Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Homeworlds Opening Strategy: Aggressive Green Building

    Having some experience now with a half dozen or more completed or in-progress Homeworld games, I finding that the most effective opening strategy, at least with standard games, is to immediately pursue aggressive building of green ships. The main advantage of this approach are:

    (1) Since you targeting one color, you more quickly get access to the medium or even large ships types, which can be traded for more powerful colors if needed.

    (2) Since the green ships are being cleared out of bank quickly, you can rapidly approach situations where you can make factory sacrifices. The idea of a factory sacrifice is you sacrifice a large green ship, but you get to build that ship again, plus another two ships.

  • Boot camp and the potentials for a totally different reality

    19 years ago today, on June 26, 2007, I was supposed to be in a van driving down to Parris Island to begin basic training. I ended up going just shy of two months later. I was supposed to ship off with some other guys from recruiting station, and also Richard Williams.

    A few weeks prior I had gone to a family reunion in Tennessee and while there I had foolishly road a skateboard with woefully loose trucks down a long hill. I fell off and experienced my first, and only today, road rash. It was bad, oozing for days. Hoo buddy that peroxide burned like hell.

    When I came back one of my recruiters, (Sgt Thomas(?)) saw this massive 6-9 inch long abrasion(?) on my left(?) leg and said "absolutely not. You are not going to Parris Island with that open wound. You'll get cellulitis." I didn't know what that was. I'd find out about 4 months later from something totally unrelated.

    I ended up getting sent to MEPS to have my leg looked at by a doctor, who signed off and pushed my ship date back about 2 months. That date ended up being August, $%, 2007. I was a little relieved.

  • handprints

    not much going on
    just thoughts about hands
    on thighs 
    tight grips
    after gentle strokes
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Astrology.com Has AI Clairvoyants Now...

    So I have been working quite a bit this last week on the GB Tarot project (hopefully some dev logs will happen at some point soon enough) and ended up going to an astrology.com page to figure out what order of suits people tend to use for Tarot Cards (I decided to just go with Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles). When the page loaded, what do I see on the top right of the page? A circle with an AI generated profile picture in it, a chat bubble icon, and a "1" icon indicating 1 unread message. That whole setup had a blue pulsing light behind it to try and catch my attention. It had the name "Estelle" and the description "AI Clairvoyant"...