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Of all homonymic months, August is the most majestic
(31 Aug at 10:11) |
I’m traveling for the long weekend. Either I’m having bad luck with the epic heat waves or there have been a lot of epic heat waves, because again the short road trip threatens to be tyrannized by the hot air. It did at least touch 100°F this time, so at least it is a proper respectable heat wave. We are in a place called Hocking Hills, whose AirBnB has these OBX-style stickers that say “HHO”, which could either be confusingly “Hills, HOcking,” or perhaps “Hocking Hills, Ohio”, but not “Hocking hills OHio” as one might expect. I plan to stick the sticker upside-down for “OHH”, as in “Ohh yeah, I need to write a post on Tom 7 Radar for the month of August, and I need to do it on this mediocre wi-fi which Google Internet Speed Test describes as ‘fine’ while everyone else drinks beers outside.” Fair enough: This is a self-imposed curse and one that’s easily tended to at any time during the month.
During the month: I worked again on making my own video codec, which is a very bad way to spend one’s time, but I don’t think there are any modern lossless codecs that would be suitable for my use case. And I do like a data compression project because of the inherent benchmarkability. The use case is for the increasingly common situation where I have a program generating a series of video frames (e.g. BoVeX is making an animation), which I usually do by writing a sequence of PNG files to disk. I’m way ahead of PNG files so far even without doing any inter-frame stuff, which is not impressive, but does make me feel like it’s at least not totally pointless. (Still, it’s quite pointless: Sure I can make these files smaller at significant cost of complexity and encoding times, but these animations typically use space similar to like one second of 4K 60fps XF-AVC footage.)
Sometimes programming your own lossless video codec is a bit too fast-paced so you need to write a Wikipedia article from scratch about Clairton Coke Works by digging through newspaper archives. I haven't even gotten to the last 30 years of its history yet! I also rounded out the Cyrillic in FixederSys though I don't think I've uploaded a new version of that yet. As usual I did some hacking on secret projects.
UHH, elsewise, I did finish off Animal Well which I liked very much. My spoilerless advice to you is: Don't try to 100% this game without at least looking at a spoiler-controlled guide! But I did have fun once I felt like I was stuck-ish finishing the remaining postgame puzzles. I have also been playing Chippy, a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that is quite hard (I usually feel good at this genre) and has several new good ideas in it. It's essentially all boss fights, and the chief innovation is that you fight the giant bosses by disconnecting pieces of them. I'm on the last boss so I will probably finish that one soon. As I have confessed many times, I like dumb first-person shooter games, and I played through Trepang 2 this month as well. It does have a few moments, but it was mostly pretty dumb, like I wanted. And then I started Touhou Luna Nights, which is a "Metroidvania" fan-game with great pixel art and music.
OK, I should get back to this vacation! |  |
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> need to do it on this mediocre wi-fi
Oh right, you probably don't carry the huge video card and 128 gigabytes of RAM with you on vacation, so you now need wifi just to nicely typeset any article or blog post.
> making my own video codec, […] the inherent benchmarkability
Please add as a benchmark test case Flock Step from Rhythm Heaven Fever downscaled to 480p. If you can compress it quickly enough to a non-huge file and there aren't visible artifacts at any time then you're ahead of the state of the art in video compression. You'll have to either emulate the game or capture losslessly, otherwise your input will already have compression artifacts.
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Nice wiki-ing! Impressed by the thoroughness of that article, all written solo in a short amount of time. A major pollution source around Pittsburgh seems like it should be widely known about.
This is apparently my first comment here in 3 years. Time makes fools of us all. |
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