The MTA recently announced a Greater Baltimore Bus Initiative.  They are planning to restructure most of the bus routes in the Baltimore system, in what I believe is that first major overhaul the system has ever undergone.

On looking at the proposal for the first time, the initial impression I got was one of reduction.  Four lines will be added (the 9, 28, 40, and 41) while 18 will be discontinued (the 2, 7, 10, 27, 31, 36, 61, 65, 86, 91, 98 (Hampden Neighborhood Shuttle), 102, 103, 104, 105, 150, 160, M6, and M12).  (In most cases, each of the areas served by the discontinued lines will be served by a different line after the reorganization.)  The reduction has both good and bad aspects.  On the good side, it will simplify the routes significantly.  As I’ve written before, the current routes are somewhat baroque, with lots of branches and optional sections.  The new plan looks like it eliminates most of those, leading to simpler and more understandable routes, at the cost of convenience—many places will be farther from the buses than they are now, though the limit seems to be between four and eight city blocks.

On the other hand, there are several places where the MTA is simply cutting service completely, largely to the north and northeast of the city.  The 83 corridor will remain accessible, but that service will stop at Hunt Valley Mall.  Along the rest of the north and northeast portion of the current service area, service will stop at or barely outside the Beltway.  The 8 will no longer go to Stella Maris; the 15 will stop short of the Beltway, no longer going to Rutherford Business Park, Windsor Hills, Ingleside Avenue, and Forest Park Avenue; the 19 will no longer go to Cub Hill or Joppa Heights; the 23 will not go to Hawthorne and Wilson Point; the M10’s entire route north of Smith Road, which currently goes up to Greenspring Station, will be removed; and the M12’s service will be dropped completely, eliminating access outside the Beltway along Stevenson Road, Park Heights Avenue, and Greenspring Valley Road, the latter of which renders Villa Julie College inaccessible.  I know people who use some of those removed routes, and I have occasionally made use of some of them myself.  Losing them makes Baltimore’s public transit system much worse.

I’d say that the changes proposed are more bad than good.  The “good” parts are mostly that the bus routes have been simplified and bus frequency increased in heavily-used areas.  The simplification is not without its downside, though, since it leaves many people walking much farther to get to a bus.  The bad part is that large sections of service are simply being removed, causing serious problems for anyone who uses those sections.

The MTA is holding community meetings this week and public hearings next week to solicit feedback on the proposal.  (I have no idea what the difference between a “community meeting” and “public hearing” is.)  The public hearings all start at 4pm on weekdays, with the exception of the one that starts at noon on a weekday.  Needless to say, they’re not terribly convenient for people who work.  The community meetings, at least, all start at 6pm.

The Baltimore Sun has an article about the proposed changes.

I’ve been quiet here for a while, mostly because I haven’t been doing too much that fits the focus of my blog.  One ongoing project, though, has been the process of putting much of my home directory into a subversion repository.  I’ll write more about that when I’m done, but as part of the process I’ve split out my public config files and synchronized them with my web-accessible config files.  There’s still stuff that I should comment for clarity, but now you, too, can see how I configure the programs I use.

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.