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I started painting my aquilons, which are deep-striking elite troops. Because they are elites, I want to make them stand out on the tabletop a bit with the paint job I give them. As a result, I'm trying using more regular acrylic paints rather than the transparent paints I've mostly been using to speed up my painting process. I primed them all white, then started with a few transparent paints (orange, dark green, and brown) going from lightest to darkest. Then I go into regular acrylics, metallic green, gold, silver, then some turquoise. Finally, I get a lighter green to do some edge highlights on the armor. I've only fully finished one model, but I've included some other pictures that show the in-progress models.

While I really really like the end product, it is really hard to paint this way. It takes so long to get anywhere. I have trouble focusing for long painting stints and its tough to stay motivated when progress feels so slow. So I've been going back and forth between painting these guys and doing my faster transparent paint processes for my regular guardsmen.

Third round of painting!

I have a lot of models that I had started painting previously, but hadn't finished. The dry brushing and transparent paints that I've been using won't work unless I want to re-prime all the guys. Instead, I did a base coat in regular acrylics and then used transparent paints as sort of a wash to give more depth. I think it mostly worked out pretty well, except the black primer shows through the lighter skin tones. I also tried doing a bit of a glow effect on the power sword.

There are several changes between the last pair and this triplet of painted minis. First: a thorough cleaning of my brushes and the purchase of brush soap. This has helped recreate and keep the points on most of my brushes. Second: a desk magnification lamp. Now I can actually see what I'm doing which makes detail work both possible to do well and a lot less intimidating. Third: more pigment in my dry brushing. I start with an over-brush (not quite fully dry) of gray, and then do a liberal dry brush of white. It takes a little more time than just one dry brush of white, but not by a lot, especially if I do it in batches. I think it turned out a lot better. The pigment from the transparent paint is a lot more vibrant. This will likely be the method I use to finish the rest of my black-primed minis.

I'm want to try two more methods, however. First, I want to try a zenithal highlight, then doing a white dry brush. Second, I want to try priming gray and then doing a white dry brush. I also have several minis that I primed black and started, but never finished, painting with regular acrylics. I need to finish those as well. My thought is to maybe use the transparent paints as a kind of wash rather than trying to do shading and painting highlights.

But anyway, here are the minis latest triplet of minis!
Front:

Back:

I've tried two different painting techniques. First, I started with a black primer, then did a gray dry brush followed by a white dry brush, then painted over it with transparent paints. The second technique started with a white primer, then did a dark ink wash, then painted over with transparent paints.

It turns out, it is even harder to find schedule overlap for a 40k group than it is for a DnD group, if that's possible. The folks I play with do not meet up nearly enough to scratch the 40k itch, so instead I've turned to the hobbying side of the game. When I'd played previously this is an aspect of 40k that I had largely sidelined, but I've found it to be quite fun!

I painted up a Sentinel using what has always been kind of my standard technique. I primed it, then gave it a couple of base coats using the main color scheme, then painted in details like the camo pattern, then did some washes, and finished with dry brushed highlights. It came out pretty well, but it was time intensive and I feel like dry brushing highlights wasn't sufficient. To make it look as good as I want I would have to paint on the highlights and frankly this process is already too time consuming and I just can't bring myself to add even more steps. I cannot imagine doing that for massed hordes of guardsmen especially.

So I've been experimenting with the slap chop technique. First, I tried using it by just diluting my regular acrylic paints. The details came out really well, but the colors were very muted. That isn't necessarily bad and it was very quick, but I personally prefer a more vibrant color pallet. Typically, the technique uses specialized transparent paints, but I didn't want to invest a bunch into a specific painting setup only to realize that I didn't like it. So I bought some greens and flesh colors from two different brands and my next step is to test them on a couple of different models and do a side-by-side comparison, then assess whether I want to try using slap chop on the rest of my infantry or just grind through the more standard technique. I will post when I've come down on a final decision, but it might be a while, as I don't have nearly as much time to paint as I would like.

On a related note, I've also been thinking about some conversions. It used to be that guard units were a particular kind of generic. GW sold troops from a variety of different regiments, but you played them as an "infantry squad." GW didn't even sell some elite units, like the veteran squad. You just said "these guys are this elite unit" and so they were. Now GW seems to be leaning more into what-you-see-is-what-you-get (wysiwyg). If you have Catachan guys they are Catachan squads. GW *has* noted that, because many players still have models from regiments that don't have a data sheet, units from one regiment can count as units from another, as long as its clear to the opponent and the models have the correct equipment.

My problem with this is that, when I last played, the only plastic (and therefore affordable) guard kit was the Catachans. The group that I play with is very cool about proxies, but I still think it would be cool/sporting to make sure my guys are more or less differentiable at a glance. So I've been thinking about how to convert my old Catachan Devil's Squad to use as a counts-as Kasrkin squad (or maybe even scions, flavoring deep-strike as a kind of popping out of cover, they were there the whole time! thing). I have, however, not been very inspired, and am having trouble thinking of cool things to do to make the Catachan models *look* elite. The only things I've thought of so far are: putting more effort into the paint job so they look better, adding some wiring and charge packs to make their weapons look more like hot-shot lasguns, and adding some plant tufts to the models to make them look extra camouflaged. Whatever I do, I need to decide on a painting method first. But I'm excited to give it a try!

