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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
    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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    This document gives a pretty good overview of the principles of shipbuilding.
     
    ---
     
     
    Spaceships vary wildly in their designs, based on their intended function, however, they can generally be classified according to their size and intended function. However, there are no standard ship classes; if you like, a good general principle is to build your ships along real-world Navy ship designs. However, your species’ biology and culture will influence this, and you’re free to design your ships however you like.
     
     
    Ship classes in this format
     
     
    Name:
    Description:
    Reactor:
    Propulsion:
    FTL Drive:
    Armament:
    Defensive Systems
    Detection Systems:
    Cost:
     
     
    You fill out every detail except the Cost, and send it to me in a PM; I’ll look it over, and if it looks good, fill out the cost.
     
     
    SHIPBUILDING CONSIDERATIONS
     
     
    You are not expected to know everything about a spaceship’s design. You’re not an engineer, after all. However, you should understand these basics of what spaceships are like, and how to build them.
     
     
    Power and Thrust
     
     
    The first step in designing your ship’s power system is picking its Reactor. Much like real world Naval ships, a spaceship needs a massive reactor. However, in space, a reactor is far more important, because it is usually also your main Propulsion system. The following are a list of a few basic Reactor types; feel free to pick from these, or choose your own system.
     
     
    Nuclear Fusion Reactor
     
     
    Your basic Fusion Reactor uses either lasers or magnetic pinches to force atomic nuclei to fuse, which produces a massive amount of energy and heat. Reaction mass(Hydrogen, Water, Deuterium, and Helium-3 are all common choices) is fed into the fusion reaction slowly enough that it is self-sustaining. This energy can be captured, the heat this reaction gives off used to produce power with temperature differentials. To produce thrust with one of these reactors, the reactor is simply opened to space; White hot streams of post-fusion gas race out into the night, propelling the ship forward. This reactor requires light elements to be fed into it as reaction mass, and thus increases the CHON cost of maintaining the ship.
     
     
    Ramjet
     
     
    A Ramjet is a Fusion Reactor, with the addition of enormous, kilometers-wide magnetic “sails” which, as a ship travels, capture free-floating hydrogen in space, and force it down into the ship’s reactor for use as Reaction Mass. Originally, Ramjets were designed as the best design for a slower-than-light ship, and were probably used if your species launched any. The advantage of a Ramjet is that its reactions get more and more efficient the faster a ship is going, and, more importantly, it does not require fuel to be carried with it. However, they are expensive to build and maintain, increasing the Money cost of ships they’re used in.
     
     
    Gravity-Trail Propulsion: An option only available to species who have Artificial Gravity, Gravity-Trail Propulsion is an excellent option for propelling a ship; a gravity field is generated in front of the ship, strong enough that the ship “falls” directly forward. Gravity-Trail Propulsion is useful because the gravity waves it produces are difficult to detect, and the ship itself produces no bright Fusion Flares or other telltale signs of existence, making this one of the few options for a Stealthy ship.
     
     
    Laser-Reaction Drive: Essentially, this drive is a fusion drive which emits its Fusion Flare in the form of a laser. There are two advantages to this type of drive; one, its drive can be used as a long range signaling device. Two, it can be used as a close range weapon, as this laser is incredibly powerful. These drives are more expensive to build than Fusion drives.
     
     
    ORION Drive: Explode nuclear warheads behind an extremely thick shell built into your ship. Propel yourself with nukes. What more do you want from life? An ORION drive can be made far more useful by coating the shell in a Stasis Field, increasing the efficiency to nearly 100%.
     
     
    Ballistic Sling: A Ballistic Sling isn’t a power production method, or a drive, per-se, but a means of getting from place to place. Using conventional rocket fuels to give an initial boost, or other low-intensity drive methods, a ship travels a long, slow, leisurely curve through a solar system, ending at its destination. These systems are useless for going anywhere but the place you actually planned on ending up, as there’s no steering and no power. However, these systems are also essentially free. For this reason, they’re popular when launching colony ships from one planet to another planet in the same system. This is the method that most Real-World deep-space spacecraft use.
     
