> Keeping streaming local passes that cost on to gamers

Another example of problematic (lack of) inflexion in English.

@tchrist shudder to think.

Hahahahaha. Hahaha. Marvellous.

@tchrist Offhand I'd say the chalkboard font. #8 on your list.

But they spelled it wrong. The ELL site should be: A Englis Langauge Leaner

@Robusto Congrats on picking Comic Sans.

What's new.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Heh. :)

@tchrist Win!

I knew you wouldn’t let me down.

The answer was obvious.

I thought people would choose number two.

And another hammer on my piano broke: B-flat 4. I have to stop banging it so damn hard. Lucky I got extra hammers.

Whoa.

Hey, I get carried away.

There’s a really intense transcription of Albéniz’s “Asturias” that I’ve sometimes worried about doing that.

Yeah. Rachmaninoff too. Those big chords cry out to be hammered.

Not saying anything about her playing, but it shows the hammering you could do if you were into that.

It would be worth replacing all the damn hammers to be able to smash the chords like that. Smash and mash!

Here, this is how it is more commonly played:

Are you replacing them with something stronger?

@tchrist I don't have anything stronger. The problem is that the nylon (or whatever synthetic it is must get brittle with age, I think.

I just pulled out my copy of Bach's Italienisches Konzert. Speaking of hammering things.

Wow, it's funny to see my teacher's suggested fingerings in pencil here. Takes me back.

Oh gosh.

I know somehow who said if they ever met someone could play Bach’s Italian Concerto, they’d marry that person, no questions asked.

I’m afraid, however, that your genders are not compatible. :)

Tell them thanks anyway, I'm already married.

Yah well. Can you really play it?

I think we've had this discussion before. I recall mentioning that I thought the middle movement was the hardest to play.

That’s a lot of work.

@tchrist It's a lot of work, but it lies well once you get the fingerings down.

I haven't played it in about five years, so I will be rusty. But it's a fun piece to play.

The meandering melody in the middle movement is hard to play musically. Hard to keep the continuity.

I don’t know the sheet music for it. But I find with Bach that it can be too easy to let the interweaving lines lose their separateness in ways that become muddled.

The rest just plays itself from a musical standpoint. From a technical standpoint it is challenging, but not a crazy challenge like some other pieces I could mention.

@tchrist That's exactly right. You have to hold the notes for their full length but no longer. That half-note in the middle of the bar needs to have a finger on it till the end, while you're playing the little ornament above it. And NO FUCKING PEDAL, TYVM!

Hah.

Isn’t that what the middle pedal is for? :)

Really, the difficult technical challenge with Bach is keeping all the voices as distinct voices, not chords. It's about counterpoint, not just harmony.

When I'm really doing a decent job I am imagining actual human voices singing the parts.

Now that I think of it, that's probably what Glenn Gould was doing (except on a vastly higher level). Which is why he was always humming to himself while he played.

Yes, that’s what you have to do. Follow the line in your mind like it’s a human voice.

I’m falling asleep at my keyboard. I’m off to bed. Good night.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

@tchrist Me too. Later.

@Rob @Reg This is . . . incredible. I believe I’ve actually attended concerts by this fellow; he’s local to me. But the incredible stuff is the computer bits, all the work they’ve done. Follow along some you know, and you will see.

You have to hit "play movie" to see the full deal.

Hey all

Can anyone figure out what that horizontal row below the horse's eyes is supposed to be? :-)

my best guess is a noseband

Hi @Jez

You're native speaker of English?

yes

You're aware of this?

that's quite a traditional way of doing things

normally these days, you actually respond to the question: "How do you do?" "I'm fine, thanks."

although the idea of the response being the same as the question has, interestingly, made its way into slang. You might hear people greeting each other thus: "Alright?" "Alright?"

thanks

From which country are you?

@Jez: Is there any weekly Writing Exercise chat every Tuesday?

@Jez yes, that's the nose band.

@tchrist I hope they go for 1. the others seem patronising.

Hello friends

yawns

yeah today is boring day

@Mahnax I see that you have been slumming again.

Why do programmers always thing English works like programming languages?