I've been thinking a lot about how frustrating the frequent updates to 40k are. I'll give an example. Most of my army is infantry. I enjoy this play style a lot, and I kind of like the challenge of trying to make that work in a faction that has historically been balanced around tanks. The way I have traditionally done this is through heavy weapons teams. By including a heavy weapons team in each squad, I basically had a bunch of 10 wound las cannons running around. That isn't a meta army build by any stretch of the imagination, but viable enough to make casual games fun.

But GW got rid of infantry squads with heavy weapons when they released the guard codex. This mean all I had available to me were the insanely fragile heavy weapons squads. But that was ok, because they were also very cheap: 50pts per squad of three. So yes, they could be killed easily, but I could include more than I could when I was slotting one per infantry squad. But then a bunch of competitive players were using mortar squads really well in one particular detachment, so GW increased the points value of heavy weapons squads in general to 65 points! That is actually a good price point for mortars, but not really for any of the other load outs.

Its not like I can't play now or anything. I just got some other alternative big guns: kasrkins and tanks. But I really liked my heavy weapons and its kid of sad having them just sit on the shelf. Plus, I didn't really want to use tanks. And now I kind of have to.

The first problem here isn't actually the points changes, but how broad the effect of each change is. Because heavy weapons squads are the same cost no matter the load out, GW cannot make mortars an appropriate cost without making all the other load outs too expensive. In isolation, I understand why GW does regular balancing, and I understand why they standardized points costs for units regardless of load out. To maintain the size and popularity of 40k, GW has prioritized two traits: balance and simplicity. Having monthly "balance patches" helps them maintain balance, and making each unit a standard points cost rather than making players pay per weapon makes it much easier for someone to pick up the game or a new faction.

But these two methods have substantial negative synergies. Namely, it is impossible to for GW to be precise when modifying points costs. This is what leads to the problem I've described above, where a whole unit gets sacrificed because one load out was unbalanced (not even OP, just unbalanced).

I have two thoughts about alternative ways that GW could maintain balance and simplicity simply using different methods that might minimize these negative synergies.

First, I simply do not think that charging points for weapons is inherently a barrier to entry for new players. In fact, list building is actually part of what makes the game fun, and too much simplicity can detract from that. For example, right now in the game heavy bolters are just worse than the main alternative on most vehicles: heavy flamers. So when building out my list, I don't really have to think about which I'm going to use. But if they were different points costs, then I would. That gives me something to fiddle with when I'm feeling the 40k itch but don't have a game coming up. Granted, in 3rd edition it used to be pretty overwhelming. The default for a squad of guard was just las guns, and everything, right down to close combat weapons, was additional points. It was good that GW reduced the total number of little, usually not even significant, things that players had to consider when list building. But just because it was too much to make players think about whether they wanted to spend 1pt per model on grenades doesn't mean the concept of points costs for upgrades was too complicated.

Thus my first proposal: make major weapon options cost points to upgrade, but have a viable default load out. Using a basic Cadian squad as an example: perhaps the grenade launcher and flamer are the default, and upgrading to a plasma and/or melta costs a little extra. Or the heavy weapons squad could charge extra to upgrade from the heavy bolter to the lascannon, and even more still for the mortar. This gives a lot of options to GW for balance: they can increase the base value of the unit if the unit abilities are too powerful, or increase the points costs for upgrades if a particular load out is too powerful. It gives new players a base load out that is, while not competitive, totally viable. And it makes list building a little more interesting.

Second, as a casual player the frequent updates are both difficult to keep up with and unnecessary. Plus, it kinda makes me feel like a sucker for buying a physical codex. When I played in 3rd and 5th editions, the codex were your rules. There were problems with this: if your codex came out early, you probably just ended up having a weaker faction because there was still power creep throughout the edition, but you didn't get updates. But overall this was an issue at tournaments, not in casual play. But there could still be issues where one faction is just crazy powerful and that needs changing. But on the other hand, it feels like a money grab to have an app that isn't fully functional without paying but also not being able to use your codex on it without paying for a physical copy, even thought the information in that physical copy is out of date before it even hits the shelves! Plus, since I only play about once a month, I pretty much only get to play my army once before having to rework it. And changing rules once a month is far more of a barrier to entry for new players than points costs for weapons upgrades! The problems balancing creates outweighs the problems it solves if you're a casual player.

Thus my second proposal: the print edition of the game is one edition behind the competitive edition. GW can release monthly balance patches all they like, but they only apply to major competitive tournaments. At the end of the edition, when the game has presumably reached maximum balance, when win rates are as close to 50% as GW can get them, then GW publishes to hard copy rule book and codices. Games with your friends, friendlies and casual tournaments at your LGS then use those rules, with no changes, for an entire edition while competitive tournaments move on to the next edition in its "experimental" phase.

Well, those are my thoughts. I've just been thinking about these things lately, and wanted to take the thoughts out of my head by writing them down so they don't take up so much mental space.

Both I and this website exist. And after five years of "oh I should post a quick update" I'm actually doing it.

1) Job stuff
I have been working at New Mexico Tech as an adjunct professor for 7 years now. As enrollment has been dropping, my department has been unable to maintain enough courses to give their adjuncts unless a tenured professor gets research funding and needs their classes covered. Being an adjunct is generally shitty, filled with the same roles and responsibilities as a tenure professor but with a strikingly small fraction of the pay, no benefits, very little respect, and less institutional support. So, given the knowledge that I am imminently going to be given zero classes and therefore be paid zero dollars, I started looking for new jobs. I applied to *counts on fingers* nine (9) jobs and got interviews with four (4), which isn't bad. Unfortunately I didn't get any offers from any of them. I got through multiple rounds of interviews for a job with an FFRDC in DC, however. That seemed very promising, so my partner applied for a job in a different division of the same center. In the end, she got an offer while I did not. So at this point we were considering whether she should accept this new position anyway. We started seriously looking for apartments and I started really shooting off applications (five of the nine), but we had to really consider the possibility that I would not have a job with the move, whether we wanted to do that, what it would mean going forward, and what I wanted to do if that was the case.

