Total DeadGod.Net

Mechanical assistants for physically disabled

Ratha — 2008-07-23T07:26:20-05:00

I ran across this the other day. We all see random tech inventions and prototypes out there, they get their 5 minutes of spotlight, and then disappear forever into oblivion. When i see and hear that products are actually going to market which could become available, they are usually completely cost prohibitive to the people who would use em, and they disappear just as quickly.

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It surprises me, that in todays age, with as much as has been done with robotics, and computers, that we see so little real innovation and progress in this area. Some of the working concepts that have gotten attention in the past *seemed* very promising and like they wouldnt be all that expensive to get into full scale production. Perhaps its just the lack of media spotlight that they get once they've been prototyped, but you almost never see anything like this gain mainstream attention, those which i have looked into in the past seemed to disappear entirely.

Yeah, what he said...

DranoK — 2008-07-22T19:24:08-05:00

Wrath of the Litch King Paladin-ing

DranoK — 2008-07-22T18:38:24-05:00

I'm never going to raid as a holy paladin again. At least that's the promise I made myself. It's so boring. So very boring. And while I'd rather play some other class in arena for some reason my comps generally revolve around preferring a paladin. *sigh*

That said, there are some interesting potential arena builds. Most of this is theorycraft based on guesses, but whatever. :) Below is one I'm very interested in...

III. The Holy/Ret hybrid (40/0/31)
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxN...MhZZyf0xG00hho

I built this one in an attempt to gain a viable arena CC without sacrificing too much healing power. It's actually rather interesting how well the two mesh.

Pros over pure holy builds:
-----------------------------------------
o Viable CC

o 5% extra crit chance for holy shock / instant Holy Light goodness

o 3% extra offense crit chance for everyone attacking judged target (assuming you have time/mana to seal and judge) With judgement of light + justice seal this could actually be interesting--run speed debuf plus health to melee attackers

o 15% run speed boost and different boot enchant :P

o 30% +spellpower from attack power (which at even my paladin's current pitiful 460 attack power would be 138 +spellpower. Given new coefficients this is likely around 200 or more +healing) On top of this, crit heals 60% extra over 12 seconds (and I'm gonna be stacking a fuckload of crit). Even with my pitiful crit focus now I have 25% before taking holy light talents into account. This would effectively be a 2700 HoT over 12 seconds in addition to the 4500 base Holy Light at level 70. FFS.

o Judgements restore 60% mana damage caused to either myself or ppl around me (sadly I must be in melee range for this)

o 16% extra attack power goodness for the melee in my group :)

Cons:
---------
o 3% less intellect
o 30 yard auras (vs. 40 yard)
o No 30% dispel resist to hand spells
o No blessed life (which I don't take now anyway)
o 14% less int -> +healing conversion
o No Divine Illumination (15 seconds of half-cost spells)
o No 20-yard judgements
o No 10% haste from judgements
o No beacon of light (1.5s cast AoE HoT)

Iffs:
-----
o Light's Grace (cast time reduction on Holy Lights after the first one) may not be worth taking since it may be unlike I'd cast two Holy Lights within 15 seconds of each other. Of course, if LG goes on from the instant cast HL procced from a holy shock crit this may be worth reconsidering ;)

I'm not sure how great beacon of light is going to be. Even with a 100% coefficient it's less powerful than a priest's renew. With a 1.5s cast time I'm not sure I'm going to be casting it much over a holy light. With a 6s cooldown on holy shock I fully anticipate most of my healing will be done via this spell and the instant cast holy lights it provides, using the remaining cooldowns to dispel. This would make me as interrupt-immune as my priest, and with enough crit gear could still do a good job healing. There's a ton of +crit gear out there since it's balanced against resilience; as a healer resilience doesn't affect me ;)

Thoughts? Flames? Things I've overlooked?

Monsters DO exist

DranoK — 2008-07-21T18:25:10-05:00

Hatchetfish suck.

Color trix.

