#sram days

[ikuraikuraikura]

RIDE KAMENS

[pubcapscott]

New Bike Day! New releases from Factor, Revel, and Ritchey

New Bike Day! New releases from Factor, Revel, and Ritchey #newbikeday

[the-spoken-wheel]

you know, I have to stop typing things like "I'm almost done" or "all I have left to get is", because it's apparently going to bite me in the butt every time.

Decided to pull the bottom bracket today since the new crankset has an updated one, and wouldn't ya know...

Frame has a SRAM bracket already, but is the press-in BB30. The S300 crankset comes with a threaded/BSA bracket, so I need to tap those bearings out and get an adapter now, and am guessing a preloader ring, as well.

Not thrilled with the one on the SRAM website, legit looks plastic. I would not be very confident in that (!!!) but I figured I must be wrong about something so did some research.

Tried to read a few forums but all I found were egomaniacs flopping their junk on the table anytime anyone asked a question about anything. I get that people like that are on the internet, it happens, am just amazed that every major cycling community seems to have 5-6 of them that post on everything and no one ever calls them on it.

Anyhow, since I can't make heads or tails of this at all, I'll ask the LBS guys about it. Still, makes more parts for me to buy. Ugh.

[andmaybegayer]

What are some of the coolest computer chips ever, in your opinion?

Hmm. There are a lot of chips, and a lot of different things you could call a Computer Chip. Here's a few that come to mind as "interesting" or "important", or, if I can figure out what that means, "cool".

If your favourite chip is not on here honestly it probably deserves to be and I either forgot or I classified it more under "general IC's" instead of "computer chips" (e.g. 555, LM, 4000, 7000 series chips, those last three each capable of filling a book on their own). The 6502 is not here because I do not know much about the 6502, I was neither an Apple nor a BBC Micro type of kid. I am also not 70 years old so as much as I love the DEC Alphas, I have never so much as breathed on one.

Disclaimer for writing this mostly out of my head and/or ass at one in the morning, do not use any of this as a source in an argument without checking.

Intel 3101

So I mean, obvious shout, the Intel 3101, a 64-bit chip from 1969, and Intel's first ever product. You may look at that, and go, "wow, 64-bit computing in 1969? That's really early" and I will laugh heartily and say no, that's not 64-bit computing, that is 64 bits of SRAM memory.

This one is cool because it's cute. Look at that. This thing was completely hand-designed by engineers drawing the shapes of transistor gates on sheets of overhead transparency and exposing pieces of crudely spun silicon to light in a """"cleanroom"""" that would cause most modern fab equipment to swoon like a delicate Victorian lady. Semiconductor manufacturing was maturing at this point but a fab still had more in common with a darkroom for film development than with the mega expensive building sized machines we use today.

As that link above notes, these things were really rough and tumble, and designs were being updated on the scale of weeks as Intel learned, well, how to make chips at an industrial scale. They weren't the first company to do this, in the 60's you could run a chip fab out of a sufficiently well sealed garage, but they were busy building the background that would lead to the next sixty years.

Lisp Chips

This is a family of utterly bullshit prototype processors that failed to be born in the whirlwind days of AI research in the 70's and 80's.

Lisps, a very old but exceedingly clever family of functional programming languages, were the language of choice for AI research at the time. Lisp compilers and interpreters had all sorts of tricks for compiling Lisp down to instructions, and also the hardware was frequently being built by the AI researchers themselves with explicit aims to run Lisp better.

The illogical conclusion of this was attempts to implement Lisp right in silicon, no translation layer.

Yeah, that is Sussman himself on this paper.

These never left labs, there have since been dozens of abortive attempts to make Lisp Chips happen because the idea is so extremely attractive to a certain kind of programmer, the most recent big one being a pile of weird designd aimed to run OpenGenera. I bet you there are no less than four members of r/lisp who have bought an Icestick FPGA in the past year with the explicit goal of writing their own Lisp Chip. It will fail, because this is a terrible idea, but damn if it isn't cool.

There were many more chips that bridged this gap, stuff designed by or for Symbolics (like the Ivory series of chips or the 3600) to go into their Lisp machines that exploited the up and coming fields of microcode optimization to improve Lisp performance, but sadly there are no known working true Lisp Chips in the wild.

Zilog Z80

Perhaps the most important chip that ever just kinda hung out. The Z80 was almost, almost the basis of The Future. The Z80 is bizzare. It is a software compatible clone of the Intel 8080, which is to say that it has the same instructions implemented in a completely different way.

This is, a strange choice, but it was the right one somehow because through the 80's and 90's practically every single piece of technology made in Japan contained at least one, maybe two Z80's even if there was no readily apparent reason why it should have one (or two). I will defer to Cathode Ray Dude here: What follows is a joke, but only barely

The Z80 is the basis of the MSX, the IBM PC of Japan, which was produced through a system of hardware and software licensing to third party manufacturers by Microsoft of Japan which was exactly as confusing as it sounds. The result is that the Z80, originally intended for embedded applications, ended up forming the basis of an entire alternate branch of the PC family tree.

