State of My Games: New Year's Eve Edition

(This used to be called PC Games I'm Playing, but I figure this sounds better)

Currently playing MarZ, Trident's Wake, and Train Mechanic Simulator (2017). 

MarZ: Tactical Base Defense has a somewhat new concept... Zombies on Mars! Apparently they were the victims of an older Soviet secret experiment in the 1960's! Now that humans have landed on Mars, the zombies are coming back out for blood! You are limited in the way your base is setup, as your central base can only support so many "hubs", and each hub can only support so many structures which includes mines and turrets. And you will have to ugpradea  LOT to survive. What's really intriguing is the level editor though. I've just finished level 3 after having to learn a new tactic. I'll give it another run in an hour or so. 

Trident's Wake is an isometric shooter where you try to reconquer humanity's last hope, the Trident, after the Phage took over Earth, yet when Trident launched, it was immediately hijacked by other aliens. Now, the Sentinel, bot bodies inhabited by digitized beings known as ECHOs, must team up and form strike teams to retake the Trident, bit by bit, and retake the ship, or Humanity would be ended. In practice, the shooter, is extremely stingy on ammo, and is designed as a 4p coop shooter, with NO bot support. The weapons don't seem to match the type of enemies we're fighting, and all in all just feels clunky, the sentinels don't feel that different, If you have a group, it may be worth trying. But there are better shooters out there. Not recommended. 

Train Mechanic Simulator 2017 is from PlayWay, the folks who had previously brought all the other mechanic sims like car mechanic, plane mechanic, even tank mechanic. You repair trains, diesel, electric, or steam, with plenty of different parts to dismantle and reinstall. What's different here: you also get to go out into the world and basically play in someone's model train setup, where you have to drive around and look for disabled train, sometimes even off the track, which you have to retrieve with your crane and put back on the track, and take it back to the right depot (one each for diesel, steam, and electric) so you can conduct repairs. The interface is both strange and familiar. The standard way of using "rust" or "dirt" to represent a damage part is here, but was a bit too subtle to be instantly recognizable. And it's obvious this is a set, not a real-world, since none of the pieces aside from the player's train actually ever move, and the time never changes. And tracks have elevation changes that would never exist on a real train track. It can only be a model train set, but it is still fun! Recommended. 

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Other games I've played in the past

Battletech (with all three DLCs, and at least one mod) -- the best Battletech experience so far. It's not perfect, but it's intriguing nonetheless. Build up your mercenary team after the entire planet was betrayed, and participate in the reconquest, while being employed by anyone and everyone... if you care to accept their contract... yes, even pirates. But don't burn your bridges... You may need access to black market later... Add random events like flashpoints, crew decisions, and plenty of battles against enemies plus occasional surprises, and dozens of mechs of all classes, including the ECM platform Raven, and more, and each mech can be customized with weapons and armor to fit your mechwarrior's fighting style, even as you take damage and crew get killed or wounded in battle, the company must go on... Highly recommended if you like turn-based tactical combat. 

Unheard -- a very interesting audio detective game where you need to solve a case and a new technology was able to reconstruct sound from ANYWHERE within the structure, so you can listen to everybody's dialog. But are they lying, or telling the truth? And there are several different cases, from sabotage to bombing. The game was originally NOT in English, but the sound talent is excellent. I haven't finished all the cases yet, and I really need to get back to it.  There's a free extra case, and some extra Chinese content available as well. 

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon (no longer on Steam?) A VERY pretty turn and turn aerial combat game with a TON of aircraft available, with a storyline by a well-known technothriller author, this is NOT a sim by any means, but it is VERY pretty and loads of fun to play, if a little frustrating at first. 

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Will probably continue with MarZ, Train Mechanic, and probably go back to Unheard, then starton Detective Di. 

Dollar Store DIY: Make your own eyewear wall display rack for $5

 After watching Freaking Reviews on Youtube. I bought one of those thick felt organizers that you can hang eyeglasses and sunglasses. At $10, it just felt a bit overpriced. And after watching a couple Dollar Store DIY channels, I realized you can make your own for a few bucks. 

Here are your ingredients: 

2 Cooking Concepts metal Cooling Racks

2 Removable Hooks

1 pack of 8-inch Nylon Cable Ties (aka Zip-Ties)

Total cost: $5.00 + tax

Assembly steps:

1) Check your wallspace, and figure out the optimum arrangement for your two racks. We want the racks vertical, but you can put the two side-by-side or up-down. That's up to you. 

