wolfwings

855924136, only good until 6/30, but feel free to use it. I haven't, and have no intention of buying anything from HP ever again. =^.^= Ten-percent off anything over $50 on their on-line store.

Leave a comment when you do, so I can tac-nuke it.

...I'm fine, my Mom's fine, my family on Catalina is all okay.

Though my Aunt's house (literally) got a water-drop dead on top of it to help make sure it didn't catch fire, nobody in my family has lost anything from the Catalina firestorm.

It was 'keep stuff loaded in the gold cart overnight and the cat gets to sleep in the cat carrier' close at one point, but my mom's at work today, the post office is open, etc, etc. They're all sleepy from staying up all night worrying, but things are good.

Blueroo's musings about wider implications from the pet-food recalls, and how it affects humans as well.

Long story vastly over-simplified, it's thought that melamine is the only direct ingredient causing this entire problem. The secondary chemical involved (cyanuric acid) can be created from melamine by certain (otherwise harmless) bacteria as a byproduct. Recombining the acid and melamine under certain conditions (common in many kidneys around the world, and in some cooking methods also common around the world) causes crystalline build-up in the kidneys.

Kidneys can't repair themselves over time.

Melamine causes a material to read dramatically higher in protein than it actually is when subjected to commonly-done 'cheap and quick' tests. It also appears to be harmless by itself in higher-order organism metabolisms aside from increased urination.

High-protein often equates to high-value. And the buyers only do the 'dump a scoop in, press a button, wait five minutes, look at digital readout' tests the melamine is practically targeted at.

The real news-worthy bit nobody seems to be picking up on loudly enough: Much of the 'tainted' material involved in these pet-food recalls was being marked human-grade. Meaning it could have been used in your pizza crust. Or your burger bun. Go read blueroo's well-documented bit for more, and focus comments here.

Specifically, why premultiplied alpha is all you should use for shipping products which boils down to three basic facts:

Less math (dramatically in more complex cases like shadowing and imposter's) to combine premultiplied images for compositing. Especially for more advanced things like imposter's (render a far-away tree once to a texture, render the texture) and other tricks useful for ultra-high-poly and ultra-low-power situations.

Removed halos, it's equivalent to the GIF versus PNG situation when changing the background color, PNG's won't halo. Neither will premultiplied alpha images. This also results in better compression. Yes, better compression. You don't have to bother with stupidity like flood-filling your transparent areas with their edge-colours, transparent is black, things just work, fewer colors = better compression.

You don't need separate additive and lerp/alpha-blending modes in your system. Hell, you can discard the 'opaque' mode in many cases, since premultiplied alpha can do additive, normal alpha-blending, and opaque rendering all at once, with overlapping handled correctly. Why? Because premultiplied alpha is associative (which is also why it works so well for imposter's) so you can render see-through window A before B, or B before A, and get the same result. Note that again, rendering order mostly doesn't matter with premultiplied alpha.

Or rather, the first 'confession' obtained from anyone at Gitmo. By an Australian held there for over five years now, only obtained in exchange for a deal that only makes him serve 9 months in prison in his home country of Australia, a deal that was kept secret from the military panel in charge of sentencing so when they handed down a seven year sentence... bam, secret agreement unlocked that limited that sentence to 9 months, he gets to go home.

To be honest, I don't care what another country was trying to convict me of, if I only needed to plead guilty in exchange for going home after being kept under lock and key for half a decade, I'd take that bargain in a heartbeat. So while I'm sure all the news pundits will start trumpeting this as proving Gitmo can be a success and can work... read between the lines, look at how few point out that the only reason this 'conviction' happened is because the sentence-limit of the plea agreement was kept secret from the sentencing panel and because the person was already kept imprisoned for over five years first.

...I appear to be entirely intact, aside from some lingering muscle-ache from around 36 hours spent in a vehicle. Minor 'Oh Crap!' when I found out at the last minute that a stretch of Interstate 70 is a freakin' toll road, something I still disagree with. It shouldn't be an interstate unless it gets federal funding, and it shouldn't get federal funding if it's not an entirely public road. And I don't consider toll roads public.

Anyways... sorry I didn't get the messages from you friends near the I-15/I-70 interchange, if I had I'd have eagerly broken my trip into three segments instead of two. Sorry. =-.-=

Here's to hoping I can come out and visit you all another time, I'm sure I'll pass through that way again on the way to FC or something. =^.^=

But long story short: Aside from feeling like I was in an amateur video attempt at a WRC Snow Special Stage when coming down into Denver (Yay for Jeep's with locked center diff's and snow tires?) since I was the only one willing to use the center lane. Everyone else was riding with one tire on the 'buzzy strip' on either the inside or outside edge coming in, but me and of all things a red Ford Probe were blazing right down the middle neatly, passing all the locals going 45 in the weather by going 50.

...since I got a gamepad again, all the old SNES games are a lot more fun.

So I tracked down some fan-translated games, and start playing them. Including one that really... made me stare.

Front Mission: Gunhazard. A game so strange in the Front Mission universe that it has entire webrings devoted to it. Many people think it doesn't fit in at all...

Myself? I get the feeling it shares the game engine with a very little-known, poorly-selling (and near as I can tell USA-only!) game called Metal Warriors. Another game so strange it has entire webrings devoted to it, because it was released by Konami, about the same time-frame as a sequal to a well-selling Konami game Cybernator would fit in, and has at least two mecha designs that look highly similair to that game, AND has controls that are almost spot-on identical.

Gunhazard also happens to share those same controls. But Cybernator has very little 'surface damage' opportunities that I've seen, and is mostly a plodding military-mecha game. Gunhazard shows marks on just about anything your missed shots hit. Metal Warriors carries it a step further, and instead of showing you a lifebar shows your mecha getting the paint stripped off, and more and more dents, sparks, and damage. But Cybernator seems oddly sterile by comparison.

Even the internal map formats in-memory appear related.

I get the feeling Metal Warriors had the game engine purchased, and the usual layers of Squaresoft polish applied before it became the core 'in mission' game engine for Gunhazard. Even the 'jump out of your mecha' and 'out of mecha movement' feels about the same between the two.

Oh, and I finally got around to setting up my GMail account to pull e-mail from all my existing accounts. That was remarkably painless. =O.o=

The above is the 'master key' of sorts for all currently-produced HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies. It's what is known as the Processing Key, and the fact that both formats share this key shows how childish Sony's insistance on using Blu-Ray really is, as well as how futile any form of Digital Rights Management is.

Feel free to snag the picture, pass it along anywhere you can or want. :-)

Stop letting your mom push you around. Face up to reality, throw out a fuck-ton of sentimental but non-functional junk or get a storage locker, use the permits you now have and get a steady-paying seperate job, and move the fuck out of there. You refuse to stand up to her on the grounds she'll evict you, so instead our friendship gets fucked over a couple hundred dollars because she decides to raise your rent since you could 'afford to treat yourself to something nice, so you can afford to pay more rent' which is utter BS.

Stop bitching about your situation, and use the tools that've been force-fed into your hands to do something about it instead of taking it out on all of us that try to help your situation despite being in crappy situations ourselves.

Yes, this is public because I'm done dealing with this shit because I can't any further for now. No, comments are not enabled. It's a rant, not a discussion.