Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Change the name carousel to "People Engaged in Twirly Amusement" or PETA for short and have the ride cars as crying Karen faces.

man, and some of those truly old classic Carousels at a few key parks on the East Coast/Midwest have hand carved and painted animals that date back over a century. A couple even still have steam-powered calliopes, and there's a limited handful of technicians who even know how to repair and maintain them any more (have a friend in the pipe organ repair business who has knowledge of them, but he says there's 2 left in the US he'd trust). Those classic ones are priceless living art, not something hidden behind a rope at a museum, and they're freaking gorgeous to me.

Palworld found it!

<Rear> <Full attack!!!>

Dang... I had started my journey to try to translate Sakura Tsuushin from japanese to english via Google tradutor, and it was a huge lot of work.

Around 2 hours and I had only half of one chapter done. Its because it takes a lot of re-reading to see if Im actually understanding whats going on. Japanese sounds more like there is a holistic meaning in the writing than the translation of separated parts.

Well, after around 2h of searching and searching to see if I had finally understood what was going on, I stumbled upon a spanish translation of ST... Till the last chapter.

eh... I mean, now there is really no point trying to translate from japanese to english. I could as well simply read the spanish version and get a closure to this long term series.

But I was super unlucky that the exact chapter I decided to start was one of the most complicated one so far. At this point, the author already made the story a fulltime hentai. Like last volumes there was only stories about sex. But the one I decided to translate there was some sort of maturing for the MC, and things were more subtle than I expected.

Good thing i found the spanish version right in the first day. Translating on my own would surely take months to complete the missing 5 volumes of it

Longer video showing three really big things- The Americans have spent almost the entire past month in just match racing setups between their two AC40s, keeping everything in-house that is allowed. The Swiss are focusing almost entirely on their big boat program, which makes sense considering they weren't competing in 2021 and have less experience.

But The French....are starting to legitimately scare the hell outta me. They've partnered with Alpine Racing and now have access to all their datapoint analysis software and other design tech aspects of a professional race team, yet they're keeping their sailors focused on proper training and letting the engineering aspects operate in the background. Considering how young the team is regarding experience, its really shocking to see such focus.

Italy looks like a wild stallion out there. They've got some serious speed...now for them to learn how to control it. They look a bit like The Americans did in 2021, and that campaign ended in a horrific crash due to the inability to control their speed.

And The Brits..../sigh. Is there any more perennial loser than them and The America's Cup? ;) Sorry guys, keep throwing money at campaigns, have the most dominant single sailor of the past 50 years heading your team....you're still slow and its obvious even without the analytics.

While we're on sailing, here is a fun cruising memory.



A few years back we were picking up our second boat, I had two folks with me and rather than run the ditch down like we usually did, we opted to go offshore and just run through the night with watches. It was slow going because the bottom was fouled and the wind was coming from the wrong direction or was totally dead, so "we" decided to run a notoriously sketchy inlet....at night. I was opposed to the idea but the other two swore they had run it countless times and knew it like the back of their hand. I didn't believe them, so I called our local Sea Tow office and asked for local advice, which is a good thing I did because there were shifting shoals and the original plan would've had us aground with an incoming tide (very dangerous). He also warned us there were unlit buoys, which are also dangerous and seem 50 times bigger at night. I heavily pushed to just heave to off the inlet and wait until morning but got overruled.

We started going and some *** decided to start blasting us with a laser pointer which half blinded me until the dumbshit stopped. We ran the inlet per Sea Tow instructions/info and it went fine, the inlet dumps out into a large sound area where the ICW run. A trick with the ICW: peoples docks are usually close to the channel. The markers weren't lit up and we were running per suggestions of someone else on board who claims they knew it. Spoiler: they didn't.

I kept looking at where peoples docks were and we were going the opposite direction. I pulled the throttle back and checked our GPS, we were on top of a huge shoal. I was marking our charts as we went along and double checked the chart, shoal. I mentioned it three times to him: "No, we aren't". The third time he said it, a second later, the boat came to a screeching halt, the prop lifted out of the water (an impressive feat for a 30ft, 10k pound displacement full keel cruising boat) and the person sleeping down below went flying out of his bunk and hit his head on a bulkhead. We hit the shoal I had been insisting we were sitting on for the last several minutes.



That light on the horizon above? That's where we were supposed to be and where I had insisted the channel was (and where it actually was).

I shut the diesel off to avoid ingesting debris and started to call our towing insurer (Sea Tow or Towboat US, I forget which), he stopped me and said "nah we can sail off it". I told him to more or less *** off and called them anyway since I knew it'd be an hour or two before they got there and it was already 1 am. His idea was to raise the main sail to heel the boat over to reduce its draft. I reluctantly agreed and, well, now we were stuck heeled over.

Finally, about 3am they showed up and towed us off in dramatic fashion (rig was shaking). It was about 4a by the time we got to the marina.

The rest of the trip was uneventful albeit a bit annoying having to motor due to the lack of wind.



This is when I learned to trust my own judgement and decision making and be confident enough to exert myself with others on board.

Good god, that is way too close to the 1st time I felt I one-upped my Dad on our boat- he always said I had to prove 1st as a navigator before being allowed at the helm...and Dad slamming in to a submerged sand bar that had been known of since HIS father finally opened the door for me to get some respect!

