Expressions of annoyance

It is with some regret that I draw to a close my endeavours to make a business of glowing dice, but the glow is simply insufficient for the necessary price. While they are nicely glowy in darkness, they're nowhere near as wonderful as I'd hoped, and so I shan't be making them available.

Not that it's all doom and gloom. I got excited about something, which made the LA very happy, and I got a set of nuclear-powered dice out of it.

Expressions of interest

As you probably know, I like dice. I also like things which glow, and am not uninterested in radioactivity. I've had the idea to combine the three, but I cannot quite do it independently. Allow me to explain.

There is a technology known as tritium illumination. This uses the radioactive decay of a hydrogen isotope to excite a phosphor, which produces cold, visible light with no immediately obvious power source. It is possible to obtain small vials which produce this light; it is also possible to obtain clear plastic dice. With these, I would be able to create internally glowing dice, which would glow for a long time. The trouble is the price point; in order to make the project viable, an individual set of seven dice would have to sell for $80 before shipping. While it's possible to sell dice at that price point, they're a niche product, and I would not have the advantage of volume. I am also considering offering single d20s, which would sell at $11 before shipping. I am willing to make a limited production run of dice, glowing green (as the other colours are lower in light output), as long as I obtain sufficient interest. I would require pre-ordering with a deposit if I committed to a production run, and the run would be unlikely to be repeated. However, given sufficient interest, and as long as it turns out to be legal, I will do this.

Know thyself

Always good advice, that. In particular, try to know yourself well enough to avoid falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, from either side.

One thing I've frequently been heard to say is that I know just enough about working with natural gas to know I don't know enough about working with it to be safe. This is, from a distant perspective, probably untrue, not least because I know enough to be cautious. Sadly, whoever was responsible for much previous gas work in this house was a victim of the effect from the low side; he didn't know to seal threads, which almost led to the house burning down before we moved in, and it turns out he didn't know enough to realise that gas hardware and water hardware are Not The Same Thing, despite both working on pipes.

I would love it if the gas standard became left-hand threads. That would make gas line idiot-resistant, in many ways.

The morality meter in games

Lately, I've been playing Fallout 3. Reasonably fun, for the most part, but it does have a mechanism called "Karma", which is essentially a measure of how "good" you've been by the game's standards. Sadly, this is a one-dimensional line. You can completely wipe out the effects of, for instance, blowing up an entire town, by repeatedly giving water to certain NPCs. It's also rather broken; I've had clearly "evil" characters attack me, and once I've done the game world a favour by removing them, been reprimanded by the karma system for taking their belongings. They're not using it any more, they were evil, I was told I was being good for killing them, but taking their stuff is bad, wrong, and evil. This seems distinctly broken, as does the entire concept; it essentially boils down to a count of puppies kicked versus kittens cuddled.

Such systems in games seem to be universally unpopular. They're generally heavy-handed. The least terrible version I'm aware of is in the Mass Effect series of games, which I've not actually played myself, but their morality meter is actually a two-axis job; it has scales for both "paragon", which is idealist (with a side order of "spineless wimp") and "renegade", which is pragmatic (with a side order of jerk-for-the-sake-of-being-a-jerk), and the two are essentially independent of one another. Unfortunately, the second game does some heavy-handed behaviour modification by means of altering your appearance based on how you've acted, and I dislike that. What I'd like is for each NPC to have their own preferences for "how people should act", and to react to the player character based on what actions of yours they're aware of (which requires a change in how such things are handled; currently, there's rarely if ever any restriction on what player actions an NPC can know of) and how well those actions line up with their concept of correct behaviour. Make it somewhat mor complex than the above-mentioned puppy/kitten count.

Of course, that's an unattainable pipe dream, and I doubt such a game would sell well, but I'd quite frankly rather have no morality meter than such a simple-minded one.

You don't need it.