Darth Druka — 2008-07-20T02:28:10-05:00

make sure you say it too.

Best error message ever

DranoK — 2008-07-18T14:20:57-05:00

That's easy. I know at least 5 off the top of my head...

Primer: A Review

DranoK — 2008-07-17T23:05:51-05:00

Primer: A Review

I watched Primer last night. I was, in fact, quite looking forward to seeing it. A movie that tackled time travel in a (comparatively) plausible way? A movie about engineers doing engineering things that actually cared about science?

Do want!

OK, so it was a low-budget movie. One of the actors would seem more at home as a rugby player than an engineer. Let’s also ignore the fact that every engineer in the movie wears a tie-- a clear sign the film crew hasn't the slightest idea what engineers actually are--but who cares? Plausible time travel! With a name so cool it has the word parabolic in it!

By the time the diagram of parabolic time travel was drawn I was mesmerized. I love stories like this! It’s like ordering hash browns and getting a steak omelet, five links of sausage and a pile of pancakes instead.

Parabolic time

Everything was going so good. The story was developing. The characters were growing. The music was--OK the music was puking. But that's OK. Music is hard.

Then the twist came and ruined everything.
I'd be happy to tell you exactly what that twist was--I have no problems ruining your experience with spoilers--except I still have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell happened. If it weren't for the sudden bout of confusion and shame that overcame me I probably would have missed the very notion that there was a twist.

I see dead people...

I'm not against twists, mind you. Yummy, delicious juice has been squeezed from the twists in such movies as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense. I have no problems with severe jolts, either. I get that some twists need to abruptly ratchet up the pace in order to be effective. Hell, the pace in The Sixth Sense didn't just approach a near-vertical asymptote of rapid plot development--it actually bended back over itself and started traversing backward through the film.

The trick is for the writers and director to ensure their audience is properly prepared to accept and understand the twist. The Sixth Sense was about a boy who saw dead people--the idea that the man was actually dead is a twist but at least it’s relevant to the movie. It's not like Bruce Willis turned out to be a banana from space, mutated by supernova radiation into a soft-spoken primate with a taste for young earth boys.

Help!!!

Primer doesn't prepare you at all. They don't strap you in, buckle your seat belt, or even suggest you keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. Nope—all you get is a trickle of blood coming out of one the character’s ears. One second it's "let's make money on the stock market using our newfound powers of going a short distance back in time!" and the next "oh snap apparently I've been poisoning myself and pretending to be a cat in the attic, reciting recorded conversations and--oh dear, my handwriting has gone all to shit."

At one point, in the middle of a sentence, one of the characters blurts (on the verge of tears): "Why can't we write like normal people?"

Fuck, I didn't even know they couldn't. I mean, I'd seen them scribble a couple things but I just assumed they had bad handwriting. They're engineers, after all.

I'm a relatively smart person, I think. I've always been good at those puzzles in which you must get the farmer, the wolf and the sheep across the river with only a single boat and bucket of silly rules. This movie, however, is beyond my ability to work out. Its ending didn’t just go over my head—it broke into another dimension and pranced through it.

It’s like someone who gets three quarters of the way through telling a story before deciding the entire thing is just too much bother to finish so mumbles something about their stove and walks away awkwardly.

This is how you'll feel

"It turns out they weren't one-use only. They were recyclable."

That was the moment of profound discovery? The climax of the film? The explanation that’s supposed to make us gasp? I still don't have the slightest fucking clue what it means. I half wonder if some other movie obliviously wandered in to make an ass of itself.

Despite all this I liked the movie. I kind of feel like a retarded man forced to sit at the kiddie table, but whatever. I loved the mood and quite enjoyed the parts that made sense.

And it's about parabolic time travel . How fucking cool is that?

--DranoK

Seth's attack

DranoK — 2008-07-17T01:14:09-05:00

Click the image to see the full-sized version. It's wide so had to size down more than usual.