Then I got a call from a friend. She wanted me to apply for a job as a research staff member for her division at NMT. I was very skeptical. I did not want to work for NMT anymore. They are very poorly run and I had been treated very poorly there. Plus Socorro (where NMT is) is about 1.5 hours away from where I live in ABQ. But I decided to interview, to see what they were about. Eventually I was convinced. I got multiple calls from the senior manager to check in with me and answer questions. I got a tour of the facility and the staff: away from the main campus and with their own staff who actually were good at their jobs. And the work, helping to run an EMS test and research facility, sounded really interesting.

So, long story short, we did not move to DC and I have a new job! Huzzah! The work is interesting, it has a balance of structure and freedom that is very well suited to me personally, I love everyone in my immediate team, and I feel really valued there. It feels kind of weird to be unable to get any jobs on my own merit, only being offered one because I know someone there. But that actually kind of drives home to me that results are *not* based solely off of merit. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose, so to speak.

2) I was recently diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD. It was something I was dealing with for a very long time without really knowing what it was I was dealing with. In New Mexico you can get a specialty for your psychology PhD or MD called a "prescribing psychologist." This indicates additional expertise and training in diagnoses and drug treatment of behavioral and mental health conditions. I went to see such a specialist and it was a really exceptional experience. He conducted four separate tests: a single blind interview (where I did not know I as being tested), a verbal questionnaire, an on site paper questionnaire, and an online questionnaire. Afterwards he evaluated the tests, cross referenced the results for consistency, and gave me my results. Interestingly, there have been a lot of advancements in the study of ADHD since I was younger, and the scientific understanding is much for fine grained.

For one, diagnosis for adults (that is, not just based off of "are you good at school") has become much better. Two, the condition now has multiple types that better reflect how it effects a person's life and which correspond with different effective treatments. The 10k foot explanation is that there are sets of symptoms: impulse control and focus. One or the other can be dominant, or they can be synergistic, and of course with varying levels. I have a focus dominant type, which likely impaired early identification since I don't have impulse control issues giving me the ability to wrestle with my focus issues long enough and frequently enough that I still did well in school. Life, however, less so.

I've been on my prescription now for about 6 months and its been really helpful. I was very wary at first, but my psychologist explained that the primary treatment for my type is just strait up amphetamines (adderall). This is because one aspect of ADHD is a physical difference in the way my body processes and metabolizes amphetamines. I.e. it is literally impossible for me to feel any kind of "high" or other similar effects from it. They also are metabolized and expelled from my system relatively quickly. The effects are immediate, end when the dose wears off, does not build up in my system, and has no long term changes to my brain chemistry. In short, a minor medical miracle (at least for me, for a neurotypical person or even someone with a different behavioral or mental condition, taking what I take every day would actually not be safe or healthy, go figure). Neat! And another huzzah!

3) I've started playing 40k again with my old Imperial Guard (Astra Militarum now I guess) army. I'm not really going to tournaments, or even playing at my LGS. Every couple of weeks I go to a friends house and play some casual games on his table tennis table with cardboard terrain. We proxy a lot of stuff, and get rules wrong *very* regularly, but its so much fun to get back in the game. I've also developed a much greater appreciation for the hobby portion of the game, building and painting my minis, as an older adult. Its also a lot more fun when you've got enough disposable income that you don't have to feel bad about taking up such an expensive hobby. Instead you just feel bad at the gray pile of shame you're accumulated because you can buy stuff faster than you can assemble and paint them with limited free time.

Boy have things changed though! No more blast templates, no more guess range weapons, no more armor values. Command points are new, and so are primary and secondary objectives. Oh, and having detachments and their associated special rules. Its been a lot of learning, even though I'm already familiar with the basic mechanics. I also get really annoyed at GW for how often they update rules and points values. I get that this helps keep the game balanced for competitive players, but I don't have the time or skill for most of these to matter to me. So I get really frustrated when a rule changes after I just learned it and I have to spend a lot of time re-learning it. Or when units get nerfed because competitive players were abusing some combo that I don't have, so now not only do I have to rework my army, but my already very meh army gets worse. I feel like there must be a better way, since I suspect the vast majority of people who spend money on models are not competitive players, but just play with friends or do friendly games at their LGS. Oh well, rant over.

So far the small group of friends that play together play: guard, Tau, Tyranids, Custodes (haven't played with them yet, just done some hobbying sessions), and World Eaters, with one person who bought an Aeldari army but never put them together and never comes out to play. I think he over estimated his free time. This presents a bit of a challenge for me because I have very few tanks. My infantry hordes rely on cover to stay alive, which Tau ignore (marker light), and doesn't count in melee (nids and world eaters). I still manage to keep games close even though I'm nearly tabled by the end of every game because my chaff has objective control for days, so its really hard to score consistent primary objectives against me, and I've got tons of extra guys who do crap damage anyway, so I've got a decent secondary objective game.

Well, that's the big update!

