My brain hates me
I woke up at 5 this morning – which, since our clocks went forward this weekend, was 4 o’clock Brain Time – and could not get back to sleep. You want to know what I was fretting about? I knew that Topeka was in Kansas and Santa Fe was in New Mexico, but where’n the heck was Atchison?
Kansas. It’s in Kansas, dear reader.
So, while we’re here, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” was written in 1944, climbed the charts in 1945 and was used in the film The Harvey Girls in 1946, where it won an Oscar for Best Original Song (though if it had been around for two years, it’s hard to see it was original original.
If you’re looking for the earworm, here it is in the movie version with Judy Garland, which sounds curiously sluggish to me. I think it must be the Andrews Sisters version I remember.
Naturally, I don’t remember remember it.
April 2, 2024 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 6
Tea time’s over
I had a wonderful Easter. I spent the sunny hours – of which there were many – sitting in the garden watching the new lambs gambol.
I spent the less sunny hours – of which there were also many – wearing my magic spectacles and playing games in VR. Specifically, the Hogwarts game. Yes, I got the plugin working that makes non-VR games into VR.
It’s an astonishing piece of work. I’m not a fan of the books, which were derivative as hell, but the visuals and the scale of this thing are amazing.
There’s a sort of giant junk room in it that contains thousands of individually-modeled items – I know they are because they animate as you walk past them. That’s the room in the picture above, but it’s many times larger. There weren’t any loading screens, either. How they fiddled the memory management for that, I do not know.
It should have been Game of the Year but wasn’t because JK Rowling.
Sadly, though, I have to run it at the game’s lowest resolution. In VR, games have to render three times: once for your left eye, once for your right eye and once for your monitor (I think there’s a way to turn off the monitor render, but I haven’t found it yet). My five-year-old rig coughs and wheezes at the prospect.
April 1, 2024 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 1