Kithop

You guys probably want to look at Vivecraft: http://www.vivecraft.org/ if you're thinking of using the fancy HTC Vive or Oculus on the PC (Java) version of Minecraft.

B-but, Genesis does what Nintendon't! ;p W E L C O M E T O T H E N E X T L E V E L "Blast Processing" ... ahem, yeah, uh, the Genesis pretty much just had the much faster clocked CPU going for it (I think just over 7MHz vs the SNES'.. I want to say 3.52 off the top of my head?) - it had similar total colour ranges, but was locked to a smaller on-screen palette at any particular point in time, and yeah, used an older sound chip. I'm actually really fond of that older, grittier sound chip, but then I like old-school AdLib and Sound Blaster 16 music on the PC, too. Think of the various Sonic games and their soundtracks, at least before Sonic CD. I was lucky enough to have both systems growing up - and later a Sega CD! - and I was a huge Sonic fan. In fact, Sonic is what got me into Furry, and Furry is what led me to Brony... anyway, I had way more games for the SNES, and I will admit, Nintendo's first party titles are almost always amazing. Mario in various incarnations (SMW, Yoshi's Island, Kart, SMRPG with Square), Super Metroid, Zelda: A Link to the Past... all great games and part of a line of usually-great hits spanning multiple console generations. ...but whether it was the console hardware or just the game design, they always felt... slow. Even Samus running at full tilt still felt plodding compared to the ridiculous, so-fast-you're-outrunning-the-camera twitch action you'd get with the classic Sonic games, played well. Plus games like Streets of Rage 3 and Ecco the Dolphin (though I had the CD version with much better soundtrack) were fun rentals. Speaking of the Sega CD, though, if that kind of counts (along with the 32X, which I don't own ) - that thing is... well, it's a thing. FMV games are horrible, but Ecco and Sonic CD were awesome. Real CD soundtracks more than made up for the crummy MIDI synth chip. Having your console be your own CD player for listening to music as a young teenager in your bedroom? Freaking sweeeeeeet. I'd put on any of my favourites and fall asleep listening to music. That was worth huge points to me as a kid, back when getting your own boombox or whatever as well would be ridiculously expensive. Not that the Sega CD wasn't expensive. Hooo boy was it expensive. My normally generous and spoiling dad even grumbled at the cost of the thing when 'Santa' got it for me one year. Still.

Does a Coleco Adam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam) - circa 1983 count? I remember we had that when I was super young, like 3 or 4, and by then it was already discontinued. I typed in my own, really bad (all O's!) ASCII art and printed it out of the included dot-matrix printer for my mom to post on the fridge. We had three other programs for it other than the built-in typewriter mode - a '2010' game on cartridge where you had to move a spark around various circuits of the spaceship to repair them before it crashed into the sun, 'Buck Rogers' on tape (yes, cassette tape, like the same you'd put in a Walkman), which I guess would be like a really really crude rear-view shooter akin to StarFox, but way simpler, and then BASIC on tape, where my older brother would spend hours retyping in sample programs from the included, huge manual, and it would draw shapes and such. ...saving? What saving? To what? Our first PC was a 486/DX 33 with 4MB RAM (soon upgraded to 8MB), a 212MB hard drive, Diamond Stealth 32 VLB video card, DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. Eventually we got a Multimedia Level 2 kit, I think it was, which was a 2x SCSI CD-ROM and Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card (with the SCSI interface on it for the CD-ROM to connect to). The 486 was replaced by a Pentium Overdrive @ 83MHz in the same socket (what? A CPU with a FAN on it?! ZOMG must be so fast!!!), the PAS16 by a Sound Blaster AWE32, the Diamond Stealth by a Matrox Mystique & m3D PowerVR card... then a Voodoo Banshee (which was a Voodoo 2 + 2D card built-in! No more pass-thru cables!), a Pentium 133, then 200 with MMX (zomg), hard drives got bigger - 800-odd MB, then over a GB. A gigabyte! Windows 3.1 gave way to Windows 95 (anyone else remember the ads with the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up'? The Hover game? Bragging that your computer was able to play the 'high res' versions of the random music videos, including one for Weezer's 'Buddy Holly' included in the 'GOODIES' folder on the install CD?), to 98, to ME (we don't talk about Windows ME), 2000, XP and so on. In that journey, this was 'the family computer' that I got to spend the most time on, learning how to make boot disks with various AUTOEXEC.BAT & CONFIG.SYS incantations, and later a boot menu with options, for getting all my classic games to run (Aces of the Pacific & Aces Over Europe were BRUTAL for needing a ton of Conventional memory, while say, Star Wars: Rebel Assault of course needed CD & Sound drivers - 'TSR's for Terminate-and-Stay-Resident - loaded, and EMM386 to enable RAM above 1MB). But me? My first real computer that was purely mine and not a family computer or hand-me-down of the 'old' one? An old iBook G3 @ 700MHz with some Radeon 7500(?) video card. And it had WiFi - AirPort, actually pre-WiFi; it came out before the spec was finalized, if I remember right, but it worked fine in the end. I did the last half of my high school on that thing; I was one of the few kids in school with a laptop - my friend had an external USB WiFi adapter thing for his laptop, and we'd learned how to set up the then-nascent chat programs (remember, school did not have WiFi, cell phones still had push-button numbers and were able to, at most, play Snake, let alone connect to some kind of internet) to be able to send each other secret messages despite being in different wings of the school, across the courtyard from each other. Getting something that worked on his PC *and* my Mac was way hard back then. I played a lot of Starcraft (Warcraft 3 ran like crap) on that laptop, and Quake 3. Sadly, however, the video card and its 'low-lead' solder decided to detach from the rest of the board, and despite being replaced once, the new board's done it again, so there's no working video on that thing at all - not even plugging in an external monitor, so it's dead. Lots of machines have came and went since then - I started building my own gaming rigs, have had a couple laptops, dabbled in watercooling and had the typical 'blinged out with cold cathode lamps & LEDs' rig for LAN parties at one point, learned BSD UNIXes (stemming from the Mac) and Linux, and just kind of went that way and haven't looked back. Still, having to work to get the most basic things going that we all just take for granted these days is what got me into computers in the first place, learning how they work, and getting me into a lifelong (so far) career with them. Unless one of you's got experience with some fun old mainframes or punch cards or something, ahem, uh, 'get off my lawn, you young whippersnappers'?

