Geekery – Page 23

Minecraft Update II

I guess everyone who gets sucked into the trap of Minecraft ends up imagining ways to improve the game. I am of course no exception and in the hours I’ve whiled away working on my Big Project™ (or getting pushed into lava streams by skeletons) I’ve come up with a number of them – all but one of which are actually slated for the next update (great minds obviously think alike…).

My one, original idea? Lodestones!

The recipe for a lodestone is…
C = Compass
R = Redstone Dust
? = Either a Diamond, an Iron Ingot, a Gold Ingot, a piece of Coal, a unit of Lapis Lazuli Dye, an Emerald (once launched) or another pile of Redstone Dust

	?
R	C	R
	R

So what the heck does a lodestone do? Simple. If you’re within 20 blocks (or maybe 15 blocks, or 10 blocks, or whatever) of ore for the particular mineral it was made with, it starts glowing and chiming.

It doesn’t tell you what direction the ore is in – you have to figure that out by moving back and forwards until it stops reacting – it just tells you the ore is nearby. It’s up to you to find it and dig it out.

So that’s my idea. You listening Notch? 😉

Minecraft Update

For the next part of my Minecraft project I’m going to need to breed and slaughter 229 cows, craft 545 wooden planks, harvest 687 sugar canes, mine 640 blocks of sand and 81 blocks of cobblestone and burn 10 units of coal.

For the first floor.

Of about one tenth of the entire project.

At least I already have the diamonds and obsidian I need…

Pathetic Cave Adventure

Yeah, that’s the opening of Zork. Deal with it.

One of these days I’m going to program a text adventure game titled Pathetic Cave Adventure. It starts…

West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

If you open the mailbox, you get arrested for mail fraud and the game ends. If you try and open the boarded front door, you get arrested for breaking and entering and the game ends. If you try to walk anywhere you get arrested for trespassing and the game ends. If you do nothing for more than a few rounds you get arrested for loitering and the game ends

Denys, Why U No Post?

Damn you Notch!

On Sunday Ryan did a very evil thing. He showed me Minecraft.

I have strenuously been avoiding even seeing Minecraft ever since it came out, on the assumption that I would become instantly hooked. As it turns out, I was completely right.

Expect a more regular posting schedule once I’ve mined and crafted myself into exhaustion 🙂

A Black Spot on the Sun

Bloody clouds!!

So, my plans to observe the transit of Venus were stymied by a massive slab of overcast that rolled in over the city just before sunrise. Justin and I had been intending to take my telescope up to Kings Park to watch, but there wasn’t much point – we headed over to Maylands anyway and had breakfast at Milkd.

I ended up alternating between the Mount Wilson and Mauna Kea video feeds, so at least I saw it, if not exactly with my own eyes.

As Justin said, roll on the 2016 transit of Mercury!

Behold the Majesty of The Emperor’s Jaws!

Rather than spend my weekend doing anything constructive, I’ve wasted several hours on another bit of stupid 40k related javascripting – this time a random Space Marine Chapter name generator. This was inspired by a mention on 40k Radio of one that used to exist on the Games Workshop site, but was apparently taken down after it spat out the suggestion “Flesh Swords”.

My one can theoretically come up with “Flesh Swords”, but I haven’t seen it yet. It has come up with some quite entertaining ones though, such as the Noise Punishers (the Chapter you call when the Tau next door are having a party at 2:00am), the Reclaimers of Hammers (for when the Necrons down the street won’t give back your tools), the Mantis Exsanguinators (for problems in the garden), the Supplicators of Angron (I don’t think they got very far), the oddly emphatic Tiger Tigers, and my absolute favorite (so far) the Hand Gauntlets. It can also however produce perfectly sane suggestions such as the Lunar Wardens or the Black Purgators, so it may have some value.

