WARNING: This post contains extremely lightweight spoilers about Fallout 4. I describe a few clusters of objects that I wandered across, among the many thousands to be found. I won’t reveal anything about the game or characters beyond what’s on the TV ads.

In Fallout 4, you’re wandering Massachusetts after a nuclear war. The world is essentially depopulated except for a few bands of survivors. As you explore the abandoned cities and buildings, there are endless everyday objects lying around that scavengers haven’t yet claimed: broken coffee pots, empty cans, plastic forks, and so on. Most of this stuff is broken junk; you can scavenge it or ignore it.

Every now and then I a bunch of junk suddenly snaps together into a story for me. I think that these are deliberately staged still lifes, and they’re lovely. It’s simply wonderful to be running around an abandoned environment, and stumble into a poignant moment in the midst of dust and ruin. Here are three of my favorites so far:

* A nursery. Four cribs, empty. A changing table, piled with blankets. Against one wall, facing the cribs, a chair. Next to the chair, a low table. On the table, an ashtray. And next to it, a bottle of whiskey. And a shot glass.

* A bathroom. On the floor, in front of a sink, are the skeletal remains of a right hand. And a left hand. And lying between them, a pair of handcuffs.

* A hotel room. A man in decaying clothes is lying on a bed. His skeletal right arm is falling off the bed, the bones of his right hand resting on the floor. Next to his hand, a syringe with the last bits of a psychoactive drug. Next to him on the bed, a female mannequin. She is naked, her plastic legs still attached to her wide circular base in a standing pose. But he’s placed her lying on the bed next to him, face up. His left arm is wrapped around her.

These are just a few of the beautiful still lifes I’ve discovered. I’m very impressed by the skill with which these were assembled, they depth of the stories they communicate so eloquently, and the casual way they were included as tiny and unremarkable details in the midst of an enormous game. It would be very easy to miss these scenes, or just move past them quickly. But each time I find one of these gems, I see a glimpse of the long-gone person behind the objects, and a moment from their story. It’s beautifully done.

Pixar provides a wonderful program for viewing and manipulating images. The name of the program is a contraction of “image tool.” It’s named it. Seriously. The pronoun.

There’s a certain beauty to this name, because it’s one of the worst possible names you could give a program. It would be hopeless to try to search for information on this program online. Every sentence involving it comes up has to be carefully parsed to determine if you’re talking about it. As happened right there. Twice.

And of course, the Abbot and Costello routines write themselves.

A: So the next step it to open it.
C: Done.
A: So you have it open?
C: Yes, it’s open.
A: Just to be sure, what’s open?
C: it.
A: it?
C: Yes, it.
A: What’s open?
C: it!
A: Suppose I work in the cubicle next to you. I want to help you with your rendering.
C: That’s great, it’s always nice to have colleagues.
A: So I come over to see what’s on your screen, and what do I see?
C: it.
A: It’s what?
C: It’s it!
A: That’s what I’m asking ya!
C: That’s what I’m telling ya!
etc.

While walking my dog Niko tonight, I was talking to him, as usual. I was just babbling. I was also mumbling. I thought there should be a nice portmanteau word combining babbling and mumbling. Both end with “bling”, so the first three letters have two choices: m/b, u/a, and m/b. That situation can be nicely drawn as a cube. Here are the axes, and the results. Of the eight possibilities, two are already words: in the back-lower-right corner (the cube we can’t see) is bubbling, and in the near-lower-left is bumbling. But the one I like best is bambling. I don’t know, it just feels right. To see a larger view of this image, and another image of all the cubes isolated, click here:

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I bought a couple of new big hard drives, and decided it was time to re-organize all of my computer’s disks. I have 3 hard drives inside my Mac Pro, and nine (yes, nine!) hard drives sitting on a nearby table.  Most of these disks are partitioned into multiple smaller regions. I have so much storage because I want every partition to have a local backup (in addition to backups from Backblaze, an automatic cloud backup service I pay for). So each internal drive has a corresponding backup partition on one of the external drives, and each external partition also has a backup (the backups get updated automatically every night in the wee hours by a program called SuperDuper). This organization works well for me because I need some partitions to be fast, some to be secured, and so on.

Moving everything around properly was risky, because if I messed it up I could lose both my original and backup data. To reduce the risk, I wrote a Processing program to let me first simulate (and debug) the re-organizing process, and then provide a step-by-step guide for actually moving stuff around.

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Apple has a product called Boot Camp, designed to let you run Windows right on your Mac. You can run virtual Windows from OSX using Parallels, but for fancy 3D work I wanted better performance, so I decided to install Boot Camp.

I have an older Mac Pro, and that made the whole process ridiculously hard. There are gotchas and hidden tricks all over the place. For the sake of anyone in a similar situation, or myself in the future, here’s what I had to do for 32-bit Windows 7.

The key things: use an older version of Boot Camp, make sure your Windows DVD is in an IDE optical drive (not SATA), and before installing Windows, physically remove all internal hard drives except the one with the Windows partition.

Read on for the step-by-step sequence.

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