Professional geologist Shawn Willsey posted a graphic of the approximate location of the newest fissure on his livestream. This fissure and flow is not likely to be a threat to the town of Grindavik, but it is a threat to both the blue lagoon and the powerplant.

I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn’t have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.

Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.

The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.

To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn’t really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software… Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.

I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I’ll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.

I look at the most recent activity and suspect that either a new fissure has opened in the town proper or the southern fissure has lengthened. There exists a mini cluster of larger earthquakes in this area. The best case scenario is that this is a new structure on fire. All three scenarios are rotten-a-f. It is getting hard to tell due to gasses, smoke and darkness.

That is most likely a RUV news helicopter in the foreground. It’s footage may be available shorty. You can also read their english blog here. Drones are once again banned 4km from town.

CDs are still king with me. 1,957 and still counting. I feel cheated if I don’t get to enjoy that romance of flipping through the liner notes while listening to the CD that first time. I rip the songs I like after a few days of listening to it. I suspect the day will come when MP3’s will not be free.

DVD’s too. Almost 1,400 of them as well.

I did have to let the cassette tapes go. I kept some of the rarer ones, but they weren’t meant to last 40 years and would not likely survive another rewind.

I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues. I do have Freetube downloaded, installed and ready to go for when they escalate their game (and they will). For certain other applications, a youtube downloader can be quite handy.

Ads truly are the most annoying, counterproductive and least creative way of putting yourself out there. Even worse, they can never seem to match an ad with the content it gets forced upon, and this serves only to train people to associate their brand with uselessness and irrelevance. Even if you have a product that is good, you’ve just presented yourself as an obstructing pair of clown shoes and that becomes your first and long-lasting impression. When the time comes that they may need it, most people will not remember your product from that ad, only that your brand is a pair of clown shoes.

The simple truth is, if you have a good product, you do not need advertising. You only need advertising if you have a bad product and you are worried that negative word of mouth will spread faster than you can dupe your share of people into buying it.

Edit: Replaced a word that may be taken as a slur.

I like it, but it can make the players whine when it fails to save them.

If I’m DM’ing I try to keep notion that its my responsibility to get them to the goal regardless of the choices or events that happen. Its my job to figure out how to interpret random numbers. I use those bad rolls for my enjoyment as well as getting the characters to the goal.

As an example.

Player: I attack.

Me: The orc or the bugbear?

Player: The bugbear

Me: Roll to hit.

Player: <Rolls a natural 1> Me: When you stopped to poop in the bushes an hour ago, you knew you were going to have explosive diarrhea from eating that cajun eel porridge. What you didn’t know was that you had accidentally sprayed poo all over your swords hilt. As you pull it from the scabbard to attack, the weight of your shitty sword causes it to launch right out of your grip. It arcs elegantly across the scrubland for several yards, slightly rifling and glinting in the sunlight. It strikes the orc in the front right quadrant. The sword penetrates his vital cavity blade first and it doesn’t stop until the hilt of the weapon slams into his ribcage, the blade protruding just behind and below its left armpit. It’s mouth agape with confusion, shock and repulsion from the scent of your human filth still all over the hilt, the orc collapses slowly under the growing weight of gravity. Sadly, you’ll never know how extremely impressed he was with your advanced combat technique.

Now the player lives but at the cost of kinda becoming the butt of a joke that’s worth remembering for years to come. And honestly, as an adult, when I’m hanging out with old dnd friends and the topic comes up, it’s those moments that we always remember and laugh about.

At that time, no one knew what was going to happen. They didn’t want to chance it so they upgraded nearly everyone.

Whatever the reason, it made my decade. I experienced no problems at all on any of my machines.

In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn’t all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.

I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC’s they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We’re talking nearly 400 PCs. 386’s, 486’s and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2’s.

A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn’t want it since it wasn’t usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2’s from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC’s and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.

I lan’d together all (8) PC’s into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC’s. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.

It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it’s day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.

VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on ‘The cat sitter’ and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.

In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.

Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.

I enjoy programming but I get kinda OC when learning something new, and have to remind myself to be patient. I usually plan projects that are way over my skill level (just a hobbyist).

Most of my successful programs have started out very small and then re-written numerous times over a couple years, gradually becoming large in both scope and complexity as my mind. This allows my mind to envision the programs entirety and make better choices instead of immediate results.

No thanks. To me, the entire point of tabletop gaming is to use your own creativity. Both DM’s and players alike.

Farewell sir. Thanks for all the laughs.

Kevin Pollack’s fantastic story about torturing Alan Arkin. Skip to 1:30 if you want to hear his answering machine prank.

I’m pretty good with it. I’ve always hated their syntax too. It’s not natural to my grey matter like a lot of other languages are. I’ll second Lee Mac. I use his numinc.lsp. Very handy. Afralisp is another good site. He does a bit better explaining certain things by example and in much smaller steps.

I can tell you that you get used to reading and writing autolisp after prolonged use. I’ve used it since learning of it around 1996ish on R11. I create lisp files as needed when I notice something being repetitive or time consuming. I currently have around 300 and they are pretty catered to my work as a mechanical designer or refractory designer. Most are very simple and pointed routines that save me a minute and I might use one of them 60 times a day.

However, a more complicated yet far more dynamic alternative exists. I often create .Net front end software programs that in turn create and output a dynamic lisp all based on the user inputs . They do require a bit more effort since they are for a more complex idea. It’s essentially making a vb or c# program that handles a geometry and its range of permutations. It does it’s own calculations and point plotting. It also knows how to write an autolisp script. So run program, input data, calculate, generate script. Then switch to Autocad, run script. Viola! An hour of work in a few seconds.

With that in mind, you can further this even more by chaining that module program and other module programs like it to an assembly type program. Teach the assembly how to determine it’s own plumbing and (presuming its calculatable), it can be programmed to create and send the module programs their inputs directly.

Here’s a video of an old one I did (sorry, no audio). You might find it neat. It’s software I made for counting and creating drawing views for brick dome module. Everything is to scale and is in fact accurate to (8) decimal places. It handled Domes, Cones, Cylinders, and all of the basic 3D geometries.

Not exactly text based, but the old sierra style games are still a blast to play. Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, Thimbleweed Park. They sure don’t need many resources to play.

Yeah, Call of Cthulu was my favorite out of most of the tabletop games. You need a good Storyteller, which I was lucky to have once.