It is important to note that the Z80 is boring. It is a normal-ass chip but it just so happens that it ended up being the focal point of like a dozen different industries all looking for a cheap, easy to program chip they could shove into Appliances.

Effectively everything that happened to the Intel 8080 happened to the Z80 and then some. Black market clones, reverse engineered Soviet compatibles, licensed second party manufacturers, hundreds of semi-compatible bastard half-sisters made by anyone with a fab, used in everything from toys to industrial machinery, still persisting to this day as an embedded processor that is probably powering something near you quietly and without much fuss. If you have one of those old TI-86 calculators, that's a Z80. Oh also a horrible hybrid Z80/8080 from Sharp powered the original Game Boy.

I was going to try and find a picture of a Z80 by just searching for it and look at this mess! There's so many of these things.

I mean the C/PM computers. The ZX Spectrum, I almost forgot that one! I can keep making this list go! So many bits of the Tech Explosion of the 80's and 90's are powered by the Z80. I was not joking when I said that you sometimes found more than one Z80 in a single computer because you might use one Z80 to run the computer and another Z80 to run a specialty peripheral like a video toaster or music synthesizer. Everyone imaginable has had their hand on the Z80 ball at some point in time or another. Z80 based devices probably launched several dozen hardware companies that persist to this day and I have no idea which ones because there were so goddamn many.

The Z80 eventually got super efficient due to process shrinks so it turns up in weird laptops and handhelds! Zilog and the Z80 persist to this day like some kind of crocodile beast, you can go to RS components and buy a brand new piece of Z80 silicon clocked at 20MHz. There's probably a couple in a car somewhere near you.

Pentium (P5 microarchitecture)

Yeah I am going to bring up the Hackers chip. The Pentium P5 series is currently remembered for being the chip that Acidburn geeks out over in Hackers (1995) instead of making out with her boyfriend, but it is actually noteworthy IMO for being one of the first mainstream chips to start pulling serious tricks on the system running it.

The P5 comes out swinging with like four or five tricks to get around the numerous problems with x86 and deploys them all at once. It has superscalar pipelining, it has a RISC microcode, it has branch prediction, it has a bunch of zany mathematical optimizations, none of these are new per se but this is the first time you're really seeing them all at once on a chip that was going into PC's.

Without these improvements it's possible Intel would have been beaten out by one of its competitors, maybe Power or SPARC or whatever you call the thing that runs on the Motorola 68k. Hell even MIPS could have beaten the ageing cancerous mistake that was x86. But by discovering the power of lying to the computer, Intel managed to speed up x86 by implementing it in a sensible instruction set in the background, allowing them to do all the same clever pipelining and optimization that was happening with RISC without having to give up their stranglehold on the desktop market. Without the P5 we live in a very, very different world from a computer hardware perspective.

From this falls many of the bizzare microcode execution bugs that plague modern computers, because when you're doing your optimization on the fly in chip with a second, smaller unix hidden inside your processor eventually you're not going to be cryptographically secure.

RISC is very clearly better for, most things. You can find papers stating this as far back as the 70's, when they start doing pipelining for the first time and are like "you know pipelining is a lot easier if you have a few small instructions instead of ten thousand massive ones.

x86 only persists to this day because Intel cemented their lead and they happened to use x86. True RISC cuts out the middleman of hyperoptimizing microcode on the chip, but if you can't do that because you've girlbossed too close to the sun as Intel had in the late 80's you have to do something.

The Future

This gets us to like the year 2000. I have more chips I find interesting or cool, although from here it's mostly microcontrollers in part because from here it gets pretty monotonous because Intel basically wins for a while. I might pick that up later. Also if this post gets any longer it'll be annoying to scroll past. Here is a sample from a post I have in my drafts since May:

I have some notes on the weirdo PowerPC stuff that shows up here it's mostly interesting because of where it goes, not what it is. A lot of it ends up in games consoles. Some of it goes into mainframes. There is some of it in space. Really got around, PowerPC did.

[pozartaa]

20.05.24 UTRZYMANIE WAG1 dzień 445. Limit +/-2100 kcal.

Wybrane posiłki:

Dziś na nockę do roboty. Od jutra początek urlopu. Krótki tydzień laby ale mam zamiar zabrać się za ten kurs grafiki wektorowej. Najtrudniej zacząć...

***

Po wczorajszym Cheat Day-u jestem nieco ociężała. Długo spałam i w ogóle nie byłam głodna kiedy wstałam i jeszcze długo później.

Dziś stwierdziłam, że nie będę na siłę odpychać - dla spokojności ducha i głowy - ale też wedle tego, co mi organizm mowi.

A mój organizm mówi: "Bruch, dojebałaś wczoraj do pieca, twoja wątroba jest Ci wdzięczna za ten cały tłuszcz w postaci sera... Dziś chcielibyśmy mierzyć się z łatwiejszymi zadaniami"

Zapełnione kiszki zrobiły mi prezent w postaci niekończacej się kupy. Byłam na kiblu chyba że 3 razy 🙈 (żadna biegunka normalny klocek) Trzy klocki na dzień....to chyba wyczerpałam limit 😆 na ten tydzień (generalnie sram codziennie czasami co 2 dzień jeśli kogoś to interesuje😝)

***

Jutro wpada do mnie madre. To od razu dostanie swój prezent na Dzień Matki. (Nie zapomnijcie o mamach to już za parę dni 26.05!).

