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HeavyMetalSunshineSister

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Blog Entries posted by HeavyMetalSunshineSister

  1. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    I have recently procured a Black Pegasus in Minecraft, via the breeding of a Pegasus and a Unicorn.
     
    Now, the Black Pegasus being the best of all horses, this one needs a name. I can't pick which.
     
    Your options are either Sleipnir or Shadowfax (I named one of my other horses Stybba, and still another Snowmane, so LOTR-based names are perfectly valid).
     
    Other options may be suggested, but nothing to do with MLP or I'll sic the Hounds of Tindalos on you.
  2. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  3. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So I've got a piece of music that's been sitting unfinished on my computer for something like two years. The current list of instruments is as follows-
     
    -Flute
    -Alto Saxophone
    -Electric Guitar (Jazz)
    -Electric Bass (Fingered)
    -Drumkit
    -Timpani
     
    The first section went along fairly smoothly, with a four-measure ostinato primarily played by the flute and saxophone... the only problem is that, at this time, there isn't actually a lead instrument. Nothing's actually playing a melody over this, which is a big problem that kind of needs to be fixed before I go forward with this.
     
    I'm going to experiment with various instruments to see what works well here. Suggestions are encouraged, as they might make my work here a little bit easier.
  4. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  5. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    I have recently seen an instance in which a single female character was portrayed overreacting to something. The scenario was played for laughs, and while a good amount of time could be spent going over the joke itself and why it was or was not funny, a more important issue is some of the criticism that the joke received - that having this character, who was female, overreact in an emotional manner, was sexist. That it implied the attitude that all women were prone to overemotional reactions.
     
    This, I believe, is a flawed judgment, for the reason that some individual women are, in fact, prone to overemotional reactions.
     
    This is not because they are women.
     
    This is because they are human, with any of an assortment of personality quirks that come along with that condition. I know more than a few men who are prone to such an overreaction.
     
    And perhaps, one might say, it would have been better to use a male character for that role - to make a man overreact instead of a woman, to deter the accusations of sexism.
     
    I disagree. Women are approximately fifty percent of the human population, and it is probable that approximately fifty percent of overemotional freakouts are had by women. Simply because years of consistent portrayals of a trait as a quality exclusive to women has made it a sensitive subject does not mean that this trait can never again be ascribed to women in fiction, nor does the ascribing of such a trait to one character mean that the writer is sexist. For that to happen ,the writer has to consistently portray the majority of their female characters as overemotional basket-cases - have a look at a good many sitcom writers if you need an example. Having one character with this trait is not sexism, it's having a character with believable human qualities - or, in the case of some works of amateur comedy, somewhat unbelievable human qualities. Even exaggerating these traits to absurdity in one case, however, does not make the writer a sexist - anymore than making a male character an unbelievably smug windbag suggests a belief that all men are cartoonishly smug windbags.
     
    When writing fiction, it isn't healthy to constantly be looking over your shoulder to make sure that nothing you write could possibly offend someone. Just write natural characters that fit the story you're writing. And even if you can't do that, a bad joke doesn't make you a bigot - perhaps a bit thoughtless, and certainly not a master comedian, but not necessarily a bigot.
  6. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  7. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  8. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    Gets a whole lot less intimidating when you realize that, with a quick enough draw, Gilderoy Lockhart could have won a duel against him.
     
    What's that? Most powerful Dark wizard in living memory? That's impressive. Shame he can't remember which way is up.
  9. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    As I sit here, listening through The Whirlwind for the first time in a couple of years, it strikes me that the vocals on this album compare rather unfavourably to those on Thick As A Brick 2, Ian Anderson's follow-up to Jethro Tull's legendary single-song album, released forty years late.
     
    It's not so much anything about the quality of the voices involved - years of smoking certainly were not kind to the pipes of Ian Anderson - but the technique of the singing. With Transatlantic's 70+ minute outing, while the voices don't sound bad, the phrasing and inflections leave much to be desired, lacking, for the most part, the confidence and impact heard from the very first track of TaaB 2. When the 1:37 mark of an old dinosaur's follow-up project is, vocally, stronger than the first fifteen minutes of a prog rock supergroup's intended magnum opus, someone hasn't done their job right.
     
    I have, thus far, enjoyed The Whirlwind, but if what I've heard so far is any indication, I rather doubt that my reward for reaching the end will be anything like as powerful as the pairing of Confessional and Kismet in Suburbia. Anderson's vocal work on TaaB 2 may not come close to the original album, but it's still miles ahead of Transatlantic so far.
     
     
    EDIT: I was going to cut this album so much more slack before they started padding the length with mindless repetition. I can only hear "Is it really happening" so many times before I conclude that you've run out of ideas.
     
