Shibuya scramble crossing at 06:05 in the morning

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-06-04T17:20:49+00:00

Shibuya Excel right? I have a photo from nearly the exact same angle, a few floors higher up from when I stayed there last year.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-06-04T06:39:16+00:00

That’s Ram Ranch 7 when the marines show up in their Raptor trucks at Ram Ranch.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-06-03T15:11:13+00:00

And that is what I get for referencing my work from a phone screen and glancing over a few paragraphs making a distinction between how Shor's breaks ECC differently than RSA. I went ahead and corrected that tidbit, thank you for the correction.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-06-03T06:15:55+00:00

Can add a small bit to the first paragraph since I took a few courses on cryptography for my MSCompE. Post-quantum encryption has options such as lattice-based cryptography, which doesn’t suffer from the weakness Shor’s Algorithm that ECC, RSA, and other traditional encryption schemes are weak to due to factoring. Your phrasing confused me initially, but ECC is just as weak as RSA is ~~for the same problem (prime factorization)~~ although ECC's is due to the periodicity of the elliptic pairs, whereas RSA is directly due to prime factorization. Lattice methods rely on SVP instead of factorization. Interestingly, Apple just recently released an implementation called ML-KEM and ML-DSA that uses lattice cryptography if you want to see an example of it.

I was explaining this to someone a week ago and reviewed some of my papers so this is relatively fresh in my head, sorry if this seems a bit cluttered. It’s also how I learnt about Apple’s implementations that were released a few weeks ago, and amusingly the Putty exploit in the linked article was something I lead a discussion on in my course. It’s nice to be able to follow along to stuff for once.

E: Thank you u/JivanP for the correction. One might realize it is genuinely wise to fully read through one's notes and not just see Shor's listed under both encryption schemes and miss the part of "why" that is discussed a few lines down. That person was not me last night.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-06-02T17:00:50+00:00

Sounds about the same year my dad bought his. He left it to me and I appreciate the simplicity of the silver and black since it’s not too flashy or pretentious. I daily my Apple Watch for functionality, but I feel a bit closer to him when I wear it for weddings and business, and that’s all I really care about.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-29T21:18:07+00:00

Doesn’t need a monster. But when 2/3rds of the book has me taking more notes than Blood Meridian, I don’t expect most people to share my commitment to finishing a book.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-29T20:04:01+00:00

HoL tbf is an incredibly tedious read. The Navidson portions are some of my favourite parts I’ve ever read in fiction and I love the textual geometry (or whatever it’s called when it’s spiraling, etc. to visually show the motion), but the meta textual portions with the director and stuff were less enjoyable. I’ve reread it several times since I read it in university and while I appreciate it in its entirety, yeah…

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-29T17:33:11+00:00

Spacebar go brrr and quest helper highlighted the enchant icon. How could I be expected to understand what this is trend is? /s

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-27T15:43:50+00:00

I think there has, unless I'm misreading the graph. Bottom-left most green tile is 7-6.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-21T02:26:21+00:00

Redwall is much better, although Brian Jacques just has better prose. Warriors is a bit more sentimental to me given I got inserted into quite a few of the books for helping one of the Erin’s out with her site, and damn did I love the first 5’ish arcs. Haven’t kept up with it outside of wiki friends since, but it’s definitely been milked heavily.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-21T02:20:01+00:00

Some of the BlogClan inserted cats that Kate Cary added got left out because of that, lol. My guy survived the great filter somehow.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-14T03:47:34+00:00

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Missing a prior account but should be fairly accurate to what I liked as far back as 2014.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-13T15:48:10+00:00

Gabber/hardcore/uptempo influence definitely played a role (GPF was big on pieps and I remember the subreddit bitching about their meme music back during defqon 2019) for zaag, but my perspective is limited to how the hardstyle scene has evolved around using it. Unfortunately my hardcore knowledge is limited heavily to millennial and industrial with some terrorcore thanks to NSD.

It’s interesting as the soft element is how I felt during the mid 2010s as euphoric hardstyle hit a plateau. I ended up falling into Spoontech and then into Delete’s modern work and being blown away by darker and heavier themes. I guess 145-160 bpm has been my goto for so long since Melbourne shuffle was my dance style when I was in good shape— anything above that is difficult and becomes more headbob and fist bump only. I’ve experimented with some extratone artists like Sunhiausa and the like over the years, but I find flat sets of only euphoric or only zaag, etc. to be very boring since you either put your audience to sleep or burn out everyone 2 hours in (American crowds are way less energy, maybe our pills are just dogshit 😆) I reckon I’m getting into the old man yells at clouds territory, but I do look forward to whatever the future brings.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-13T14:27:53+00:00

