According to a recent announcement, the southern portion of the Light Rail will open completely on December 5th.  No more shuttles, at least in that direction.

On the other hand, they’re closing the northern portion (everything north of North Avenue) on January 3rd.  And the shuttle bus system they have set up is confusing, to put it mildly.

From what I can tell, there will be three shuttle routes, designated ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.  ‘A’ shuttles will go to Falls Road.  ‘B’ shuttles will go to Timonium Fairgrounds and Warren Road.  ‘C’ shuttles will go to Lutherville, Timonium Fairgrounds, Gilroy Road, McCormick Road, Pepper Road, and Hunt Valley.  No shuttles will go to Timonium Business Park, Mount Washington, Cold Spring, or Woodberry.  Users of any of those latter stops are expected to use buses that run nearby.  (Light Rail riders often use the trains to avoid those buses.)  The Light-Rail-served terminus of the shuttle routes is not North Avenue (as one might expect), but the Cultural Center stop.

Confused yet?  There’s more.  The ‘C’ route is a general service route that will run roughly the same hours as the Light Rails does: 5am to midnight on Monday through Saturday and 10am to 8pm on Sunday.  The ‘A’ and ‘B’ routes are limited-time express routes: the ‘A’ will run from 6am to 10am and 2:30pm to 6:30pm; the ‘B’ will run from 6am to 9:30am and 2:30pm to 6:30pm.  Both express routes will only run on weekdays.

They don’t say what the more specific time constraints are.  (Does “to 10am” mean that the last bus will start its last run at 10:00, or that the last bus will arrive at its final destination at 10:00?)  They don’t say how often the buses will be running.  (Probably because there’s either no set schedule or because the schedule won’t be enforced at all; either would fit the behavior of the southward-running buses this year.)

Neither the MTA’s website nor the Double Track Project’s website has any mention yet of these changes.

I’ll be using several resources to track the election results tonight:

• Wikipedia’s election results,
• CNN’s election results,
• Contrapositive’s Election Night Cheat Sheet,
• And, of course, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

There are so many descriptions of skillchains in Final Fantasy XI, and none of them really made sense to me for the longest time.  Through the help of a skillchain discussion and two skillchain charts, I finally made sense of it all.  This is an explanation of that understanding; hopefully others will benefit from it.

Skillchains are the result of doing weapon skills in a particular order, with precise timing.  They unleash a significant amount of additional damage.  [There appear to be rough calculations on how much, but I can’t find reliable numbers.] There are three levels of skillchains—the higher levels do more damage.  Every skillchain has at least one elemental component—if a mage casts an elementally-appropriate spell at the same time that the skillchain occurs, you also get a magic burst for more additional damage.

Let’s start with level 1 skillchains.  There are eight types of level 1 skillchains: Transfixion, Liquefaction, Impaction, Detonation, Compression, Scission, Reverberation, and Induration.  I don’t beleve that there’s anything inherent in most of those names; they’re just what they’re called.  Almost every weaponskill has at least one of those types as an attribute.  There are certain pairings of attributes that will create a skillchain.  See the chart at right for a graphical layout.  From that chart, you can see that, for example, Impaction leads to Liquefaction.  Thus, you can create a level one skillchain by chaining together, say, Flat Blade and Burning Blade, in that order.  The skillchain created is named after the attributes of the final weaponskill, so this example would make a Liquefaction skillchain.

The items in the graph are also color coded to indicate their elemental attributes: Transfixion is Light, Liquefaction is Fire, Impaction is Lightning, Detonation is Wind, Compression is Dark, Scission is Earth, Reverberation is Water, and Induration is Ice.  The above example is Liquefaction, so you could magic burst with any Fire spell.

Finally, some weaponskills have multiple skillchain attributes.  For each skill there’s an order of priority.  An example is Spinning Axe, which has, in order, Liquefaction, Scission, and Impaction.  If you have two weaponskills with multiple attributes, the first skillchain’s priorities are more important.  Let’s chain Spinning Axe with Shadow of Death, which is Induration and Reverberation.  The first priorities of each weaponskill are checked first, but there’s no Liquefaction -> Induration skillchain.  So the game goes down the list of the second weaponskill, trying Liquefaction -> Reverberation.  Nothing.  Now it goes to Scission on Spinning Axe and starts over with Shadow of Death, checking Induration.  There are no Scission -> Induration chains, so it next checks Scission -> Reverberation.  That is valid, so the two will form a Reverberation skillchain.

Skillchains themselves can be chained.  You can go Scission -> Reverberation -> Induration, which will make a Reverberation skillchain followed by an Induration skillchain.  When you do this, the damage multipliers are higher; the Induration skillchain would do more damage than if it had been created separately.

That covers level 1 skillchains, and is really most of the hard stuff.  Now we go on to level 2.

