What Stable Diffusion thinks 'Year 2023' looks like.

Here's what got clicks in 2023.

1.ODST

ODST is Halo's darker, more stylistic installment. It plays about the same, though they tried to do maps and objectives. Since each of these campaigns is maybe 8-12 hours, they are thoroughly enjoyable even without major gameplay additions.

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2.Charging on January 6th

Couldn't resist with that title. Photo conditions today were a bit challenging. Even at low tide, the break was pretty far out. The inside waves were also tall and mushy enough to occlude a lot of the action and throw mist on the rest. I stopped over at Scripps after Black's but the wind had killed it. I cropped the bottom of most of these.

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3.Michael Bay area

The PUBG video editor: basics and best practices.

I have a sound card. I guess that's not normal anymore, but out of habit I bought one for my last pc build. I'm happy with it. It has a leet red led and also 'Scout Mode' which (I think) is just an eq setting to amplify footsteps. While I like hearing enemies like the pros, I suspect having a sound card is the source of audio being all screwed up when I export a replay.

The basics: the replay editor is under 'Career'. The default mode is view-only, 'J' key gives you a timeline to hop around. If you press 'Edit' it will bring up camera controls and the like.

Blue circle:

The red circle highlights a slider that controls timeline zoom. For our purposes, find your battle with the timeline zoomed out, then drag this slider to the right (I mostly have it at 3/4ish) so you can navigate your battle's timeline with higher precision.

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4.Graphic art

Look, I haven't followed baseball since the strike and I hate all those sites that steal content from the Jalponiks and Reddits of the world. But here is some baseball content stolen from Reddit cause, like, it was funny and I learned cool A's facts.

Also, funny comments deserve recognition, looking at you /u/Ted_Dongelman. I just wish the /r/baseball crowd had set up their avatars so the quotes below didn't look so lifeless. (I re-scrape every time I generate the page, so maybe in the future they will populate).

Sure, they aren't the most bearlike bears, but they strangely seem to capture the national zeitgeist:

I'm not going to post the cropped Braves logo, it's plenty visible at the top of this post. Instead, here's the NFL version.

Before italics and boldface were a thing, people used quotation marks for emphasis. Or something, all I know is that it's hilarious that they put quotes around "The Pirates".

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5.Up the coast

A few pics from holiday travel.

Left to right:

Christmas was pleasant. Dani loved her magnetic vegetable cutting board. I loved my white elephant National Lampoon gift box. There were dogs and bubbles and a few more rounds of Charterstone.

We enjoyed the cold weather, the redwoods, and the cider in Sebastopol's new(-ish?) town center.

Flying to/from STS was pretty easy.

The same was not true for people on Southwest.

(Via text)

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6.Halo

After blazing through The Ascent (review forthcoming), me and J consulted the list and decided on an epic Halo playthrough. It didn't go so well.

Though Reach is a prequel, we opted to run the games in release order. After realizing that I needed to download Halo 1 from within the collection UI (rather than Steam), we hopped aboard the Pillar of Autumn.

We were immediately slapped in the face - not by elites with laser swords but rather by 3-20 fps gameplay. Like what? It's an early-2000s game running on modern hardware. The atrocious framerates were accompanied by frequent reconnect prompts and eventually a crash on the host (Steamdeck) side.

I gently suggested we have the gaming rig on ethernet do the hosting (though he has fiber), but he couldn't connect to the game session. A little bit of searching yielded this:

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7.The humans are dead

I was at the grocery store the other day getting squeezies and more squeezies. At the checkout I inserted my card to pay and, as usual, the screen flashed some messages like "Insert your card", "Keep your card inserted", "Please don't remove card", "Okay you can remove it now".

There was a time when I'd see "Keep your card inserted" flash over to some other message and pull my card out, assuming the thing had processed. What else would the next message be for? Oh yes, to tell me to leave my card in the reader but using different words. That's always miserable because you need to have the cashier invalidate the transaction and do the whole thing over again.

Thank you, that's all for tonight, I'll be here all week.

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