=VG= SemlerPDX

Happy Birthday, man! Cheers!

We never get snow like this in Portland - thick and wet, and sticking to every branch and twig, and even the sides of buildings.
Sure makes for some good pictures!

Check out the other 9 pics on Imgur (click here)

Happy B-day!

Yesterday we got 2 inches of snow in less than 6 hours centered around rush hour traffic. This only happens every several years, and no one seemed prepared. Whole damn city pretty well shut down and this morning it's crawling back onto it's feet with snow shoes on. The giant hill that is the main road off our street is a mess of pileups frozen in action, abandoned for the night. I saw a car with it's dome light on - at least one of them will have a dead battery when they return.

Not one can move as all the cars are touching and bearing the weight of each other. It will be an engineering challenge to safely dislodge them individually without sending one rolling off the side and into one of the houses along the hill.

I took a walk up the hill to look at the mess, there were about 10 cars a quarter of the way up this 1/2 mile hill, a steep hill with angles from 4 to 7 degrees. A set of four cars were sandwiched together right in the middle of the road.

Another pair were frozen in what was a head on collision and they're nearly rolling off the side of the road, and one of them is wedged a foot in the air where their front ends meet, it's tires suspended above the icy ground.

Everyone else that couldn't make it up the hill parked their cars along my street everywhere there was space. They'll have to wait for the snow to melt to get emergency equipment up the hill in order to resolve that massive pileup.

Firstly, people here do not know how to drive in the snow, and secondly the trucks think they can go full speed and ignore packed snow even when they are not 4x4 off-road style trucks. The ignorance and false hope is frozen in a picture of those cars parked in their crashed positions on the hill.

They already got a guide to the best locations for sniping on the new Battlefield 1 DLC map, Giant's Shadow:  http://i.imgur.com/7RGvCGr.jpg 

From the VG Minecraft Modsauce 2 --  I've been building here and there to further develop my castle, flattened out the courtyard and started building the village.  First building I've finished is the church near the back, tons of carpenters' blocks for a proper angled roof, and some neat brick textures thanks to the chisel tool.  The larger L-shaped building near the church is next, gonna make it a Tavern of sorts.  Decocraft Mod is what makes the interiors so cool - having tons of fun building this model castle and village!
Every few months, more of that mountain becomes part of my castle.

That largest tower on the left is my indoor automated farm - it's 21 levels going well below ground, using ComputerCraft Farming Turtles for the automation, they reap every 3 hours.  Turned them off now, I have stored 10,000+ of every crop I keep.  It's mostly a Hemp farm, which I harvest Industrial Hemp String from, crafted into standard String, and then crafted into Wool as needed for other projects.

Happy Birthday! 

Thank you for the donation!

Sup man!  Welcome back!
I noticed your display name on the website - check out this post on how to change your name from "VG-Hans" to "=VG= Hans"

Happy B-Day man - hope you are doing well!  Miss you bro - take care, have a great day!

We'd like to add a few client side mod keys to the 2nd Arma 3 server (Insurgency) and I tried a few times but failed.  I have no idea what I was doing wrong, literally trying to drop key files in the key folder from TeamViewer File Manager, RDP, or even FTP.  Kinda frustrating - I must be doing something wrong.

Contact me when you can, maybe you know how.  They want st_hud, st_movement (if available), JSRS, and something called badbensonEM.

Thanks!

(also, Nvram said something in chat "PITN Check your steam"  - whatever that means. maybe he sent u a message.

-Sem

I just remade the Reputation system here on the website to include many of the ribbons from the last website.  18 Levels just like the content count ranks.  Hope people enjoy it!  Feedback and constructive criticism is welcome.

First weekend of Fall had two of the last hot sunny days of the Summer - I went up to Long Beach, Washington to hang out with my cousin. It's about a 3 hour drive from Portland.
Nothin like seeing the sun set on the Pacific Ocean. Sunday night's was beautiful. 
Got some fresh salt water taffy to share with my fellow landlubbers back home.
Good times!

Been having quite a bit of fun on the VG Minecraft server with Renainn(davestrike) and his brother LionClaw, KiwiBob, Airbats, Double13, and Jaki the past few days...  Good times!