And why don’t they ever expect their programming languages to work like English?

+1 but I think you could make that sentence longer

Of course I could, but you have to come for air eventually.

that's what scuba gear is for!

I could of course have used the archaic formulation "which is why" for the quotidian shortcut "wherefore", but at the cost of three more characters piled up atop the camel’s back.

I'm glad you didn't

Though sometimes I'm unsure what era you are living in

I’ve just come from reading Paarfi of Roundtree, who is given to such embellishment and turn of phrase, and from working out the intricacies of various ornate fugues from the High Baroque, two unrelated endeavours that are nonetheless linked by their very complexity and so condition the mind to continue in the same line and tone.

I see.

Morning.

I dreamed I had a flexible phone.

I could bend the entire device, screen included.

How silly is that?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I've done this before, and at far greater length. Once prompted to describe the process that went into finishing up the Turquoise Camel, here's the sentence I wrote in response:

“That reminds me of how I despite diligent and even prayer-filled attempts to rid myself of such traumatic experiences to this very
day still recall in dreams sleeping and waking those interminably long and bleary-eyed nights sequestered chez Larry in Mountain
View this past July during which I would cobble together tortuous monstrosities of innumerable clauses and moods and styles and
dubious-at-best antecedents bereft of periods or even semi-colons, chthonic monstrosities long since banished to the nethermost

@tchrist That's surprisingly readable.

That was part of the point. Anybody can pile up clauses and phrases in an unreadable pile, but it takes real work to assemble them into something that can be understood.

There’s a lovely Brust quote about that very thing, but which I’ve no time to hunt out and type in now, because Indian beckons.

Where have all the commas gone?

@Cerberus I used one. It sufficed.

Actually two.

I was positively profligate with them in my ELU sentence.

@Cerberus I dreamed that it was half-past midnight and someone knocked at the door, and my wife said "Oh, probably someone from the bus stop: I told them how you have a funny way of saying 'Mamma Mia'." I went to the door and a Chinese woman with a shaved head came in and introduced herself. She said she'd heard that I had a funny way of saying 'Mamma Mia', and that I made good scones. Then she told me that her middle name was "Vader Piet" but that she pronounced it "Viader Piet".

She also asked for a scone but I didn't have the heart to tell her that they were from a store-bought mix.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Haha wtf, okay, you win hands down.

"Probably someone from the bus stop" is actually quite funny.

I'm still trying to understand why the Chinese woman spoke English but had a Dutch middle name and why her head was shaved.

And I see you you have internalised Dutch racist rituals.

Shaved head = monk?

@Cerberus racist?

You saw monks on the news?

No, I don't watch the news.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Well, Zwarte Piet is obviously racist!

And Dark Father is obviously an evil parent. Apparently.

@Cerberus oh, sure, ... well, perhaps. But isn't "Piet" just Pete? Or is that reserved for him.

Or a hidden one.

I recently saw a picture of a Burmese monk standing outside in this Roukoy (or whatever) village where heavy fighting had broken out. Last week or so. I thought perhaps you had seen it too.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes it is just Pete...but I thought your Piet was based on our chat discussions.

Tsk.

From here:

@Cerberus Possibly influenced by it, yes.

And why "Vader"?

@Cerberus why anything?

Usually, you can trace back some elements from thoughts you had the days/weeks/years before.

Can't you?

I usually can.

My flexible phone was based on what I read about flexible screens, and possible also our conversation.

Well, I can sometimes think of other times I've thought of certain elements of my dream. For example, I have met bald Chinese women before. Or Japanese. Hard to tell sometimes. I have never made scones but I do bake. etc. But why all of these elements would come together into one dream... who knows.

Oh, I think the coming together is often 100 % arbitrary. It feels like that.

I think in my case it might be 200% arbitrary.

But, in the case of the bald woman, I often just "feel" what previous thought it was distilled from, when analysing it later. If it somehow feels the same as the memory.

200 is a rather regular number still. Why not 263 % arbitrary?

yeah, sometimes there is a clear trigger. Eg yesterday a Chinese woman that I'd seen on the bus DID come to my house IRL. But I was expecting her.

