do this, you have to be a good composer already, so don't all of you tweeny-boppers and dead-beat crooners go running off to hack something into the corpse of your genre. It's got to be two things. The first is a good song. It has to be something someone could justify listening to any time of the year. The second is, and if you didn't predict this go jump in a lake, a Christmas song. It has to have some undeniable relation to whatever you think Christmas is. Two very different examples have been done by Jethro Tull (Christmas Song and Another Christmas Song), but if you want examples that have not a bloody thing to do with Ian Anderson, try John Lennon's shot at a Christmas song (Happy X-Mas War Is Over).

There's my little rant for the night over and done with. Back to inexplicably pumpkin-flavored egg nog (seriously? pumpkin? who thought of that and are they still alive enough for me to hug them?) and avoiding "Christmas traditions" like Frosty the Red Snowman.

Today, I'm going to do a one-off feature - my "Premier" Membership runs out on the 28th, and I'm undecided on the matter of actually buying it when that happens.

The purpose of this Tech Highlight is to point out the very real possibility of practical electric vehicles. The Tesla Roadster takes approx. 3.5 hours to charge, and, on a full charge, can go for about 245 miles - not too shabby, considering that other electric cars can take about 20 hours to charge and still don't go as far as the Tesla Roadster, but it still sounds pretty bad for a long trip - driving halfway there and then having to stop for 3.5 hours doesn't sound very good.

But, when you consider that they've been able to get solar panels to achieve about 21% efficiency in commercial applications, it's easy to see how a solar cell on top of the car could help prevent the battery from ever quite falling to zero, getting rid of the annoying stop in the middle of a trip - and possibly accelerating charging when you are stopped. If you want to make things just that little bit better - or throw in a supplementary system for conditions where you don't exactly have the optimal amount of sunlight - then a small wind turbine powered by the wind flowing over the car just might be ideal. Now, of course, neither of these supplementary systems are efficient enough to power a car on their own, but they don't have to - the core of the power system will be the energy you get from the power grid, which hopefully has something like a nuclear power plant instead of a coal-fired power plant at the center of it all. The solar cell and wind turbine are there to extend the life of the main battery.

This concept, I think, is what the future of high-tech energy systems will look like - a central, reliable system supplemented by things designed to make it all work just a little bit better.