[091215]

Well, J got his update in more or less on time, so I suppose I should follow suit. I find it interesting that J took the approach that he did… because I’m actually doing a painting right now, and I think we started heading down the same path at the same time. At any rate, mine’s taking forever as well, so maybe next week.

I feel like I’d rather be working on said illustration, than writing this entry, but I feel obliged to write a little bit after not having written shit for the past three weeks. I should probably go on with the codification of the BKS stuff, but I think I’ll leave that for those times where I don’t have anything else to say.

About a week ago, in a spontaneous burst of OCD, I decided to redo the wiring in my room. It’s kind of hard to explain exactly how things changed here without some sort of diagram (that I don’t feel like drawing), but it’s a ton more symmetric now (what, I reorganized just for that? Of course!) and I can move my large, custom table without disconnecting a ton of shit (just one twist tie and one plug now). So yeah. It’s better. I promise (myself).

So I don’t get much use out of that nice Samsung display I mentioned about picking up in d253 in my dorm, and it occurred to me that it would make much more sense to have it as my main monitor at home, attached to Motoko. It’s matte, it’s bigger than my Sony, it’s got a higher resolution, it’s 4:3 and it rotates. I can’t really ask for much more from a display – it pushes more pixels than my dad’s 22″ Dell monitors.

And since I’m going to be home for 2 out of 3 holiday weeks, I might as well keep my Sony monitor around for the time being… and get some proper dual-screen action.

It occurred to me that I love to do these kind of progression comparisons with like art and computers and whatnot, but I’d never done it with my room computer setup before, so I thought I’d give it a go. I dug around in my archives and I actually found at least one picture for every year between now and 2006 – maybe 2005. It’s kind of interesting (at least for me) to see.

So this is my “official” picture for 2009, since it’s more in the middle of the year (and I think most of the others are kind of in the middle of their years). Really, the only difference between this and now are the the multiple monitors and the wiring. Colette and Motoko are pretty much the same, as are the rest of the fleet.

Pushing back to early 2008 (yeah, I know it says 2007; my camera was behind a year for about a year – I was just too lazy to reset it), and things are fairly drastically different. Motoko’s more or less “new” at this time, and I don’t have my TC4200 yet, nor my table, nor my Model M. That Dell tower Flonne is ten years old this year and still getting fairly consistent use in my dad’s office, while Colette is actually running “open bench” to the right, out of the picture.

2007 is so damn long ago that the boxes on the shelves on the right aren’t even arranged the same way. This must be like the earlier half of 2007, as I still have the clear acrylic tower (that I was going to try to mod into a display case) under a cloth on the side. I still have that chunkyass Maxtor external HDD and the Plextor external ODD, which I felt like I sold oh so long ago now.

2006 and I’m still in high school, and I still have my Lego layout set up. I was using the old CpT C as a secondary machine down here when one of the hinges broke, and not being familiar with eBay and all, I wasn’t equipped to fix it. That’s why I’ve got that clunkyass CRT on the table, probably hooked up to the old Dell tower, and a ton of chunkyass periphery to go with it. I bet I actually played Tales of the Abyss on this setup… it may have already been rolled over from 2005.

At this point I kind of run out of pictures for which I know the date on which they were taken. There are pictures, but they’re considered to beof my Lego, and not of the room, so it’s a bit harder to deduce what’s going on.

Here you can just make out the computer on the left, and maybe a couple small details on the room if you squint… This and this show a slightly earlier layout – this must actually be the first layout I set up in the room – it’s actually dated (or at least, implied to be dated) late 2004! The first picture here actually seems to be a “lost” layout – one that I don’t seem to have any pictures of.

What? I can push back further? I can push back to when none of the current furniture existed? Oh, yes, I can. These are actually shots of this room from when I first moved down (holy shit, more than five years ago now!) and started sifting through the mess that was my Lego collection at the time. This was also when I suddenly because a neat-freak and started doing my work early as well. What really triggered this shift, I don’t really know, but we’re going OT; there’s one more set of pictures here, and it’s of the room in which I lived with my brother before NW started.

It’s pretty much a wreck.

Ok, done for today.

Click for enlarged version

[12/14/2009] Finals week~ I only have two this year, but they’re pretty brutal. The first one was kinda eh, and the one on Wednesday …

Let’s just say it’s thermodynamics, and leave it at that, k?

Anyway, here’s another coloring experiment. It’s a very painterly style (I was advised by one of my friends; her art style comes through a bit here), with a lot of color variation, etc.

I’m beginning to think that painterly stuff doesn’t suit me. My drawing style’s kind of simple anyway, so trying to use this sort of style is a bit … pretentious? I think I’ll try going all the way in the other direction (total cel-shading style) as another experiment …

This post was going to be accompanied by a parody of Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”, but finals intervened. Sorry!

[091207]

The following entry was written on November 18th, originally intended for the next week’s update. It is incomplete.

This week’s update is a further codification of BKS technologies, etc. J and I were talking about writing all this stuff down this time around, and I figured my entries (while not totally conveniently accessible) would be a great vehicle for this, especially for those weeks where I don’t have anything else to say. This week would be one of those.

So I’d first like to make a couple of corrections to my entry of d259.

First, is the matter of hyperspace travel. Hyperspace is an parallel dimension “under” the space-time “plane” of the “real” world, and there are different levels of hyperspace into which one can warp. With every subsequent lower level, you can go quadratically faster, but it takes a quartically larger amount of energy to get there. Once you get into hyperspace, it doesn’t take much energy to stay there, so hyperspace travel is really limited by the instantaneous amount of energy you can dump into the hyperdrive at the time of a “jump”. The amount of energy needed for a jump also depends on the mass of the object you’re pushing into HS, but mass only factors linearly.

HS0 is fairly easy to get into, and you can get about one lightyear to the day with regard to movement. This is good for moving really massive objects through HS, like… planets. HS1 gets 10 lightyears to the day, and is still fairly attainable. This is the most commonly used HS level; it takes a fair amount of energy to get there, but I could get from earth to Sirius in less than a day. HS2 is attainable by old BKS ships with higher-order reactors and a number of select craft with a high enough power to mass ratios. Messenger ships (as you can’t put messages through HS) use HS2, but even at 100 lightyears to the day, it’ll take about three years to cross the galaxy.

HS3 has been entered, but only by a handful of ships in all of BKS/CL history.

Ok, so that’s hyperspace. Now moving onto anti-gravity.

So with of hyperspace, we can start to explain some of the bigger feats of the BKS era. The old BKS capital comprised six planets held together, and this suggests that these worlds had to be moved into place – often from far away – hyperspatial distances away. With enough high-order reactors on a world, and a ship (or two) built specifically to dump huge amounts of energy into a hyperdrive (J calls it the Hand of God), you could move a world into HS0 (1 lightyear to the day) and keep it there. But this still makes it hard enough to do this such that you can’t do it on a day to day basis. On the flip side, HoG could also get itself into HS3 – 100 days across the galaxy.

[12/6/2009] Hello everyone, sorry for the many weeks without updates. It’s been a hectic month, with multiple projects (including one group project that I had to do all by myself). I hope to have something for you soon; In the meantime, please enjoy the ghost of drowned J, which is exactly how I’ve been feeling. *wheeeew*.