You have a closed box. There may be a live cat inside, but you won’t know until you open the box. For most people, this situation is a theoretical conundrum that probes the foundations of quantum mechanics. For me, however, it’s a pressing practical problem, not least because physics completely skates over the vital issue of how annoyed the cat will be when the box is opened. But fortunately, engineering comes to the rescue, in the form of a new US $50 maker-friendly pulsed coherent radar sensor from SparkFun.

Perhaps I should back up a little bit. Working from home during the pandemic, my wife and I discovered a colony of feral cats living in the backyards of our block in New York City. We reversed the colony’s growth by doing trap-neuter-return (TNR) on as many of its members as we could, and we purchased three Feralvilla outdoor shelters to see our furry neighbors through the harsh New York winters. These roughly cube-shaped insulated shelters allow the cats to enter via an opening in a raised floor. A removable lid on top allows us to replace straw bedding every few months. It’s impossible to see inside the shelter without removing the lid, meaning you run the risk of surprising a clawed predator that, just moments before, had been enjoying a quiet snooze.

The enclosure for the radar [left column] is made of basswood (adding cat ears on top is optional). A microcontroller [top row, middle column] processes the results from the radar module [top row, right column] and illuminates the LEDs [right column, second from top] accordingly. A battery and on/off switch [bottom row, left to right] make up the power supply.James Provost

Feral cats respond to humans differently than socialized pet cats do. They see us as threats rather than bumbling servants. Even after years of daily feeding, most of the cats in our block’s colony will not let us approach closer than a meter or two, let alone suffer being touched. They have claws that have never seen a clipper. And they don’t like being surprised or feeling hemmed in. So I wanted a way to find out if a shelter was occupied before I popped open its lid for maintenance. And that’s where radar comes in.

SparkFun’s pulsed coherent radar module is based on Acconeer’s low-cost A121 sensor. Smaller than a fingernail, the sensor operates at 60 gigahertz, which means its signal can penetrate many common materials. As the signal passes through a material, some of it is reflected back to the sensor, allowing you to determine distances to multiple surfaces with millimeter-level precision. The radar can be put into a “presence detector” mode—intended to flag whether or not a human is present—in which it looks for changes in the distance of reflections to identify motion.

As soon as I saw the announcement for SparkFun’s module, the wheels began turning. If the radar could detect a human, why not a feline? Sure, I could have solved my is-there-a-cat-in-the-box problem with less sophisticated technology, by, say, putting a pressure sensor inside the shelter. But that would have required a permanent setup complete with weatherproofing, power, and some way of getting data out. Plus I’d have to perform three installations, one for each shelter. For information I needed only once every few months, that seemed a bit much. So I ordered the radar module, along with a $30 IoT RedBoard microcontroller. The RedBoard operates at the same 3.3 volts as the radar and can configure the module and parse its output.

If the radar could detect a human, why not a feline?

Connecting the radar to the RedBoard was a breeze, as they both have Qwiic 4-wire interfaces, which provides power along with an I2C serial connection to peripherals. SparkFun’s Arduino libraries and example code let me quickly test the idea’s feasibility by connecting the microcontroller to a host computer via USB, and I could view the results from the radar via a serial monitor. Experiments with our indoor cats (two defections from the colony) showed that the motion of their breathing was enough to trigger the presence detector, even when they were sound asleep. Further testing showed the radar could penetrate the wooden walls of the shelters and the insulated lining.

The next step was to make the thing portable. I added a small $11 lithium battery and spliced an on/off switch into its power lead. I hooked up two gumdrop LEDs to the RedBoard’s input/output pins and modified SparkFun’s sample scripts to illuminate the LEDs based on the output of the presence detector: a green LED for “no cat” and red for “cat.” I built an enclosure out of basswood, mounted the circuit boards and battery, and cut a hole in the back as a window for the radar module. (Side note: Along with tending feral cats, another thing I tried during the pandemic was 3D-printing plastic enclosures for projects. But I discovered that cutting, drilling, and gluing wood was faster, sturdier, and much more forgiving when making one-offs or prototypes.)

The radar sensor sends out 60-gigahertz pulses through the walls and lining of the shelter. As the radar penetrates the layers, some radiation is reflected back to the sensor, which it detects to determine distances. Some materials will reflect the pulse more strongly than others, depending on their electrical permittivity. James Provost

I also modified the scripts to adjust the range over which the presence detector scans. When I hold the detector against the wall of a shelter, it looks only at reflections coming from the space inside that wall and the opposite side, a distance of about 50 centimeters. As all the cats in the colony are adults, they take up enough of a shelter’s volume to intersect any such radar beam, as long as I don’t place the detector near a corner.

I performed in-shelter tests of the portable detector with one of our indoor cats, bribed with treats to sit in the open box for several seconds at a time. The detector did successfully spot him whenever he was inside, although it is prone to false positives. I will be trying to reduce these errors by adjusting the plethora of available configuration settings for the radar. But in the meantime, false positives are much more desirable than false negatives: A “no cat” light means it’s definitely safe to open the shelter lid, and my nerves (and the cats’) are the better for it.

