Valkyrie Chronicles

I purchased Valkyrie Chronicles (video game for the PS3) when it came out. Ever since I have been busy with school or sick. Now I come to a point in my life where I can procrastinate for a few days and relax a little bit, so I started playing.

The game is explicitly a story, the way you advance is by interacting with a book. This is one type of game that I really like, there is a strong story that you can connect with. The writing is fairly good. It is a fantasy world and there are some unlikely situations, and some lea way is need for that, but the suspension of disbelief isn’t as difficult as for watching a modern block buster movie. Heck it is actually worth it.

There are several main characters. There is a male who would rather be peaceful, but since violence is thrust upon him, he is going to defend his family and country. His adopted sister is a racial minority who stands up to murders to defend a pregnant woman, then saves her brother with some quick thinking. There is another female lead who is the love interest. Unlike every other love interest or woman character that I have seen of late this one is strong, defends her people and country. Yes she is good looking but she dresses fairly modestly.

There is some outright racism against the sister at one point. This isn’t adequately dealt with. She goes on to show that so is not only willing to help the team but does some major good.

Moving onto how the game works there are two things that really stood out to me. One is that they slowly introducing features. This keeps you from having to learn everything about the game all at once. This works well from keep you from getting over loaded and either giving up or simply ignoring some parts of the game.

The graphics are very interesting. A cell shading effect is employed to very good effect.

Pancake

That was one big tasty pancake. It took two people to flip it.

Cold and Wet

Not fine art, but it sure does make me thankful to be living inside and have warm food to eat.

Engineering

Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.
- Dr AR Dykes
British Institution of Structural Engineers, 1976.

Navy Shower

So yesterday around 8pm I was going to take a shower. The dish washer was running but I just needed to get clean so just needed a bit of warm warm. I couldn't get the warm enough that I wanted stand under it, even for a short period of time so I went and did a bit of homework. Came back at 10pm when the washer was done and tried again. No luck. In the morning I find out that we can't get a new one installed until four days from now. Hmm. I still need a shower.

So I spent the day thinking about how to get clean with the situation. One could warm up some water and wipe down with a towel, or boil a bunch of water and dump it into the tub with some cold water to even it out a bit. All of this seem like a pain in the butt so I opted for a Navy shower:

1. turn on the water
2. immediately wet the body
3. turn off the water
4. soap up and scrub
5. turn the water back on and rinse off the soap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_shower

It isn't the greatest thing in the world but you end up clean and not too cold if the air temp isn't too bad. Hey and it saves on water. Apparently a lot of the Earth hugger people and people who are trying to save money do this quite a bit because you can easily save 50 gallons for each shower.

Class II Oven Mitt

That is one serious oven mitt.

Summer photos

Sometimes you can give more then 100%

If you are sober enough to open Matlab or Mathmatica and type that in, you are sober enough to do just about anything.

Image found from XKCD

Tomatoes

Two weeks ago it was going to start freezing here in MN. So my Mother and I went out and picked all of the green tomatoes to bring them in before they froze. The cherry tomatoes we threw in a box and covered the whole lot with newspaper. The larger ones we wrapped individually. After a week we started checking them and a few had turned. You have to be careful because once they have a little bit of color they really finish changing quickly. This bounty is after the full two weeks. The larger tomatoes were boiled, peeled and frozen. Them makes *great* spaghetti sauce in the winter. As we would not be able to eat all of the cherry tomatoes, many were packed into zip lock bags and set to work with my Dad.

Night Visitors

So last night I was playing video games (was kicking peoples hind ends from around the world). At some point I went to do some read. About this time I figured out that it was 2:30 in the morning. Whoops. Then I heard someone stomping around on the deck. I knew who this was. Walked over and flipped on the light. Nope I was wrong. It was mother raccoon with her 5 babies. I opened the door a bit and was yelling at them to leave. They just looked at me. When I stuck a food out and started stomping on the deck mother decided to leave and sit at the base of the tree and hiss. The babies scattered a bit. Three climbed the railing and went a little ways up the tree. The other two huddled in the corner of the deck. At this point I shut the door and found my camera. As I was getting setup one of the babies decided that it liked the corner of the deck better. So it walked over that way. Mother was still hissing up a storm, and as she was pretty big so I decided to not go too far out on the deck.

Hutchenson CMP Range

See the little red box for the target area. It sure looked a long ways away.

KABOOM!!!

This is bad, m-kay? Two different cases. The first was a bit hotter load then the second This was produced in trying to make a XD 5" .40S&W run with a 9mm conversion barrel made by bar-sto. The barrel does not appear to be functional as the ramp is cut too deep into the chamber leaving the casing unsupported. This was make when trying to get the pistol to cycle with a compensator. The second case was a normal power round, the red circle indicates a bulge. It is difficult to show on camera but is obvious to inspection by a finger. The first case had a bit more behind it.

Crappy review

To each the knife, tent, and dehydrator each kicks some serious hind end.

Extended basepads are safety equipment

During a steel shoot I had to do a reload. Ended up catching a part of my palm between a magazine basepad and the frame. This would not have happened if I had an extended basepad on the mag, and my hand would have been held an inch or so away from the frame.

This was the first time I used the medical kit I have kept in the trunk for the last two or three years. It was nice to have.

Bike Ride

A big day - Food Dehydrator

My food dehydrator showed up last night, so this morning I ran out and picked up a bunch of food to dry. We have some apples (pink lady smith, granny smith), sweet baby carrots, pineapple and mandarin oranges, and one tray of apple sauce hoping that it comes out something like a fruit roll-up. So far so good, but it sure does take a long time for these things to dry.

A big day - Tent

This is sort of a jumble of images, and I am not sure how the formatting is going to come out but lets give it a shot anyways. My new tent showed up today. It is a Marmot Twilight 2p. Setting it up was easy without reading the manual. BTW the manual is on a tag inside of the packing bag. There were some features that made this very easy to setup. First the posts are all connected as one piece, it is then also labeled "Assemble with this side up". The pole tips and grommets are also color coordinated. Very nice. The fly is solid, and have the benefit of having a small window at the head of the tent so you can see the sky without going out. There is a good deal of storage internally in side and head pockets, as well as a hanging mesh.

I will be giving it a shot in the next few nights to see how it works out.

CRKT M16-14M

A new knife showed up today.

The folder lock automatically engages, which makes it a bit more difficult to shut, but is now something that is actually useful. It is a good deal heavier then the other knife pictured.

I have used it to open a few boxes at this point, so far I like it.

Robins in the Snow

Yesterday was 55F and sunny. Today we got a good deal of snow. For the last several years flocks of Robins have shown up in the spring just as it snows. They eat the berries in the trees. Today they ate in the trees for quite some time, then a hawk showed up and they all flew away. Well except for one that stayed behind, and looked around stupidly.

Some Knots

Bale Sling Hitch or Ring Hitch

Figure 8 Loop

Figure 8 Loop

Granny Knot

Morning Dove

Choices