So a while back I found out about Magic: The Gathering Arena, a free to play mtg video game. I recalled how much I liked playing magic, so I tried it out. It has been a lot of fun! For me, who just wants to play magic sometimes without spending oodles of money on a physical collection of cards that will get cycled out of play every year or so, it is a really ideal scenario. One can get a collection of cards for free that will enable a wide variety of decks and strategies, and even if you're pretty unlucky in what cards you get you can still have one or two decks that are really specifically, exactly how you want. It would probably be a bit frustrating if you wanted to play a specific mtg format, but I don't so its great.

When playing, standard games are ranked. So you play against players who, roughly, have the same win record as you. Rankings are roughly determined by your ratio of wins to loses, with it being easier to advance in ranks at lower ranks than higher ranks. Ranks reset at the end of a season, which is about a month long. There are 6 ranks, from lowest to highest as follows: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, and mythic. Each one, except mythic, has four tiers. Each tier is, in turn, divided into steps. It is fairly easy to advance in bronze, as a win moves you up two steps and a loss doesn't move you down steps. Silver is a bit harder, but still relatively quick for me since a win still advances two steps but a loss only moves down one step. Gold is where it gets difficult. Each win only advances one step, and each loss moves down one step. So to advance through gold, you have to win more than you lose, and an unlucky streak can undo your progress very quickly.

I have been keeping track of the performance of each of my decks, and getting rid of decks that consistently lose even after several tweaks. This paid off two season's ago when I made it to the platinum rank for the first time. That was exciting. However, last season I didn't even get close. This season, however, has been even more frustrating. At one point I was one win away from making it to platinum, but then lost a bunch in a row. For like a week I've been hovering at about 3-4 wins (in a row) from getting to platinum and just haven't been able to pull it off. I'm probably putting in way too much time now that the season is nearing its end, but I really want to be able to make it!

So it seems like I update about once a year. Mostly because I'm not good at things, and keeping any kind of journal updated is among that list.

Biggest news: I am Dr. Bouchey now. Despite graduate school being, possibly, my most serious regret I am now done with it. I can now continue to do literally the exact same stuff that I was doing before I finished, but now I can select something new in drop down menus for name prefixes. Really, I expected to feel relieved, or at least a sense of victory. But I just feel bad. I almost don't like that I'm a doctor. I hated so much of graduate school that I wish I could make the whole experience disappear, and even the congratulations just make me feel sick to my stomach. It takes active restraint to not send my diploma through the shredder, because I just want to destroy anything that is even remotely related to graduate school or academia. I hate it. My partner is so openly proud of me, but even that makes me feel so angry I just want to scream at her, which in turn makes me feel awful and ashamed. Whenever I think about I feel literally nauseous. Not really a point to this, just needed to get it off of my chest because I don't feel brave enough to admit this directly to another human, and typing it feels more like just sending it into the void even though I knew exactly who is going to read it :P

Actual good things that are happening: My partner and I joined an adult soccer league through her work. I am very out of shape and that makes me pretty sad, but at least the rest of the team isn't that much better than me, so I just have fun playing.

My partner has been very involved in the local caving grotto. She has been involved in some volunteer restoration work at Carlsbad Caverns as well as mapping, exploration, and restoration at Ft. Stanton cave. She wants to help out with a mapping project for the lava caves at El Malpais, but there just isn't enough time. I've been doing the restoration work at Carlsbad with her, and was just invited to take a trip to do some mapping in Ft. Stanton, which is pretty cool. I enjoy caving, although I would say that if I had my choice of hobbies/pastimes and also the motivation to actually pursue them I would probably spend the time doing something else. However, if I just left caving to her, I wouldn't do something else. I would sit around at home doing nothing and beating myself up over not taking advantage of the time to do something I enjoy. So I let her drag me along and have fun doing stuff with her, which is pretty good!

The xeriscape in the front yard turned out really well. We are situated kind of on the sides of the Sandia mountains, so to account for the slope, our backyard has an upper and lower tier. Our upper tier was already pretty well landscaped. We're mostly just going to add some nice details and finishing touches. The lower tier, however, is most weeds. It is totally overgrown. So my next major project, which will be a lot more work than the front yard was, is to redo this lower tier. I want to plant two fruit trees and put in a compost bin on one side, add a pergola and a fire pit at the bottom of the stairs which lead from the top tier, and put some raised beds and a chicken coop on the other side. I think it'll be really nice when done, but I first have to clear out all the weeds. A note about New Mexico plants: if they can grow here without human assistance, they will almost certainly try to stab you. All the weeds have thorns, needles, or stickers. Just walking down there can be painful, much less weeding. I was planning on taking a fairly long time to get it done, but my partner's father is giving us some stone which I would like to use, so now I would like to try to get it done sooner rather than later.

Lastly, I've coauthored an article for a science and technology magazine. The editors have contingently agreed to publish it based on the pitch, but they reserve the right to reject the draft still since I'm a first time author for them (or any non-academic publication). I'm really excited about this, so I'll try to write an update when I find out about it.

Partly, this update is long overdue, and partly its to get stuff off my chest. Tl;dr I still don't have my PhD, but I live in NM now rather than NY.