Chciała storczyk - będzie storczyk. Specjalnie rano po niego wyskoczyłam do kwiaciarni. Umie się tymi storczykami zajmować, więc proszę bardzo 😉.

A tak poza tym nic ciekawego. Dzień jak dzień przed pracą na nocną zmianę. W połowie przespany, w połowie przebimbany na pierdoły. Miałam się zabrać z małe zmiany w mojej talii do Magic The Gathering ale okropnie mi się nie chciało. Znając mnie... Będę to robić jutro godzinę przed wyjściem (jeśli jutro pójdziemy grać bo wtorek, a dawno nie byliśmy)

***

Na koniec trochę kotospamu

Dobrej nocy wam życzę i tradycyjnie pozdrawiam wszystkich nocnych stróżów i nocną zmianę na Tmblerze 🌙🌛🌝!!!

[cocogum]

Bestiale: the show after Wakfu.

On June 14th, 2023, Animation Digital Network (ADN) released a teaser trailer for the upcoming series, Bestiale, following Wakfu.

Unlike Wakfu, the production of Bestiale has been entrusted to the Japanese team "Studio No Border" instead of the French team.

Here is the synopsis of Bestiale:

Yrehn, a brave and impulsive young Osamodas, protects a sanctuary for animals on Coqueline's island. One fateful day, the Elante, a mythical creature under her care, is abducted by the ruthless Gang of Viandards, a band of dangerous criminals. With the assistance of her new companion Tim, the young woman will confront formidable enemies determined to stop at nothing to accomplish their goals.

Based on the summary alone, we can quickly infer the content of the scenes revealed in the teaser.

In the first scene, Yrehn is shown eavesdropping on a pirate captain as he negotiates with a sram who may be the Gang of Viandards' head chef. The pirate captain appears to be striking a deal with the sram: if he and his crew can capture the Elante, he will receive a good bag of gold as a reward.

In the second scene, we see Yrehn meeting a new character who is supposedly the soon-to-be friend named Tim. He seems to have met her in a restaurant or tavern at best in this shot.

In the third scene, Yrehn is seen tending to the Elante on Coqueline’s island. This Elante, which was previously featured in Season 4, has now reached full maturity.

The Elante has been left unattended without Yrehn (and Coqueline) for some unknown reason and has been pursued by the gang's sram chef.

Luckily, Yrehn arrives on time and immediately starts fighting with the sram.

In the aftermath of a violent confrontation, Yrehn manages to rescue Elante and delivers the amputated hand of the sram chef to the pirate captain who had previously attempted to negotiate with the chef.

(We can tell Yrehn killed the sram chef because we can see that he wears the same skull ring and bracelet on the same right hand)

Here we see Yrehn walking around in town with her familiar, either looking for the whereabouts of the Gang of Viandards or if she’s looking for the Elante.

(This shot doesn’t indicate at what time in Bestiale this takes place or if that’s when she already beat the sram)

And that’s all we’ve got since then.

In addition to the synopsis and the teaser trailer, we got some character sheets of Yrehn made by Xam on twitter as well as an animation exercice.

Here is the Bestiale cover!

Based on the cover alone, there are characters we can already easily identify.

At the top of the cover, right above Yrehn, we can see the pirate captain and the sram chef, followed by a malicious iop who looks like he might also be after the Elante.

At the bottom of the cover, we see some animals and beasts and….ADAMAÏ?!??

Right behind Yrehn, we can see Adamaï in his full dragon form, with no clear explanation for his presence. It is possible that Adamaï may have encountered Yrehn during her quest to find the Elante, as suggested by the Bestiale synopsis. Alternatively, he may appear after Yrehn reclaims the Elante, indicating that Bestiale's plot extends beyond Yrehn’s initial mission. It's important to note that a synopsis usually gives a general overview of the plot and may not contain or present all the elements of the story.

The appearance of Adamaï in Bestiale offers some intriguing insights. Despite the catastrophic event of the big wave, Adamaï is still alive. He appears to be alone, as he is the only easily identifiable character on the cover, and there is no sign of Yugo. Additionally, Adamaï seems older, placing him in a different era. This is indicated by his full dragon form and the sort of hairy bush on his draconic chin, which is the first form we see of him on the cover.

In addition to Adamaï's complete dragon form and Ankama's confirmation of Bestiale being set in the new era, it is obvious enough to know that the series takes place in the Waven era due to the younger and smaller appearance of the last Elante we saw in Wakfu's season 4.

While in Waven, it now looks like a majestic beast in its prime.

The wide difference in the beast’s height, horns, and colors seemed to indicate that a lot of years had passed after the great wave that had marked the beginning of Waven which would suggest that Bestiale happens not at the beginning of Waven, but rather in a time when the twelvians have accustomed to the huge change that happened to their world.

Besides everything that we’ve discussed about Bestiale however, I would like to mention something important about the main character: Yrehn.

All we know about her so far is that she’s a female osamodas with seemingly no family members and has been tasked with being the guardian of a shelter for animals on Coqueline’s island.

