Warlords 2

I really enjoyed the computer game, warlords 2, published by SSG in 1993. It is a turn based strategy game in which you control fantasy armies and try and take over the game map from 7 computer opponents. I found out that it is available again as a free download from Best Old Games. It is a dos game but there is an emulator, dosbox, with versions that run under Windows, Linux and macOS. What a time waster, but I am happy to relive the experience. 

Manbroidery

I started embroidering when my daughter (then aged 10) expressed an interest. I am the hobby guy in our family. My daughter got bored with it quite quickly but I ended up interested. It is a fun way to personalize your clothing at little expense. If you look at all traditional embroidery patterns, they tend to have a chick feel: hearts, flowers, feel-good sayings, etc. OK, I can do hearts and flowers, but I also like geometric patterns, dragons, skulls, and sarcasm. The latter I have dubbed as "manbroidery". Here is an example below, that I made for my host in Michigan. He is the chair of the department here, and "loves" to hear about everyone's problems. This was a warm-up project for a wedding present I am working on.

Michigan Cider

I like (hard) cider, although my real love is gin. I tried a new kind, Uncle John's, a local Michigan brand. It is a typical dry cider very much like Strongbow. I also bought another bottle of JK's Orchard Gate Gold Scrumpy, which has to be the best I have ever had. At $8US a bottle (ouch!), I won't be having too many of them. Another favourite of mine is Stella Artois cidre, although I have never seen it sold in North America.

First Apple device failure

I switched to Apple devices about seven years ago. I have apple computers at home and at work, an MacBook Air laptop for travelling and presenting material in lectures, an iPhone, an old iPod that connects my digital media to our old stereo system at home, the old TV downstairs and my alarm clock, and now an iPad (mostly for reading comics on the bus). I may be stuck since I have invested in iTunes media. I do enjoy the transparent synching of my contacts and calendars through the Apple cloud, although I gather that the same thing is possible with google apps on android devices. Dropbox is fantastic to be able to seamlessly work on things in different locations and on different devices.

I have never had an Apple device fail on me until last week. My iPhone 5 (one of my more recent devices) died here in Michigan and needed a new battery. Replacing that seems to have fixed it up. Like all people of my generation, I grew up without cell phones. However, I have recently become quite dependent on them for social contact and directions. I rely especially on it when I am travelling. Most of my contact to home is by e-mail and Skype, but there are also quick things I run by my family and friends by text and I phone my old father once a week to see how he and his wife are doing.

Revisiting the Tekkit Classic modpack for Minecraft

I went back to the first Minecraft modpack I ever tried, now called Tekkit Classic. It is no longer being updated but it is maintained and has a dedicated wiki:

http://tekkitclassic.wikia.com/wiki/The_Tekkit_Wiki

It is based on an older version of Minecraft in which pigs and chickens eat wheat, cocoa beans don't grow, and there is no Wither. It is interesting to see how many things have changed in vanilla Minecraft and its mods in just a couple of years. Tekkit Classic is dominated by two mods: Equivalent Exchange 2 and Industrial Craft 2. It always bothered me that EE2 allows mass creation of matter, much different than the idea of that name from the manga, Fullmetal Alchemist. However, I got over the urge to "fix" that mod or this pack in general. You can make increasing amounts of matter with energy collectors which can be changed into any other kind of matter with an energy condenser. My small collector "flower" is shown below:

I got early matter for condensing from pumpkins, just as I did when I first played this pack. Later on (long after I needed it) I built a system that converted oil from an oil well. This is a strategy that would have been very helpful mid-game. If you want to make even faster progress, you can use the well documented strategy of blaze rod maceration, using some of the matter generated to make redstone to directly power the macerator. My setup is shown below, in my gold and ruby block room: 

Here is one of the places I used item automation with the Redpower 2 mod. That mod is not maintained in current versions of Minecraft, unfortunately. There is not a lot of decorative variety in this pack compared to recent ones, but I built a tower home as usual with some microblock accents and later a mountaintop tower for decoration. I used black and red matter blocks as an ostentatious show of wealth.

I did a few new things this time in addition to the macerator blaze rod system. I built a cobblestone generator for matter - again, long after I needed it. I made a teleporter system from my base to the mountain fortress powered by redstone from an energy collector/condenser system. I really tried to finally get into the IC2 crop system but it still seemed way to finicky for me. I tried, and failed, to use combustion engines without them exploding but found water strainers to be quite useful for smaller power systems. If I were going to "fix" anything in this modpack, it would be to allow combustion engines to run without water without exploding. Also, I have always been annoyed by the wrench mechanics in IC2, so I would make Buildcraft wrenches compatible with IC2 machines and lossless. 