Empty your Message Inbox so I can send you a private message, bro

Gotta take a sortof 'life pause' right now, put my Twitch Streaming project goals on hold for another week while I take care of life.  Using the time to develop ideas, and reflect on input from friends - I've decided to make a 'video framework' in my Sony Vegas program so I can drop in video footage and easily edit it down for content and upload to YouTube and this will be a better way to cater to any audience I may attract with a Twitch stream as I may not be able to stream as regularly as some people are able.
While I handle things, I've been spending my time learning Java for games development.  My goal is to make a small game (2D game like the old NES or Atari stuff) that will be an exercise to teach me the different bits that make up a game in Java and how to program them.  If I do it right, my 'first game' may be a decent framework for me to make other little games out of in the future if I want.

I already know the basics of programming in a few other languages, so it's not as hard as it could be to learn, but I do need to get into some new areas for me, so it's properly challenging as well.  Had to put the 'code learning' on hold to actually draw some characters and objects (and background stuff) for this little game I'm making.  The max size of things in the world is 32 pixels by 32 pixels, so I'm using MS Paint to make all sorts of textures - grass, dirt, stone, brick, etc.  and also to make a character framework I can tailor to different in-game creatures like the Player or "monsters" or some "princess" to save, but all sharing the same style of legs, arms, head, feet - so I've made all those up, getting 2 frames that look like 'walking' when I flip between the two (will be used for animations in game).

Fun fun!

I'm spending the time to make the look good, and when it's just pixels, it's limiting - I've made my character's framework 64x64 pixels and will scale it down in-game to 32x32 pixels to fit the world, but it will retain the extra level of detail in that way.  I suppose any graphical item that needs extra detail to look good I will do that way.
Here is a little doodle I did last night, gonna turn it into a properly drawn character for my little game, it's inspired from my memories of that little mage from Final Fantasy 9 and those wizards from the Legend of Zelda game (the original NES):

Teamspeak is having issues, keeps restarting every hour or two.  At first, the bottom two channels would disappear when it restarts, now we're missing tons of channels.  For some reason, it reminds me of this crazy fantasy movie I saw in the 1980's called Never Ending Story -- the world is slowly disappearing into a mysterious fog because no one believes in the world of imagination anymore. 

Been loving Fallout 4, and I know it has a ton of popular mods, some that add things, some that fix things -- and I do want to just play the game through once, with no mods, as I know the game has TONS of replay value and mods only add to that.

But this issue of not knowing what my character is going to say when I choose a dialogue option is very frustrating.  Oniblood turned me on to the Nexus mod site to find the mod that shows exactly what you will say when you choose an option, and I am a very happy camper!!  Gonna keep playing the game with this one mod, and I gotta share the info for those who might not know it cuz it's just that helpful!! Huge thanks to these two modders!

Quote

Full Dialogue Interface (NewDialog English and CN-DE-ES-FR-IT-JA-PL-PTBR-RU translations) by Cirosan and shadwar

Here's a screenshot from my current mission, a long dialogue back-and-forth with the Synth Detective - and I am so happy I can see the full dialogue now:

Hell of a week so far for me, my damn back (up near the neck) has been out since Saturday, that kind where you can only hold yourself upright in one position without stabbing pains.  Can barely concentrate at times, it sucks - then I had to cough but couldn't move my back so I had to hold the front and back of my head just to get through the ordeal.  All I want to do is hang out with friends and play some Fallout 4 - the pain is half of what it was days ago, though, and I'm finally coming out of this... ugh.  Here and there I got a few hours where I felt okay, and I've been playing around with Settlement Building in Fallout.  Built supply lines between them all, and starting to build some shops to add to my in-game income.

Took this screenshot at one of the farther out settlements a little after sunrise - awesome scene of destruction from the nuke behind me.  The detail in this world is freaking gorgeous!

Been waiting for the Steam Summer Sale in hope that Bethesda would loosen their death grip on the $60 price tag they've held on Fallout 4 since it released near the end of 2015 - happy as hell it got a 50% off tag, and I've been playing the hell out of it.  For the most part, it seems this game tries to cover every base in the most popular gaming genres these days from survival to open world RPG to FPS action (including random IED's here and there!) with a bit of Minecrafting and base building as well as a fair amount of item and weapon upgrading.  Hell, they even got the "Zombies" genre covered in Fallout 4 with the rotten-brain ghouls and beasts.  Finally feeling a little deadly (against the normal shit, that is) and went back home to examine that old OP Power Armor Suit that I left behind.  Spent some time to fashion up some Grade-B parts for the power armor and bought some extra fusion cores - really getting into this!
Got my dog, got my Stimpacks and RadAway, got my Minuteman painted Power Armor and my Minigun - game on!