Posts Tagged ‘blastoise’

It Gets Weird(er)

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Dumb Yoshi is DUMB and should have read the documentation better. This card (Galaxy MDT GTX570) is basically “one monitor or three/four/five, no twosies for you!” Basically, I need to get my hands on a third monitor, preferably one that matches my secondary (a 22″) if I want to go anywhere. For now, Blastoise gets to be One-Eye McPirateFace and I’ll have to drag Dinah over to make her pick up IM/Twitter watch.

…though, Amazon says 22″ widescreen Samsungs are $150, that’s not TOO bad…
F it, I’ll make Robert get it for me. :P Ha ha ha!

I was planning on going triple monitors sometime, this just wasn’t how I was going to go about it. Oh well. This also forces me to clean up my desk hardcore (and soon), I’ve got soooo much junk out here. >_>;

Oh, I forgot to mention this but I investigated Blastoise’s non-working frontside USB ports… turns out I’d put the header into the Firewire port. OOPS. Now that that’s fixed, that’s opened up, like… 3 more USB ports. Rock!

It Gets Weird

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

One video card swap later and Blastoise is back… mostly. I didn’t change out one of the DVI adapter-things for the one that came with the card, so while Blastoise knows the secondary monitor is there he can’t see through it, so he’s still “blind” out of one eye. But at least the primary monitor works for now, and I’ll do the adapter swap tomorrow since I don’t have enough natural side-lighting to do it now. (Can’t use artificial lighting because the way his interior’s painted sucks up light like crazy. Doesn’t matter if I crank up my overhead and use my headlight. Boo!)

Whatever the case, as soon as he’s fully back in action… HOPEFULLY Mass Effect doesn’t cause his card to commit suicide again. >_>; (Or if it does, it’d better be within a month since it’d fall under the warranty time frame.)

I think my subconscious got bent or something. If I stay asleep long enough to dream for a good while, said dream eventually takes a turn for logic to try and break itself no matter how much I try to set it straight.

The constant in all of the dreams I can remember is that they all take place within a large but confined space– an office building or a house of some sort, broken up into smaller compartments and halls. And I don’t really have any interaction with anyone I know in depth… usually some kind of passing acquaintance or even someone I saw on TV or a podcast.

The first time, I was passing through some large building (airport lobby/hotel?) and I stop at a panel to log in… except the computer rejects my name as a copyright violation. “The name Yoshi Ayarane is property of S. Miyamoto. Please enter a different name.” WTF? Even my own dream world thinks I’m the Nintendo character? Still, I keep trying to log in and it says that I am either trying to pose as that Yoshi, or that my name doesn’t exist, or some other kind of system error. All in all, whatever I’m trying to log into is insistent that I do not exist in the system, that I may have committed some kind of error in asserting my identity. Yet somehow I know I can end everything by waking up, and that it’s probably best to wake up now and try again in what would presumably be a fresh instance.

…which is good because ohgod my nose was stuffed to hell and I needed to get up and walk around to clear it. At 5am.

Today’s was even weirder. This time I’m in the “TWiT Infinity House,” a (fictional, of course) new building that King Leo either bought or commissioned for show guests to stay in if they’re coming from out of town. For some reason, it’s got old Reconstruction-era diaries and books on back-lit corner shelves and… you know, country-barn trinkets like painted horses and dolls. I don’t get it, either. And then I find out why it’s called the “Infinity House” because the house literally NEVER ENDS– there is no absolute limit to the X or Z axis (the building is single-level) and it keeps spawning rooms and hallways forever and ever, and the farther one deviates from the entry at the north-center, the less gravity, to the point where you’re floating if you jump even the slightest.

I wander a bit too far out, enough to where I’m floating in the rooms because gravity no longer has influence… only to be pulled out even more by some other kind of force. Once I try to go back, that pull becomes even greater to compensate, like it wants to keep me from returning. This isn’t right. But I can’t fight it… I just don’t have the means to. All I can do to save myself is to wake up and terminate that instance.

What is it with logic and reason and physics trying to break itself and take me with it?

I think I would prefer it if my dreams went back to trying to convince me I’m really a lesbian. I used to get those a lot. (It probably has something to do with my voice and interests and how nerdy I am!) At least they don’t involve the universe trying to collapse itself and consume me in the fallout.

Nearly 4 days out from Yoshi Day, doods. Uhm… is that a skill level or talent point level? I can’t remember these days. What patch are we on again? :P

Blind Turtle-bot

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Who’s got two thumbs and gets to replace Blastoise’s video card already? This dood!