    EDIT 2: I was right. In summation, The Whirlwind is an instrumentally fun/kind of impressive album/song with merely okay lyrics and mediocre delivery of those lyrics.
  10. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    It is hardly a secret that worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing. I don't care much for plots until I've got, at the very least, a detailed map of the relevant planet's ocean currents. I won't design a single character until I know where the tallest mountain is and whether it casts a significant rain shadow. I could go on, if I had no other responsibilities, for years, figuring out how a fictional world ticks. Once the planet is done, the ecosystems come in. Here I could get lost forever, and with good reason. I'm quite likely to, with no thought for what lies ahead, devote a significant chunk of my time to figuring out the last five million or so years of the planet's natural history. Once that's done, I can figure out cultures, and then characters and plot.
     
    So I love world-building, and put clinically insane amounts of work into it. That is, from my perspective, great.
     
    But, I do not harbor the illusion that the average reader actually cares about where all the deserts are. They don't. They're there for the plot and the characters, and pages spent lovingly describing the world will be met with a sudden loss of interest on their part. This is not their problem to fix, as it would be pretty daft of me to expect people to not read stories for the stories.
     
    What this really means, then, is that only the bits of the world that are relevant need to show up. The rest is all still there, of course, much as the currents of the North Atlantic are still there in a Sherlock Holmes novel, but it never needs to be mentioned. This runs quite counter to the inclinations of some writers I've run into, who appear to believe that any detail is good detail, and thus pack whatever they write with infodumps on whatever they think might be involved in some way, even - or maybe especially - if it has no relevance to the plot.
     
    If the way your starship's engine works never enters into the plot (or, if you're making an RPG, the gameplay of the RPG), the readers don't need to hear about it. You can have it all figured out in case someone asks, sure, but don't stress out about it if you don't understand all of the tiny nuances, and don't regurgitate every detail in a vain (of the self-image variety, not so much the futility sort) attempt to show the hours of work you put into what the reader is holding in their hands. Quite apart from making you look whiny, showing your work for the sake of showing your work is a recursive, stupid activity that tends to ruin your work.
  11. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    One thing that bugs me, and which I hear a lot from people looking at drawings or playing Minecraft, is the tendency to look at anything that's been done well, and remark that they would never be able to make something as good as that. This is especially irritating in Minecraft, where we're all working with the same cubic-meter blocks of material, and thus there is no really good reason to think that any particular piece of work is impossible for you to match.
     
    The idea of someone being naturally talented beyond anyone else's ability to match is, to me, ridiculous. No one's first attempt at architecture, with no background in it or Minecraft, was as good as what some people have made in Minecraft. M.C. Escher did not wake up one morning, with no background at all in drawing surreal geometries, and start producing art. J.S. Bach's first experience with music, almost assuredly, did not immediately result in any famous compositions.
     
    Getting good at something took time for them, and it will take time for anyone looking to follow in their footsteps - they were not born doing what they do/did, but rather worked to do it and do it well. If you really want to be good at it too, study the principles of the artform, and practice. Practice until you're sure more practicing isn't actually possible, and then continue practicing.
     
    Because if one more person looks at something I've built or drawn [i don't show compositions to non-musicians, because I can't get them to sit still long enough] and says 'Wow, I could never build/draw like that,' I'm going to chase them around the world with a diamond pickaxe and set their weird squarish wooden shack on fire.
  12. HeavyMetalSunshineSister

    Hoo Boy

    By HeavyMetalSunshineSister,

    So, a few months ago, I tried to find some reference on the medieval Chola naval vessel known as the Thirisadai - essentially the equivalent of a battleship. At this time, I posted a blog entry, requesting aid in finding these references - the request was unsuccessful, which is hardly shocking; BZPower is not exactly a community built upon a shared fondness for naval history, nor is a high proportion of the site's population comprised of historians.
     
    Anyway, I let that project rest for a while, as I tried to find the pictures I needed. Other ideas came up, I wrote some music, bought a didgeridoo, and the idea slid to the back of my mind, resurfacing earlier today.
     
    So, feeling lucky, I tried Google again.
     
    This was the top result.

     
    That's how little relevant material there is on this.
  13. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    Let's just take a moment to reflect on the fact that the Green Hornet got a movie before Wonder Woman got to appear in one.
     
    Okay? Had your flashbacks to how awful that movie was yet?
     
    Great.
     
    Wonder Woman's going to be played by a cardboard actress in a movie directed by Zack Snyder.
     
    Let me put it this way - given the choice between not eating, and eating a muffin made of broken glass, I'd go ahead and not eat.
     
    Zack Snyder movies tend to be muffins made of broken glass - very shiny, no real substance, and it leaves kind of an unpleasant, metallic taste in your mouth.
  14. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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
  15. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    Found myself in a Deep Ocean biome for the first time, and it's honestly kind of scary, swimming at the surface, looking down, and not being able to see the bottom.
     