We don’t know where she came from, why she had been chosen to be the guardian of the island we had a glimpse of in Wakfu’s season 4, and we have no idea what kind of relationship she has with Coqueline that has resulted in her becoming the guardian instead of simply having the demigod osamodas fill that role herself.

There’s also a very good chance that Yrehn could have been a child at the beginning of the Waven era because of the Waven game cover.

When we look at one of the covers for the game, we can see a little osamodas child with other adventurers and warriors, along with Yugo.

But strangely enough, that little osamodas girl does not appear on the official Waven cover when you enter the game.

Whether the other cover where she was in was an older version of the one we have now leaves us to speculate.

In addition to that, there is also another little osamodas girl who might be Yrehn. And that other osamodas girl is… also another guardian of Coqueline’s island.

Seriously why are there so many osamodas guardians-

This unnamed osamodas girl appears in the 10th chapter of the Lance Dur webtoon.

Lance Dur and his crew (in their prime) were looking for the Elante to kill it so they could take its horns and skin in exchange for a good sum of kamas.

Cadence: “I’m so excited to see this beast! She must be so beautiful!”

Lance: “We’re not here to give her some hugs, we got told to to take its horns and skin.”

And surely enough, they found it when it was much younger (which would mean this event occurred earlier in the Wakfu era).

That’s when they meet the young osamodas girl who has been staying in Coqueline’s island. Granted, the little girl never introduced herself as the official guardian of the island but it is still rather odd that she is staying here on her own without any supervision.

Unnamed osamodas girl: “I present to you all her majesty the Elante!”

Unnamed osamodas girl: “Last of her kind!”

Some people have already made the correlation that this little girl is Yrehn before the Waven era but I would have to disagree for multiple reasons.

When we compare the little girl’s and Yrehn’s designs side by side, we see a lot of differences.

1- The little girl has yellow eyes while Yrehn has blue eyes.

2- The little girl only has one horn situated at the back of her head while Yrehn has two horns in front of her head.

3- The little girl has bangs covering her forehead while Yrehn has a clear head (although this third point can easily be proven inaccurate since hairstyles change over time).

(They both, however, have the same round blue cheeks and eyelashes, I’ll give them that.)

I also don’t believe that this could be the same osamodas because this little girl has been alive since prime Lance dur which must’ve been at a time when the Brotherhood of the Tofu members hadn’t even met yet.

I’d personally prefer to think that the little osamodas girl we’ve seen on the Waven cover is Yrehn for the reasons below.

1- They both have horns situated in front of their heads. The only visual difference here is the younger osamodas girl’s horns being much smaller since she’s far younger.

2- They both have blue eyes.

3- They both have identical strands between their face and don’t have any bangs covering their foreheads.

4- They both prefer to tie their hair high up.

5- They both hold staffs and use them as their main weapons.

All those similar designs lead me to believe that they are the same girl but the waven crew must’ve taken the little osamodas girl out of the waven cover to preserve her for Bestiale only. And unlike the other osamodas girl from the Lance Dur webtoon, this osamodas being a child at the beginning of the Waven era matches perfectly well with how the timeline is supposed to be in Bestiale. Since Yrehn looks to be in her late teens in an era where people have gotten used to the wave’s collateral damages, it would make sense that she’d be a kid when it all began.

However, there is also another possibility to consider: the design of the osamodas girl in the Waven cover must’ve simply been Yrehn’s concept art and the crew decided to use that osamodas to make her.

So in short, here are three possibilities as to which osamodas guardian used to be Yrehn as a child.

1- Yrehn is the osamodas girl from the Lance Dur webtoon.

2- Yrehn is the osamodas girl from the Waven game cover.

3- None of the above. The osamodas girl from the Waven game cover has been removed because her design had been used for Yrehn’s.

Either way, finding out if she was indeed one of those little girls isn’t important, I just wanted to point out the similarities they all shared as well as how many girls Coqueline had given the guardian job to.

Looking back on what we've got for Bestiale so far, it all seems promising.

We do not have a release date for the series so far but we do know that it’s in production at the moment. The news of Bestiale has been known since 2023 so there's a good chance we won’t be seeing it anytime soon.

It just looks like we’ll have to wait and see what kind of new information we’ll be getting in the next ADN upload.

[theselfstudyenthusiast]

Sorry, my bad....

I want to publicly apologise to the Great Dragon. 🙇

After a cool-down period, I dove into Wakfu Wikia and re-read the first chapter of WAKFU: The Great Wave.

I've realised the dragon who invaded my boy's dream and gave Yumalia a case of coitus interruptus (a wet dream ?) was NOT Yugo's father.

*Beware of potential spoilers for Dofus the Movie, Wakfu, Wakfu the webtoon and Waven*

The silhouette shown during the dream sequence reminded me of two dragons from the World of Twelve.

Theory #1 : Grougalorasalar

The first one is Grougalorasalar, the Primordial Ebony dragon. Yes, the same dragon linked to Master Joris.

The picture from the webtoon is very similar to Rasalar, especially the wings and horns.

I can't show the webtoon, but here is the Ebony dragon. Looks like if Godzilla and a giant bat had a baby.

