The weekend brought nice waves and great weather, plus the water is not exactly numbing. Saturday afternoon had a strong offshore breeze, making for some serious spray off the lip. Sunday morning I went out at Encinitas with Derrick and Ryan.


There was no lateral current so it was easy to stay in position. But for whatever reason I was down... down-sun (? is that a thing? anyway he was backlit) for most of the session.

Also there was like a +2' tide so I could actually stand some of the time, meaning I was not exhausted at the end of it.


On my own advice I went with center/continuous focus (stupidly not doing continuous shutter). I can't say it produced significantly better results. There are fewer frames where the water in front of me is the focal plane:


... but plenty where I missed my subject or water spray grabbed focus to leave the subject just a little bit off:


But it was a fun shoot and great to be in the water.

We had the spot pretty much to ourselves, but I did snap a couple of randos. One of them at least served the purpose of showing how closed out some of the waves were.


A few more:




Alright so it was a little while ago, but I got a jonesing to do some city building. I had sworn off of the new SimCity after the online-only snafu and maybe reconsidered when they fixed it but the mediocre reviews settled things.

I've heard games like Tropico are excellent alternatives, but Origin offered SimCity 2000 for free, so why not? What's more, I think I've played the game in two eras - when it originally came out and again around college on an emulator. Both times the game would hang or crash once cities reached a certain size. So I felt I had some unfinished business.

I stiched screenshots of Sahn Diago:


I was never the kind of kid to build a lego spaceship only so I could crash it, I had too much admiration for my own efforts. Nothing's really changed, but when a few incidental fires wiped out large sections of SD (including arcologies), I wanted to conduct study on fireproofing. So I turned a single monster loose (seen in the gif above) and did not deploy emergency services.

Best guess on the fire algorithm:


Meaning:

• Fire will not jump spaces (excluding the initial monster death ray).
• Some things like water will serve as a natural barrier. Hills? Roads?
• Some spaces will be missed by luck of the draw.

This area was obliterated. I think there was a stadium and maybe arco here. A single park did not burn, but the fire clearly climbed the hillside.


Downtown, adjacent to the bay, remained untouched. A lot of dumb luck or other forces at play?


Another section that seemed to escape the dice roll. I mean, they have no power or anything so they can't be all that lucky. Plus the rampant looting and violence.


Okay so the water protected the peninsula, the bridge and raised wires did not burn, but neither did their adjacent tiles. The southeast road did burn, but remained untouched at the bottleneck.


Note to city designers: islands are good. You know, unless your disaster is a flood.


At the late stages of my city building I did a lot of earth moving. Cause, you know, what's a few thou here and there. Putting arcos (and power plants) on artificial islands was good policy, although it slowed their growth. Dominant strategy: build arco, fill arco, moat arco.


Moat all the things! I guess dedicating livible tiles to water isn't such an issue when you can build arcos.

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