Wednesday 12 October 2016

Rant 1233 / The Times They Are a-Changin'

01 Sept 2016

So the following rant is going to be number 1234. Oh boy.






















92.4kg this morning. Still couldn't do the bonus round in the Core Synergistics session of P90X but the weight loss is there. Waistline has now visibly shrunk when I put on my leather belt after a long period of using my army fabric belt which has no hole.















02 Sept 2016

Decided that this format is better.






















Anyway, the 28th day horde arrived and left. The dance pit was deepened by yet another layer despite the mix of reinforced wooden log spikes and iron reinforced wooden log spikes. Two medium-sized holes just enough for zombies to get through were made on the front and right front side of the house, so it was easy to reseal afterwards.

That was a slightly larger horde though, and unlike the 21st day, half my walls were reinforced concrete and all of them were three to five layers thick. Therefore the holes indicated an even greater amount of damage despite no change in the size of holes in my walls. Strangely, the sole reinforced concrete pillar at one corner of the dance pit remained undamaged by the horde.

The mix of concrete blocks with reinforced wooden blocks was used because they have not dug through the soil level to the rock below, unlike in the dance pit, and I'm reluctant to do something that the zombies would do for me for free every 7th day.

Where there is soil, I'm more inclined to use wood because if they dig a tunnel underneath, the burden on the surrounding blocks would be much less, therefore putting the house at a much lower risk of collapse.

That's what I'm trying to avoid all these days - collapse. Hence the quick jump from wood to concrete, forgoing the iron reinforced blocks I could have used in between.

There are 90 units of steel in my chest too, ready to further reinforce my concrete walls which have mostly already been reinforced beforehand with rebar frames, but this will come later. Priority goes to thickening my walls, placing eaves all around the third floor of my house and building a very high fourth level.

Also realized that plants can't grow without sunlight so I'm moving the planned farm to above the roof which I've already build walls around. The fourth floor will be built above those walls so that there is a large gap between the top of those walls and the floor of that top floor. Maybe I'll build it with iron bars as windows so that I can harvest some hornets whenever they get close.






























05 Sept 2016

The Qatar Airways Travel Festival is almost over but I haven't booked anything because we couldn't confirm anything. Damn!























The 35th day horde was pretty big compared to before, at about 105 by 6am and at least one zombie got close enough to keep hunting me after sunrise. It turned to have reached the second floor but somehow was only attacking horizontally, ie at the walls, instead of digging directly at the ceiling. Well, it did hit one of the ceiling blocks once but that was nothing compared to a column of wooden wall that got completely destroyed under me. Maybe the idea was to collapse the supports under me, an idea that wouldn't have worked anyway.

Moreover, how was the zombie seeing me through the floor? Probably a bug. Therefore I'm now in the process of adding another layer of wood to the floor, making the ceiling on the second floor lower.

Despite the size and the distance of one zombie from me, the horde did surprisingly little damage to my ground floor. Only one two-block hole was made through the side where the front door used to be and although the dance pit was deepened again, the lone log spike furthest from me was still intact.

All these are likely due to the increased amount of spikes placed within and without, which is, in turn, due to a larger supply of wood from the new farm/orchard on the roof of the house.

However, the one zombie reaching the second floor is still a concern, so I'm also considering filling it up with wood.

One major problem did crop up recently. I've been trying to extend some sections of the walls up beyond the roof by another 15 or so blocks but somehow, on one section, no block can stick to it. This is not due to any logical issue like weight and stress, a fact that I've learnt the hard way. The current theory is that the trees whose branches are clipping through it are affecting its physical properties, and I think that's the most probable answer because on the other side where half a bridge has already been attached at the top, there is no tree clipping through it.

Otherwise, it could be due to something buried under the wall, something that would take a long time to find.

And yes, this has to be a bug. If it's anything like physics, having something buried under the soil a structure was built upon would cause it to topple, not affect its ability to support horizontal beams. Instead of only having the beams collapse, the entire thing beginning from where the buried item is would fall.



























06 Sept 2016

Took me this long to understand why this wasn't a bug. When there is a hole under a block, the block becomes a beam supported by other blocks next to it. Even if it is very tall, a beam is still a beam; it just becomes a heavier beam the taller it gets.

So the tree is causing a bug in a block in the wall, making it non-existent in terms of structural integrity, something like a jelly. The caused all the blocks above it to be considered by the game as blocks requiring support from other blocks, or a one-block wide and about ten-block tall bridge.

That was why when I tested the wall's structural integrity by placing wood frames on each section of the three columns that formed the bugged extended wall from the roof of the house upwards, it collapsed after I stepped on a wood frame placed on a block that was a tree was clipping.