However, I don't know how Grougalorasalar could have entered Yugo's dream or how he would have known about the threat the Eliatrope king might represent. I mean, sure, Yugo is a walking disaster but his reputation is not (yet) that bad, right?

As far as I know, Grougalorasalar doesn't have a "dream-hijacking" ability. Plus, like in all good old fantasy settings, the Ebony Dragon and all Black dragons from the WoT is a malignant creature, symbolising Black Fire or Stasis... or so the Wakfu wikia says.

If that's the case, why would Grougalorasalar seemingly try to prevent Yugo from doing what he does best, "unwittingly endangering the world" ?

That's why I'm more inclined to believe this is the work of Draconiros.

Theory #2 : Draconiros

His dragon form is flawless.

Draconiros is the Master of Dreams and the Lord of Nightmares. He lives in the Kingdom of Dreams, within the Astral Plane. As such, he can manipulate dreams as he wishes. This could include hijacking someone else's dreams or even changing his appearance within said dreams.

In the wikia, it is said that Draconiros also seems to have a part in the events preceding the Eliocalypse, possibly trying to prevent it.

Since he has access to dreams, this dragon could know about the vision the Eliacube gave Oropo and how Yugo might be linked to the almost destruction of the World of Twelve (WoT). If so, it would make sense for Draconiros to contact Yugo and announce his upcoming courtesy visit. This dragon is a true gentleman! 🙏

Still, if Draconiros is really behind Yugo's nightmare, why would he pick the form of another dragon? It could also be that his true form has been redesigned for the webtoon, like they did with Nora in the tv show, idk.

Theory #3 : Idk for sure but it's not the Great Dragon

Either way, an interference from any Twelvian dragon makes more sense than the Great Invisible Dad trolling his son just to say "I hate you! Wait till I get home! 👿👿👿".

This is especially true, taking into account what is known about the Great Dragon. He is the incarnation of Stasis, the energy of destruction. Why would he bother preventing the end of one world among so many? Plus, he wasn't shown interacting with the Eliatropes back in the day, even when they were facing extinction, thanks to the Mechasms. he Great Dragon is the incarnation of Stasis, the energy of destruction.

Nah, Great Dragon "danced" with the Eliatrope Goddess, which helped her get the kids she wanted, and DIPPED! Does he even know the names of his kids? There's a reason they are called Eliatropes and not Stasisians or something. 😒

These are speculations based on my small understanding of the Wakfu universe. I don't play any MMORPG from the Wakfu franchise. I have not read all the available materials, apart from the manga-style Wakfu comics, which are a must-read for fans of the series and take place after Season 2.

For all I know, Yugo's nightmare could be sent by someone else or something else entirely.

For example, if the gods were not MIA, I would have thought Osamodas, the OG dragon master, or Sram, the biggest troll in Twelvian History, would have something to do with this nightmare.

Ngl, I was hoping this was a nightmare created by Yugo's trauma (ptsd) or his link with Toross. I really want to see this antagonist come back to haunt Yugo somehow. Maybe he can still make an appearance as a hallucination (PTSD?) or as himself from the Necroworld, channelling Rotalström (still in the Sadida kingdom), the stasis he stabbed Yugo with or the wakfu he ingested from the Eliatrope king. Anything to see Toross again! 🙏🙏🙏

I cannot wait for Episode 2 to drop and obliterate my theories!

**Please, go read Wakfu The Great Wave if you can **

[whirligig-girl]

Losar System

Cooking the Solar System from the Inside Out

(yeah lol it does kinda look like it says Loser)

For this system layout, I have taken the Solar System planet's orbital distance in astronomical units, and taken the reciprocal.

The major planets, in order of increasing distance from Los, are Enutpen, Sunaru, Nrutas, Retipuj, Sram, Thrae, Sunev, and Yrucrem.

Read more about them below the cut:

The Losar system formed through a very different mechanism to our solar system. I'm not sure entirely about the specifics, but the arrangement is not dissimilar to the Kepler-90 system, in which 6 super-earth-mass planets are extremely compact and close to their parent star, with a low-mass and a high-mass gas giant at the outer part of the solar system. Perhaps as Retipuj formed, it migrated inward, carrying with it the ice and gas necessary to form the super-earth-mass planetary cores which accreted into Enutpen and Sunaru, or perhaps there was some kind of switcharoo where the Hot Ice Giants started out on more distant orbits, before crossing orbits with Retipuj and then being coralled into lower orbits.

Either way, some kind of migration is necessary, since Enutpen and Sunaru are volatile-rich, and the outer planets are comparatively volatile-poor.

I've excluded Pluto (or "Otulp") and the other dwarf planets, not because I don't like them or think they count as planets, but because I think by the time you're accounting for every large object in the Solar system in the Losar system, it just gets really implausible. also I bet some objects end up inside of the Sun. Plus, this kind of thought experiment is playing the same kind of planetary dynamics game that splitters are playing when they say Pluto's not a planet. Suffice to say, there are definitely lots of interesting small worlds in the Losar system, but they don't have 1:1 analogues with Solar system planets.

