It's interesting to me

[67447d9abba9fRocketMan]

But you have a bit of an advantage for cost-effective power adders.  The smaller the car, the smaller the engine, the cheaper it is to make it fast.  The BRZ is already pretty sporty and with less than 1/3 the displacement nitrous or a small electric turbo would really kick ass.  You could add a dry 50 shot for example (with a 5 lb bottle that goes a long way).  Or you could use the guy I used to make you an electric blower that'll probably cost in the neighbourhood of 1000 USD and yield well over 5PSI without stressing the engine.  Just a thought.

ZB:  Why don't you ask that chick to train you?  That'll make it worth while

[67447d9abbcbdfox]

I'm certainly thinking about getting a turbo kit. NOS isn't really an option in terms of street legality here in Germany - at least as far as I know.

[67447d9abc060Kolya]

I kind of want a VR setup now

I know just the guy.

[67447d9abc1eeZylonBane]

Shhhhhhhh.

[67447d9abc39dNameless Voice]

What do those car mods do to the fuel efficiency of the car?

[67447d9abc4ddfox]

As far as I know, turbo chargers usually don't change the fuel effieciency much but since they squeeze more power out of the engine under load, they increase it, if anything.

[67447d9abc766RocketMan]

Technically speaking superchargers lower your fuel efficiency the most, followed by turbochargers.  Then you have Naturally Aspirated, which is nominal mileage and then you have stuff like nitrous and electric supercharging off to the side, which has no effect at all on mileage except when they are running. 

Supers reduce mileage because they are constantly coupled to the engine via serpentine belt and take energy to turn.  Turbos reduce mileage (albeit less) because the exhaust is obstructed by the turbine and makes it difficult for the ascending piston to expel exhaust gas on the exhaust stroke, when the exhaust valve opens.

However these drawbacks are usually moot to a performance enthusiast.  The real cheat in something like electric supercharging (and nitrous) is that the HP ceiling is higher due to the engine not being under any additional load to run the power-adder.  Otherwise there's no way I'd do this.  I don't give a shit about the environment and a roots blower (like a Weiand) is sooo sweet.

EDIT:
Now that I think about it, I recently did a study on an additive to determine if it increased gas mileage (it claims to reduce friction).  There seems to be a break-in period (a phenomenon I'm currently studying and report on soon) but even after no break-in period it increases mileage in the neighbourhood of 10%.  I don't know how much you lose from running a turbo but if it's around 10% the 2 might cancel each other out!

https://youtu.be/r4M7MwWVN0I

[67447d9abca0fKolya]

When I was studying media sciences I met an old hacker. He was the sole IT administrator at our institute in Bonn, which was located in a beautiful old observatory. Most of the time I didn't see him, because he stayed in his office while I was running around campus.

But then I took on a job at the institute as a webmaster and this is how I met him. His office was two rooms crammed with old tech on bended shelfs, including a server that hosted the institute's website, which was why I was there.

While smoking was disallowed by then on campus grounds, he apparently had been smoking in that office since the late 1970s with no intention to stop. So we had a smoke. Then he showed me how to get on the server remotely.

He was a weird old fart, very proud, a bit cranky but at the same time obviously happy to impart some of his wisdom to a young padawan like me. I vividly remember his commenting on making a backup of a file he was going to change. He knew what he was doing of course and there was little chance of him making a mistake. But he wanted to show me good practice. Make a backup first, same name with a tilde at the end of the file extension. In case things go wrong you can always go back.

Well we made the necessary changes, had another cigarette and off I went. I never saw him again. There just wasn't any chance and a few months later he went into retirement. My prof was happy as she had plans for that office after a thorough renovation.

[67447d9abcb93icemann]

People can try all they like, but they'll never eliminate smoking.

[67447d9abccb1RocketMan]

So that's why they put that squiggly line on my keyboard?  No wonder I keep losing my work.

[67447d9abcdc7Kolya]

It's the backup key.

[67447d9abcf5fJosiahJack]

And here I thought it was the console key so you could enter cheat codes.  Also, cool office.  You have skills as a story teller too.

[67447d9abd1a6JDoran]

This is my new favourite Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN3tkJEMcT0

It's an amazingly beautiful piano solo arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon and Yiruma's River Flows in You, the latter of which I'd never heard of before. If you want to hear the original River Flows in You, it's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7maJOI3QMu0

[67447d9abd3d5Kolya]

Wernher von Braun in his office (src)

[67447d9abd81funn_atropos]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKn1aSOyOs

@von Braun
What a smug aSShole. Maybe someone can shove a V2 or, even better, a Saturn V up his Sturmführer arse.

[67447d9abd981Kolya]

Yeah, it's hard to accept how well things turned out for him.

And it seems very unlikely that a spaceship would be named after him. Did Levine just want to point at general corruption in his fictional UNN or was there some deeper meaning to this decision?

[67447d9abdab2RocketMan]

It could have been arbitrary.  I might have done so, had I not learned more than the average citizen about his actual methodologies and values.