I was on Blastoise earlier and decided to play some more Mass Effect 1 (since I had to restart as my old saves were on old Blastoise). I get to the Citadel to do its clusterfwegh of side missions, and… o hi, BSOD! Well, in this case it’s more like “go directly to black, do not pass go or collect $200, just press the damn reset button.”

Big deal. Even the best machines burps now and then. Pick yourself up and try again! (Also auto-save FTW.)

I get a little farther, into Chora’s Den and… ow, geez, another BSOD. This is starting to get a little scary. True, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated my video drivers… but then again I’d just built Blastoise in December, so it’s not like that should affect things either because he was just fine before today! I made a note to look into that later, I just wanted to get this Citadel crap done so I can go get Liara. (VA nerdery: her VA is Lightning! :D)

I’m just about to wrap up the last side mission and during the chatter… oh wow, total meltdown. Blastoise freezes up mid-syllable and won’t visibly reboot properly even after hitting the reset button or even doing a hard reboot. I let him sit for a few and try again while I go get another Pepsi, and I hear the Windows startup sounds. Oh good, he recovered, right?

Noooope. It’s, like… the keyboard and tablet LEDs flash like normal, and his webcam orients itself like normal… but the monitors aren’t having any of this nonsense. Even after checking the monitor connections, it’s still a no-go. I’m guessing Blastoise’s card went bad in such a way to kill video export but not enough to completely brick itself (or else I don’t think Windows could even proceed, heh). Whatever the case, if I can’t see anything, it’s no good. I don’t have any spare cards to throw in as a temporary measure, either (remember, the one in his old body is impossible to extract, I must have cemented it in or something), so I get to loot a new card.

If you forgot from the previous “let’s rebuild Blastoise” posts in November/December, he ended up using the N560GTX (I actually bought it through NewEgg since Amazon was sold out at the time). I’m wondering if I should just get the same card again or if another kickass mid-range go-to card has cropped up since. I would like to stay nVidia, and putting a soft cap @ $300.

Bleh. I was hoping not to spend major coin for awhile (since I did get mother her iPad and I still need to get new glasses) but, well, poop happens. :\ Looks like this will be my Yoshi Day loot (in place of Tales of Graces f and another mega-sized Angry Birds plush), haha. That aside, I’m only mildly pissed that there’s no Mac version of Mass Effect so I can at least continue through Dinah. :P

And, of course, it’s when Blastoise goes down that I really want to paint. Boo!

Speaking of Angry Birds… dude, Angry Birds Space kicks ass. I got it on Dinah– you really do benefit from having more screen space here compared to the other variants. No wonder Rovio partnered with Samsung for this one (to pimp out the phone version of the Galaxy Note).

Also, I swear that the Space version of Red Bird looks like Kamina from Gurren Lagann. “Who the squawk do you think I am?!” or something. :D

(Instant Ramen LIVE) Hummer Hydro Pump Attack!

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

The best kind of ramen is the kind that’s made fresh, just for you! Instant Ramen LIVE!
For those who were unable to make tonight’s yet-again-impromptu livestream, the time-lapsed YouTube edition:

By gosh, I think I’ve found the magic combination for converting from Justin.tv autoarchive into a format that won’t get artifacted too badly on YouTube. H.264, WHY haven’t I used you sooner? XD It exports hella fast into a nice, small little thing that uploads to YouTube in about 10 minutes.

What do you doods think, anyway? Is time-compressing the streams into 10-minute fun-size versions awesomesauce, or do you prefer watching at the original speed? (Because I can easily toss the stitched-but-otherwise-unaltered versions on my server if you wanted to loot those.)

Also had quite a few doods in the audience/chat room this time, just some passers-by who were curious about the software and thought this was fan art. XD

In any case, I’ma try to assemble the actual wallpapers before raid time. As for what’s next… uh… oh yeah, something for NSFW since the next episode is TRIPLE COMPLETE BIRTHDAY (one of the hosts, a frequent guest and one of the TWiT tech director doods).

(Instant Ramen LIVE) Turtle on a Stick

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

What? Another time-lapse release of the last Instant Ramen LIVE broadcast? Okay!

We’re… getting there as far as video quality goes. But I get the feeling that it’s not going to change much if I go past 1mb/s, since it appears the other half of the problem is something that can’t be fixed (video compression hates line art… which is what this IS, and is less glaring when I add moar color). But now I’ve gotten a means of speedily extracting, polishing and punting to YouTube. :D

Now it’s just a matter of getting more doods to show up and watch, so I can open up Skype for what would ideally be a 3-way+ sass commentary. Yeah, I should be doing these streams much earlier in the evening.

The next part (Blastoise dual-wielding the giant Hydro Pump cannons) will be tomorrow tonight.