There are only five large moons in the entire system. Aside from Retipuj, satellites and rings are not stable around any of the Hot Giants. If satellites were initially formed around the Hot Giants, they would have either crashed into the planets or were ejected into one of the asteroid belts.

The first civilization to arise in the Losar system are the Sunevians, suspiciously great-ape-like feathered aliens who walk on their upper limbs and use their lower limbs as graspers. Sunev is an oceanic world with one large australia-sized landmass and a great number of volcanic islands. The ocean is relatively shallow, with a lot of coral reefs across the planet. The world is kept warm due to an atmosphere with an Earthlike composition but over twice the atmospheric pressure. Its slow retrograde rotation period results in day/night cycles which are more like seasons, and there is plenty of time during the warm nights to peek through the relatively dense cloud cover into the nearly empty sky. Early or late in the night, one might be able to see Thrae and Noom, or Sram, or if they catch it at just the right time, they might see the incredibly bright spectacle of Retipuj or even Nrutas peek out of the treeline, brighter than any planet or star. On a really good sunset across the ocean with clear skies, some observers report seeing additional super-bright red stars next to the red Sun, but these are thought to be some kind of weather phenomenon reflecting sunlight.

In rare moments of clear skies at night, away from light pollution, one might see many faint hazy spectacles. The zodiacal light (meteoroids orbiting beyond Yrucrem) shines as a faint haze across the ecliptic. The milky way too, shines as a glittery patchy cloud across the sky. But sometimes, every few hours, early in the night, there is a bright patch near the sun, brighter than the zodiacal light. A mystery for ages, but this is now known to be the cometary tail of Enutpen. Sunaru's tail is also detectable, but substantially fainter.

Sunaru and Enutpen were the first planets to be discovered, and were detected within a week of one another by early Losar observers. After the invention of the astronomical telescope, a reflector, observers got very bored during the daytime months. That is, until someone figured out a safe way of pointing towards the Sun. At a cadence of 52 and 103 hours, little black dots would march across the Losar disk. 52 hours was also the cadence of the brightening and dimming of the twilight zodiacal light. And suddenly, two brand new planets were discovered!

Millions of years later on the cold ice-age planet Thrae, astronomers would have an easier time with Enutpen and Sunaru, having known them to be planets since antiquity, due to their apparitions during total solar eclipses. Thrae's comparative cloudlessness also helps.

Sunev has three tiny asteroid moons, which was a helpful jumpstart to Sunevian space exploration, providing early wins for all four space programs. But these little asteroids were not truly other worlds, merely refueling outposts on the way to the rest of the Losar system.

Every few years, there would be a perfect alignment between Sunev and the Hot Giants to allow for a grand tour to be completed using only flybys of the gas giants, with minimal propellant expenditure. The first grand tour attempt got no further than Retipuj--contact was lost due to overheating before the probe made its Nrutas flyby. Specially developed solar flyby probes had to be developed that could survive hotter temperatures before the Hot Giants could be properly explored. These probes would resemble the Parker Solar Probe in some ways, albeit with very different scientific instruments designed for planetary science as opposed to Oilehphysics. Nrutas, Sunaru, and Enutpen turned out all to be much less massive than originally thought, having been puffed up to a larger diameter by being cooked by solar radiation. Nrutas, thought to be the king of the planets, turned out to be merely puffing up its crest to appear regal, so to speak.

Retipuj's moons were incredibly interesting. Retipuj turned out to have 8 satellites--four tiny inner asteroid moons, and four large satellite planets. Otsillac, the innermost turned out to be a volcanic world, yellow-brown in color and pitted with dull-red volcanoes, and a thin atmosphere constantly replenished by volcanic plumes. The next three are in a Ecalpal Resonance of 1:2:4. Being both larger than Otsillac (and, in fact, Yrucrem) and in a more eccentric orbit, Edymenag was even more volcanically active, with a molten surface and exposed mantle. The smaller and more distant Aporue and Oi turned out to be less active, with only a few active volcanoes and many extinct ones. Oi was the least active--although the most recent eruptions were only half a million years old, it was practically dead. It was also the only one with a substantial amount of impact craters, and like Thrae's satellite, Noom, there is likely some volatile ices stuck in the permanent darkness of polar craters.

Hot Giant exploration was best appreciated by specialists, but the other outer planets were much more appreciated. Sram was thought to be warm enough to potentially support liquid water, but its atmosphere ended up being 1/20th of the pressure initially expected, the majority of it having been blown away into space by the Losar winds and the Enutpen tail. But Thrae was a sweet spot--it may have had a thinner atmosphere, but that was compensated by being nearer to Los. In addition, a giant impact it sustained billions of years ago lead to it having a powerful magnetic dynamo to survive the onslaught of the Losar and Enutpen winds. Thrae was a habitable biosphere of similar complexity to Sunev's, albeit with deeper oceans and all the alien horrors that comes with the territory.