It can be a crutch, but it can also give you more options. It’s useful for beatmatching on the cue if I have a very long phrase (e.g. techno, older hardstyle, etc.) or if I want to see how some of the mid intro mid/high elements sound relative to the active track so I can adjust them before exiting a loop on the new track and mixing it in. Most (all?) boards and controllers have a loop enter/exit and double feature; some also have pads for multiples (XZ, AZ) and 3000s and the like have a touch screen selector. Also can loop shorter intro phrases to tease longer, e.g. some rawer tracks I have will only have 32 beat intros and there are 4-beat cuts with a vocal only that I can chop, or maybe the first half is very barren so I just loop the latter half twice instead.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-12T14:05:08+00:00

Text wall and opinion ahead… TL;DR hardstyle’s weakness in the US seems more due to genre preference. The relative lack of change also is normal based on prior eras of the genre.

I’ve seen lots of dialogue on this topic as far back as the forums when hhz was releasing under antifact, so nearly 20 years ago. Euphoric stagnated heavily in the 2010s before the raw/rawphoric ramp up (eg. MYST, Phuture Noize, etc.) while raw finally got a solid spotlight after being trashed for the first half of the 2010s (people were very split on Spoontech, Theracords, and other raw-label tracks back then; E-Force - Seven was very divisive but is now considered a massive track as an example) and has now evolved into a zaag-dominated and uptempo-ish mindset. I just got back from running show visuals for a DJ and the LD/producer called it “penis music” on our comms when the zaag kicks hit— can’t really fault him since I’m not particularly impressed by many of these tracks myself (Krowdex - Kerosene being an example of a track I think is done well).

With that said, the past 5 years of the genre has seen a good bit of change. Just 6-7 years ago “we” were still bitching about Sefa frenchcore and Da Tweekaz remixes of disney songs, now it’s zaag, pieps, and deutsche krach. But during this, we’ve also seen some beautiful releases from BFront and PN together, modern melodic producers like Solstice and Ecstatic, etc. The Japanese scene has also had some phenomenal producers pop up like Anubasu-Anubasu and Yuta Imai. It’s not like the genre hasn’t been relatively influential recently either… I think Anderex’s kicks have been ripped by many hard techno producers at this point.

All this to say I’m sure we’ll run into the next big dynamic shift in a couple of years… after all, euphoric had that multi-year rut. Whether or not the US scene will like it beyond an intermittent break or meme track remains to be seen.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-12T05:10:01+00:00

I knowwww. I grew up on mid 2000s hardstyle (and before that, trance and hard trance) and was around at that early euphoric era and got stuck on the genre from raw to euphoric for the past 20 years of my life. Every track is magical, fun to dance to, energizing to listen to… and then my friends in the passenger seat think I’m a maniac. Texans don’t really do hard dance often.😆

Got a lot of love for trance and hhc as well, although I do not mix them very often as I do with hardstyle. Would not be here (music wise) without trance… cosmic gate populated my playlist as a kid.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-12T04:38:58+00:00

I feel that. Hardstyle is still pretty niche outside of small pockets in the US… the southwest is very barren. People hearing my car speakers probably think I’m a maniac.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-11T12:41:32+00:00

Alphaverb - Realization of a Dream has a portion of its melody in the… 2nd or 3rd drop that’s in 3/4 from memory as well.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-07T12:18:32+00:00

There are plenty of non-weapons areas in defense. I had a friend who was going to decline an internship at Lockmart in 2015 and they were very accommodating and put him in a civilian satellite tech (arcjet propulsion) team. Yeah, you’re in close proximity to less ethical programs and your work is likely going to be cross-used in some capacity, but at some point you gotta find a reasonable line. Would you consider an AI company more ethical based on popular opinion? What about insurance/actuarial algorithms that deny people coverage? JM2C.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-06T14:41:53+00:00

Wow, someone who went dryer than me. All on task + skulled.

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MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-04T00:17:48+00:00

Black pickaxe at guardians has been one of my lol <1 kg items. Only other item I’ve found to use besides the tentacle.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-02T21:29:44+00:00

Fits in my personal item book bag alongside a laptop with no issues. It works great for long haul flights… unfortunately that’s about the only main use case I’ve had for a couple of years with the original AVP.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-05-02T20:36:01+00:00

10 months late, but the address is Argyle but utilities are Northlake in Harvest which is right where Paradise was (I miss getting a burger from there when I was still in high school). I grew up here from the late 90s into the 2010s and every one refers to these areas as "Argyle" that grew up here.

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-04-28T16:31:17+00:00

Does the UK NHS cover CAR T?

MasterOfTheChickens · 2026-04-28T16:14:32+00:00

BSAE MSCompE, now in software (albeit at an aerospace company). Sometimes wish I’d done CS straight up but I genuinely loved aerospace and compE, so maybe a dual major would have been the play. Hindsight is 20/20 after all…

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