[67447d9abdd9ficemann]

Last day or 2, been reading up on video editing as I'd like to start putting up game reviews of the games I'd covered previously playing through on my Youtube channel.

So one of the recommended programs was Shotcut. Have to say that on the animation side it's lacking from what I've seen from the tutorial videos they have up for it. Hell in half the tutorial videos, the guy sounds bored to death. It's not great even on text display. You have to add a text filter to the video, then a keyframe, then you have to manually drag the area on the timeline for the video for how long you want it on screen for. Simple enough, but when initially added it spans the entire video. If you have a really long video then that's going to be really annoying to have to manually adjust.

So after watching 8 tutorial videos, only about 20 minutes of all that was interesting.

Then I needed to type up a basic script of what to cover, then record that. First attempt didn't sound great. Second was ok. Then needed to regather all the gameplay videos I'd uploaded to Youtube. This took the longest, as downloading videos directly from youtube was slow and often the downloads would cut off and need to be manually resumed. Grrr. In comparison, if your uploading a video to the site it takes no time at all.

Once I had all that, then was just a matter of placing the recorded voice overs onto an audio channel, use clips from the games where appropriate, and use music from the game as background music to the video. The end result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqPHw-jSGZI

Feel free to tell me how terrible it is. Though more than anything else it was just good to learn something new. I may be nearly 40 now (gah), but that doesn't mean I can't be learning how to do new stuff.

[67447d9abe0cdVegoraptor]

I don't think that review is terrible at all, looks quite nice for a first attempt, I'd say you just need some more practice, find out what exactly it is you wanna do, and develop your script accordingly. Do you want to be matter-of-fact-ish and give an objective overview of what the game is (or isn't), sort of like a video-essay? Do you want to share your personal experience and encourage people to try it out themselves while entertaining them? As it stands now, the review feels somewhere in between both options, not really fitting either. Either way, some more details and direct examples would be nice, what exact glitch(es) did you notice in the asylum, who is Robert Hirschberg and why would one care, etc. Also, you did the VO in a single take, right? Cutting and merging might be tedious, but I find that most of the time, it's definitely worth it for the end product. Y'know, just my two cents.

I used Shotcut myself for a while, but the workflow just didn't feel right. If you've learned the ropes and are contempt with it, go ahead, it is functional after all, if not, I've heard a lot of praise for DaVinci Resolve lately, it's basically free professional software that has everything you could ever wish for and a kitchen sink, if your machine can handle it (mine can't). Might be slightly overkill though. VSDC Editor is nice, too.

[67447d9abe1fbNameless Voice]

I've used kdenlive in the past, which is decent and free but a bit fiddly to use at times.

[67447d9abe9b6icemann]

I don't think that review is terrible at all, looks quite nice for a first attempt, I'd say you just need some more practice, find out what exactly it is you wanna do, and develop your script accordingly. Do you want to be matter-of-fact-ish and give an objective overview of what the game is (or isn't), sort of like a video-essay? Do you want to share your personal experience and encourage people to try it out themselves while entertaining them? As it stands now, the review feels somewhere in between both options, not really fitting either. Either way, some more details and direct examples would be nice, what exact glitch(es) did you notice in the asylum, who is Robert Hirschberg and why would one care, etc. Also, you did the VO in a single take, right? Cutting and merging might be tedious, but I find that most of the time, it's definitely worth it for the end product. Y'know, just my two cents.

Thank you. All good points. Robert Hirschberg played the main "villain" Henry Stauff, owner of the mansion across the previous 2 games. The style I'm going for, is for a video essay / review style, where I talk about the key areas of a game negatives / positives and then give a score at the end. The voice over was done in a single take. Splitting that up and redoing the bits that are are awkward / could use improvement is definitely something I'll start doing.

Here's my basic script template:

Channel intro:

Hey guys. Welcome to JReviews, I am icemann and the game covered today is <insert game name>.

Game intro:

Give a brief introduction of what the game is about.

Story and narrative:

Talk about the background story to the game, how the narrative is told to you.

Feel:

Talk about the general feel to the game. Atmosphere etc.

Graphics:

How good / bad are the graphics?

FMVs:

If the game features FMVs. How good are they?

Music:

Discussion of the music in the game.

Gameplay:

Discussion of how gameplay works. Positives / negatives.

Overall:

Conclusion to video. Give an overall opinion.

Rating:

Conclude on a final rating for the game.


The plan is to get better at these as a I go along just as I have with my "JPlays" lets play videos that I've been doing for about a year now.

[67447d9abeb45icemann]

And taking all the feedback on board. I put together another review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBwra6yRuFI

Recorded each section separately, did multiple takes when appropriate. Put much more detail in.

[67447d9abee72Kolya]

Apparently earth has temporarily captured a second moon.

Twitter

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2235427-earth-has-acquired-a-brand-new-moon-thats-about-the-size-of-a-car/

[67447d9abf083voodoo47]

moon moon?