Those few criticisms aside, this is still a very fun pack. If you have never tried it, I recommend that you do. The reward for building up all that matter creation machinery is some really fantastically powered end game items in EE2. You can fly, are basically invincible, can kill all the hostiles with one hit, and can mine huge areas with a single click. Of course at this stage, you don't need to mine anything and, in the nature of these things, once you have attained these items, you are basically done with that world. 

Best movie theatre

When I stay in East Lansing I try and go as often as I can to the movies. The theatre, Studio C! In nearby Okemos is easy to get to by bus or bike. It has very nice seats and there is a higher tier of even nicer seats where they come and take your food and drink orders. You can get alcoholic drinks, although after the cocktails my friends make, they seem weak and tasteless. Beer would be the way to go, but it often doesn't agree with me now. This year, I have seen Ex Machina (better than I thought it would be) and the new Avengers movie.  Rounding out my four weeks will be Mad Max and (unless something better appears) Tomorrowland. In suburban/rural Michigan, they do no get any alternative or foreign films...

East Lansing Art Festival

The East Lansing Art Festival was last weekend. I am quite happy when my annual research trip to Michigan State University coincides with the fair, as it did this year. Stalls are set up on the side streets of East Lansing centre. On the North side of the main street (East Grand River Ave) are the high class artists and on the South the more mundane. Of course, there are some in the grey area that get sent to one side or the other. I got a few things from the artists that really stood out for me:

The bowl is from Aslakson Pottery. Even though I make pottery myself, it is not crazy to buy wheel thrown pieces which I don't do myself (I only hand-build). Anyway, it was a shape and decoration that I really liked. The leather wallet with the ginko leaf is from Mike Barnes. I am fond of ginko trees: there was an old one on UC Berkeley campus that I remember as a kid (my mother was a graduate student there and so I went with her). The tie-dye shirt was from one of the nameless South side vendors. I really like tie-dye (maybe from my Berkeley days) but am bizarrely picky about the colours and pattern. This one worked for me. 

There were a number of other great things there. The one other stand-out was the guy selling extra large (up to 2-3 inches), incredibly ornate marbles: Larry Zengel of Hot House Glass. I really, really tried to think of a good reason to spend $50 on a giant, fantastic marble but just couldn't find one. This may be one of life's great regrets. 

Good Deed

I am learning to play the guitar. Six weeks in I can play a few guitar riffs (from "seven nation army" and "smoke on the water") and play a few chords. I can play one chord per bar for "let it be" and "the house of the rising sun" at a dirge pace and sing along. I started playing with a friend of mine who asked for joint lessons for his birthday and am really enjoying it even if it is clear I am not a natural.

For the last several years I have been spending a month every year at Michigan State University working with Keith Promislow, with whom I have had successful research collaborations for the last 15 years. He is also a personal friend at this point. I come out to visit to find new things to work on together. I usually stay in a glorified dorm room (with a kitchen) on campus but this year there was nothing like that available so I am in a long term suite at a local motel.

I didn't want to bring my guitar with me on the trip, but I also didn't want to lose momentum on playing so I looked into renting a guitar here. I found the store, "guitar centre" which seemed promising but when I e-mailed about a possible rental, I heard back from the manager that they did not rent guitars. However, he said that he had an old guitar that he could fix up for me to use. So I have a guitar to use at no cost. It was waiting in the store for me to pick up when I arrived. It always makes me feel good about the world when strangers help you out expecting nothing in return.

Recommendation: Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun (anime)

Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun is translated as "Monthly Girls' Nozaki kun" and is an anime available on Crunchyroll (a streaming service for Asian content), based on a Manga. It is a charming show that my daughter pointed out to me. Shoujo manga is a type aimed at teenage girls. The show is entertaining because it hits at three levels: it has standard shoujo tropes; it lovingly parodies standard shoujo tropes; it gives a behind the scenes glimpse into the manga business. The title character is a high school boy that writes shoujo manga commercially, though few of his classmates realize it. The main female character is Chiyo, who has a crush on the clueless Nozaki and ends up being part of a team that produces the manga.