    They need to add ocean-going hostile mobs now, just so you can get the experience of having a great white shark come rushing out of the depths, or even just see a faint hint of movement down there, and start fearing for your life.
     
    And once they add hostile ocean-going mobs, they need to give you an update or two to wait and be afraid of the water..
     
    ...and then they need to add a bigger boat.
     
    Anyway, great whites, giant squid, and maybe a couple of other nasties would really make the oceans more fun.
  16. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So, my search for a mesa biome continues, as I have covered more than ten kilometers searching for that magical land of disco clay and pretty sand.
     
    Today, the search has hit a milestone - the first time I've found an entirely different ultra-rare biome while looking for mesas.
     

     
    On the one hand, this is really cool.
     
    On the other, I really wanted a mesa.
     
    It doesn't really help that I have nothing with Silk Touch.
  18. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    The actor [Gal Gadot] that is slated to play Wonder Woman has confirmed that she is undergoing some serious training/physical conditioning for the movie.
     
    Training that involves swords.
     
    I may still have some doubts about her acting ability, based on what I know her to have been in - the Fast & Furious franchise isn't exactly known for nuanced performances, or actors capable of the like, but...
     
    Well, if the long list of training material is any indication of her role in the movie - a list including swords, Kung Fu, swords, Ju-jitsu, and freaking swords you guys - then Wonder Woman is going to be a pretty entertaining character in a braindead action movie about Batffleck and some neck-snapping enthusiast wearing Superman like a cheap suit.
  19. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So here I am, hiding, terrified, in a shack I hollowed out of a rubber tree, when I see some dude with really long, thin legs marching around in diamond armor, carrying a diamond sword, and kind of walking like a chicken. It's night, so I figure he'd probably stab me if I went outside, so I just watch him through one of the windows.
     
    This goes on for five minutes, until I realize that the only piece he's missing from a full set of diamond armor is the pants.
     
    This disturbs me greatly, until I realize that that's exactly what I'm missing from my iron armor.
     
    Ladies and gentlemen, I have started a fashion trend among creepy tall people.
  21. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  22. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So today I took my shiny new diamond pickaxe down into a cavern to mine some obsidian (and maybe more diamonds, because hey, I'm an optimist like that).
     
    Instead, a group of skeletons decided it was high time for me to take a good long time-out in a column of lava, beginning today's adventures in messy death.
     
    Next, I went back into the cave, recovered what I could (which did not include the diamond pick, because of course it didn't) and set out to mine some more - this ended with me using water to pillar up to a lava source and get shot into it by a skeleton. Dead again.
     
    So I set off on another rescue mission, climbed near where I died, lagged out, and logged back in. Dead again.
     
    So I dropped back into the cavern with no tools at all, ran past a bomb-shop quartet, and finished climbing to where I died and lost the rest of everything.
     
    I recovered nothing but 19 redstone, a stick, and a bucket.
     
    So, at this point, I'm sitting in a cave with 21 melon slices, and I'm pretty angry. I'd just used most of my iron reserve trying to save my own precious behind, and I had exactly nothing to show for it.
     
    So I start dismantling the planks of the mineshaft I'm in, and I make a wooden sword and a wooden pickaxe, and I declare to the server at large my intention to maul every living thing underground.
     
    An hour and a half later I bob to the surface of a river, hauling 3 stacks of rails, 2 stacks of iron, a stack of coal, 16-ish gold, a bit of redstone, some lapis, and various other odds and ends.
  23. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    Yeah, yeah, I know - there wasn't a Musician Spotlight for January. I'm sure all -3 of you that read this thing were livid.
     
    Ahem.
     
    Anyway, I'm probably going to have some more business - sorry, busy-ness - so from now until April 3rd - or, until I update the Musician Spotlight again, whichever comes first - the Spotlight will be focused on Ian Anderson's new album, which is to be released as a direct sequel to the legendary Thick As a Brick... err, 40 years late.
     
    I've heard lots of good things about this album (some of the songs that will be on it! Steven Wilson's involved! Another Ian Anderson album! Steven insisted that Anderson use the same instrumentation [for the most part] as the original Brick! Anderson went along with the idea!) and one bad thing (Martin wasn't interested in working on this album) that's kind of a good thing (Martin is instead off doing his own thing.) so I'm really pretty excited about this.
     
    The one disappointment is that, unlike the live (and lyric-less) performance done in India a while ago, the album version of A Change of Horses is unlikely to feature sitar.
     
    But, hey! This blog isn't about my opinions - no, really it isn't. My opinions matter about as much as the -3 people who read them matter. This blog is about the opinions of those people who 1. don't exist and 2. were just told, in a hypothetical universe where they do exist, that they don't matter!
     
    So, tell me what you think of the upcoming Thick As a Brick 2. Or don't. Probably don't. But do if you exist.
  24. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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?
  25. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
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