I'm partial to running my own Mumble/Murmur server instead: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page Free, open source, runs on pretty much anything, and it's had awesome latency/voice quality for ages. Been around a lot longer than Discord, but it's purely a VoIP chat geared for gaming (rooms/channels vs. one-on-one private stuff). But then I like running all my own servers in my basement, so.

I ran around a whole bunch with my friends (and coworkers, who worked on the BronyCAN website this year!), and spent just as much time recovering in the hotel room. Being anemic and trying to do a con is a mite difficult, but I had a ton of fun regardless. If anyone's interested, I have video up from my panel now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W04i87KJ1os

I did get approval for my panel - tentatively scheduled for Friday. So now I get to put all the info together! D:

I'd love people attending who are interested! Still waiting on review and approval, of course, but here's what I submitted as a draft conbook entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MU* It sounds like my panel idea (that I submitted yesterday) might be a good one then. ;P Basically: think something a little more laid back, but similar to IRC, with a focus on roleplaying.

I'm already pre-registered; it's in the same hotel as VancouFur this year, which I'm going to this very weekend. ...oh, and my coworker is apparently (one of?) the webmaster(s) for the BronyCAN site this year, so, I uh... guess I kind of have to go, don't I? One idea I actually am just coming up with now potentially for a panel (and I've never put on a panel before! D:)... 'A Brief History of MU*s, and where they fit with MLP'? I'll need to do some more research on specifically MLP:FiM places; all I know of is https://wiki.equestriandawn.com/Main_Page - somewhere I've been for a number of years, but I've been on Furry and Sonic the Hedgehog-themed MUCKs before - SPR, FluffMUCK, FurryMUCK... and the now-defunct ChaosMUCK, where for a brief time I helped out on staff as 'Co-God' / #2. Even did some horrible MUF programming ('2 2 +' ... 'pop swap pop pop pop...') For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, think something a little more structured than IRC, and typically used for freeform, realtime roleplaying where a small group of 2-6(ish) players can bang out a scene in a couple hours, as opposed to a forum RP that can take days or weeks. What do you guys think - sound interesting? ^.^

I used to have a fairly long, full beard when I played full-time in a metal band. Since got a razor (gasp!) and shaved the sides. Kept a full goatee, with the chin bit staying longish. But then, I kept (and plan to keep) my long hair to go with it. ;D With full-beard (bonus: pony shirt!). And now just a goatee.

I have my own espresso machine. And French press. I used to have a Moka pot, until it exploded (oops). Making double-shot soy lattes every morning at home? Awwww yissss. <3 Or, in the summer time, prepping a French press with extra strong cold-brew coffee to sit in the fridge overnight, only to get plunged and poured over ice in the morning? Maybe even two presses worth, to have one with lunch? There's a couple localish grocery store brands I like, bean-wise (Kicking Horse, Saltspring Island), but there's a roaster / cafe in my town here that I've started visiting and getting whole beans from that are pretty good! I like to keep things on the light-medium roast side (dark roast tastes like I imagine cigarettes taste) - more caffeine that way, too.

I've had plenty of blood taken from me - 6 little vials in a row the other day, even! Oh, wait... you mean like, donated for other people? Yeah, no, they won't take mine. Something about 'permanently deferred'... I even showed up once, but they turned me away. Whee Crohn's. In all seriousness, though, for those of you that have donated, thank you - I showed up once in hospital with a red blood count of something like 49 (instead of ~125). The doctors asked me incredulously how I was still even conscious. Two bag transfusion right then and there in emergency. Turns out I was bleeding internally from an abscess. Who knows what would've happened to me if that wasn't there.

