MeghanIsMe

Hey folks I know: I am terrified of meeting strangers online to play games with. Would anyone I know like to play Factorio or Satisfactory with me semi-regularly? It would be so much fun to work on a big project with friends over Discord or something. Let me know if you're interested! No worries at all if you have not played them. If they look interesting, I'd love to show you the ropes.

Links to games:

Factorio: https://factorio.com/

https://www.satisfactorygame.com/

What do I do with a night off before a holiday?

I calculate production ratios for different methods of ore production and make a flowchart one level abstracted from the one with individual production chains so I can figure out how to arrange the production units with each other.

Yeah, I'm a party animal. If that animal is a sloth or something.

It was *cold* this morning. My bike computer says about -5C / 23F. It was the first day I've arrived at work with a little moisture from my breath frozen into my mustache as ice. I was ok without the balaclava after I acclimated, but I maybe should have worn my mittens. After ten or fifteen minutes, though, I got to what I think of as my operating temperature and felt mostly comfortable.

I fixed my bike lock yesterday with the application of some Tri-flow oil. I've washed my hands any number of times since then and I can still smell the oil on my hands. At least I can unlock my bike!

I'm planning to start working much more consistently with Rufus. I'm going to start feeding him on a set schedule in the morning when I get up (around 5) and in the evening before bed, maybe around 7:30. I read that Chihuahuas often do best with three small meals, so I also ordered a treat/food-dispensing toy to give him a third meal during the day and hopefully keep him occupied.

I used half his dinner to do some 'come' training. I think it will be slow. I'm also training proper leash demeanor by stopping every time he pulls rather than let him feel like he's pulling me along. He seems to pick that up quite quickly!

My average mental state is a little better lately and I'm itching to get back to electronics work. First I want to feel like I'm more caught up on stuff around the house. (Why do I feel like I need to be more caught up on stuff for electronics, but not for something like Factorio? I don't know. Something to explore there.) I paid bills and made progress on kitchen cleaning yesterday, and I've been doing a little bit around the house most days.

In Factorio, I realized that I can put multiple train stops on one spur line and use logic and chain signals to keep trains from stacking up on the mainline waiting for a delivery/pickup train to clear the spur. It works really nicely for low-volume stops! I'm many, many hours in to my current Bob's + Angel's game and have not come near launching a rocket, but I don't care. I'm still enjoying just building and tweaking systems. That's why this toy/game is so wonderful to me; I've been playing with it for a year or two and I still keep inventing new approaches to things.

I spent a few more hours on the flowchart yesterday and I'm just about done. It's so pretty!

Hmm. The embedding function doesn't seem to work. Here's a link.

I have vague memories of turning myself around like a rotisserie while trying to sleep at four in the morning today.

I'm back to playing with Factorio, in my game named "Special Kind of Hell" after someone's description of trying to play the game with all the mods I have.

In the base game, you mine iron ore and smelt it into iron plate. Two steps. In the modded version, one of multiple ways to do it is to mine a composite ore, crush it, flotation filter it with pure water, process the chunks with sulfuric acid in a leaching plant, refine it into a purified form, sort the purified form of the composite ore into it's component refined ores (including iron, nickel, cobalt, gold, etc.), turn the purified ores into ingots (which have their own processes, involving, for instance, putting nickel ore into a blast furnace with carbon monoxide to get nickel ingots - Wikipedia says this is the Mond Process; I love how close to real processes the mod author has tried to be), then, for the most efficient production, smelt multiple kinds of ingots (one combination that works is cobalt, nickel, and iron) together in an induction furnace to make molten iron, which is cast into iron plates in a casting machine.
Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to do something that's so very simple in the base game and I take a break for a while. But I keep coming back to it. This is one of the best toys I've ever played with.

I'm also playing with a new way to arrange train lines that looks more factory-like. I'm having some signaling issues and trains getting stuck, but I'm working through the bugs.
I'm something like a hundred hours into this map and I have yet to get anywhere close to launching a rocket, the ostensible 'end' of the game.

