Thought I'd De-Pan a few pics, for all your Dakimakura needs.

Yanno, I think they distort the proportions a bit on some of those pan shots. Also annoying was frame vignetting that I didn't clean up 100%.

Also, I can add more if anyone is interested. This show seems to love panning up her figure.

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The mismatch between English and Japanese titles can be really surprising.

For example, "Sousou no Frieren" has an English subtitle of "Frieren: After the Journey" Which makes it sound like the cozy remembrance we all know and love. But I was skeptical. Then in episode 8, one of the demons says "Sousou no Frieren" and the subtitle gave me a double-take. So I dug out my Japanese character dictionary, because my pocket dictionary was no help, and online translations weren't helping me match the characters either.

(I have to recommend DeepL for translation, far better than Google or DDG.)

葬送のフリーレン translates as "Funeral Frieren" at the nicest I was able to determine. The first character gives "To bury, to consign to oblivion, or to shelve". The second "To send". So "To send to your grave Frieren." So it makes sense when Lugner said:

Click to Embiggen

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 04, 2023 07:18 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at November 04, 2023 09:57 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at November 05, 2023 05:31 PM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 07, 2023 10:17 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at November 08, 2023 04:35 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: J Greely at November 10, 2023 08:56 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at November 12, 2023 11:54 AM (sZ6tC)

Posted by: mikeski at November 15, 2023 08:08 PM (DgGvY)

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What am I trying to watch this season?

Helck, Frieren, Spy Family, Shield Hero, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, Kanojo mo Kanojo

What am I actually watching?

Frieren, and Kanojo mo Kanojo, and I'm still trying to finish Love After World Domination.

Most of those shows in the first list are continuations of previous seasons that I haven't finished, so I've got a backlog on the order of Boeing's. I'm actually kinda hoping for a strike next year....

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One problem I had with the build was the stiffness of the wires for the USB 3.0 ports on the front panel. The two wires from the port melded into a single, fat, plastic-encapsulated plug, and the header for the port on the motherboard, instead of being vertical like most pins, was parallel to the board, and that caused the cables to press against the drive frame. The fix was a simple right-angle adapter meant for exactly this purpose. And it was only $6 and change.

My case also came with a 200 mm fan that sucks air through a screen in the front panel and blows it across the drive bay. It ran virtually silently at 18 db. But the original fan developed a nasty squeak, so I sought out a replacement. Unfortunately this is a unique 20 mm thick fan, and nearly all replacements were 30 mm. There was only one, and the one with the blue LEDs that matched the original was out of stock, so I had to get the red one. Fortunately with the front door shut, you don't really have to see it.

I had a little USB Bluetooth dongle that for some reason I was unable to make work. Broadcomm only makes Windows 7 and earlier drivers, and doesn't support it any more. Then I realized that my motherboard has bluetooth built in. I just hadn't thought of it. It apparently uses the antennas on the back that I hadn't attached because I didn't intend to use the built in wi-fi. So I put on the antennas and enabled the bluetooth and the signal is a lot stronger than the little dongle. I can now use my headphones anywhere in the house without dropouts. However, the phone utilities will be kind of missed.

My case is designed to be a noise suppressor. The left panel even has eggshell foam on it, but I haven't had that panel on for ages because of all the monkeying I had to do with Himawari, and because the numeric display that showed the boot process and temperature was on the motherboard. Even now, I have the LED on Purah's CPU heatsink set to display colors to indicate temperature and the cover off so I can monitor it. But I won't be able to see it if I put the cover back on to control the noise (My homebrew water cooling system was virtually silent). This is from before clear cases became a thing. But I have seen the light. As much as I normally hate all the ludicrous RGB crap that is in fashion, which makes your PC look like a Pride Parade exploded inside it, I finally saw a use for the 12v, 4 pin RGB connector. I spotted some cheap RGB strips (not the more expensive 5 volt ARGB stuff that does chasing lights etc.). I can easily run one on the exterior of the case and set the software to have IT display the CPU temperature where I can see it.

The strip's waiting in my shopping cart while I decide on one more thing, I wanna get a Much bigger drive to replace D (Where all the anime lives.). I could either double it with a 6 TB Western Digital Red for under $100, or go completely mad and get the 14 TB model - which would have more than enough space for running automated backups of the rest of the computer too, confounding my previous plan to take advantage of the drive slot in the top of the case.

I should also consider finding a good way to merge F and H, removing the Windows installs, and consolidating the data and the saved preferences (for programs I haven't reinstalled yet). Although, if I consolidate H to F (The SATA SSD) that frees up another drive. And there's still the stack of drives I was going to run backups to (various 2 and 3 TB drives, but older ones). Decisions, decisions.

And I'm left again pondering the wisdom of water cooling again in my pursuit of silence.

Posted by: Mauser at October 12, 2023 05:14 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 13, 2023 08:04 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 21, 2023 04:00 PM (sZ6tC)

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So after a water leak messed up my GTX 980 card on Himawari, a friend sold me his GTX 1070 card for a c-note. I was never able to really put it to the test because of the problems Himawari was having doing anything at the time (I could play DVDs fine, but watching YouTube would case dropouts, pink video ports, and bluescreens), Instead I kept using the really old 650 card I didn't realize I still had that I'd put in before I bought the 1070.

Well before this Himawari had been so unstable I couldn't even run World of Warships - which is why I was running it on Etna at minimal video settings for a while, and getting about 30FPS.

