Mass market paperbacks are being phased out of distribution, which is a little sad for old time bookworms. I buy lots of trade paperbacks and hardcovers, but I still have almost every mass market paperback I read since I was a teenager.
Teslas displaced my exotic cars many years ago, but with the Roadster still an indeterminate distance in the future, I had been feeling an urge for something a little more… analog.
I was initially thinking about a 60’s Camaro with modernized running gear, but a part of me was also nostalgic for my old MGB. I eventually remembered that there was a car right at the intersection of muscle car grunt and British roadster charm – the ‘65 Shelby Cobra.
It is kind of amazing that the federal Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act of 2015 authorizes small runs of replica vehicles to basically ignore all the safety and emissions regulations. All the paternalism and crusading was just pushed aside in the name of letting small companies make badass cars.
On my birthday, Trista nudged me into visiting @earthmotorcars , where they had a dozen different replicas on hand. I was partial to the idea of a carbureted 427 with a magneto as a Mad Max post-EMP LARP, but practicality prevailed, and I wound up with a modern Coyote crate motor in a @backdraft_racing chassis.
Trista turned the formal dining room into a library for me at our new house, and I love it!
We still have separate shelving for paperbacks, magazines, and graphic novels, and a few more bookshelves in my Fortress of Solitude, but this is the most books I have ever had shelved in one place.
I have never thrown a book away in my life, but I know there are many books that have somehow been lost in moves over the years, and I occasionally miss them.
I had an interesting set of connected artist experiences yesterday.
I became a fan of @liammccormacksharp after spending a lot of time with his work in the (late and lamented) Madefire VR app, so I was excited to read Starhenge.
Trista was reading something else, but kept glancing over at it as I was reading, commenting on how amazing it looked. When she was flipping through it later, she mentioned how some of the art looked like Vallejo.
I pulled up some Vallejo imagery, and realized that I had forgotten that @juliebellartist , his wife, had done the cover art for Wolfenstein 3D!
At the end of Starhenge, Liam included a related script he had intended for a Madefire motion comic, which he had hoped to convince @theofficialsimonbisley to illustrate.
I always mention Aliens and Evil Dead as cinematic influences for Doom, but Simon Bisley’s comic book art was right there with them.
The demo we showed at Upper Bound is an RL agent on a laptop playing an unmodified Atari with a robotic controller moving the joystick and a camera looking at the screen.
Researchers have been playing emulated games for a long time, but adding real world latencies and uncertainties actually breaks many of the high performance algorithms that condition anything on the taken action having an immediate effect.
The real research focus is around long term continuous multitask online learning, but this is a nudge to the research community about not overfitting to simulation.
Ask your dancing humanoid robot to pick up a joystick and learn to play an obscure video game!
I love the @arcade1upofficial cabinets that @trista_d_75 has given me the last couple years. Yes, you can run free emulators on almost any device, but having the games running in a cabinet with arcade controls is a much better experience, even though it is just a packaged emulator.
I was pretty decent back in the day, but after playing these for a while, I got farther than young-John ever did.
Recently I played an original Joust machine at @cidercade_fortworth and on my second game, I blew away my previous best score at home — 158k!
The subtle control latency of the emulated experience versus the real thing matters!
I measured the press-to-flap latency at home, and it looks like about 80ms. It isn’t blatantly obvious, but it shows up in the game feel and control error rate.
I know there is a hard core community around emulator optimization, and with high refresh rate monitors it is possible to get objectively lower latency than the original CRT based hardware, but there is no reason the popular consumer versions can’t get most of the way there.
This is probably just a matter of backing up a triple buffered swap chain or extra layers of image scaling / UI compositor getting in the way. Phase sync to the last quarter or so of the video interval and swap to the actual display should cut that latency in half. Doing the bit plane graphics and scaling directly to /dev/fb0 with software would be a guaranteed low latency path if you can get vsync timing.
Trivia: The real Joust, and all the classic Williams games, didn’t even page flip, they just drew straight to the frame buffer, paying attention to the scan time.
We have a little alcohol burning indoor fireplace that deposits a fair amount of soot on the glass. I was considering how playing a very lean oxy-hydrogen torch over it should make the soot instantly vanish. The Rube Goldberg alternative to actually scrubbing something.
Looking at a panel from Beyonders:
Me: Three against the horde!
Trista: He is in Corgi Battle Pose
Me: … that’s a good title for an indie game!
@pauljenkinswriter@wesstclaire