Ahh there you go!

@Cerberus That's too much arbitrary.

Do you ever contemplate baldness?

@Cerberus contemplate it?

Sometimes I also dream of a random kid that was in my class in primary school.

Whom I haven't seen in 15+ years, and whom I was never close with.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yeah. Or whatever.

@Cerberus well, I am bald, so... But most women I know are not.

So it doesn't have to be an important thought memory that it is based on. But I can often trace a detail in my dreams back to something like that.

Yeah OK, so it figures you might have thought about that in the past at some point. It doesn't have to deep or important thoughts.

Yeah, I can guess that some dream element represents some real life memory, but the path is not always clear. And that dream was followed by a different dream in which I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting at the dinner table, and a bunch of scotsmen were going door-to-door to play bagpipes.

Haha, oh my.

You are very creative in your dreams.

Sure, many elements are untraceable.

But I have to run.

Later!

why South Africans called as proteas any idea?

the English common name of a genus of South African flowering plants

Um, that’s its name?

yeah Proteas - Its part of their Cricket South Africa's logo

its National Flower of SOuth Africa

Mmm, cake.

My little son is playing classic Sega games.

^ cake

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Is that the birthday cake?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Art.

@KitFox yes, for my daughter

You're getting better every year.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Sweet.

A ballerina wearing red shoes and a party hat

Ballerina bear.

It's cute.

@Cerberus I thought the bear part was obvious :)

More so than the party hat, eh.

Well, who knows.

Who, indeed?

Actually I'm pleased with the party hat. I dyed some white fondant blue, and yellow, and then rolled them together to make a mixed-up pattern.

Anybody ever play the original Sonic?

@KitFox yes. I much preferred Sonic II.

Yeah, the colours have turned out very well.

Do you remember how to get past a part with a green stretchy leash?

haha no

I'm not sure I ever finished it.

I think I have played the original Sonic...I remember a blue animal and yellow rings, in big pixels.

I barely remember it.

That's all.

It's right in the first level. We keep getting stuck there because I can't figure out what to do.

Google for a walk-through?

Well, he's decided that he wants to play VectorMan instead.

How are you feeling today?

Better than yesterday.

I'm drinking coffee today.

I had a fever yesterday still, but I think it's gone this morning.

I chugged some tylenol just to be sure.

Oh OK.

Can you walk around and e.g. go out to buy food?

I remember I just couldn't walk for more than a minute or so, last time I had the flu.

I can't do much without coughing and I'm very tired, but I feel well enough to sit on the couch and play with my little son today.

I should set up my old atari and let the kids play pac-man

We lost two good days of working on the house.

OK.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You don't need the atari, man. They ported all those games.

I remember I didn't actually feel that bad; I was just weak as a cloth puppet.

Did you see the dohickey where they put the Atari games on a controller that you can just plug in to your TV?

I had little or no respiratory syndromes, oddly.

I'm not sure if the two are related.

I feel like I've been sick this entire winter.

You can probably even play Atari games on Android!

I read that the flu usually comes with respiratory symptoms, but not necessarily.

I'd like to play Ladybug again. That was Colecovision.

I almost bought one with 30 games for $30.

Not bad.

We weren't allowed a console.

We didn't have one either.

We had a Commodore 64.

And then a 128.

Doesn't that count?

We had nothing until I got my Game Boy. Somehow that was allowed.

Computers are not consoles.

Then later came a black-and-white PC.

Oh, so a Commodore is a full-fledged PC?

Oh yeah. 64 kilobytes of crazy computing power.

I don't really know what it is.

THAT MUCH!?

Wow.

The first time I started tinkering with a computer (only to get some game to work, of course) was on a 486 at 80 MHz. It had 500ish KB memory.

I had a 486 in grad school.

I remember you had to use some complicated method to enable "conventional memory". Not that I had any idea what that meant.

It was so hard to fix computers back then, when there was no Internet!

And now we have this.

@KitFox yes, I've seen it. I also have all the Atari games on an emulator and even bought an atari-usb adaptor but it's laggy

Bummer.

