Merry Christmas

In the drafts folder of my blog I found this... It's a lil late but never mind... I'll just click the post button anyway.

Christmas at TYC

Christmas is always nice and warm in SL. I suppose it's kinda like in Australia. I wonder what it's like to wake up after a night-sail and yell: Hey! It's Christmas morning, - let's drop the anchor and go swimming! Can't be that bad...

Building charts

There's a great writeup about the practicalities involved in building an accurate (sort of)  world wide navigational chart over on the Steam Community. It's about the charts in SailAway.

Picture from the process

If you dunno what SailAway is, the do yourself a favour and google it. It's truly amazing. Anyway, the creator of SailAway explains the tech stuff so even humans can understand; Perhaps except for the json-stuff, but I'll add a few words here.

Way back in time, they stored data in a way that took up as little space as possible. On top of that it was fast to read, write and computer those data. Then someone invented XML, and the need for harddrive space and CPU power exploded, because XML makes data grow by a factor of ten - plus it takes loads of CPU to decode and transform into computable data. These days it seems JSON is taking over. Not much is different. If they store the oceans of the world in JSON then no wonder it's a huge database.

Read the whole thing here!

SailAway is a huge and fabulous project. I can't really decide if I like it better than SL; But they  don't really compare. SL sailing is so much more than SailAway, and yet in some ways it is so much less. Strawberry or vanilla?  Hmm...

Clarisse in the Transat

Pretty interesting... A rather new sailor with relatively little experience, Clarisse Cremér, seems do be doing extremely well in the mini transat. She is close to the leading boats, but that's not all. She is sailing a standardboat and still she is ahead of many of the one-offs; Those are the ones with foils, kanting keels and magic wands...

Clarisse en route

It's almost like having a rookie in a Citroen C3 beat a Porshe on a racetrack.

Check it out on InterestingSailboats. Check the leaderboard on the MiniTransat site.

I totally agree with Paulo over at InterestingSailboats. If this is what she can do now - it's gonna be very interesting to watch her in the future, when she gains more experience.

Clarisse has a website on clarissecremer.com. It opens with the text "check out my crazy project". I like.

AC in monohulls

A real sailboat crewed by a real crew of real sailors - as in not bike riders, not weight lifters and not computer experts!!? What? Does that mean that classic sailing skills will be rewarded?

Is this the next AC boat?

What a crazy thing. It's interesting. This may even interest the rest of the sailing world; Question is: Will it attract television? Question is: Who cares if it looks like sailing? More on sailworld...

49er champs woohoo

You go girls...

Jena & Katja

World Champs in 49erFX is definately an achievement to be proud of. Fantastic sailing. A million congrats...

Dear Sailing Gods

Dear Sailing Gods!

I hope you enjoy sunny weather, a fair breeze and your favorite coctail onboard your no doubt luxurious leisure yachts up there or where ever you are. I try to imagine a modified Wally 1001 with an intergallactic Volvo Penta S-drive or something, but that's probably not even close.

Down here, we're not that lucky. In RL we've now seen 6 or 7 consecutive weeks with bad wind, too much rain and day temperatures between 13 and 19 degrees Celcius. One night in july the temperature went down to 8C. That's like february temperatures. Rainy, unstable and windy weather all summer! What is going on? Where's that global heating?

Writing a complaint

So instead of sailing in RL and praising the good weather and the good Sailing Gods, I now find myself lying here on my virtual boat writing a complaint. How's that? I mean really? Are you trying to force me off the real live ocean and into the virtual counterpart?

Finally sunshine

Well, I got news for you guys up there. Real sailing is in fact way better than virtual sailing, but you need to fix the weather. Seriously. People here on earth will turn away from both real sailing and real Sailing Gods; Be adviced that in virtual sailing there are virtual Sailing Gods. Obviously.

Perhaps I just need to unwind a bit

Oh no, this is not a threat. I'd never dare to threaten you guys. I am just observing. Yes Sir! That's what I do. In case you need help with the fixing let me just tell you this: My friend Craig was so good as to show me an article about the sun cooling down. Our sun. For the next 300 years or so. That's no fun. No, I didn't bother finding that link. It was depressing enough to read it once. You'll need to google it. I suppose you have internet. After you've googled it then please please pretty please... fix it.

Checkout from Noodle aboard Unwind, currently anchored in Dex, SL.

How to build a sailing sim

Very interesting... this interview is about how a single developer built a huge, complex multiuser sailing sim. It's taken two years, and now it's even on Steam. Check out the interview on Gamasutra. Enjoy!

Something makes me feel right at home

The game itself is here: www.sailawaysimulator.com

The Trump Issue

Yesterday I received a rather disturbing message from Tradewinds YC in SL. It read: "You've been evicted from the group Tradewinds Yacht Club". Or something. I went "huh!". I knew I hadn't been online much lately, so it couldn't be something I'd done. Today I logged in to see what's going on, and whoa... I found TYC completely littered with signs with all sorts of statements. Check this out:

Signs at TYC...

My first thought was that this was an odd type of griefing. but then I remembered the message. It was actually sent by Tasha herself; Very strange. So all this would be Tasha's idea of a bright lit future for Tradewinds YC? Hmmm. I wandered on and found this:

Another sign at TYC

What's this about? Clearly, someone squeezed way too much lemon in Tasha's tea. Over by the boatshed I found a clickable thingy that gave me a clue. Sort of. It was a message from Tasha explaining - or rather outlining - some recent changes in the TYC Charter. Hmm. Interesting. I walked on and found more signs and posters. How about this one:

And another one...

Yup. She's mad. Not that she's gone mad. More like really angry. Still, the explaining text I found didn't quite point at one particular event or person. It just stated stuff about fairness, equality of races and sexes plus something on global heating. Common sense stuff to most people I'd say, so wtf?? This next banner leaves no doubt what this is about.

And another...

So it is the Trump Issue. I had a feeling it could be that, but I never thought it would move into SL like this. I mean, I've known Tasha for many years, and I have never seen her perform an outburst like this one. The Tasha I know is sweet, sensible and intelligent. What gives...

And another...

Ok, I'll admit that I too am a bit worried by Trumps doings so far. In fact I believe that more than half the world watched in disbelief as he took office. Those tweets during the campaign wasn't just hot steam escaping. However, it's not all bad. I kinda get the idea that everything shouldn't be made in China. Not that I hate the Chinese people or anything. I don't. It just doesn't make sense to produce everything in one place and send it half way across the planet. Besides, it's unbalanced. Also, it seems kinda fair that Europe should do their part of protecting... uhm... Europe. But that's about all there is to like. I totally get the message on the above sign.

And another...

Turns out there is a new TYC group for those able to symphasize with the signs at TYC. I signed up. Thank you Tasha for letting us know that not all Americans are Trumpeteers. We were kinda worried. We still are, but at least now we know that we're not alone.

So what's your thoughts? Is Trump good or bad, or is he somewhere inbetween?

And the British... or should I narrow it down to the English... Where are they in all this? So busy leaving EU that they'll be the next star in the US flag? I sincerely hope not.