     
    Defense
     
     
    Every spaceship needs armor, even if it’s just there to hold in the atmosphere. The most basic spaceships use metal layers, often Steel or Aluminum. Some spaceships, especially those preferred by races with more advanced material science, prefer Aerogel or Foam Aluminum armor, but armor is all essentially the same; a solid material designed to take impacts and energy, to keep the structure intact.
     
     
    Interceptors are a critical system for defending your ship from missiles, because missiles, while slow, have insanely high damage if they do score a hit. Interceptors can come in the form of tiny kinetic-interceptor counter-missiles, bullets, or laser beams. All are about equally valuable. The effectiveness of these interceptors depends on how far away the missiles are launched.
     
     
    Energy shields are, in the time of Starscape, mostly science fiction. The closest thing available is a large Magnetic Field, probably made with the same projectors the ship uses in a Ramjet. This Magnetic Field serves to deflect incoming plasma and particle beams. If dust and iron filings can be held in the field, it will actually serve as an effective shield against laser beams, relativistic-velocity kinetics, and missiles.
     
     
    The above idea of a magnetic shield can be combined with a Flak Barrier, essentially a set of cannons that set up a spherical shell of explosions around the ship. This, filled with iron filings held in place by a field, provide a good, if temporary, shield against nearly everything.
     
     
    Detection Systems: See the “Scanners” section of the Technologies post. Most ships will have all of those.
     
     
    Other Considerations
     
     
    Venting Heat: Spaceships build up heat while in space, and have to lose it somehow. Without an atmosphere, you can’t just vent heat to the air, so a ship must use Radiators. These aren’t the big, orange glowing things on the Venture Star in that one James Cameron film, but rather, a Radiator in use on a spaceship is a big sheet of aluminum, painted white, and run through with tubes of water or some other liquid. The tubes carry heat to the radiators, and the radiators bleed off their heat as light. However, these radiators are fragile. Pieces of shrapnel from missiles and destroyed spaceships could ruin them. Thus, in a fight, these radiators must be retracted to keep from being ruined. As all ship’s operations produce heat, a ship’s endurance is mostly determined by the heat tolerance of the crew, more than its ammunition supplies and reactor.
     
     
    Atmospheric Entry: A ship’s gravity and pressure tolerances will determine what sort of planet it can land on. The Discovery from 2001: Space Odyssey might be able to handle the pressure on Earth, but its long, tube shaped structure would snap in half under the gravity. By contrast, the NASA Space Shuttles could fly on Venus’ low gravity without a problem, but would be crushed like little origami frogs by the pressure on Venus’ ground level. As a general rule, a smaller ship can handle less gravity, and a better armored ship can handle more pressure.
  7. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    The blogs have become an uncomfortable place lately, and, due to some disagreements on the way a few things have been handled, I have found myself at odds with people I would rather count as friends. I don't see an end to this situation coming as soon as I would like it to, so there is something I would like to make clear before things go too far.
     
    I do not want a fight.
     
    I have never logged onto BZP with that desire in my mind. I have enough people to argue with elsewhere, were I the sort of person who revels in confrontation - but I'm not. When I log onto BZP, I want to relax, laugh with my friends, and maybe debate minor matters of philosophy. No matter what is said in the rather more serious debates happening now, and those still to come, no matter what my errors of communication or careless, accidental, hurting words, I am here to talk, relax, and have fun. Not to make enemies.
     
    If the time ever comes that I do not respect you, I will not fight you. I will not argue with someone for whom I have no respect, whose views, desires, and feelings hold no value for me. I will ignore them. I will give such a person up as a lost cause, and happily avoid the irritation they brought me.
     