Even Yrucrem turned out to be a surprise--despite a dull appearance in telescopes, it was found to have cryovolcanoes and pockets of subsurface oceans, which could potentially support a biosphere. It's a dark brown color due to ice having been aged by solar radiation, with white spots and rays spraying out from recent asteroid impacts and cryovolcanic plumes. The small planets of the trans-Yrucrem asteroid belt were a similar treasure trove, although the nearest large trans-Yrucrem planets were a dozen au away, and requiring RTG power sources. Initial flyby probes to the Trans-Yrucrem-Objects required both being capable of surviving the oppressive heat of Los-shine near Retipuj, and the cold of deep deep space, in order to take advantage of Sunev-Thrae-Sunev-Retipuj gravity assists.

The Sunevians never had a chance to discover the deepest secrets of the Losar system. Their planet froze over due to anthropogenic aerosol production intended to reverse anthropogenic carbon emission, civilization fell, and it never recovered.

But millions of years later, perhaps the Thraelings have a chance to discover, whether through direct imaging or through analyzing the weirdly arrayed orbits of certain trans-yrucrem objects, the four Cold Giant planets, and the distant brown dwarf companion of the Losar system...

[commodorez]

Let's take a moment to remember my imperfect, but ever useful portable XP powerhouse, the Toshiba Satellite P25-S507. Probably my favorite laptop of all time. It's old, but hardly vintage yet. I was given one as a hand-me-down after it grenaded its own RAM a year after it was purchased.

I used it as my music jukebox, played a ton of Command & Conquer games on it, did my high school and college school work, talked with my friends on AIM, Skype Teamspeak and IRC, edited videos, programmed on it, did image editing in photoshop.

Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR SRAM stock (mine was upgraded to 1GB and later 2GB), ~60GB hard drive, 17" WXGA TFT LCD, Windows XP (Home, but we upgraded it to Pro), ethernet jack AND wifi, DVD burner, SD card slot, all coming in at just shy of 10lbs of computer.

I either had it sitting on my desk next to my desktop computer (P4 or Phenom II x4), or used it sitting on my bed with a wooden board under it to give it sufficient ventilation so it wouldn't overheat or burn my legs. I disassembled that laptop several times over its lifetime, and replaced:

keyboards twice

the screen once (for the backlight)

4 hard drives

RAM once to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB

sound card subsystem once

battery twice

DVD drive once

Eventually after it destroyed TWO IDE SSDs (yes, those are a thing you can buy) after a shorter than normal lifespan, I realized it was a losing battle and gave up the fight. I realized that it no longer served as a laptop, it couldn't keep pace with newer versions of Skype (before Discord was a thing), and sure as hell wasn't going to run Discord. It got slower and slower at running simple websites like my email, or youtube -- things that it used to handle just fine.

The form factor was limiting, and it was outmatched for the times, so I finally gave up and decided to retire it in favor of building a dedicated power-house XP desktop to do the jobs that it excelled at.

I bought a spare for parts to supplement it, so maybe one day I'll install a fresh hard drive (either spinning rust, or an IDE to m.2 adapter), and bring it back to a working state.

[sir-squibbly]

One of my many Iop OCs. I love her very much. And now an infodump:

•~~~~~~~~~~~~~~•

Name: Siniphine of Ballen (or just Siniphine) Class: Iop Age: 27 Gender: Female Pronouns: She/her Height: 6ft 3in (190.5 cm) Siniphine is the sole daughter, and youngest child, of the Ballen Dynasty: the (self-proclaimed) largest family of fighters in Amakna. She’s tough, chipper, a little too energetic, goofy, and loves to party. She might not be the smartest in the battlefield, but that doesn’t stop her from enjoying every second of a battle. Ever since Siniphine was little, she’s wanted to travel and see the world of Twelve. This caused her to wander out of the house. A lot. She actually learned how to fight when she accidentally ran into a very hungry and very angry blibli. One day, she wandered so far from home that she ended up in a completely different town. There, she met a Xelor boy named Hector, who she decided was going to be her best friend forever. Siniphine would take Hector on adventures (which he only agreed to do to keep her from dying), and Hector would often fix up anything that her brothers had busted. The two became genuine friends and sort of like siblings. Despite the fact that her brothers don’t like Hector anymore (due to an incident that almost resulted in Siniphine’s death), she still loves Hector and still considers him her favorite brother. When Siniphine was around 19 or so, she decided to leave home in order to fulfill her dreams of adventure. She basically had to drag Hector out of his house to go with her. Jump to now, and the two have basically formed an adventures club that includes an ex-pirate Ecaflip, an odd-looking Sadida, a lazy Huppermage, and a 10-year-old Sram. Quite the team, if I must say.

•~~~~~~~~~~~~~•

And that's kind of all the lore I have right now because I haven’t written enough to make a whole hypothetical wiki page on her lol.

[saturnniidae]

As someone who loves both httyd and wakfu I am BEGGING you to talk more about this

Well it wasn't much more than a passing thought I wrote down before i forgot it and I was gonna apologize and say I've not thought of much but character classes, but I blacked out and went into a frenzy.

So for character classes:

Hiccup: Eliatrope and Toothless is his dragon brother

Astrid: Feca or Cra (though I could maybe see her being a Iop too?)

Snotlout: Iop

Twins: Iops as well (I'd say most of Berk's population is)

I'm kind of stuck on what Fishlegs would be. huppermage? Maybe? Idk

Dagur: Sacrier

Heather: Sram

Undecided on what I'd want Viggo to be, or if I'm even going to include him but I'm open to any suggestions.