2) Once you've decided, use 2-4 ties to tie the two racks together in the orientation you wanted. 

3) Get a rough measure of where the hooks should be on the wall using the rack as template. 

4) Stick the hooks on the wall, hang the racks on there, You'd want the "feet" of the rack to face the wall. 

5) Use it to hang your eyeglasses or sunglasses. Really, that's it. Enjoy!

Total time: should not be more than 10 minutes. 

Somewhat Interesting Pursuits: Men's Cologne

Man's cologne is an interesting world that you may have to do a deep dive in just to see how deep it is. And let's just say, for someone who rarely if ever thinks about this topic, it's... complicated. 

Did you know men's cologne (or perfume) were sold in FIVE different concentrations? From weakest to strongest: Eau Fraiche, Eau de Cologne (EDC), Eau de toilette (EDT), Eu de Parfum (EDP), Parfum. 

Did you know fragrance can be measured in 3 ways: projection (how far the scent travels), sillage (how long it lingers in the air), and longevity (how long it lasts on the skin of the wearer)? 

Did you know even men's cologne have seasons, and different scents work better for different seasons? Summer fragrances have more lighter notes, while winter fragrances have more base notes. 

Did you know that some men's cologne costs like several hundred dollars per ounce, while others can cost as little as $20, and I am talking name brand fragrances, not the dollar store knock-offs? 

Did you know that men's fragrances can be classified by application? Like casual, office, date, and so on? 

No, I didn't know ANY of that. (And I learned most of it from this link)

I thought about my own situation. I am almost nose-blind to subtle scents and let's just say my "men's cologne" knowledge is limited to Stetson and Old Spice. (!)  I really thought I leveled up when I discovered solid cologne. But turns out I have much much more to learn. 

I may have to buy some "cologne sampler" for men and see which ones I like better. They are fairly expensive... $3.00 for each tester sample (so 12 for $36 on Amazon), but it's an interesting world to know. 

Oh, and a personal atomizer is a thing too. 

PC Games I Played Recently: Post-Christmas Edition

Some play progress on Skyhill, Damnation, and Learning Factory. 

Learning Factory Alpha Test --  tries to teach AI and machine learning with factory assembly line game. Admirable, but I can finetune the production line without any AI price optimization. It kinda makes sense, and kinda don't. If you want factory game, get Satisfactory, Factorio, or Shapez.io. I'm a bit of "meh" about this one so far. 

Skyhill -- had this game forever, only started playing. It's interesting, as you are meant to explore the various alternate endings. Basically, you are the only real survivor of WW3 when a bio-bomb was unleashed on your city. You're stuck in the VIP room, level 100 of Skyhill Condo. Staff and guests have been turned into blood-thirsty mutants, and you're running out of food. Can you survive your way down to 1st floor and get out? Or will you die along the way? What secrets will you discover along the way? You will die plenty of times, as the rooms are randomized. 

Damnation -- shooter with acrobatics, weird combination, alternate history where Union and Confederacy have destroyed each other, and in its vacuum, an evil industrialist has turned US into a slave labor camp with promise of "liberation" with ultimate goal of world domination. And only a few rebel are in his way of his army...  Think Matrix gunplay (without bullet time) combined with a bit of Mario wall-jumping in 3D, plus a few bits of vehicular action that features horrible visibility due to being 3rd person. :-P

UPDATE: Abandoning game. Generally I tried to finish games, but this one is turning into "why won't this jump". I somehow can no longer effectively wall jump It just won't do it. ARGH. I think I am about 3/4 through the game. Too frustrating. 

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Now about some games I've played previously... 

Molek-Syntez -- a different kind of chemistry assembly puzzler... Spacechem was also about chemicals, but that's on a regular grid. This one is from the same guy, but it's on a hex grid, with 6 manipulators to push ions and stuff around. And the idea is to synthesize the required chemical in the shortest amount of time using your basic building blocks by manipulating bonds and electrons and the ions and molecules. It's more complicated than it sounds, yet simple to understand. Interesting puzzler. 

Metal Dead -- a humorous trip through the zombie apocalypse... standard point-and-click adventure game about making choices, combining and using items, with a lot of humor. 

Race the Sun -- an "infinite flyer" where your objective is to not crash, and make sure you outpace the sun setting in front of you. Good luck. 

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I'm going to finish Damnation, then try Trident's Wake, MarZ, and Detective Di. 

