The LARP is creeping ever closer and I should do some more practice, especially on the NerdyGurdy, as its keys are much more chonky in comparison and if I'm already not a genuinely good player, I shouldn't practice with a different instrument than what I'll be playing live with (⊙_⊙;)
I'm not sure if the difference to before is visible, but I think it feels much nicer again. Then again, my wife keeps telling me that I am very easy to please and have low standards for what I deem nice lol
I have only put cotton on one of the two melody strings for now, because I don't plan to play the second string on the LARP anyway. I feel it very easily sounds too screechy and if we're there for a few days, the gurdy will sound different because the wood warps a bit from the varying humidity, therefore changing everything unforeseeably.
Look at that fucking amount of rosin flakes that have flown off from the wheel while playing. And since rosin is treesap, it just keeps sticking to the instrument and I'd have to wipe it off with wet wipes or something like that, but that couuuuuld wipe off some of the paint, too. So I'll just keep it as a visual sign of my love for actually playing the instrument instead of caring too much for what it looks like.
Secret tip I learned from Patty Gurdy: Put a dot of glue on the keys you'll definitely want to remember what note they are. So in my case I put this dot on the C, upper G and upper D keys, since they are very common and yet far enough apart to be a meaningful distinction and let me infer where the other notes are in relation. Unfortunately I probably want to replace that glue dot because by now it has shifted a little bit too much onto the key itself (instead of hanging over the edge) and so now I no longer really feel if it's there when I hit the keys. As I like to say in such cases: Die Idee war gut, aber Lillis Arme waren zu kurz.
Oh and if you're wondering, I'm learning the melody of this piece. My wife might sing it, so I'm also trying to figure out the keys that Annie Hurdy Gurdy plays on her gurdy here when accompanying the melody piece (because yeah it does work and sound nice if I play the melody and my wife sings the melody/lyrics, but it would sound even better if she sang the melody and I played a proper accompaniment (that evne a fuckin word? xD)
28.05.26
One of the funny things about playing old games is that, very often, modern hardware is not meant to run old-ass deprecated software and so their drivers and such don't accomodate for cryptic .DLLs or shit like that. In the best case, you get a small graphical or auditory glitch for an effect that happens very rarely in the game. In the worst case, you just cannot play the game; either from completely missing textures, making floors and walls and people invisible or the same colour, to outright crashing in pivotal moments or not launching the game in the first place. And in between you have stuff that's just persisently annoying and you'd rather not have to deal with, but the game remains playable. Today, luckily, I was only somewhere in that middle ground, leaning to the lighter side of annoyances.
I've been playing Star Wars Galaxies very actively for years before the official servers were shut down in 2011 to make room for Star Wars: The Old Republic (my own suspicion). Looking at the Wikipedia article — to find the dates of when it launched and when it went offline — I found this BBC article about the shutdown. According to the official statement, it was due to the "contract expiring". SW:TOR was set to release relatively soon after and I never could shake the feeling that LucasArts (the one giving the Star Wars licence to Sony and then Bioware) wanted to make sure the newer MMO wouldn't have to compete with the older one for players and thus just decided to go with "every kid on the block would want to play the new game if the only game they can play is the new one". Very relevant shoutout to Stop Killing Games here. Anyway, when it comes to SWG's quality, I very much agree with one of the mentioned journalist's sentiment of "You [Star Wars Galaxies] were always a bit of a mess - but you were also one of the most fascinating and ambitious MMOs there's ever been."
Back to the old software on new hardware thing: As mentioned in my post on 17.05.26, I got a new graphics card and — because I grew up with "Nvidia for graphics cards, AMD for processors" — this also is my first ever AMD GPU. It turns out that Star Wars Galaxies has a pretty known graphics problem with AMD cards, if you leave it unmodified. My character's face had weird splotches of mismatching colour in different spots (or the entire face, giving my ochre Twi'lek suddenly a Human face). When I asked a nearby player if my face looked normal to them and then mentioned what I saw, they immediately jumped to telling me it sounds like the AMD graphics card bug, which is a pretty well known issue with modern AMD cards. When I kagid it, I instantly foundmultiple reddit posts that, lucky for me, also mentioned the solution.
Turns out that all I needed was a .dll that, if I understand correctly, doesn't usually come with modern AMD driver updates because it's just that old? I still don't quite understand what drivers and .dlls do, but the practical solution is super easy as long as you can find a download for that .dll. Here's a link to the Github page to download it.