And for a Rotbtd version (bc I contracted that disease recently):

Merida: Cra

Jack: Rogue

Rapunzel: Eniripsa

But I don't have much more than that for this version rn.

And then I have some story ideas for it but I'll put them under the cut because it's kind of a lot

Berk is a a small coastline port village known for its fishing and inhabitants with ridiculous names and violent tendencies (most of them are Iops).

(Debating on its actual location but I can't for the life of me find a map for the World of Twelve that's actually labeled 💀)

Stoick is a Iop and chief of the village. He found Hiccup when he was an infant. He's never actually sat Hiccup down and given him the "you're adopted" talk, but they're both aware of it. This doesn't really have any strain on their relationship though (they love each other, but like in canon, are shit at actually showing it) the fights they have are over other things, mostly Hiccup's hazardous passion projects. And later, Hiccup's desire to leave Berk.

Hiccup is the village blacksmith's apprentice, but is often distracted with his own projects.

He is more focused on making inventions powered by wakfu than honing his own abilities beyond portal making (because of this, they often explode). as well as seemingly having a lack of interest in finding out about himself and what he is. Beyond the fact that deep down, he knows he is not human. He still wants to get out of Berk and dreams of exploring the World of Twelve.

Hiccup lost his left leg below the knee in an accident he indirectly caused when he was 14. Part of why he doesn't like using his powers.

(If you've watched the show, you'll know that when Yugo makes two portals and puts them in front of each other, it creates a beam of energy that essentially decimates whatever it comes into contact with. And iirc it's mostly been used on machines and such, so I don't think organic matter like bone muscle and flesh would stand a chance.)

Fishlegs is the closest thing he has to a friend. they'll eagerly talk about his inventions, until Fishlegs asks Hiccup to go more in depth on how his powers work, then Hiccup shuts him out. Usally after a few days of silent treatment things go back to normal and they act like it never happened.

Snotlout is Hiccup's cousin who used to bully him but has stopped (doing it outright anyway, ofc he's still rude and we love him for it <3) due to a begruding respect for Hiccup, not that he'll ever admit it (and perhaps out of fear, after all blowing your leg off and accidentally destroying half the village, intentional or not, is an impressive feat). The twins follow Hiccup around in hopes to see what disaster he'll cause next. They're the reason Hiccup moved his 'Workshop' out of the smithy and into a remote clearing in the forest miles away from the village proper.

Toothless is Hiccup's dragon brother and has been searching for Hiccup for years, but Hiccup is so out of tune with his wakfu their connection was almost completely severed and Toothless is unable locate him. Until recently Hiccup had no idea Toothless existed, beyond a lifelong feeling of something being very distinctly wrong and the occasional vague prodding sensation in the back of his head (Toothless trying his absolute hardest to get through to him).

I have no idea what I want to do for Astrid tbh. I want to do her justice which is why I'm so indecisive.

And I have nothing for Heather and Dagur beyond what their classes would be honestly. Something will come to me eventually though.

If anyone has any questions (especially abt wakfu if you're only familiar with httyd) feel free to shoot me an ask and I'd love to elaborate!

(Also a lot of this is subject to change if I have any better ideas)

[adafruit]

PCB of the day! Adafruit Metro M7 with AirLift - Featuring NXP iMX RT1011 🚀💾🌐

Speedy NXP iMX RT1011 microcontroller with a 500 MHz ARM Cortex M7 processor. 8 MB of QSPI for firmware and disk storage, and 128KB of in-chip SRAM - includes an AirLift WiFi Co-processor for secure, fast wireless integration via CircuitPython library support, and high speed USB.

Leggings and t-shirt of the PCB pattern for fun :)

[brokatowekosci]

Dziś chyba zrobię sobie cheat day (z umiarem) bo waga ciągle stoi w miejscu i nie sram od 4 dni jakoś XDD więc jak narazie zjadłam

2 kanapki z twarożkiem na lekkim jogurcie

Pół tacki ptasiego mleczka :((

2 mandarynki

[isfoodasinv3]

[ 10:02 ]

Jakoś 17 robię metabolism day pewnie i będę robić tak co 2 tygodnie, bo ja nie sram praktycznie i wgl😭😭😭😭

[marcelskittels]

Annemiek van Vleuten of Movistar Team, Katarzyna Niewiadoma of Canyon//SRAM Racing, Kim de Baat of Fenix-Deceuninck, Elisa Balsamo of Trek-Segafredo & Riejanne Markus of Team Jumbo-Visma prior to the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad 2023, Women's Elite a 132.2km one day race from Ghent to Ninove on February 25, 2023 in Ghent, Belgium. (Photos by David Stockman/Getty Images)

[wakfu-weekly]

There was an uncorrected visual error on the Incarnam class altar, where the new looks for the xelor, sram and steamer class that had been implemented with the most recent updates lack the ghostly blue look of the other models.

(The blank puppet at the end corresponds to the steamer class.)

This was recorded the day before this area was replaced, so I guess Incarnam would go off with that never getting fixed.