Don't Trust Youtube Reason ??? of ???: The setting was already optimized

Have you seen the promise on Youtube before: "change one setting and your internet connection speed will be 3 times faster (or more)!" 

Hint; it only shows that dramatic increase because they had ruined their previous settings for force the speed down, in order to show you the "dramatic" differences, like going from 150 mpbs to 450 Mbps. 

TheTechieGuy was guilty of this, and so was TheDealGuy, who basically relayed the same lesson. 

What did they do? They optimized the MTU. 

Optimizing an MTU is a legitimate "hack". Basically, it's to coordinate between the router and the client. Router basically says "I can handle this many bytes at a time". The client can send a smaller packet, but that would be "under-utilizing" the router. So to optimize the settings, one should set the MTU on the client to "match" the router's allowable size. 

I had recently swapped out my older AC router for a more advanced AC2600 router from D-link. I know I didn't change the MTU on router OR client. 

Why not do the test? Who doesn't want more speed? 

So I did the test. I got the result of 1472. 

C:\WINDOWS\system32>ping www.yahoo.com -f -l 1474

Pinging new-fp-shed.wg1.b.yahoo.com [74.6.231.21] with 1474 bytes of data:

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set.

Ping statistics for 74.6.231.21:

    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

C:\WINDOWS\system32>ping www.yahoo.com -f -l 1472

Pinging new-fp-shed.wg1.b.yahoo.com [74.6.231.21] with 1472 bytes of data:

Reply from 74.6.231.21: bytes=1472 time=79ms TTL=48

Reply from 74.6.231.21: bytes=1472 time=79ms TTL=48

Reply from 74.6.231.21: bytes=1472 time=79ms TTL=48

Reply from 74.6.231.21: bytes=1472 time=78ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 74.6.231.21:

    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

    Minimum = 78ms, Maximum = 79ms, Average = 78ms

Add 28 to that, the optimal MTU size is 1500. 

So I checked the Win10 MTU size via the same cmd (administrator) prompt  (use netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces)... It is ALREADY set to 1500. 

So it's pretty obvious that if the DEFAULT router settings are already optimized pretty much, any of those "change one setting" and show dramatic speed increase is rigged. 

And now you know... Don't trust Youtube advice on something important. Study what they have to say and why they say it, UNDERSTAND the actual advice, and see if it really works for yourself. 

And don't be surprised if it doesn't. 

Herbalife "managed" critical lab study with legal threats, scientific journal caved

Herbalife decided to silence scientists who published a study that may put their products in a bad light by first sending bogus claims from their scientists, then when that failed, sent in their lawyers with multiple threats against the journal, and the journal caved and removed access to the study. 

As reported by BehindMLM, medical researchers in India had published a research paper detailing their findings of heavy metal in Herbalife products sold in India.  At first, Herbalife sent in their own "toxicologists" from Brazil disputing the paper. Science was reviewed by the journal's panel, and found to be correct, and thus, the paper was definitely NOT retracted. However, it appears that Herbalife, realizing it cannot challenge the science of the study, decided to send legal threats to the medical researchers of the study, but also directly to the journal's staff, journal's editorial panel and the publisher, Elsevier. 

And despite the editorial panel concluding that there was no cause for retraction as per COPE guidelines, the publisher and the journal pulled the paper ANYWAY, without consent of the authors. 

And furthermore, retracted studies are usually kept available for access in order to provide a reference on what not to do. This was not done. The entire study simply disappeared. 

Two thoughts on this: 

A) Why isn't there an anti-SLAPP equivalent for scientific studies? SLAPP, or "strategic lawsuit against public participation", is a tactic a person or organization is being sued to prevent it from publicizing some information that the public deserves to know. What Herbalife did here is a SLAPP to prevent the study from being publicized. 

B) With the high cost being charged by Elsevier to "publish" those journals (we're talking about a couple hundred dollars to read ONE article, sometimes), you'd think Elsevier would actually have a team of lawyers to defend such. 

But this cannot stand. It's time to make Herbalife realize they can't get away with this behavior. 

Random Item Reviews: Two Bluetooth headsets, one's great, other one's bad

 Recently, I decided to upgrade my personal audio by going to replaceable "ear buds". That means I can exchange the buds with something that has the same connector, even though they will sound different due to different amount of drivers inside, different material, and tuning. And no, I don't mean the tips, but the actual buds. Tips are either silicone or memory foam. I mean the buds behind them, either .078 mm or MMCX. (There is also 0.75, but those are very rare). 