So I *was* going to finish my PhD in August of 2017. That, it turns out, didn't happen. I wrote up a complete draft of my dissertation and turned it in to my committee and advisor several weeks before the deadline! I was very happy and proud of myself, thinking I was ahead of schedule. Being ahead of schedule, and having no word from my advisor or committee, when it came time to renew my fellowship, I declined. If, as I was planning, I was going to graduate, I wasn't eligible to renew. Then, about a week after the deadline to renew, my advisor gets back to me suggesting that my draft was not defensible. Thanks for the timing. I busted my a$$ over the next few months doing two more rounds of revision in order to try to get it defensible before the deadline for a summer graduation, but to no avail. At least, not in the eyes of my advisor. While I had missed my opportunity to renew my fellowship, I could still get funding if I worked as a TA. However, my partner had already gotten and accepted a position in NM. So my choices were as follows: a) move with my partner to NM and become a part time student, b) live apart from my partner for the next year in NY while I tried to finish the dissertation, or c) leave graduate school with a second master's degree instead of a PhD. Option a) would cost over $2k per semester which I would have to try to offset by working as an adjunct in NM. Not to mention that by becoming a part time student all my student loans would go into repayment. Not idea. Option b) is even worse though. The TA salary at RPI absurdly small, and would hardly cover the extra living expenses of having separate lives in different cities. Plus being apart for that long would be unbearable in and of itself. Option c), however, is perhaps the least desirable. Although it is tempting at this point. After having put so much work into the thing and yet still being thwarted at every turn, I do sort of want to cut my loses and move on with my life. And yet, leaving with a completed draft on (at this point) its seventh iteration seems too much to bear.

So here I am in NM. We bought a house. I am working on designing a xeriscape that we are trying to implement this year. I adjunct at New Mexico Tech. The pay sucks, only $1k/credit hour/semester, which is about half what I would say is the "typical" rate for such work. Between the housework and teaching responsibilities (and no small amount of dissertation related depressive episodes) I have not been able to put in the work on my dissertation that I would like. IT IS STILL F*CKING GOING! I am immensely frustrated right now.

While my conscious brain has had more important things to worry about, my subconscious brain has been wondering very hard about what the Skyrim remaster could possibly offer PC users given the already extensive graphical mods available. Well I finally found a video that explains it very nicely.
Youtube Link

Well its been a while, but I wanted to talk about a cool mod for Skyrim that I recently found out about. The mod is called Tundra Defense and what it allows you to do is build your own hold!

Skyrim does have the Hearthstone expansion that allows you to build three somewhat customizable player homes, but I always found these to be a bit lacking. First, while its cool that you can build this huge mansion for yourself, it is still just a single house. It always ends up feeling empty and lonely. You can fill it up ok if you hire a bard and a stewart, and then also adopt a kid or two for it and have a follower with you. But even then, its just one house. You go outside and its lonely again. I wanted my house to be the head of at least a small hold. Second, its customizable in the loosest sense of the word. The entryway and the main hall, the back room, and the cellar all only have one way they can be setup. The customization comes from being able to add three of nine possible wings to your house. Even this is limited, as each wing is limited to three possibilities, which means that some combinations (like a kitchen and also a library) are impossible. Beyond this, the furnishings are all pre-placed, so you don't get any micro-customization at all.

I played around a bit with some mods to make the houses more customizable. I had mixed success here. I found some mods that let you build a limited set of furnishings and place them yourself, as well as a mod that lets you set each followers home, so that you can have multiple followers hanging out at the same house, which you couldn't in the vanilla game. So, I'm a big time hoarder in rpg games. I like to keep my old sets of armor to show my progression, and same with weapons. I also keep pretty every unique named item I find, as well as keeping the gear of the most fearsome foes I've slain. Hearthstone gives you a nice trophy room that you can show off some of these things in, but its so small that it can't come close to accommodating my item hoarding! Really, I narcissistically wanted to build, basically, a museum to my exploits, and none of the mods I've found so far allow me to build any of the furnishings that allow you to show off items.

But that still leaves the problem of just getting a house. The house is this great manor estate, but its just out there by itself in the wilderness. I wanted to be able to attract other settlers and at least found a little town. I found one mod that allowed me to do that at first called Blackthorn, but it still lacked the customization I wanted. It had a set of prefab buildings that you could build by collecting the money and materials for them, but there was no customization. It also had a manor house for you, the leader of the town, that actually had all the item display furnishings I wanted! Alas, the textures for the mod were pretty terrible and it was really laggy and glitchy, so I eventually gave up on it.

But then I found Tundra Defense and it was exactly what I wanted (at least in terms of building a village). You start out with just a few things you can build, which come in the form of plans. Use a plan and a placeable building appears, which you can put wherever and in whatever orientation you want. As your town grows and you complete missions associated with it, you attract more people with specialized skills and equipment. You attract a general store merchant, and inn keeper, a blacksmith's wife, a mining speculator, and probably more people I haven't found yet. With each one your town gets new buildings. You can build a guard house and hire guards, as well as set up a system for outfitting each guard, so you control how they are outfitted based on your own ability to get or craft gear for them but you don't have to go and outfit each one individually (although you can). You also get two houses, one huge manor house, and a smaller log cabin. You don't control their layouts, but you place them like any other building and they come completely empty. The furnishings for them work just like the buildings - you buy or make plans for them, then you place them wherever and however you want. Complete customization. The only problem so far is that, at the moment, the available furniture is really sparse, and all lower quality stuff, not befitting the lord of a hold! So I hope that as I continue to grow my hold I'll get access to new furnishings so I can make my manor how I want it (and hopefully that includes all of the item display stuff that I want). The last neat thing about the mod is that your hold is periodically attacked, and you have to hold them off with your guards. You can set the frequency and difficulty of the attacks, and your selection will yield different varieties of enemies. You can also initiate attacks yourself, for example if you want to test your defenses before you leave your town to make sure your guards can hack it.