Download the dxvk-2.7.1.tar.gz
Extract from the 32bit folder the d3d9.dll
Shove that up your and my ass into the SWG installation folder
As always, if you are reading this from a future where the download link doesn't work anymore but people still play SWG and other similarly old games and my site is still online, you can message me and I'll try my best to find the file and send it to you.
25.05.226
Oiii Paralives is out and oof, it's been crashing on my wife every hour or so; she didn't even get through character creation. We finally nailed it down to hopefully just being a driver issue (she easily beats the given minimum specs on the store page). Her current Nvidia driver version was still from the pandemic-times, that's how long we didn't check for new drivers on her pc, simply because no game showed any sign of trouble (not even Baldur's Gate 3, which is probs the newest and most demanding game we played before Paralives). Sadly, because it's already relatively late, she won't be playing anymore today. After the third crash, the mood is gone. As I'm writing this, I'm sitting in the character creator on her PC, testing out if it won't crash until we go to bed. Guess the age-old adage of "Newer play on patch/launch day" still holds true even in Singleplayer games (I will concede that not checking for the latest drivers was our fault, though).
In more positive news: We recently cooked one of the world's oldest written down recipes. It was really good, yet really expensive to make...almost entirely because of the lamb. Iunno about you, but here in Germany these lamb cuts cost us 40€/kg, which is kinda bonkers. I found the recipe from watching Vasi Birchwood's video about it. It's super simple to make, which is great because I wouldn't want to waste 20€ of meat by messing up a complicated recipe. I fried the ingredients in a different order and mostly seperate from each other, though, because we like our carrots (when we fry them) well-done and not very chewy anymore. One thing, I would try next time, is to put the sprinkle of salt on the meat before throwing it in the pan to fry instead of right when putting it in the pan.
A whole lotta carrots and fry them (we used our cast iron pan for everything, use whatever oil you vibe the most with)
Turn down the temperature after the first good fry, because now you'll grind up leek — preferably with mortar and pestle (we used about half of the white portion of the leek and half of the green portion)
Throw the leek in with the carrots (if by now the carrots are too singed/fried already, take them out first and fry the leek seperately)
Grind up one entire garlic if fresh or a couple cloves if dried and yeet them into the pan to fry for a minute or so
Take out whatever is in the pan and throw in the meat (if you want to fry it sharply with very high heat, this is the moment when you use oil with a high smoke point, such as refined rapeseed or refined sunflower oil)
Fry the meat for around two minutes on each side on a higher temperature
During that time, cut up a handful or two of dates and throw them in with the meat
Lower the temperature and cook it for additional four minutes roundabout
A minute or so before the cooking time is up, throw in the vegetables you already fried, to warm them up and somewhat mix in the flavours
Please tell me if you cooked it and how it turned out
17.05.26
The "joys" of running a Microslop Windumb 10 PC spark up at the very latest when you update your BIOS and are suddenly locked out of your computer, because Win10 is of the opinion that you changed some security settings and need to set up your PIN again. But oh boy, when I click the "Set up PIN" button, it's stuck in infinite loading. Why? I don't fucking know, maybe because Microslop is getting ready to completely ditch Win10 or maybe because Microslop encourages their devs to make AI slop. Full-text (because fuck paywalled news articles) is below, just in case you can't access it in Reader Mode. Why did I even update my BIOS, like an idiot, you ask? Well, I bought myself my first SSD and it just wouldn't get recognised (which later turned out to be mayyybe my fault because I needed to initialise it via the Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc in the command prompt) first?) and one of the first steps to solve this, anywhere online, is to update your BIOS.
Also, before I forget to write it down, my wife is so lovely! We looked for a new graphics card for her, since she had had a Nvidia GTX 970 for the past fifteen years or so now. And when we picked out an AMD RX 9070 XT she basically went "Hey, it would make much more sense for you to put it into your computer and I just take your current one (Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti), since you game much more and usually play more demanding games anyway." So yeah, we both now got new GPUs and omg for both of us the difference is night and day now. I can finally play The Isle with a consistent framerate higher than fucking 20 FPS lol. And with the SSD my fucking PC finally boots in a more than reasonable time (maybe 20 sec or such) instead of taking literally (not exagerrating, I mean "literally literally") two or three minutes.
Now let me teach you how to solve "Something or another happened and you need to set up your PIN again"
Summary of what we'll be doing: Create a USB stick which will boot you into a recovery software when you start your PC. From that, we'll use a program "Windows Login Unlocker" to reset the PIN/Password, which will allow us to just sign into our computer, almost like it's actually your computer and not Microslop being so generous to allow you to use the box you paid money for. If the download links ever not work anymore, message me and we'll find a way to send the files to you.