I'm fairly happy with this and may try to color it over the weekend. Depends. Comments and criticisms welcome as always :) I changed Seth's head to be a bit more interesting. I like it better, anyway.

People are idiots

DranoK — 2008-07-16T20:03:42-05:00

But we alread knew this, right? The vast majority of people, so far as I can tell, simply have no desire to think independant thoughts.

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=146828

Quote:

"I have all the letters still," Shirley wrote, "and if they could be considered to give any accurate cross section of the reading public, or the reading public of The New Yorker, or even the reading public of one issue of The New Yorker, I would stop writing now."

She goes on, "Judging from these letters, people who read stories are gullible, rude, frequently illiterate, and horribly afraid of being laughed at. ... The New Yorker never published any comment of any kind about the story in the magazine, but did issue one publicity release saying that the story had received more mail than any piece of fiction they had ever published."

Lets Get Rid of Darwinism

DranoK — 2008-07-16T16:57:00-05:00

This is an excellent article, written by a woman who apparently has a very nice, very large neck. At least that's what I gather from her portrait.

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008...3e0&ei=5087%0A

Quote:

In short, Darwin did more in one lifetime than most of us could hope to accomplish in two. But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It’s a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. “Why Darwin was wrong about X”; “Was Darwin wrong about Y?”; “What Darwin didn’t know about Z” — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix “neo”), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.

Why is this a problem? Because it’s all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.”

He wasn’t, and it has. Although several of his ideas — natural and sexual selection among them — remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, the field as a whole has been transformed. If we were to go back in a time machine and fetch him to the present day, he’d find much of evolutionary biology unintelligible — at least until he’d had time to study genetics, statistics and computer science.

Remote-controled shopping robot

DranoK — 2008-07-15T18:25:32-05:00

Ok; this is awesome.

Quote:

Robot developer tmsuk has unveiled a remote-control robot that promises a new way to shop from the comfort of home. A prototype of the telerobotic shopper — a modified TMSUK-4 humanoid robot that incorporates a variety of cellphone communications technology — was demonstrated on July 10 at the Izutsuya department store in the city of Kitakyushu, Japan.

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/07/...hopping-robot/

First Day of College

xapexi — 2008-07-15T12:24:12-05:00

Hi, I'd just like to share a poem-type thing that I wrote up yesterday after my first day of College.
If you were wondering why I used the word "competition", its because I go to Art Institute, a design school. So yeah. Enjoy and Please tell me what you think.

Note: I've NEVER done anything like this in my life.

First Day of College. By Daniel Choo AKA APEXi

I woke up, staring at the blank, white, ceiling. It was that time again. I dreadfully pulled myself off the bed and got ready for school.I read the letter my mom wrote me on my desk and was reassured that my parents really cared for me. I get in my car and I start the engine. I sit in the car thinking, if I leave now, this is it. No turning back. I got on the freeway and started to head to school. During the drive there, I started to think about life and how it was passing by so fast, just like the cars that were pacing and passing me by. All of these thoughts stop as I slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car that stopped in front of me abruptly as the morning rush hour traffic built up. I finally arrived at school. I parked my car,turned off the car and sat in the seat motionless again, hoping that this would be a successful and progressive day. As I walked towards the front doors of school, I felt eyes, the eyes of my competition, the competition that I'm going to destroy, laying eyes on me, like I was the prey, when in all honesty, they were the ones soon to be hunted. I kept pressing forward. I walked into class and took a seat, near the front, by the door. People started walking in one by one and taking their seats. There were awkward silences, phones vibrating from people's text message arrivals, clicking and tapping noises on desks around me made by people's fingers, clock ticking as the time moves so honestly slow, I heard vibrations in my ear drums, the sound that was made by vibrations of my ear drums were my own heart beat as the time ticked on, class was now about to be in session, and the teacher walked in, saying "Welcome to the next biggest step of your life."