One thing I'm constantly astonished by in the US is the prevalence of what I can only call monster trucks. Pickup trucks in general are far more commonly seen over here than in the UK, no doubt because over here they're available with far more plush interiors and lower registration fees than cars, not to mention laxer controls on emissions and consequently less strangled engines, but a truly amazing number of owners seem to have decided that now they have their pickup truck, they must of course modify it; which they achieve by altering the suspension and wheel sizing such that the truck now rides with the floorpan at roughly shoulder height to an average person. This lifting is generally described as being a benefit to off-road performance, which makes it all the more remarkable in its popularity; the vast majority of the moster trucks I see on a day-to-day basis are in near mint condition, with perfect, undented sheet metal, suspension components blazingly orange, and paintwork so carefully shined one could use it as a shaving mirror, although the acres of chrome brightwork would be somewhat preferable. I will admit to having seen a few trucks which had been lifted and had been offroad. I could identify them by the fact that they appeared to be held together by dried mud, rust, and maybe the odd wodge of chewing gum, and if they'd ever been painted, the ripples in what sheet metal remained were ample evidence that it had all flaked off long, long ago. There's no real middle ground when it cones to lifted trucks.

I suppose that this fad, much like the fad for putting two foot diameter mirror-finish wheels with tyres of approximately the aspect ratio of a rubber band (a cost of roughly a grand per corner) onto clapped-out rustbuckets worth maybe $200 on a good day, and whose handling may once have enabled them to negotiate the corners needed to parallel park, or the fad for replacing reasonably functional suspension with hydraulics with all the compliance of a housebrick (but which can cause the car to jump in place), will forever remain a mystery to me.

It would seem that I've become one of those people who doesn't understand the youth of today. I like my car because its seats don't hurt my back. I drive at reasonable speeds. I park carefully, unlike the inspirer of this post, who this morning parked their monster truck in four spaces at once. There were multiple cars circling the parking area looking for spots...

You can't do that.

I heard on the radio news this morning that the US government is considering getting rid of its much-derided colour-coding for "terrorist threat levels" (the one which never, ever went below orange, and only ever spiked up to red when there was an election the Republican party wasn't sure they could win coming up; and I must insert my joke about the getting rid of it being because the TSA saw the threat level was "Grape" and thought it said "Grope") and replacing it with a system which uses words. Specifically, one which has only two levels: "Imminent" and "Elevated".

You can't do that. If the danger level is elevated, it must be elevated from a lower level. That's what elevated means. To make "elevated" the lowest possible rung is far, far more blatant fearmongering than the never-less-than-orange rainbow ever was, and I am sick of it. Moreover, I am sick and tired of the average American reaction to terrorism, which is essentially to cower in the corner and whimper. I've said many times that the way to react to terrorism is ridicule and mockery. Laugh at them. Scorn them. Don't let them change your behaviour at all. Stop being scared. Fear and behaviour modification is their objective.

Trouble sitting.

Lest you think I'm some kind of automotive genius based on my last post, allow me to remind you that I'm a fool from time to time. This one, well... shortly after buying my car, it became clear to me that the velour seats in a fetching dark grey were going to get distinctly hot over the California summer. So, off I went, and acquired a seat cover, of the large-wood-beads persuasion, and fitted it. That was distinctly tricky, due to exceedingly limited space beneath the seat. The easiest part was getting the elastic straps through the gap between the back and the squab, and that was no picnic. Still, I succeeded, hooked the little plastic hooks on, and went on my merry way. Come winter, I removed it, to allow me to make better use of the heated seats. In the process, one of the plastic hooks departed, and by the time summer rolled around again, I was forced to make do, with both of the elastic straps, with velcro cable wraps. These were a sight tougher to manage than the hooks, and I barked several knuckles, but I again succeeded, and until that autumn, there it sat.

Today, it came time to reinstall the thing once more, and so I pulled it from the boot. The velcro made it tricky to feed the straps through, and my eye lit upon the height/tilt adjustment lever for the seat. "Aha!", thought I, "maybe if I adjust this, the gap will widen!"

It did not. However, I should have expected that, as the seat was already at the bottom of its travel, and upon the lever being moved without my bulk in the seat, it leapt to the top with a mighty SPROING! and moved no further. The seatback and the squab are a single unit, as one might expect of a seat designed by a lazy orthopaedic surgeon; so the feeding through remained annoyingly hard. With the seat a good three inches higher, though, connecting the straps beneath it was a breeze.

And it only took me two and a bit years to figure that one out.