Overall its a lot of fun, and I'm excited to keep building up my town and hopefully earning new furnishings for my manor.

After months, its finally over. I have finally completed all the edits given to me by my committee, and my advisor is going to recommend to them that I move to the next stages of dissertation writing. Theoretically, all that remains is paperwork.

Recently I've been playing a lot of the game Banished. I like it a lot. It is a city builder game in the same genre as Sim City, but substantially different. First, it seems to take place at around the 17th century (it is often called a medieval city builder, but colonial city builder is more accurate to the aesthetics I think). Second, it is more of a meso-level city builder. You can't micro manage the individual citizens, but on the other hand you aren't constructing a macro scale city. A few hundred citizens is a really big city in Banished.

I the vanilla game for some time, but once I figured out how to get past a few standard difficulties, it lacked the late game flare that I had hoped it would have. Getting through the initial precarious stages of starting a city, and the early low population die-offs from old age are the hardest parts. Once you get well over 100 population, there isn't much to do in the end game other than generate a lot of trade, which you need to do anyway since stone, iron, and coal are too unsustainable and personnel intensive to produce yourself. So I spend a lot of time making warm coats from cattle and sheep and selling them for iron, coal, and stone. Part of the problem is that there just aren't that many value adding buildings/professions. You can make cloths, tools, firewood, and ale. That is it!

As you might guess, this got boring pretty quickly. But I could see that the potential for a really great and involved game was there, so I went looking for some good mods. Boy did I find them. I found a medieval mod, which adds a more medieval aesthetic, and a LOT of late game professions and buildings, as well as splitting up the market into distinct stores. In addition, it adds canals, which are great for creating awesome looking cities. Finally, the houses stack up the three floors, so you can have a much higher density and place housing on top of buildings where people work. I also found a mod called Colonial Charter. Colonial Charter is substantially more complex, with exponentially more professions. I decided to go with the medieval mod first, and once I've started to play that out I'll switch to the Colonial Charter mod.

Now I want to show off my medieval canal city a bit.

One thing that I've learned to do, especially with the increased types of buildings, is to lay out my city beforehand. Fortunately, you can place buildings and then pause their construction. So I lay out most of my cities before even starting to play the game. Inevitably, things change a little bit and my preconceptions of what the city will be gets altered by unexpected terrain or when I get access to what crops and livestock. Here is my layout for my medieval canal city, Annecy!

Here is what the town looks like after being about half finished.

A look at a nice row of shops. These are the split up market shops with second story houses on top of them.

Another row of shops on the other side of the canal. These are a butcher, a baker, an alehouse, a clinic, a third story house that I used to make a sort of raised structure over a road, and a hostel.

One of the coolest things you can build is the cathedral, the first "wonder" you can build in Banished! Its quite the construction project! Here is what mine looks like as I began to build the second half of the city.

This week I defended my proposal for my dissertation project and it did not go as planned. A little bit about how my phd program is organized first. Getting a phd is basically a series of hoops. These hoops are of varying shapes and sizes and distances from one another depending on your department. Some are on fire while others have spikes. My department has three major hoops. The first is called the portfolio review. I went through this process two years ago, at the end of my first year in graduate school. This was relatively simply, I simply had to create a portfolio of short and long writing samples from my work in graduate school thus far justifying the inclusion of each one and proving that I have a good understanding of the breadth of my field and that I have made adequate progress in my growth as a scholar. The second hoop is the dissertation proposal. For this, I must write a paper that lays out my plan for my dissertation research. I must demonstrate my familiarity with the relevant literature, and my ability to plan and prepare research. This paper must be approved by my committee. I must then defend my proposed project in presentation format in front of my committee. I tell them all about it, and they ask questions and get clarification. The third and final hoop is the dissertation itself, which must be written, accepted, and defended. I just finished with the proposal.

I thought my proposal was pretty good. It didn't seem, at least to me, that much different in quality than the half dozen others I read in preparation for me writing it. Nor were the comments from my committee all that bad. I addressed them, made corrections, resubmitted, and was ready for a defense that would not be a breeze, but I thought would mostly be me getting a feel for where my committee members and I disagree or hadn't adequately communicated what my project is. Boy was I wrong.

It was a two hour long pummeling. My 20 minute presentation stretched for 45 minutes because of all the questions that were interjected. Then, after that, its was another hour and 15 minutes of questioning and critique. For a good part of it, my committee practically started deliberating with me right there in the room. It wasn't comments directed at me anymore, but all of the stuff they felt I had not done adequately enough to pass being discussed among each other. It was very difficult, and a level of grilling that is completely uncommon in my department, and completely unexpected from me. The end result: Provisional pass. To put in context: this is a hoop you must pass. If you do not pass, that is your committee telling you to leave the program. In fact, if you are not going to pass, then your adviser shouldn't let you propose. The provisional means that they have to pass me and that is basically the only reason that they did. I have to complete a near complete rewrite before I can be considered official a candidate (i.e. considered having only the dissertation remaining).

One thing I did learn from it though: I'm doing too much. Given the amount of time and effort I spent on my proposal and the amount of work my committee thinks I should I have done, I took on too much. My first order of business is thus to pair down my project. I'm only keeping about 1/3 of what I originally proposed in terms of research questions and theoretical foundation. With that, I should be able to actually meet the expectations of my committee. At least I don't have to go through another defense...I hope.