'Dauma-otoshi' skyscraper demolition

LiQUiD_X — 2008-07-15T04:14:04-05:00

Quote:

Unlike conventional demolition that begins at the top of the building, Kajima’s new method starts at the bottom. As each floor is demolished, the support columns are cut and replaced with giant computer-controlled jacks, which slowly lower the entire building one floor at a time. The process is repeated for each successive floor until the entire building is gone.

Kajima informally calls this the daruma-otoshi method, after the old Japanese game consisting of a daruma doll made of stacked pieces that players knock out one by one without toppling the doll.

Watch:
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Source: http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/07/...er-demolition/

See? I told you mom doesn't like you...

<LCC> — 2008-07-14T21:26:11-05:00

Even in nature, parents play favorites...

Sense this picture makes none, VII

DranoK — 2008-07-14T18:35:02-05:00

God damn Japan is awesome.

Like spiders?

DranoK — 2008-07-12T16:31:08-05:00

Warhammer Online cuts its own balls off

DranoK — 2008-07-11T17:07:09-05:00

It's shocking to me that so few game companies use the business model of releasing finished, complete games that are fun to play. Instead, most game developers seem to follow the release unfinished garbage, promise a miracle patch then fire most of the dev team and whine about how much money you lost model.

It's shocking because I always assumed game developers want to make money. If I'm thirsty and have two liquids in front of me--a glass of water and a glass of antifreeze--I'd almost certainly choose the water every time. I think most people would. At least 90% of them.

Logic, then, suggests that 90% of game publishers would rather release a game that made them rich than fling dung at a dartboard praying the hype will cover development costs. Yet this obviously isn't the case.

http://www.massively.com/2008/07/11/...hammer-online/

Quote:

Mythic Entertainment ... has dropped big news on the Warhammer Online fanbase: major features are being culled from the game in order to make their Fall launch deadline. In short, the capital cities for the Dark Elf, High Elf, Orc, and Dwarf factions will not be in the game at launch. This is an enormous change, seemingly changing much of what we know about the game's core of RvR gameplay.

Additionally, four classes are being removed, deemed to be in a condition unsuitable for launch. ... As the website notes, all of these are melee classes and two of these were intended to be the primary tanking classes for their race. This leaves the Empire and Dark Elf races without a dedicated tanking career, possibly limiting their contributions to end-game PvE content.

Most games are utter crap. The vast majority of these could have actually been good had they been, you know, finished.

Water or anti-freeze. Which do you choose?

It's just astonishing, really. Especially MMORPGs. How they can spend so much money creating their game only to ceremonially disembowel themselves as they approach the final stretch is a concept I simply can't wrap my head around.

I mean, say you're Mythic. Let's pretend you've been working on an MMORPG that millions of people want to play. Let's pretend you even have an MMORPG so hyped that a good chunk of your competition's (WoW) player base is salivating over it. They've been waiting for years. They want it. They want to leave WoW. And let's pretend you have an intelligence on or above the level of your average squirrel and understand that the reason Blizzard's games (including WoW) always succeed is due to their long development cycles and attention to detail and polish.

Now, I present before you two paths: You can have $0 today and $1,000,000 over the next two years, or you can have $25 today (which won't even cover your debt) and $0 over the next two years. Water or anti-freeze. Which do you choose?

Anti-freeze, obviously. I mean, who wouldn't?

Good job, Mythic. Good fucking job.

Riddle thread, I

DranoK — 2008-07-10T18:07:13-05:00

We've had a few threads like this in the past. Most were fun. I'll start the numbering over again (for reasons we'll get into later)

I heard this one today. It's easy, but possibly somewhat new. At least, I hadn't heard it before. (BTW, google is cheating)

If you solve it you get to ask the next one. Original ones are best, but if you're lazy (like me) you can recycle other people's.

Quote:

What has rivers but no water,
forests but no trees,
and cities but no buildings?

I wants one...

DranoK — 2008-07-09T18:20:49-05:00

Do want.

Maybe nobody will notice...

DranoK — 2008-07-08T12:26:25-05:00