I’ve also rigged up a sun projector for my telescope out of a coat hanger, a plastic plate, the cap from a deodorant can, some wire and some duct tape, in anticipation of the Transit of Venus on Wednesday. I’m taking the day off work and the plan is to head up to Kings Park to observe. They’re predicting clouds, but I live in hope.

Oh, and I also made soup. Hooray!

Reading the Runes

Lego is releasing models for the Lord of the Rings. This is a combination of two of my favourite things, and is hence awesome! 🙂

There’s one thing that’s bothering me though. One of the panels in the Mines of Moria set is decorated with text written in the cirth…

Cool, no? Except that I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s meant to say.

If my interpretation is correct, it appears to read ndigwbndio pdy eobo.

I have no idea what this means.

So, am I using the wrong mode? Is it written in Khuzdul, or Sindarin? Or maybe Maori or Danish? Or is it just decorative gibberish? I have absolutely no idea, and it’s going to drive me nuts until I figure it out.

Later: Bah! It’s not the Cirth, it’s standard Futhark and says “Diordie was here”. Bastards! ;D

Synesthesia

Standards compliant HTML code written in a text editor by someone who knows what they’re doing sounds like this.

HTML code produced by a WYSIWYG editor sounds like this.

HTML code produced by pasting Microsoft Word content into a WYSIWYG editor sounds like this.

Thank you! Come again!

Warblings of a Diseased Brain

Last week I was sitting at the Morley bus station (as you do), and – not having anything to read while waiting for my bus – my brain was wandering (as it does) down highways and byways of the strange, mysterious and downright stupid.

By far the most stupid of these trackways was speculation on what would happen if Games Workshop signed a promotional deal with A Large, Unnamed Fast Food Company™ (ALUFFC™ for short) and started handing out snap together Space Marine models along with burgers.

Think about the possibilities! All the overweight nerd children who could be lured into the hobby by a single model with some cheap chapter stickers and a collectable Primarch information card! All the burgers that would be bought by fanatical GW fans desperate to get their hands on the exclusive burger-deal-only Space Marine model! The money would just roll in on both sides!

But best of all, ALUFFC™ could launch up to 21 new meal deals based on the Emperor and his Primarchs! For instance…

The Emperor: An oversized burger with the lot – guaranteed to keep you immobile on the “Golden Throne” for what seems like millenia.
The Guilliman: ‘Blue’ beef with extra cheese.
The Fulgrim: Wagyu beef, Italian lettuce, brie and artisanal hand cut fries.
The Angron: Three beef patties, spicy pickles and ‘extreme’ chilli sauce.
The Sanguinius: Rare beef with a side of wings.
The Perturabo: A pretty standard burger, but you have to eat your way through a massive breastwork of fries to get to it.
The Mortarion: Extra onions, limberger cheese, garlic sauce and underdone meat (for the thrillseeker not afraid of intestinal parasites).
The Horus: Flame grilled beef on a wholemeal bun with spicy ‘heresy’ sauce.
The Alpharius: You never know what they’ll serve you, but there’s two of it.

The possibilities are endless!

(I’ll shut up now ;))

Nextwave

Finally got around to reading Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. over the weekend. My opinion? One of the funniest things I’ve read in ages.

For those unfamiliar, Nextwave is Warren Ellis’s deconstruction of modern super hero comics. He describes it himself thusly…

“It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode.”

He forgets to add that it’s freaking hilarious.

Having read something freaking hilarious it’s very tempting to expound on the bits that were particularly freaking hilarious. I’m not going to do that, since not encountering them in context would spoil the jokes. But I will mention the following things…

Purple underpants
Rocket Submarines
The French
Tabby’s Mindlessness
Letters that don’t stand for things
The big bad’s intestinal problems
The entire existence of the Captain

Track it down and read it people. You won’t be disappointed.

PS: The book managed to inflict a bit of a crush on Tabby on me. There’s something about an insanely stupid woman that makes me go all masculine and protective – which is ridiculous because I’d most likely want to throttle myself after spending ten minutes with one 🙂