dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

A long way for coffee https://carfreeaustralia.blogspot.com/2024/06/ascot-park-to-mawson-lakes-long-way-for.html

I'm going back to regional Australia and I'd like to see if I can get by without owning a car. And I'm going to blog about it at ' Car-Free Australia '. 

A piece I wrote on HoyoLab for Genshin Impact characters.

Fix. No tweaks required. YouTube videos would start OK then start stuttering after about a minute, with CPU in Task Manager spiking to 100%. What I didn't realise is that how you play videos affects resource intensity.

Generative AI uses energy and pumps out CO2 yes, but so do humans.

Why not? Calculators sure changed mine. A lifetime ago, in a safe but stifling job, I found an online mortgage calculator that visualised the power of extra repayments. Having just borrowed to buy a home, it opened my eyes. I was hooked. Learning that early escape from debt was possible made it my obsession. I checked that calculator after every stymied project and pointless restructuring. So, like, twice a day. With few opportunities to flex my skills in my IT role, I wrote other calculators to rationalise and strategise my approach to life.

 Tang dynasty rap.

This is it, boys. The big one. The freaking widowmaker of Chinese poetry. It's got patriotism. It's got isolation. It's chock full of allegory. Every line has multiple meanings. But everyone tries to interpret it because everyone knows it and, like debating Confucian texts, it's a mark of intelligence.  And I'm a sucker for proving I'm smart. Now I'm going to try and make it rhyme. With the help of a robot.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 6 If the world of Genshin Impact is so good, why don't you just go and live there? Good question, but first, a digression for context. My spouse commented that video games are subversive by allowing people to become powerful alluring characters. Me, a superhuman anime waifu? Novel, but fleeting. Even with jiggle physics.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 5 Part of Genshin Impact's approach to its artificial scarcity is to bombard you with varied rewards so that, much like real life, there is always another way to progress. However, with that abundance comes complexity. The game's transparency only goes so far in helping you navigate it. Where else can you turn for help? Who else can you turn to for help? A lot of what makes the Genshin Impact experience great comes from outside the game.

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 4  At some point in Genshin Impact, as in real life, you will face running out of stuff.  What has that taught me about approaching that scarcity, and can I apply it to everyday life? Many Ways to Play

少小离家老大回， 乡音无改鬓毛衰。 儿童相见不相识， 笑问客从何处来。 I can make it rhyme, but should I? Is wanting to do so colonialist or appropriative?

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 3 The drive to play on is supported by the constant accrual of rewards, plus the assurance - not mere promise - of future rewards. "Pfft." You may say. "How can one trust claims of certainty in a game genre explicitly run on chance?" Trust through Transparency 

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 2 Genshin Impact satisfies my craving to micro-manage. Even offline, planning my next moves in the game world displaces anxiety about what may happen in the real world. It exhausts my rumination like a mental chew toy, after which I have little urge to fret further. Nevertheless, should I be worried that I so easily place a trivial computer game before more mundane matters? A better question to ask may be, ' Why do I?' I have a theory:  Always Be Compensated

Genshin Impact Life Lessons 1. Genshin Impact is more than a gorgeous open-world fantasy game with deep lore and a stirring soundtrack. In a half-year or so of play, it has taught me... Fight Worry with Worry

Yes, it's possible. Yes, it's powerful. Yes, it saves you money. Here's how I did it.

Got a site which won't allow you access from overseas?  Got no VPN? Got an internet-connected Raspberry Pi?  Read on.

...so that your web-based Linux admin app gets auto-updates. You probably already know this, but Webmin is a web front-end for administering Linux systems. It really shines when you can't use a graphical user interface, e.g. when your system is 'headless', i.e. not connected to a display, and/or you don't want to use a remote command line.

The space between us is smaller but the gap between our experiences is wider. How can science fiction help?

Whenever white people kill people of colour, as in 2021's anti-Asian shootings in Atlanta Georgia , this sort of counter-commentary appears: "Since the killing of six Asian women who worked in massage parlors in Atlanta, the media has amplified the false narrative that “white supremacy” is to blame.  ... official crime stats show that white people are significantly underrepresented in terms of the violent crime threat they pose to Asians."  ... citing FBI statistics , whereas whites comprise 62% of the population, they committed 24% of crimes against Asians in 2018.  In comparison, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, committed 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018.  So clearly, white people do not represent the biggest crime threat to Asian Americans." Not only is this an attack on the media and its imagined agenda, it also implies that Asians can't tell who's assaulting them.