Anyway, I bought a set of KZ ZSN Pro X which advertises itself as "dynamic driver AND balanced armature" dual driver design. Looks pretty good, sounds pretty good. But I want wireless, so I bought a KZ Bluetooth 5 "upgrade wire", which basically means you can unplug the earbuds from the original wired setup, into this "upgrade wire" and voila, you now have Bluetooth! 

I figured it can't be that bad, can it? 

Turns out, their own Bluetooth adapter sucks big time. It actually plays background noise that is VERY noticeable. You can hear it as it times out, and the noise drops to zero. VERY noticeable. 

I ordered a different one, and this one is much better: FiiO LC-BT2. Yes, a neckband headset that can last 24 hours (roughly), and it supports 0.78 earbuds (a different version supports MMCX), AND all the advanced BT codec on the market, including AAC, AptX, AptXHD, etc.) 

And yes, it's great. 

PC games I played recently, Christmas 2020 edition

 In the last week or two, I've been playing:

Genesis Alpha One -- a first person game where you are the leader of a starship assigned to explore the Alpha One sector for a planet that humans can settle and start Genesis, thus the name. You need to jump from system to system, salvage wreckage, harvest minerals and plant life on planets, but also shoot hostile aliens (over a dozen species) that will invade your ship (brought in or up as hitchhikers), attack your landing party, and more. And you need to plan your defenses with energy barriers and autoturrets, and periodically go on bughunts yourself to make sure the enemies don't destroy your ship from within. Keep in mind that space is hazardous, asteroid fields, solar storms, cosmic spores, and worse. And there are rogue captains who decided to not report back and attack any newcomers... What's really interesting is you play this in first person. And you can even raid the derelict vessels... or even LIVE enemy vessels. 

Not to say this game is perfect, as it has some problems. Like while your crew can chase down enemies in the corridors, it can't control the critters if they escaped into the access tunnels. The world is procedurally generated so it is random, and moving around does give you a feeling of exploration, but also a bit of boredom, unless you want to just fly around and explore the place and use that to outfit your ship.  

Rover Mechanic Simulator --  In this new "Mechanic" sim, you are a mechanic on Mars ready to fix all the components on various Mars rovers as a part of the Martian colony. The rovers used to be NASA, but now there are quite a few more of them and you need to fix them all, from the simple Sojourner class to the medium Spirit and Opportunity (The "Twins") , to the big boy Curiosity (size of a small car). Learn to take them apart, replace the parts necessary, fix circuit boards, 3D print replacement parts, and if you want, do it under a time limit. 

After a while, after you mastered all three classes of rovers, it does get a bit boring. 

The Pit: Infinity -- an old 2D survival dungeon game with procedurally generated levels, with a sci-fi twist, gets turned into a full 3D first-person shooter with multiplayer support (up to 4 total) so visuals are interesting, Can you survive all 20 levels of the Pit in order to secure the cure? 

The game is EXTREMELY difficult and should probably be played multiplayer as one person can't solve all the problems alone. 

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Games I've played in the past, but deserves a mention

Wasteland 2 (Director's Cut)  -- Think 3rd person Fallout, where the desert rangers deal out justice against wrong-doers... but the commander's a radio away... You can be as good... or evil as you want. And there is not really a "right or wrong" decision... Director's cut is an improved version with a few extra features not available in the original 2014 version. 

Eterium -- basically a Wing Commander remake without the sync'mouth tech, and characters that look like they came out of anime. 

Stable Orbit -- you are in charge of a new private space station with a backing of a couple hundred million bucks. Keep the operation going by building lab modules in order to conduct research projects to earn big money, but you also need to keep the station in good repair, all the astronauts supplied with oxygen, food, and water, the lab supplied with power via solar panels and batteries, nobody overheats via radiators, and only expand at a rate you can sustain without overreaching (sorry, no loan here). 

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I think I'll try these games next:

Learning Factory (demo) -- assembly line / AI learning game

Damnation -- 3D adventure shooter

Skyhill -- 2D survival horror

Starting Over: Welcome to New Random Rants by Kc

Welcome to a new iteration of Random Rants by KC. 

I was inspired to talk more about my interests and things I find interesting, so I think I'll start today, Christmas Day, instead of on New Year's Day. 

And I have a LOT of interests, and I hope to talk about them all. 

So stay tuned.