First, you need a USB stick (which I'll assume you have, since you need one to update your BIOS anyway (unless you came to this issue another way iunno)) and a computer you have access to, so you can download the recovery tools and move them to the USB stick
Once HBCD has downloaded, load it into Rufus and hit "START"
You shouldn't need to change any of the settings, at least I didn't have to
When Rufus has finished writing the image to the USB (took about 30 minutes for me), put the USB stick into your troubled computer
Start up your computer and spam the Delete-key (DEL) until you're in your BIOS
Select the USB stick as your drive to boot from (I think it's different for every motherboard how to do that)
Save and Exit (if necessary) and wait for the files to load (a black screen with gray bar going "Loading files..." should appear)
Once it's loaded and you're inside the recovery tool, go...
Start...
All Programs...
Security...
Passwords...
Windows Login Unlocker
In the unlocker, right-click the affected user/account and hit "Reset PIN code" and/or "Reset password"
Restart your computer and boot the normal drive
If it worked, you should not get a PIN/password input but instead either be directly signed in with "Welcome..." or just need to hit the "Sign in" button and then be signed in
The Verge article on Microslop devs using AI
Microsoft is pitching a future where AI controls everything on your PC and agents go and do work for you in the background. But before the company gets there, it has to build the tools to make these systems work and convince its own developers that AI is actually capable of achieving these big promises.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed earlier this year that up to 30 percent of the code of “some of our projects” is written by AI, and I’ve been eager to learn exactly how Microsoft’s developers are using the technology ever since. I’ve been speaking to sources and company execs to get a better idea of how AI is being used by Microsoft developers. Some employees have told me they’re skeptical that AI agents will be able to fully replace the work of humans, leaving developers to fix the mistakes of automated agents.
When I ask the company for more specifics, though, Microsoft touts its early success in deploying AI internally.
“We want to really look at where there’s developer toil, where we have inefficiencies,” says Amanda Silver, a CVP in Microsoft’s CoreAI team who leads product for the company’s Apps & Agents platform, in an interview with Notepad. “Part of what we’re looking at is both how we can apply [AI] and where we can apply it.”
There are over 100,000 code repositories inside Microsoft, from brand new projects to legacy codebases that are more than 20 years old and still up and running. “We have pretty much every programming language, architecture, and lifecycle stage that you can imagine, and this really reflects a lot of our customers,” says Silver.
23.04.26
Don't ask me about the gurdy maintenance! It's going great and I'm not procrastinating on the other three (more difficult) strings after I made one melody and my one drone string sound almost nice. How dare you even conceptualise something horrendous and lazy like that? I've been practising my hurdy gurdy play every day for three hours at least, naturally, because it would be stupid to attend a LARP with your instrument without having done some practise beforehand, wouldn't it? So of course I've been practising No I really haven't and I know I should fucking start soon because otherwise I'll embarass myself even more than I would anyway
With that out of the wayyyy, let me show you some cool things I've pictured in the last week.
I went on a slightly longer route to walk Jacky and Bosco and this rapefield was just sooooo yellow. The pic really doesn't do it justice. IRL it looked much more like a yellow carpet with green specks instead of the other way around. I have a hunch the name for the plant was imported into the English language. I wonder if, when rapeseed first came to the British Isles, rape already had the meaning of sexually violating someone and they kinda just went "sure, lets name it after this horrible thing."
One of our proximite neighbours has a magnolia (thanks to my wife I now know what tree* that is) in her garden. I really like the flowers there. Super picturesque, which is why I took the picture! *turns out I'm not sure anymore what a tree even is because nature never gives shit to you straight
Finally, we ordered a cast iron pan for the LARP (although I eyed cast iron tools occasionally anyway). It's sooooo globdamn heavy at 3,3 kg and a very short handle. Like, literally, there's almost no buffer when I wrap my handle around. My fist is something like 8 cm long (or do you say "tall"?) and the handle has maybe a centimeter left that isn't covered by my grip. But frying food in it works really well after I "burned it in" and built up the protective patina. And since iron has such a low thermal conductivity, it retains the heat incredibly well. We usually make enough food to get two plates per person and the food is still almost as hot as fresh from the stove by the time we grab seconds. Buuut that comes with the detriment that heating up the pan in the first place takes much longer than with stainless steel or teflon pans.