Gotta say its really hard to brag while getting towed back in, though. ;)

Ruh roh.

Okay so, Star Trek Online does these "event campaigns" every year; throughout the year, completing events (which have their own individual rewards) gives you points towards the overall campaign, and if you get enough you get a bonus reward. This reward has beeen a choice between 1 gamble-box ship, 2 100% off store ship coupons, and a ton of gamble-box currency (which has it's own store full of unique ships and costume options).
It's been really good, and allows even F2P players to get whatever ships they want.

This year the reward is no longer a choice; you just get all 3 options at once. That's awesome.
But why the change? Why so generous? I am mildly concerned. >_>; <_<;

Finally finished with Fire Emblem Engage. weird. I have my complaints, but at the end of the day, it's fire emblem, it's fun, I enjoyed it. Now what though? Classic gamer moment or something.

I would never imagine finishing the reading of a manga would make me that happy but now I finally read Sakura Tsuushin because of that colombian scanlation group.

Im really grateful to them.

I think it was more than 10 years wait to see the closure of this story.

So happy

I think next I want Those Who Hunt Elves, another serie dropped long ago, but that I first saw in the same anime channel I had in my childhood.

Or Imouto, from the same author of Yume de Aetera, another mange I simply love.

For me, it would be Palworld.

Otherwise either I would try Star Ocean 3, or Shin Megami Tensei

Ugh... I had 2h download yeaterday, and now I have more 19GB to download?

dafuq

Star Ocean 3 best of the series.

Remember when tekken was simple and you could finish the game in norma and hard difficulty just by spamming squares and triangles.

spent all day dropping managed democracy on a bunch of bugs, good times

Too cool, altho apparently the cloud released with mixed reviews. Expensive but probably gonna skyrocket in price later. The FF9 line is insane atm, Freya/Beatrix sold for 660 on ebay. These are really light on accessories/changable parts for the price tho. And no cig for Cid

https://x.com/HollowRiku/status/1755276974644236470

Knew we'd see things like this

Official music video for Freedom is out. Some spoilers for the film, but not as many as I expected.

Film is supposed to be hitting Thailand this week, so hoping for a camrip or a leak soon since there's still no accouncement of an NA/EU release. (y'A')y

EDIT:
New Garo! Lots of action to make up for last week's more character-focused episode.

Wraps up the first part of Souma's arc, and sets up where things are going from here. Can't wait to see more. Q('w'Q)

Did you kill them all???

Thats too cruel, you enemy of humanity!

Take off the rosecolored nostalgia glasses, early tekkens were peak arcade times, the AI straight up read your inputs and let the random number generator decide if you hit or miss with the odds heavily against you on later stages.

I get what you mean, but it always feels like this when you pick up a new fighting game till you find that one loop hole in the AI. In fighting games AI is just the tutorial anyway, PVP is the real test.
Or at least it used to be, if you want to win by mashing triangles and squares buy a DLC character...

I remember when i tried to get into KoF early games.

I have always loved KoF series, but i was never apt to play fighting games: i can totally understand the basic strategies in a fight, but i simply dont have enough finger speed and precision to pull out moves and combos. Im also poor to figure hit boxes and frames.

And playing at harder stages, mistyping a command means opening a huge gap in my defense that the AI will never leave alone, and i will always be punished for it.

I actually spent like a solid month trying to improve it. I even bought an arcade joystick, played against static opponent to improve my fingers speed and precision, but i feel like my progress was stagnant. I wasnt better from 1 month ago, all my special moves were unreliable, and i always resorted to basic moves to achieve any win. Also, i never even once beat the KoF94.

I had to give up at some point. As much as i like fighting game, trying to get better at it seemed like pointless for my actual results

Fighting game has always been in a kinda weird position in PVP focused genre tbh. It is very tough to get really really good, and until you hit that high level of playing a random kid spamming square with zero idea what is going on can often beat someone who spent some time to learn but haven't reach top end.

Essentially the skill improvement curve v.s the result that you see is not linear.

I think this may be one of the reason why this genre is less popular than 90s era tbh. As casual players who spent some time to learn but don't feel like they improve that much they leave and play a different genre instead, then the community gets smaller and more niche....

street fighter 6 and tekken 8 both have modern/simplified control options as well as the traditional ones. i think fighting game devs are starting to cater a lot more to casual players than before, hoping to reverse that popularity problem. we'll see if it works.

i still love watching high level competitive play in fighting games more than any other esport genre, but that's largely because i grew up in arcades playing street fighter and kof.

It's cause the strategies and mindgames that come into play at a medium to high skill level assume that the opponent is aware of certain mechanics and knows the frame data or is at least intuitively good at guessing when he has frame advantage.

You can't play chess vs a button masher, you have to play checkers.

I feel your pain, great series but considered to be one of the most difficult fighting games.

Its carnival here, and there is a lot of ***-maker machines exposed in the street.

The DP input literally gives me blisters, so I'm thankful for the new "Modern" control schemes. I also kinda like the idea of being able to focus more on learning a game's mechanics over input execution.

Today I spent some time playing Palworld

Here Im.

Do you like that Panta, Vyre-kun?