I've been vegan for... probably 8 or 9 years and counting now, but I don't care what other people eat. I've got all sorts of digestive problems, a bad dairy allergy... I found I had way, way more energy when I went vegan initially. After 2 or 3 weeks, it was like night and day. When I found out I had Crohn's disease and probably had it from when I was at least 12 or so, it was like... 'Oh. That makes a bunch of sense.' One of the things they tell you is most Crohn's sufferers have issues with dairy. A lot of us apparently have issues with meat, too. Weirdly, I never gained nor lost much weight. Save a bit of money not buying meat, eating out less (because, you know, choice is pretty limited for us ), but then turn around and spend some of that deciding to splurge on organic things or that extra-fancy dairy-free dark chocolate (omnom). That said, I think PETA is silly and probably the 'vegan' equivalent of the 'Christian' Westboro Baptists - you want to grill up a steak? Go for it. I'll even help you cook it. I made an Epic Meal Time-style bacon weave for a friend once. But this works for me, helps me manage my condition, and yeah, notions of kindness towards animals and the environmental/food security bent do help a little, too. ^.^

In interesting news, though, despite a scheduling conflict nixing yesterday's get together, as of next weekend I should have a complete band meeting for the first time here at my place. We're going to be focused on original material, and I don't expect to be uber productive on our first day - heck, I'm meeting the guitarist & drummer for the very first time on recommendation of our keyboard/flute & bass players. But it's enough to call ourselves a proper band with me out front, and we've got all the gear to record what we work on, so as you can imagine, I'm super excited for what the future holds.

It's layered a bunch, so yeah - just one camera taking multiple parts. I might have a friend willing to splice it together, or we might actually tackle doing this a bit better. I *do* have a drumkit, guitar amp, bass amp, etc. in the basement, so I could do this decidedly-not-acoustic. I'm just recovering from spending some time in the hospital a month and a half ago, still anemic, so my energy levels aren't quite up to where they need to be to tackle that. I believe, without switching computers to the one I recorded with: * 7-string acoustic rhythm ® * 12-string acoustic lead (L) * 7-string acoustic lead (centre, post-bridge bit) * Main vocal * Doubled vocal All just the webcam I have at my desk. Saving up for some kind of proper camcorder next, and putting together a band slowly.

I did take video at the same time while recording all these parts - I just don't have good video editing software (iMovie sucks) to splice ~4-5 video parts together. http://www.kithop.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kithop-Everlong-Acoustic.mp3

Hey, I've been working on banging out a couple live acoustic / vocal covers the past week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo_o70oI0Y&index=1&list=PLQH2QUt1epC3zuLiftCvhrjLMT70vTQDh I figure I'd throw it out there: Any suggestions for someone with my somewhat grungy vocal range that you'd like to see? Alternately, if you're working on a project and need a vocalist, feel free to hit me up.

One fun thing I like doing is Parallel Compression, particularly on drum submixes (usually two separate paths for the shells with a couple more stacked in, and much less on the overheads/cymbals). You take your dry drum mix, put it into a bus in your DAW, then set up 2-5~ish Aux in tracks that are reading in that bus, push them down to say, -14dB or so and slap on fairly heavy compression, say from an all-buttons-in 1176. If you solo that aux track with the compressor, it should sound just on the threshold of being really annoyingly squashed. Dupe that setting across the rest of the buses, group them together so you can adjust their faders together, and then bring them up and down (or alternately, try muting/unmuting individual aux tracks to alter the number of parallel compressors) relative to the original dry track that you want to leave at 0dB. What this does is rather than just making loud things quieter, it alters the curve to try and make quiet things louder, without boosting the noise floor too much. I'll usually run 3 or 4 compressors on the dry drum shells and one or two on the cymbals. My first attempt at doing this from a live situation (too much on the cymbals, but it fits the style): http://88miletrip.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-the-dtes Bit better mix of my other friends' doom metal band - all live off the floor in a really noisy room with 15+ mics: https://oldeworldenudists.bandcamp.com/releases

Mics are very situational - what is it going to be used for? Live applications, I splurged on a BETA58A. Studio, I'm using an Audio-Technica AT2020 (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo_o70oI0Y&list=PLQH2QUt1epC3zuLiftCvhrjLMT70vTQDh) - they make an 'AT2020USB' that's the same thing, but with a USB interface instead of a standard XLR condenser that needs phantom power. The BETA mics are much more expensive, but you get a bit more clarity and top-end out of them, I find. They can also be pretty hot, gain-wise. A good condenser at home or in the studio though makes a huge difference for recordings.

My Favourite Mane 6 Pony: Rainbow Dash How did you find MLP Forums?: Friend pointed me at Poniverse! How you became a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Started watching a few eps into S1, got hooked, typical story. Hi! I'm new here, but not to pony in general - have been watching since FiM's first season. Visited BronyCAN a few times, may be back next year! I do IT work by day to pay the bills, but my real passion lies in music - played in bands since I was in middle school, and will be starting a new one here very shortly. In the meantime, have some silly acoustic covers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo_o70oI0Y&list=PLQH2QUt1epC3zuLiftCvhrjLMT70vTQDh