If you’ve ever thought that the idyllic farming fantasy of Stardew Valley was too easy, there is a mod just for you. “Hardcore mode,” as it’s called, changes nothing about the game itself but will delete your save file if you use the Stardew Valley Wiki, the most useful community resource on the game.

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For the record, I do not own a PS5, so I am unable to play Stellar Blade, but I’m here today to talk about the discourse surrounding it, which can summed up as “If you like sexy women, you are a creep.” All you have to do is look up the comparisons to Hades 2 that can be summed up as “hotties for straight men bad, hotties for woke weirdos good.” But I am going to focus in on an article by Gamesradar entitled, Stellar Blade puts Eve in some incredibly stupid sexy outfits that hurt the game’s story, but despite the forced sex appeal I actually love her detailed design. It can be summed up as “Eve is a well designed character, but since she exists to appeal to the male gaze, she is bad.”

Stellar Blade angers Woke Game Journalist Austin Wood

The author of said article about Eve from Stellar Blade, Austin Woods, is an asexual male who has spent his life unlearning the male gaze. That’s not me talking, that’s him talking:

Oh it gets worse:

This article is not about me, but I should explain where I’m coming from. For me, romantic and sexual attraction are not only foreign but utterly undesirable. So more than with your average person, games like Stellar Blade bark up the wrong tree when they assume that I, as a man, am eager to gawk at and fantasize about characters like Eve. She’s hot! I like her! I’d consider myself sex-positive, but I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not care. I’m not put off by Stellar Blade’s ham-handed sexiness or its assumptions about me, but I am sensitive to and critical of tone in storytelling, and Eve’s treatment undeniably hurts the game’s voice.

Austin Wood, quite simply is the end result of Feminism’s attack on male sexuality, which can be seen through the fact this discourse over Stellar Blade’s Eve even exists at all(and is a diatribe that’d take up longer than we have here). Austin hates his own sexuality to the point he buries it and calls himself asexual. You can see that in this paragraph:

I like loads of details in Eve’s design. She has incredible brows and lashes. I love the little baby hairs by her ears, the subtly imperfect texturing of her skin, and the pores on her cheeks. I love that she has some natural belly fat while being slim. She’s a great-looking character, and it’s genuinely fun to put her in the many outfits, accessories, and hairstyles that Stellar Blade offers, some of which are plenty fashionable. I mean, of course it is; customizing characters is a video game staple. For my money, Eve is sexier and cooler in outfits that actually have enough material to embellish and accentuate her. She absolutely rocks a leather jacket and jeans, and that’s just the start. 

He knows Eve is sexy. He even praises her sexiness, but he buries it and then proceeds to call it bad.call it bad because its divorced from the story or anything else.

The problem is that Eve’s sexiness is totally divorced from the rest of the game and her personality, and Stellar Blade wants to be taken seriously despite how strangely this comes across. I think this is why a lot of people don’t like how Eve looks. Characters like Bayonetta own and flaunt their sexiness, and games like Hades are inextricably sexy from corner to corner. That’s partly why they’re so beloved – this stuff is hard to pull off convincingly, and memorable when done well. Everyone being horny in, and for, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. But Eve’s amped-up sexiness is a weird outlier. She has next to no interest in her own appearance or sex appeal. At most, she mentions her hairstyle one time.

I read the rest of article and honestly, his argument only makes sense if Stellar Blade’s Eve’s sexuality is bad because it only exists to attract the male gaze. But Aphrodite from Hades 2 looks like this and is just fine because its the right sort of hot:

The Self-Hating Man

I looked up Austin Wood but could find little that wasn’t on his Twitter Profile. But I’m venturing to guess Austin went to a liberal arts college where was brainwashed into hating himself. He even more or less admits it in the article(“Unlearning the male gaze.”) I, on the other hand, am not a self-hating man. I like looking at attractive women. It pleases me. It is hard wired into my lizard brain. Male sexually, in fact, is partly how we got to eight billion people on Planet Earth. Reminds me of an online exchange I read once somewhere where some guy was like. “Nobody want to see my grandmother naked,” and someone replied, “Someone wanted to see your grandmother naked, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” That’s right, men being attracted to women creates babies!

In essence, Austin is grasping at straws to justify Stellar Blade’s Eve being bad because he thinks male sexuality is bad. Eve was created to appeal to the male gaze, and that is bad because reasons. Honestly, who cares if she’s sexy? If people want to play sexy characters, let them. But games journalism is infected by woke people, like Austin Wood. They must adhere to the message, even if it doesn’t make much sense with any scrutiny. For example Austin praises Bayonetta, but her design was criticized heavily for being pure male-gaze.Why doesn’t Eve get that pass? Is it because its the current thing? Probably.

In conclusion, I know that if this blows up, I’ll be called a creepy incel pervert. But am I? Or am I just a self-aware man who doesn’t hate his own sexuality like Austin Wood obviously does. Male sexuality good, woke weirdos bad!

The post Stellar Blade and the Hatred of Male Sexuality appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.