@Cerberus you can, I have an emulator, but it seriously needs a gamepad which I lack.

Now my boy wants me to play The Cave for the fourth time this weekend.

So later.

cya

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hmm...buy a gamepad? Try a different emulator?

Bye.

@Cerberus I think any of them would be really awful without a controller.

the touch screen was never meant to be a controller for twitch games.

Yeah.

But...many people do play games that way, and enjoy them?

I have no idea what it's like.

I did enjoy Donkey Kong on the PC.

All keyboard.

Have you ever played World of Warcraft?

For some reason, multi-player RPGs never attract me.

If I'm playing a multi-player game, I want it to be more casual, I want short sessions when I feel like it.

Tyrant was fun in that way.

@Cerberus Well, a game designed for touch would work fine. An old Sega game, designed for a digital control pad, sucks on a touch screen.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No, I mean exactly that, old Sega games.

I'm sure it's not as good as with a game pad.

@Cerberus Kind of like the Greco-Roman wrestling of PC games then?

I didn't know DK featured in Graeco-Roman gigantomachies...

I shall have to consult the Altar of Pergamon.

@Cerberus In the sense of an arbitrary restriction.

Ah.

Actually, it wasn't any harder than I remembered it on the SNES.

You can find all sorts of cool games on gog.com. Pretty cheap too. If you like turn-based RPGs, I recommend Baldulr's Gate and Fallout.

I have played Baldur's Gate.

I am in fact now playing its remote successor, Dragon Age.

Combat works much the same way, real-time but automated and pausable.

If you liked BG, you will love DA.

I think I played Fallout 2 once.

That was truly turn-based.

I liked Baldur's Gate and I disliked Dragon Age.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Or you could get an Ouya.

Ouya to bolster launch games with NES, SNES, N64 emulation

@KitFox But you described a different combat system.

@KitFox you disliked dragon age?!

Yeah, I know.

how dare you?

I wonder whether I will like Skyrim.

It's mysterious.

I really like the combat in DA.

It is like BG and Neverwinter, but perfected.

@JSBձոգչ It was boring and stilted and I don't find pausing to step through two or three menus in every battle movement to be particularly engaging.

I love that.

ah, well, poo on you

An dying.

i loved it

And trying again.

i also didn't step through menus much

Yeah, what menus?

You just click on abilities in your action bar, and program lots of tactics.

Maybe she means the tactics menu?

I must say that that is a little bit tedious.

Maybe she plays on a console because she prefers to sit on her couch.

I barely used tactics until halfway through the game.

console users deserve whatever suffering they get

She played DA on a console, really?

Whatever. You want to sit in a cramped chair in a cave, you go right ahead.

Did she at least like the storyline?

:)

Sure, he likes the couch too.

But he has no huge screen.

I have just defeated Branka.

That was a tough fight.

I had saved up lots of ability points, and I really had to add some new spells to Wynne and myself in order to be able to beat her.

And manage threat levels better.

@KitFox Couches are underrated as a game platform.

The storyline was meh. It seemed, I dunno. Like it was trying too hard.

All games may be played on Couch 360. Or Sony's Plush Sofa 3 (PS3).

They actually made the game easier on consoles.

By changing some stats, like how much healing you receive etc.

XBox controller is better than the keyboard, but lacks the immediacy of the mouse.

The voice-acting is also rather good.

The immediacy?

I don't use the keyboard much in DA.

i loved the plot. it was the thing i loved most, actually

Typical games have WASD controls for movement, and mouse for POV and camera orbit, etc.

@JSBձոգչ Who did you play?

BTW, before I forget: Bioshock Infinite is out tomorrow and it is going to be teh awsum!

@KitFox i was a female elf mage. i fell in love with alistair.

alistair was awesome. swoons

Yeah he's funny.

And actually nice.

Huh.

within ten minutes of meeting each other in-game, i was pretty sure i was going to jump his bones

Well, well.

@KitFox who/what did you play?

Mahlzeit.

@JSBձոգչ Elf um. Thingy.

A guy.

Are you going to have your Frühstück?

I also really like the spell combinations.

Like Paralysis Explosion and Storm of the Century.