Level 2 skillchains are more powerful than level 1 skillchains.  In addition, each level 2 skillchain has two elemental attributes; you can magic burst with either of those elements.  The level 2 skillchains are:  Distortion (Water and Ice), Fusion (Fire and Light), Fragmentation (Lightning and Wind), and Gravitation (Darkness and Earth).  You can see the paths to make level 2 skillchains in the graph on the right.  Since the graph is not entirely clear, let me clarify a bit.  Certain combinations of level 1 skillchain attributes will make a level 2 skillchain: Liquefaction -> Impaction creates a Fusion skillchain.  Also, some of the highest-level weaponskills have level 2 attributes; Swift Blade, for example, has Gravitation.  You can put together level 2 attribute to make a level 2 skillchain in a manner analogous to the level 1 skillchains.  Fusion -> Gravitation will make a Gravitation skillchain.

As with the level 1s, you can hook together multiple level 2 skillchains.  You can do things like Liquefaction -> Impaction -> Gravitation, which will make a Fusion skillchain followed by a Gravitation skillchain.

Finally, there are the level 3 skillchains.  There are only two of these, and each has four elemental attributes.  Light skillchains are Light, Fire, Lightning, and Wind, while Dark skillchains are Darkness, Earth, Water, and Ice.  Level 3 skillchains can only be made by putting together two level 2 attributes, as illustrated by the chart on the right.  Note that these are essentially pairings; the same two level 2 attributes will give the same results regardless of the order in which they are executed.  Since at least one of the weaponskills in a level 3 skillchain must have a level 2 attribute, these are restricted to the highest-level characters in the game.  The earliest that these weaponskills come available is at level 65, and some classes don’t get them until 67 or so.

The usual rules of chaining apply; you can make, for example, a light skillchain with the sequence Liquefaction -> Impaction -> Fragmentation, which will first make a Fusion skillchain followed by a Dark skillchain.

Insofar as anyone knows, there are no level 4 skillchains.  Following the logic from lower levels, there would only be one level 4 skillchain, and it would have all elemental attributes.  It would be made by putting together a Dark type and a Light type weaponskill (possibly in the other order).  It would require weaponskills that had Dark and Light type attributes, which none seem to.  In short, not only do they not exist, as far as anyone can tell, they cannot exist in the game as it currently is.

For your edification, here’s a full chart of the links to form the various skillchains:

I don’t know of any complete, up-to-date list in English of weapon skills and their skillchain attributes.

A few years ago I came into posession of a video entitled “Godzilla vs. Mito Komon”.  Most people, I suspect, have heard of Godzilla, but not necessarily Mito Komon.  Mito Komon was both the title and star of a very long-running Japanese TV show set in 17th century Japan.

The video itself was apparently done by an art student as a project.  He wrote the script, directed the film, and acted all of the parts (including Godzilla, Great Majin, and several high-voltage electrical towers).  I have been unable to find out who did the fansubbing.

Since I haven’t found anyplace else to get it, I’ve put together a torrent of the video.  Behold, Godzilla vs. Mito Komon.

This evening, a pickup truck ended up on the Light Rail tracks around Northern Parkway.  To say that the MTA didn’t handle it well would be an understatement.

I left work at about 5:20 and arrived at the Light Rail stop a little before 5:30.  There was already a train there, sitting with its doors open.  I asked people what the wait was and was told there was some accident.  I waited a while and eventually the driver announced that he would go to the Lutherville stop.  No word on what was going on, just, “I’m going to Lutherville.” When we got there (two stops down the line), the driver announced that he had to stop until he was told he could go.  I considered taking the 8 bus from there, but figured that whatever shuttle system the MTA had set up would still be faster than the 8.  Eventually, we got moving again, traveled to the next station, Falls Road, and the driver said we all had to get out.  That was the extent of the communication from the driver.  He was minimally informative and gave no indication of what the MTA was doing to cope with the situation.

At the Falls Road stop, I looked around for any MTA personnel so I could see what was going on.  There were none.  I pulled out my system map, figured out what buses I needed to take, and set out.  On my way out I passed an MTA supervisor’s car driving in, so I went back to see what was up.  The woman assured me that there were shuttle buses on the way; she’d left at the same time they had, but she’d taken back roads impassable to buses.  I was told that the buses would take us to the North Avenue Light Rail stop, at which point we could board a train and continue south.  Replacement Light Rail drivers got out of her car, switched places with the drivers of the trains at the stop, and she and the old drivers drove off.

Roughly fifteen minutes later a bus arrived, disgorged its passengers and then closed its doors.  When someone went to ask the driver what was going on, they discovered that the driver had been told to take people from North Avenue to Falls Road, but hadn’t been told anything about bringing people back.  She called her supervisor (a different person than I had talked with), who also didn’t know anything about it, but told her to bring us down to North Avenue.  On the way back I talked with the driver a little.  She had been given only the roughest of directions on how to get to the Falls Road stop, and those had been given verbally; a passenger had supplied her with the necessary details.

By the time we got to the North Avenue stop, the tracks appeared to have been reopened; the first train to go by was northbound and went north past us.  I waited about 15 minutes more before a southbound train arrived.

All told, I got home two hours later than normal.  Given the circumstances, I could have understood some delay, but the MTA’s mishandling of the situation led to even worse conditions.

A distilled version of this tale will be filed with the MTA as a complaint, not that I expect them to do anything about it.