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.

I primarily use Unix-based computers, mostly Linux.  On those computers, I live in text mode.  This entry is an attempt to document the software I find most useful to my text-mode guerrilla lifestyle.  Included are links to the programs I rely on, links to alternative programs, and links to my config files.

screen (.screenrc, .screenrc-mithrandir).  Simply indispensable.  It slices and dices console sessions.  Pretty much everything I do, I do in screen.  For extensive details, see my ode to screen.

zsh (.zshrc, .zshenv, .zshprompt).  My shell of choice.  Think of all the good features of bash, ksh, and tcsh rolled together.  (Without much of the ickiness, particularly the csh heritage.)  Personally, the killer application of zsh was that fact that not only did it have context-sensitive completion but (unlike tcsh) it shipped with hordes of completion definitions right out of the box.  Type dpkg -L fo<tab> and zsh will autocomplete on the Debian packages currently installed on your system.  With an ssh-agent running, type scp otherhost:fo<tab> and zsh will ssh to the other system and autocomplete on the files available on that host.

irssi (config, theme).  The best IRC client I’ve come across, certainly beating out IrcII, BitchX, and even epic.  Multiple windows, extensible, tons of plugins available.

bitlbee.  This is actually an IRC-to-Instant-Messaging gateway.  It allows me to use AIM, Jabber, and the like from within my preferred chat program, irssi.

snownews.  curses-based RSS aggregator.  I shopped around a bit before finding an aggregator that I liked.  snownews does everything I need.

mutt (.muttrc, config directory).  Possibly the best mail client around, GUI or not.  While pine is okay (and simpler to use), mutt is much more customizable and scales better to large volumes of email.

procmail (.procmailrc).  Slices and dices my email.  I have procmail rewriting things so they’re easier for me to deal with, sorting my list mail into separate mailboxes (automatically; no need to add new lists by hand), and checking (and dealing with) spam.  Essential to my email usage.

Emacs (.emacs).  My text editor of choice.  Feel free to substitute XEmacs or vi (preferably vim) at your own preference.  I prefer emacs to vi, though I know a decent amount of vi, as any sysadmin should.  I actually like XEmacs a little better than GNU Emacs, but GNU Emacs has better UTF-8 support.

w3m.  Web browser.  Among other things, w3m does tabbed browsing, though it’s not multithreaded, so you can’t read one tab while another is loading.  It even has image support; run it with a valid $DISPLAY and it’ll render images on the page.  There are other text-mode browsers, most notably links.  I’m not tremendously familiar with links because w3m fills all of my needs.  (My original decision between the two came about because w3m had better HTML support, but I don’t believe this is any longer the case.)  The grandaddy of text-mode browsers is, of course, lynx, but it’s lagged far behind w3m and links in support for newer aspects of HTML.

moosic (config).  This is a music jukebox.  The features that distinguish it from other such programs are twofold.  First, it runs as a standalone server; you interact with it via a command line client.  (In theory, a curses or GUI client could be written, but to my knowledge none yet has.)  Second, it’s customizable with regards to how it plays music.  It has a config file where you tell it what programs to use to play various music formats (it does come with reasonable defaults).  A program with similar design is mpd.  mpd does its own music playing, which allows some advantages over moosic, but moosic has much better playlist management.

mplayer (config).  Okay, this is kind of a hedge.  I do indeed use it purely in text mode on occasion—it has better support for streaming media (usually mp3s) than any of the actual mp3 players I use.  mplayer’s main advantage is that it will play pretty much any video format I throw at it.  (I’m not quite masochistic enough to watch the videos in aalib, though.)

surfraw (.surfraw.conf).  surfraw is a collection of command-line based jumping-points to various web-based information, mostly searches.  For a quick google search, I need only go to a command line and type sr google <my search terms>.  (Debian uses a single program, sr, as a wrapper for all of the surfraw “elvi”.  On other systems, you would probably just run google <your search terms>.)

wget.  The swiss-army-knife of grabbing things off the web (and via FTP).  I’ve automated many downloads, some tweaked in interesting ways, with wget.

tdl.  Completely command-line todo list manager.  Along similar lines is DevTodo; I haven’t really played with it because tdl does everything I need.  Those two are both command-line based.  For more of a todo list editor, you might want to take a look at hnb or woody.  (Though, of those two, hnb has better support for todo lists.)

Those are the bigger programs that jump to mind most readily.  I use a host of other programs, too.  Listed briefly, they are:  less (pager), mpg321 (mp3 player), GnuPG (OpenPGP implementation) (options), aumix (volume control), teTeX (TeX implementation), pal (nice colored calendar with a number of features), bc (simple command line calculator), dict (actually a dictionary network protocol but their command-line client is also named ‘dict’), mp3gain (normalization of mp3s (ideally should be done non-destructively via ID3v2 but no one supports that)), netcat (connect directly to TCP sockets), BitTornado (bittorrent client; slightly nicer than the standard one), subversion (source revision control; nicer than cvs), abcde (CD ripper) (.abcde.conf), lame (MP3 encoder), nmap (portscanner), hping (packet generator), and tcpdump (packet sniffer).

I do normally run X; it lets me have multiple xterms on the screen at once.  For managing those xterms, I run ion (config directory), a tiling window manager.

There are a couple of GUI programs I use regularly.  I’ve already mentioned mplayer; you really need a pixelmapped interface to watch movies.  There’s also Ethereal, an excellent network sniffer and protocol analyzer (much nicer than plain tcpdump), and GnuCash, one of the best asset management programs I’ve come across.  (But see clacct for straight command line checkbook balancing.)  Oh, and Firefox, for those websites that just won’t work with w3m.