Yaaaaaaaay! The Factorio 1.5 update came out early!!!!!!!!

I learned recently that the English "chauffeur" comes from a French word meaning one who heats. References to obsolete technology in daily life (in this case, referring to when the driver would need to get a head of steam on the car's boiler before it could be driven) make me happy. Incidentally, now I understand why a chafing dish is called a chafing dish, and can guess at a connecting etymology between that and to have chafed skin. Language is cool.

Speaking of obsolete tech, I have a problem. I have bought another vintage hi-fi receiver. It was $30 at the thrift store, and while I was looking at it, the clerk announced that there was a half-price sale on electronics, but it was ending and people should get in line now to qualify. I'd been trying to find info about it via Google and had a general idea that it was a nice piece of gear, but few specifics. So, time running out, I grabbed it and got in line.

It turned out to be a great find. Not only an unusual piece of hardware, but a piece of local history. It's a Sherwood receiver; the company began here in Chicago and one source says they produced the first ever fully solid-state receiver. Mine is a 1974 S8900a, with support for an external quadraphonic adapter (for a system called Dynaquad), and is likely one of the last Sherwood units made in the United States. It can put out 60 watts per channel with 8ohm speakers, so is notably more powerful than my later 20 watt Marantz. It was top of the line in its day; I've seen a cost of about $400 in '74! I keep thinking that someone must have really loved this unit once. It's the only receiver I've ever seen with a sliding pot to set phono line sensitivity too. I powered it up and it all seems to work. The tuning dial lights up in a beautiful rich blue and even without an external antenna, the bouncing signal strength meter told me it was picking things up as I rolled through the frequencies while squatting on the floor of the store. After getting it home, I found that sound gets all the way to the speaker terminals, though one channel seems come in and out. Maybe I can try to fix it up.

And on the topic of fixing things...I feel more and more like I want to get Posi to help me learn to do component level electronics repair and tuning. Oddly enough, it comes from thinking metaphorically about all the Factorio I've been playing. Building a factory in Factorio, I was thinking a while back, feels like building a multi-stage rolling ball sculpture. I can watch things go in, get transformed, follow a path, over and over. I've enjoyed things like rolling ball sculptures, watching liquids flow through a system, or, later, imagining the flows of electrons and information through computer networks I built, ever since I was a kid. Factorio appeals for the same underlying reasons, and it's enthralling. What else, I asked myself recently, would have that feeling?

It's a lot like how electrons flow through an appliance, isn't it? They enter the system, are shaped and transformed by various components of that system (I know, in AC they don't actually 'flow' as such), and eventually exit again. Modifying those circuits modifies the flow. It's a logical, intriguing system. Posi has an oscilloscope, a soldering station, and a lot of electronics experience. I think when I visit him this Sunday I'll bring the service manual for the Sherwood with and ask him how doable the procedures therein seem and whether he'd help me learn to do them.

Speaking of Factorio, I spent some hours planning out potential layouts for my second run through the game. A portion of my work is below. The first time, I just stuck things wherever was convenient at the time and got conveyor belt hell. This time, I'm going to be more organized.





And then, I'm going to play with a set of mods called Bob's Mods that add bunches of more resources, production processes, and products to manage. Because apparently this is not complex enough for me.

Actually, what I'd really like is a game that shows the complexity, and eventual futility, of producing endlessly and trying to manage waste products. There was another person creating a very realistic mod that involved managing useless waste products. Someone on the forums complained about how much of this 'red mud' stuff copper production produces and how annoying it was. He said, in more or less these words, that he really wanted an efficient production loop that doesn't result in lots of useless byproducts. I had to laugh at that; I'm sure a lot of engineers feel the same way! The mod's author responded in part with a link to the Wikipedia article on red mud. It's a shame he seems to have given up development. Bob's Mods seem to be the closest thing to it.