    So unless the time comes that I never reply to anything you say, never visit your blog, and never argue with you, know that I respect you. I may not be your friend, I may not agree with you on anything, you may not even like me, but I would rather have you as a friend than an enemy, and if, by some chance, all the people who are so much better at being human and nice and comforting than I am have disappeared, know that, if you need it, I will try to have something good to say. I will try, in the small ways available to me, to make your day better.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    More Technic fun.
     
    I went tromping off through the Nether Portal I set up in a Siege Castle I captured a while ago, taking only weapons and food, with the intention of acquiring a few Blaze Rods so I could craft an Ender Chest or two... well, exactly two. Thaumcraft plans.
     
    Knowing that a Nether Fortress would be the best thing to find, I set about the task of wandering aimlessly until I found one - finding, instead, this cheeky little pigman in a funky robe who immediately started setting me on fire, making me nauseous (a nasty little effect that makes your vision swim about) and spawning pigmen (not even zombie pigmen, just pigs on two legs) to rush forward and... I don't know, hug me? They weren't very good in battle, and judging by his swift death, neither was the Great Wizard Chuckles.
     
    So more wandering ensued, followed shortly by falling in lava, dragging myself out, and burning to death. This resulted in a knee-##### expedition to find the site of my death, which resulted in abject failure, and the creation of a new escape Portal... which dumped me in a cave, under the ocean, more than three kilometers away from my house.
     
    ...Yeah.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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
    ...and Star Trek Colon Into Darkness becomes a much better movie. Why?
     
    1.
    That's the Captain speaking, right there.
     
    2.
    "Khan" was basically the hero anyway - he exposed a corrupt, war-mongering admiral, went toe-to-toe with the Federation to save his friends, and got shot in the back by Kirk and Scotty. Keep Burgerking Custardbath in the role, and it's just Sherlock Goes to Space with thirty minutes of desperately scrambling to make him the villain at the end.
     
    Swap Mal in, and it's just another day at the office.
     
    3.

    [All glory to the greatest webcomic on Earth. Fan poster by offsite artist deino-erd.]
  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.
  20. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So, yesterday, everyone's favourite guitar-playing undead penguin released a new album - his third, if you don't count the EP released under his metal side project, the name of which I can't even type right because Windows refuses to believe that you can put an Ümläüt over a t. You can follow the link above to the album's Bandcamp page, where you can pick up this shiny new album for a very reasonable seven bucks - not bad for 45:18 of instrumental rock. The cover art might be a bit sketchy, and there are no actual grenade launchers included with the album, but that doesn't change the quality of the music within.
     
    I could take the time to review the album in detail, but that would be time you're not spending checking it out yourselves - so go have a listen, buy the album, and pay special attention to the tracks Underwater, The Snake Charmer, and Hitchhiker.
  21. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    So, I found the most adorably stupid Daily Mail article today - yes, I know, that's a tautology, but bear with me.
     
    The article, you see, was about the Greenland Shark, a large, cold-water shark most closely related to dogfish, that looks like this;

     
    Now, most of what the article said in describing this "fearsome creature" isn't factually incorrect - they have indeed been found with the remains of polar bears, reindeer, and seals in their stomachs.
     
    The article just failed to mention one thing - the top speed of the Greenland shark is about 1.6 miles per hour - somewhat slower than a live polar bear, but considerably faster than a dead one. In keeping with the tendency for these sharks to be mostly or completely blind (due to a parasitic copepod that feeds on their corneal fluid), and their goofy, mostly-harmless appearance, the Greenland shark is believed to primarily be a scavenger.
     
    As the delightful Wikipedia article on this shark put it;
     
    Fearsome creature, indeed.
  22. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    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.
  25. HeavyMetalSunshineSister
    In an effort to get some more productive work done than wandering and dying in search of a mesa biome, I elected to hunker down by my river and fish.
     
    This was, on the whole, an excellent idea, considering the fishing rod I dredged up - Unbreaking III, Lure II, Luck of the Sea II.
     
    Clearly, great Cthulhu would like a favor in return for his generosity. Perhaps a temple is in order.
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