Category: Geek

On knockoffs

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

So the Task that I was nattering about for a few days there was building the Lanter Fish— no, not a “lantern fish,” we’re going to respect the Chinese misspelling here– which represents the first not-a-Lego set I’ve ever ordered. And as you can see, it looks pretty fucking cool– the jaw moves up and down, and the little light is actually a light– the Amazon listing claims you can use it as a lamp, which is hilariously wrong, but it is an actual working light.

At 1038 pieces for $35 or so, it’s probably less than half of what you’d pay if it had LEGO on all of the pieces, and there are a couple of places where you’re going to suffer for that difference, because there are definitely some quality of life issues involved in putting this thing together that Lego ironed out years if not decades ago.

Let’s start with this, the contents of Bag 2:

Perhaps you haven’t put a Lego set together in a while: the pieces come in numbered bags, and there’s usually fifty to a hundred pieces in a bag, sometimes even fewer. This set had three big bags, each of which had five or six smaller bags inside that bag:

The problem is that, while I can see some organization in terms of which pieces were in which bag, that organization has nothing to do with the order they’re put together in, so you have to open all five of those bags right away, because the first three steps might involve pieces from all five bags. That means you’re sorting through hundreds of pieces to find whatever you may happen to be looking for for any given step, which slows everything way the hell down. I am not the type to pre-organize my pieces before building, but that feels way more essential with these sets. It took me easily twenty minutes of searching for one particular piece, which I eventually found stuck inside another piece. Now, that could happen with a Lego set too, but there would be a fifth as many pieces inside the bag, so it would still have been much easier to locate.

The other thing: I’ve occasionally wondered why Lego chooses the random colors they do for the pieces you can’t see, and have speculated that it was maybe a product of whatever they had a lot of lying around or something– was there a reason this piece was red and not blue? Sometimes the answer is yes, but in putting this set together I’ve realized a couple of other reasons to vary the colors:

  1. Easily 90 percent of this set is black(*), and any piece that isn’t black is going to be grey or dark brown, which blends in with black pretty damn well. The eyes are the only red pieces in the entire set. This makes it really hard to pick out individual small pieces in a pile of parts, especially when you’re stupid enough to try to build the set on a desk with a black surface, like I did.
  2. It helps with orientation when you’re looking at the instructions– not just “Okay, the 2×6 brick needs to be facing up,” but “the 2×6 blue brick needs to be facing up,” which is a big difference.

I spent a lot more time than usual pondering the instructions on this set and making small mistakes that I had to undo later, and it just led to more respect for the fucking geniuses Lego has creating their instruction manuals over there. They do this thing where all of the new pieces in a step are in color (mostly) and everything else is greyed out, and I can see why they decided to do that– it’s a lot easier to pick out the new parts, and one of the most common mistakes you will make with a Lego set is not noticing a specific part you were supposed to add on a certain step– but the printing quality of the manual was not high in the first place, and what it often meant was that the instructions were just hard to understand. There were also a few steps where you were building things in a way that would never fly in a Lego set, and instructions where you were adding things to the bottom of stuff you already had built, which was a huge pain in the ass.

That said? The lanter fish looks pretty fucking cool, and at that price I’ll put up with some nonsense.

(*) All black, yes, but a gorgeous, pearlescent black that is really hard to capture in pictures. I love the color of this thing.

So anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

I was going to start yesterday’s aborted post by making fun of these horrifying things. After that I had a whole gross story about getting sick at work and hell if I remember what was coming after that.

So, yeah, I got sick at work, and then made it through the rest of the day and I’m fine now. Meanwhile, I haven’t technically fixed the deeply weird issue the new laptop is having– I think something about the OS isn’t playing fair with Gutenberg at WordPress, because nothing else makes sense– but I’ve found a sufficient workaround for now. I’m going to spend some more time tomorrow or Sunday fiddling with it; until then, all good.

Anyway, I’ll do a review of the laptop once I’ve had it for a week or so and put it through its paces. I’m pretty sure this particular issue (did I ever say what it was? Click on “new post” in WordPress, get a white screen. In every browser. No matter what. Every other device I have is fine.) is not the laptop’s fault. We’ll see if anything else stupid crops up.

Tomorrow we’re going to get some more shit done in the bedroom. The goal is to get work done in the house without inhaling enough drywall dust to give me cancer. Not the highest of bars. We’ll see if we can pull it off.

Oh what the hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Got a spiffy new laptop.

Was gonna use the spiffy new laptop to write a post.

New post wasn’t going to be about the spiffy new laptop, it was going to be about getting sick twice in two different ways at work today.

Spiffy new laptop won’t load the WordPress new post screen. Everything else works fine!

Guess why I bought the spiffy new laptop?

Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone and it is possible that there will be a ragesplosion soon, so y’all can look forward to that, because this makes no sense at all.

On parenting a fellow geek

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

I am too old for Pokémon.

That is more literal and less insulting a statement than it might seem. I am about to turn fifty this summer and I spend a positively unhealthy proportion of my income on comic books and Legos. I spend so much money on Legos that I am noticing that the technically-proper singular (it’s “Lego,” not “Legos,” believe it or not) is starting to sneak into my vocabulary; I am not someone who can accuse anyone of being too old for anything they enjoy except under circumstances of the most rank hypocrisy.