Been a very long time, so I've decided to post a wider variety of things on here so that maybe I'll post more often. Steph and I are finally going to move in together again after nearly a year of marriage! We both only have one year left (in theory) in our PhD programs, so all she has left to do is data analysis and writing. I also have to TA to get funding, so we decided that she is going to move to Troy for our last year. She will stay with a friend when she goes back to Providence twice a month to meet with her committee.

We got a lovely little two bedroom apartment in Troy's Washington Park neighborhood. It has a lofted master bedroom with a walk in closet and a spiral staircase, as well as an open floor plan living area, a solarium, and we will use the second bedroom as a home office. Yay!

Stephanie and I just got back from Japan a few days ago. The last time I was in Japan was when I went to visit Stephanie while she was living there 7 years ago, so its been a while. She was going to the JAXA campus in Sagamihara to present her research on the importance of strength in determining melt and vaporization during impacts of small bodies like asteroids. I went because it was fun, but also got a chance to meet with some space policy people there.

We left on December 1st, and arrived on December 2nd. We flew from Boston to DC, and then from there directly to Narita airport. Now that is a long flight! In addition, Narita airport is pretty far on the east end of Tokyo, and Sagamihara is pretty far on the west end of Tokyo. After our nearly 16 hour flight, we had to spend another 2 hours riding the train to get there. So our first day was pretty much get to hotel then sleep.

Day two was a Ghibli day (one could easily describe the free time portions of our trip as a studio Ghibli pilgrimage). We went to Sakuragaoka, which is the area that Whisper of the Heart is supposed to take place in. We got there and just started to walk around, seeing if we could maybe find something that looks familiar from the movie. We went up a road climbing a large hill, and found some stairs that seemed familiar so we went up those. After a while of not finding anything, though, we decided to head back to the station. On our way we saw a woman walking out of a shrine we hadn't noticed on our way up. So we went to take pictures and when we went back to the stairs to head down, we found a map on the ground. Now, we were just hoping that it would be a simplified map of the area so that we could manage our search for movie sites better. But lo and behold, it was a map of the movie sites themselves, complete with stamping stations! It turns out we were on the right track. The hill we were climbing was, indeed, the hill from the movie. So we went back up, found the where the import shop from the movie was supposed to be. Instead there was a bakery run by a little old couple. But they had decorations and were playing music from the movie, and the little old lady who was working the register was very excited, and talked to Stephanie about where we were from and why we liked Whisper of the Heart (didn't talk to me because I don't speak Japanese and Steph does). Then we went to other stamping stations (one of which we passed right by without noticing at the station) and went back to the hotel.

The next two days was the conference for Stephanie. I stayed in the hotel on December 4th and graded my student's final papers (yuk!). But I did meet Stephanie at the JAXA campus for a dinner and talked to one of her colleagues from Tokyo University about space policy. The next day, December 5th, was another day at the conference for Stephanie, but that day, I had a meeting with Professor Aoki at Keio University in Tokyo. So I took the train, and we talked for an hour about space policy and space law. She does a lot of work on deweaponization and demilitarization of space, which I find very interesting. She is also one of the few legal scholars I have found that is explicit about the normative aspects of her work, which I really appreciate. Today was also Stephanie's birthday, so on the way home I bought her a very tasty Japanese birthday cake at the station.

On December 6th, since the conference was over, we moved to a hotel closer to the center of Tokyo in Kanda. We dropped our bags off at the hotel, then we went to meet with one of Stephanie's friends who is a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. We met up in Ueno, and went out to Oyakodon for lunch. After lunch she showed us around her campus, and we walked through Ueno park. Then we took the train over to Harajuku for tasty, tasty crepes! After this we were thoroughly exhausted, so we went to a coffee shop where we just chatted for a while. After our rest, we walked around in Yoyogi park watched the sunset and talked until it got dark. Stephanie got to practice a lot of conversational Japanese with her friend, which is very good. She has been taking classes and knows a lot more Japanese than she did when she lived in Japan, but it isn't quite the same without being able to practice. After that, we parted ways, and Stephanie and I went back to our hotel for a bit. Today was a very social day, because at 7pm, we had dinner plans with another one of Stephanie's Japanese friends. This friend works for a space systems company, and studied space policy. We had a traditional winter meal, the name of which escapes me now, and talked for a while about Japanese space policy, which was quite fun! Her and Stephanie also did a lot of catching up.

December 7th, our last full day, was another Ghibli day! Today was our trip to the Ghibli museum. We had to go west again, to Mitaka. The museum is in this beautiful, overgrown building, with architecture that makes it look like it sprang from a child's imagination. Inside, it was like the whole building was designed for children. There were spaces that adults couldn't easily fit into, and tons of cool, interactive displays about how animation is made and how it works. They also play a short film, which changes over time. They never release any of these films, and when they stop showing it at the museum, they stop showing it for good. It was also one of the least paternalistic museum visits I've experienced. There were staff around watching the guests, but they never seemed to scold anyone, but rather encouraged them to touch and interact with the displays. There was also a roof garden modeled after Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Interestingly, they don't allow photography in the museum. I was initially disappointed, as it was so cool, I wanted to be able to share it with everyone. But in the end I was glad I didn't take any pictures, because it helped me to focus on what a cool experience I was having. At the end of our visit, we went to the gift shop for some souvenirs, and then had some green tea ice cream. We decided that we needed to get more souvenirs for friends and family, so we went to Akihabara for the evening. This mostly consisted of us walking around shops and in arcades. But the buildings were so huge, and there were so many lights that it almost looked like daytime. We had dinner at Yoshinoya then went back to the hotel.

