A late tau day, and some cruise ship photos

First of all, happy belated Tau Day! I remembered to bring it up at work on Friday and forgot to note it here. I'm going to blame the bout of COVID-19 I had last week making me a bit scatter-brained.

Second, two weeks ago I went flying over the bay with the intent of catching a cruise ship leaving in a hyperlapse. I actually managed to pull off a pretty good one, where I got my drone to focus on the ship while executing a sideways move, creating a very dynamic video. However, the experience has also cemented my previous opinion that hyperlapses involving the ocean just fundamentally don't work, at least with the Mini 3 Pro where the fastest interval between frames is two seconds (for reference, that rate compresses fifty seconds' worth of time into each second of the hyperlapse, at 25 fps). Going over land, that frequency isn't a big deal, as the land itself generally isn't moving noticeably so any movement comes from the drone. Over the ocean, though, the surface waves which are so slow and relaxing in real-time become a series of flickering monstrosities when sped up fifty times. It's not something that can be handled by, say, slowing the drone's speed, because it's inherently part of the environment. Perhaps if I can slow it down a bit I'll share it, because it's otherwise a pretty neat clip, but I just don't like how the waves look when sped up that much.

I did take a few normal video clips of the ship as it got out of the harbor and onto the open sea, and while they don't really come together into a cohesive video I at least managed to get some interesting still frames from them that I wanted to share:

I quite like how the ship's silhouette carves into the Sun's reflection.

A top-down view of the pool as I flew over.

Looking back towards shore.

And out towards the open ocean. Full steam ahead!

I've mentioned on this blog that it's been a very rainy winter and spring here in Hilo so far this year, and even now as we get into summer we still have a lot of overcast and rainy days. (I'm not complaining, as it keeps things cooler with the AC out at work.) We have, however, started to have some more sunny and clear days like this one recorded here, and it's been nice to get out and fly again after not flying at all in May. I'm looking forward to doing more flying in the near future, so we'll see what that produces (there's a waterfall I've been wanting to revisit for months now). A hui hou!

Dice, and the towers they roll down

I've been meaning to share this incredible dice tower my friend Graham 3D-printed for me for my birthday for a few weeks now, so let me finally do so:

I realize now I should probably have shown something for scale, but it's a good eight or ten inches tall, and large enough for “normal” sized dice to clatter down the stairs with ease. (I tried getting a photo of them in motion, but they descend so fast that they're just a blur!)

Now while you can use a dice tower for anything that involves rolling dice, as a way of ensuring a good random roll or just for the fun of watching the dice fly down, in this case it was because I finally had a nice set of dice worth rolling. (Very) long time readers of this blog may remember this post from all the way back in 2011, where I (badly) modeled a set of polyhedral dice and mentioned that I'd long admired the amazing designs of polyhedral dice that exist, but never really had a reason to get some of my own. Well, I finally picked up a set a few months ago from Die Hard Dice, which has a lot of really neat options such as this Mythica Copper Aquamarine set that I got:

They're made from a zinc-alloy with an electroplated copper finish, and if, like me, you've only rolled plastic dice in your life they'll feel surprisingly hefty, rolling with a good hearty ‘thunk.’ Not directly on a table top as they'd probably put a good dent in it, which is another purpose of dice towers now that I think about it. (There are also a few additional dice in the set such as a pair of ten-sided dice, but I wanted to focus on the Platonic shapes in this photo.)

The reason I finally got a set of polyhedrals is because a friend I know from board gaming invited me to a game he's running with a rather interesting premise: he's created an original fantasy world where he wants to have various games progress through time, with this particular time period involving small parties scouting out an unknown land mass. I'm one of over a dozen players, with the idea being that people organically form parties together based on what parts of the world they want to explore together (so one group might scout a river glimpsed to the north, while another scouts a ruined city to the east, or magical glaciers to the south). Multiple parties are considered to be running simultaneously over two-week periods in-game (though individual sessions would be spread out and consist of no more than four players each), with the world progressing forward in time after each party has had a chance to go out and explore (and return and share their finding on a large shared map).

It piqued my interest since it hits upon my love of exploration and discovery, and it's been a lot of fun getting to play with different groups of people each time. We're using the Shadowdark rules, which keeps things relatively simple and moving along, and provide pressure and danger when outside of safe areas. (Indeed, my first character was already among the first casualties, when three-fourths of our group got killed in a nighttime encounter; we learned that climbing trees is not a good way to fight hostile humanoid frogs since they can just jump up there with you, then proceed to knock you out of the tree to take falling damage.) I've long been sort of “peripherally aware” of role-playing games and the stories they generate, and I've been having a blast finally getting to experience it in person. We'll see how it develops! A hui hou!