No, what I mean is I was born a couple of years too early for Pokémon to be a part of my youth. This is the real dividing line between Gen X and the Millennials, people; if Pokémon was a part of your childhood or late adolescence, or your friends’ childhood or late adolescence, you’re a Millennial. If it wasn’t, you’re either a Gen Xer or a girl, and we all know girls don’t count.

(That was a joke, shut up.)

My son has been into Pokémon since he was three or four. He has absorbed all of this shit entirely on his own, because his mother and I don’t know a damn thing about it. And he has only just now, at the ripe old age of fourteen, decided that he wants to learn how to play the game. And he is putting together a “deck,” which is a thing you use for card games, apparently, and he and I spent two hours at a soon-to-be-going-out-of-business card and game store today searching through thousands and thousands of bulk Pokémon cards in hopes of finding the exact cards he wanted.

We were, all told, more successful than I might have guessed going in. That thing up there, or at least one of them, is a Toxel, and goal #1 was to find a Toxel card. We found a few different ones and he just kept adding goals as we continued to sort through huge boxes of cards; I kept one eye out for the stuff he was looking for (any “dragon” types, any cards in Japanese, just for the hell of it, fairy types, and a half-dozen or so specific Poképeople) and another out for anything with a ridiculous enough name that I wanted to buy it. We were spending $20 for all the cards we could fit into a specific box, and that was hundreds of cards, so I really could grab any card I found momentarily interesting without worrying about whether it was any good or he was going to reject it. He announced that he wants me to play with him; normally my son expressing a wish to spend time with me under any circumstances is a great thing; that said, I’ve managed to avoid getting into CCGs for all this time for a reason– I know how my brain works and these shits can get expensive when you’re not taking advantage of a store closing.

He said something about wanting to learn Magic: The Gathering the other day, too, and I told him he was allowed to play it as soon as he got a job and could buy the cards himself. I will happily give him a car on the day he gets his driver’s license; I draw the line at Magic cards.

The punch line is he’d rather have the cards.

I’m not sure if that makes me a winner as a parent or not.

I want my brain back

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, video gamesLeave a comment

I have believed myself to be entirely neurotypical for my entire life, other than, y’know, the anxiety disorder and occasional crippling depression, so … yeah, maybe this wasn’t the right sentence to start with? But I’ve definitely never thought I had ADHD before. Until this week. My god. It has been a nightmare week in a lot of ways, some of which I’ve talked about and some of which I haven’t, so maybe I’ve earned it, but … ugh. I read nearly 9,000 pages in January according to Storygraph. I don’t think I’ve managed 200 this week. I can’t focus. It’s driving me batshit.

Now, a good chunk of that is Nioh 3, I’m not gonna lie; I’ve put 24 hours into it already since it came out. I knew it was going to eat my life, and eat my life it has. The other thing, though? Have you heard of Redactle? It’s the worst fucking thing ever. Imagine a Wikipedia article, with all the words except maybe the 15 most common English words blanked out. Selected at random. And then the game is you guess words until you get the title of the article. Which might be, like, “Jesus,” or something you’re familiar with, and might be Niamey, the capital city of Niger, or maybe it’ll be Navier-Stokes Equations, which you will somehow solve in 178 words? “Adivasi,” by comparison, took 401.

It’s not … fun, so much as addictive and horrible? But I haven’t done one yet today and I will before I go to bed. Right after I beat this boss. And then maybe I’ll get some sleep before I pick my wife up at the train station tomorrow morning, and hopefully my life more or less returns to normal.

(Thirteen minutes and 235 words for today’s puzzle, btw.)

Trivia Night update

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

We were in third place until this round, which didn’t go great, and “confidently wrong” is my theme for tonight, apparently.

Let’s start an argument

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies6 Comments

Or, “In which I choose violence at 8:52 AM”

I will die on this hill: that’s Battle Cat. I was not aware that I had strong, nay, immutable opinions about something as ridiculous as He-Man until the other day, when I said something about Battle Cat being in the trailer and my wife, who, for the record, was not a boy in the 1980s, tried to tell me that was Cringer.

Her argument? Battle Cat wears armor. Cringer does not. That cat is not wearing armor, therefore it is not Battle Cat. Quod erat motherfuckin’ demonstrandum.

The intellectual in me wants to make this post about ontology and how we construct identity and how we construct our categories and definitions. The ‘80s kid in me started screaming bullshit right away, and now that I’ve seen other people spreading this nonsense it’s time to fight about it.

It is true that that cat is not wearing armor. It is also true that that cat is holding his head high and his tail straight, and while he is standing behind the people in the image, I’d argue that that’s an issue of shot composition and not hiding. His bearing and stature conveys nobility. That is not Cringer.

A similar shot, from just a couple of moments later. Again, look at his eyes. This cat isn’t afraid of Goddamned anything. Also worth pointing out— he’s huge. Cringer grows during his transformation. That cat is absolutely big enough to ride, saddle or not.

And the coup de grâce:

Cringer ain’t never had that look on his face not once in his whole life. I don’t care about a helmet. That is Battle Cat, and if you think otherwise you are wrong and he’s going to bite your face off if you try and tell him otherwise.

That is all.

Duckery

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.

Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.

Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.