December 8th was our last day. We started out by going to Tokyo station to buy Tokyo Banana (yum!). Then we did some shopping at the station. After we finished, we still had some time before we had to leave for our flight, so we decided to go to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku. We went up to the observation tower (there are two, but they open only one per day, trading off which one is open every other day) on the 45th floor. We had cake at the cafe up there, and enjoyed the views. But soon, it was time to take the hour and twenty minute long train ride back to Narita and a long flight home. One last funny observation, our flight out of Narita left at about 4:20pm Tokyo time. Our flight out of DC boarded at about 4:20pm Eastern time. Time zones are weird.

I was in Colorado to get married and stuff, and while I was there I decided I would try to climb a few mountains. I didn't succeed, but all were fun. My first attempt was Argentine Peak, elevation 13,738ft. Some stats and the trip report link are below.
Estimated One Way Distance: 3 miles
Estimated Elevation Gain: 1700ft
Beginning Elevation: 11,100ft
Estimated End Elevation: 12,300ft

Trip Report Link: http://14ers.com/php14ers/tripreport.php?trip=15376

Don't know why I didn't think of it before, but here is my bracket for the world cup. I'll probably do another one once the group stage is over and single elimination starts.
Groups A through D

Titanfall went on sale recently for 50% off ($30 instead of $60) so I jumped on it. I had recently become pretty disillusioned with the online first person shooter market. Dominated on PC by Call of Duty and Battlefield, it had become pretty stale. Ever since starting undergraduate I had gotten quite good at PC shooters, but after starting graduate school I just didn't have a lot of free time and the shooters available didn't motivate me enough to play them or put any kind of serious effort into cultivating my skills in them. So, basically they weren't that fun so I didn't play much and when I did I sucked. My hope was that Titanfall would be good enough that I would be willing to put in the time and the effort to be good and have fun.

Fortunately it delivered. It's really fun to play, and the movement mechanics really let you take your interaction with the environment to the next level. Best of all, mutha-fuckin mechs! I had recently tried Mech Warrior Online, a free to play mmo shooter with the gameplay of the previous Mech Warrior games. Unfortunately, the free to play platform meant that as a non-paying player, I always lost to paying players. Always. No contest. So the mecha genre had a hole that needed filling as well. Titanfall fills that too. The mechs are pretty easy to control. You can enter and exit them in the middle of battle, and the AI controls them well enough that they'll hold out in a fire fight (but don't expect them to win) and are certainly not sitting ducks. A couple things I wish the mechs had is more customizability and more dynamic damage systems. You get to pick your main weapon, a hull weapon, and a special ability (for example, 40mm cannon, rocket salvo, projectile barrier) and pick from three different mechs, but I really like the Mech Warrior customization. You had a number of mechs bodies that balanced speed, heat dissipation, ammunition capacity, armor, and weapon hard points. You attached weapons to the hard points, which would either take ammo or produce heat, so you had to balance those weapons. This sort of customization would be nice in Titanfall as well. Mech Warrior also had more dynamic damage. If you hit a mech on the arm it damaged the arm, hitting the torso damaged the torso, etc. and when enough overall damage was done the mech was destroyed. This meant more balancing. If you had only one really powerful weapon it could be destroyed and you would be left helpless. It also meant that a damaged mech usually had a disadvantage over a fresh one. These added a lot of uncertainty to the game that made it lots of fun. I wish Titanfall had both of these, although there is certainly an appeal to the simplicity of the operation of the mechs in Titanfall. Its really easy so the player can focus on the fighting and really have fun with that.

There are lots of other cool abilities the pilots (you play as a pilot) have. Cloaking being the foremost. You can cloak for a short period of time, which makes you, not quite invisible, but really close. They also have a smart pistol weapon, which is an interesting concept. It locks on to enemies. It takes three lock on cycles to lock on to a human player, then it only takes one trigger pull to take them down. At first I thought "thats bs, way to take any semblance of skill out of it. With cloaking all you have to do is cloak, walk up to someone, and boom they're dead without even trying." This isn't quite right. Each lock on cycle takes a bit of time, and the range of a lock on is short enough that even with cloaking you risk being seen before it finishes. The lock on doesn't work through objects, so if your target runs behind a wall, even if they reappear you have to start the lock on process all over again. After playing, I would say that the smart pistol is well balanced. It doesn't take less skill, it just emphasizes a different play style. You must be good at dodging enemy fire, and playing stealthily is rewarded, which is not usually the case for FPS games, and feels very refreshing.

Some other cool things are that a pilot not in a mech can hitch a ride on someone else's mech. This means you could ride along on a teammates mech, or you can jump on the back of an enemy mech, open up the circuitry, and start shooting to damage it without contending with the shields (that is, if you can get close enough without getting shot or squished, and if another enemy doesn't shoot you while you do it, or the pilot gets out of their mech, or used their ability to give them a defense system, so its hardly a sure thing). The game refers to this as "rodeo" and its one of my favorite things to do because it feels so bad ass!

Anyway, so far its a really fun, really well balanced, really good game. It's brought me back into online FPS on the PC, and, even better, I'm actually good at it!

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