This means I have to rethink my tree plantation. A safe source of wood is necessary but it also needs to stay away from the rest of my base. New idea: use the eaves that are currently only one block long to prevent crawlers from climbing up. If they are extended slightly, the upper surface can be used as a farm and plantation. Just need to extend them further for the wider trees.

This will take some work since the extension will require a lot of iron, the material that can reinforce wooden blocks to the point where they can support 16 blocks of themselves in weight on each of their four horizontal sides.

In the meantime, my need for more stones is becoming an issue. The safest source of stone is the ground under my house but it's slow. Moreover, it risks giving the zombies more surface to hit and possibly undermining the integrity of my structure. With enough holes under the walls, they can collapse my entire base, a problem I've been trying to prevent all this time with concrete.

Like I said, a block with a hole underneath becomes a beam, even if it's the rock under my house. If there is a hole 15 blocks under the rock of my house, then every block starting from the block above the hole gets considered as a bridge over the hole. The number of blocks supporting it may be great for that one-block-wide beam, but the 7th day hordes rarely do so little damage.

On the other hand, I can also just place many layers of log spikes.


























The problem of the bad wall is that instead of being directly on top of the pre-built cobblestone wall of the house, I had placed it one block further out, on the overhanging roof block instead.

Time to rebuild the entire wall.

































26 Sep 2016

Stopped playing 7 Days to Die for a while already. Probably two weeks. It was getting monotonous due to the simple mundaneness of building up my walls, repairing them after every 7 days and going out to harvest materials en masse every once in a while.

The hordes don't even get through to the center where my zombie dance floor is anymore. At this point, it's safe to fill the entire hole with concrete, and it may have to do with my sky base where I don't get detected by the hordes at any time, causing them to maybe not focusing on getting to the center as hard as they used to.

In any case, maybe A15 of the game will be more interesting than this.

Or I could just move back to Project Zomboid, where surviving is a lot harder.























Took SQ to Guangzhou this time and it was a lot better than expected. As I fly more, the little differences that didn't use to matter to me have become a lot more noticeable, like better food, eg Magnum ice cream for dessert, and the greater variety of movies, not to mention the metal cutleries. Still better than the ones from Qatar Airways but not as good as the older ones my parents took from SQ flights in the 90s.

It should be because when you fly this often, air travel has long lost its novelty and turned into an annoyance. I'm not even kidding - I find train travel a lot more pleasant than air travel, even though the former takes so much more time. Then again, trains are also better than coaches. Perhaps it's the fact that you have a greater freedom for movement when in a long-distance train ride, unless you're talking about packed trains which are as good as coaches and planes.



























12 Oct 2016

So it's been a month since I began this post and it's still not done yet.

Been distracted. This year's trend in Korean fashion is yet another one that doesn't exactly fit the Singaporean style. Why are they still sticking with big sizes? At least it's not the gigantic sleeves that look like they were meant for morbidly obese dwarves, though similarities can still be found easily in this year's Korean winter fashion.

Work isn't going well tbh.





















7 Days to Die is finally in a new version! Alpha 15 if I'm not wrong. Looks cool but I have no time to go into it. Looks really great though, with the new biome and NPCs. Also, spikes are no longer dirt cheap so a new defense strategy will need to be formed.




















Mostly done organizing the trip to Changbaishan in December. Had to really go into it because it was kind of complicated, with three of us visiting three places in ten days. Even made an Google Sheet for it to remember all the dates and details, especially since some things cannot be booked, like the bus from the train station to the town we're going to stay while taking at least one day trip to Changbaishan.

This town, Changbai Town or Changbaixian, has almost no information available online in English and little in Chinese, mostly in comments made by visitors in forums and a few by professionals in the tourism industries in the same places.

It's so unknown in the English-speaking world, hotels that accept foreigners are uncommon in that town, so it was somewhat hard to find one that we could book online that was in a convenient location, had a reasonable price and had reviews commending their hygiene.

That hotel only accepts cash.

This will be an adventure for all of us because even I, as a far more seasoned traveller than any of my two travel mates, have never been to such an unknown place.

The main reason for picking that town to stay in is not only is it close to the lesser travelled and therefore more pristine southern slope of Changbaishan, but also because there's a train station servicing trains to North Korea there. Heck, the town itself is on the border between China and the DPRK, so going to the latter will simply mean crossing a road. At least, that's what it looks like on Google Map, but who knows if they will have guards standing along the actual border. Got to keep an open mind here when dealing with unknowns.