And Shatter!

Paralysis is very ugly disease.

Yes.

wow. Awesome graphics work

BTW, can tell name of this game?

Dragon Age: Origins.

It's great.

The graphics were cool.

I liked Skyrim better though.

Skyrim's graphics look much better! Although DA's are OK.

But DA loads an area all at once into memory, so no clipping.

But that means areas are smaller and less detailed.

Still great looking.

I'm going to lay down for a bit. bbl

Ok bye.

bbl means?

[I'll] be back later.

ok

Yeah there are many chat abbreviations like this.

yes. I know few from them, like BRB

Yeah exactly.

This room is very informative, especially like me people who want to learn better english

We do what we can! You can ask anything here.

I think you meant for people like me, by the way.

And I know a few of them.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Holy shit..you don't know what 'knocking at the door' means in dream symbology? shakes head I'm so sorry...so, so sorry.

i'm terrified of people learning english from the contents of this room

yeah..terified. FTFY

I blame microsoft for chaotic spellchecking.

@JSBձոգչ How about German, Latin, and Dutch, then?

@tchrist 'in a film it has something to say to everyone' - OMG OMG OMG...it's saying something to me right now

@JSBձոգչ Yeah, did you see Kit up there laying down as though she were some eider duckling?

Do not answer that door! hides under bed

@Cerberus those are much better

Crap there's no bed here.

@Cerberus Greek, Farsi, Spanish...oops not Spanish, I think that was one point.

@iAmbitious bbl means 336 pints.

@tchrist a Bery Big Liter?

@JSBձոգչ Ok, and let's not forget the Dalish and Darkspawn dialects.

@Mitch The more, the merrier!

@Cerberus Quenya and Sindarin

Yes!

I'm just listing out the curently available ones.

@Mitch Big leaders are known to drink prodigiously. That is why they are big.

There really should be some represntative from the subcontinent, but none so far.

I'm trying to work out where the 336 came from.

$ units bbl pint
	* 336
	/ 0.0029761905
$ units pint gallon
	* 0.125
	/ 8
$ units bbl/hour pints/minute
	* 5.6
	/ 0.17857143

$ units bbl gallon
	* 42
	/ 0.023809524
$ units gallon floz
	* 128
	/ 0.0078125

$ units dram pound
	* 0.00390625
	/ 256

$ units bbl/hour floz/second
	* 1.4933333
	/ 0.66964286

One and a half ounces per second is the same as a barrel an hour.

A 'bbl' is a barrel? I had no idea!

> Oil barrel, (abbreviation bbl): a legacy volume measure of 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal; 158.9873 L).[7] It can also mean 35 imperial gallons (42.0332 US gal; 159.1132 L). Commonly a barrel is regarded as 159 L volume.

> The abbreviations 1 Mbbl and 1 MMbbl have historically meant one thousand and one million barrels respectively. They are derived from the Latin "mille" meaning "thousand" rather than the Greek "mega".

> The "b" may have been doubled originally to indicate the plural (1 bl, 2 bbl), or possibly it was doubled to eliminate any confusion with bl as a symbol for the bale. Some sources assert that "bbl" originated as a symbol for "blue barrels" delivered by Standard Oil in its early days.

> Care must be taken when converting an oil barrel (bbl) to other units of volume, such as cubic metres (m³). Because oil changes in volume depending upon its pressure and temperature, and the standard temperatures differ slightly between the American conventional and international metric systems, the volume must be corrected to standard conditions for temperature and pressure if an extremely accurate conversion is required.

Must compensate for STP when doing oil conversions.

@tchrist Yes indeed!

@Mahnax to reply to your earlier message: I won free coffee.

Look, I asked on ELL for a mnemonic for remembering lay/lie/laid and I got a crap answer, OK?

An answer that said essentially "All you have to do is remember which one is which! :) hth!"

factually correct but irrelevant

time to go

Bye!

> Even going to a 1,000 instance Amazon EC2 cluster with super-computer performance doesn't dramatically increase password lengths that I'm able to crack.

So nine random characters seems pretty safe against brute-forcing if stored in SHA1.