Cryptocrystalline Shrikes

Dear visceral depression and related adversarial phenomena:

You can make me cry involuntarily. (Empirically speaking.)

You can lock down my coarse motor controls for another two and a half hours because I'm not allowed to get out of bed yet. (I'll have to find a way to either undermine this or maybe set up my sleep cycle so you don't get the insomnia-synergy.)

You can't make me not a dragon.

I'll claw at you every time. May my beaks rend your causality to scraps and dust.

Screech-peckfully not-yours,
Metiagon Efydd, Premchaia Teneb Geminorum

• Garlic parmesan popcorn.
• Staring into space.
• Also, someone presenting us with a hypothetical question earlier, underestimating the amount my& emotions tend to bind to the transitive complexity of the world, and pickaxing their way into two hours of babbling about possibilities and completely deconstructing their point, because of all the ways the proposed alternate realities would have implications that would completely overshadow the original question, even when I try to make it as “normal” as is feasible. >..> Chirp chirp.
• Coffee.
• Coffee.

This was inspired by a fediverse thread, in which I wound up writing up a bunch of stuff by accident. c..c It kinda wants a more persistent place, even if what it really wants is to be more thoroughly researched and edited and have an even more persistent place than that.

Ey'd mentioned marveling at plurality being a thing, so I wrote:

Hah! SSC did “an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Cindy Lou Who and the Grinch”. Shenanigans! But also amphibrachic tetrameter. Their conclusions lean pro-Christmas, as one might expect from the participants. I have mixed amounts of agreement with them. *preen*

So I decided to log into Destiny 2 to check whether a thing I wasn't sure would work worked, namely keeping a completed clan XP bounty past its expiration deadline in order to smooth over the weekly personal cap. (It turns out it does work, which surprised and pleased me.)

But also it turns out the Tower has been decorated for their in-game Winter Holiday, the “Dawning”. And Eva Levante is over there offering Eva's Holiday Oven, which starts a little sidequest line in which the first thing you have to do is cook Gjallardoodles for Zavala, using Ether Cane, a Delicious Explosion, and Essence of Dawning. Now it's branched off into sidequests to bake more different kinds of cookies for other NPCs. The other interesting thing is that this has given me some Enhancement Cores, which I had previously thought could only be gotten from the expansions (which I hope we can pick up eventually, just we're short on cash for that sort of thing right now).

The Tower also has shiny strings of bulbs, some other kind of massive light show decoration off the side of the Bazaar, and things like a mound of snow where you can make snowballs to throw at other Guardians. Probably some other stuff I haven't explored yet.

This is all somewhat more MMO-like than I'd originally expected to get into when picking up this game, but I'm generally pleased by this sort of good-natured holiday stuff, depending on the implementation.

Update: I made Radiolarian Pudding and Eliksni Birdseed, too.

In case you haven't seen them, horizon aka baxil did a few posts over on FIMFiction regarding the severe fires spreading through parts of California through much of November. He's a Search & Rescue volunteer in that region, and also a really good writer, so these are well worth reading.

1. (10 November) “As California burns”, with some sharp words on the political angle
2. (23 November) “California's Camp Fire”, RCL special interview, including photos
3. (3 December) “Scenes From a Fire”, followup, grim SAR perspective

I defeated the final boss! I have credits screen!

… there's still a bunch of stuff left, but basically I beat it, in the sense of having my first winning run.

Gungeoneer: Marine
Area: Forge
Time: 0:57:12
Money: 336
Kills: 376
Killed By: “Nobody. You did great!”
The Past still haunts you

From a silliness:

That's only true on systems where long long is 64 bits, though that's the case for all the systems I know of.

You could use ucat_least64_t or ucat_fast64_t instead, but I don't remember whether either of those is guaranteed to be the same size as unsigned long long.

But then, make sure you're not accidentally conflating any of this with stripes64_t (native support for interleaved access) or tail64_t (recommended to be placed at the ends of structs for alignment purposes) or tiny_little_nose64_t (which is at least 64 bits mostly for precision rather than for range, as you've probably guessed, and is involved in the delivery of siginfo structures for SIGBOOP handlers on many PAWSIX systems).

—Metiagon Jade

Died in Habitica to a task our (in-system) GM gave a special deadly attribute to. Goodbye level 14 (again).

We'll just have to earn it back. o..@