Enter Purah, and I decided to go for a little while running the built-in graphics, which could handle YouTube just fine, even at 1440P, and never crashed on anything (Well, Chitubox may have bombed out once, but it merely exited and didn't take anything down with it). At the minimum graphics settings it ran WoWS at around 70 FPS, which is still faster than the TV's refresh rate.

I was considering leaving it like that, or maybe buying the latest hotness in Video cards, but my demands aren't really that high. But then I decided I'd want to see the difference between the built-in graphics and that 1070 card. Just to see if it was faster and to take some load off the CPU. After all, I had it, why not use it?

At those minimum graphics settings, WoWS ran at an absurd 500 FPS, more or less. After clicking the auto settings in the preferences, it turned the graphics all the way up on every setting, and still ran at 80-100 FPS.

I think that's quite good enough for now. True it supports more than the 1440P I'm running it at, but it's comfortable for how I'm set up at the moment.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 05, 2023 08:14 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at October 06, 2023 05:57 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 07, 2023 08:02 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at October 07, 2023 11:14 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 07, 2023 11:22 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at October 09, 2023 07:30 PM (BzEjn)

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There is still a lot of work to do. The build went pretty well. The one issue I had were some bent pins in the header for the front panel USB3 connector. That really should have been sticking up out of the board (Along with the SATA connectors) because sticking straight out from the edge runs into the drive bay rack. I also had to dig out the extra cables from my power supply because the MB wanted a second 12v cable.

Even the Windows Install went well. I made sure I left the ethernet unplugged so it created a local account. Ran some updates, and along the way MSI ran a mass installer that only runs once (where does it come from?) that put in all the drivers and support programs. I only refused the third party apps.

I have not installed the graphics card yet, just using the built-in, simply because it works well enough for now.

First round of Windows updates took longer than the install!

Getting FireFox installed was a bit of a pain. I had saved a VERY out of date installer. (Ugh, version 48! it was SO ugly!). Trying to copy my profiles over from the other SSD didn't work until I found that it had AppData in all three folders.

Some of the really old shit still works. The Eudora installer worked, and so did the C S 2.

Samsung Magician said the SATA SSD had a read speed of 406 MB/sec. The M.2 drive reads at 7002 MB/sec. Although I guess some of the zippiness gets tempered by the bloat of the OS.

I even installed uTorrent without an issue, although I haven't migrated the data or hooked up D: yet. A security scan didn't complain about it, oddly enough, but I put an exception on the .exe anyway. It didn't handle the UI scaling very well, so that may take some fiddling.

So far it's very quiet. The fan on the cooler isn't quite a Noctua, but that's the only moving part. Since this board doesn't have a digital temperature display, and I haven't seen any software the colors the fan LEDs with temp info, I may just disable them and finally put the sound-insulated side back on this case. (Once I finish loading in the other drives.) And hey, I still have slots for two more M.2 drives....

Next task is getting WoWS loaded up and see how well that runs (considering it didn't run at all on the old system as it decayed) (I mean, it USED to run great, for years. I don't understand what went bad, but something did, and I could never find out and fix it. I guess I did finally take the "Just get a new computer!" advice....)

Now to see if I can watch you Tube without crashing. I will be VERY upset if I do.

Posted by: J Greely at September 18, 2023 04:36 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at September 18, 2023 06:45 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: J Greely at September 19, 2023 02:19 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at September 19, 2023 06:57 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at September 21, 2023 05:57 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at September 23, 2023 10:08 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: J Greely at September 28, 2023 07:50 AM (oJgNG)

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Saturday was spent just making sure everything was backed up, and then some. I turned out to have more drives laying around than I thought so not only did I run the Macrium backups of my C and H drives (C being the SDD, and H being a legacy drive that has a ton of stuff on it), but I've been able to clone off C just for suspenders. And I am FINALLY cloning D, which is all my video, which I did not have a backup of....

Lesson learned, sometimes Macrium can leave that 100 meg system partition exposed, and it will get a drive letter assigned to it, which will make that clone unbootable. Few things seem smart enough to fix it. But the ACTUAL fix is to fire up Disk Management and remove the drive letter.

Ran into a couple of issues related to this machine being made before everyone was fully committed to UEFI, It's not really a problem that the C backup (2 TB SSD) went onto a 3 TB HDD, but it just wasted some unallocated space, but really, there was only about 500 gig on it anyway. I did have a 2 TB Seagate laying around, but the note on it says it's unreliable.

Maybe the old Motherboard knows the jig is up, because it's been behaving itself all day, no crashing. But then, I'm not doing anything really taxing like opening a browser window....

One of the drives laying around contained nothing but a clean Win 7 install. I'm not sure what the genesis of that was. It's getting the D backup on it. I have to remind myself I have a new computer to build, and I don't need to see if I can still make a clean Win 7 install work without the crashes.

The scratch drive I tried putting Windows 10 on though, that was almost a write-off. The failed install left it in a bad state. Half the time I could hook it up and the system wouldn't detect it was there. But it might also be a SATA cable going bad. (But that would be very new, since I wasn't having any issues with the drive it was normally connected to.) Trying to use the Win 7 install disk to repartition wasn't very helpful, see the UEFI note above. Even manually choosing the UEFI CD Rom reboot didn't always work. What finally DID work was going ahead and let it format the drive to 2TB, MBR, and then Drive Management came to the rescue. I deleted all the partitions and it gave me the option of making it GPT. Of course, once all that was dealt with, Macrium was used to overwrite the partitions anyway....

So, a lot of puttering around avoiding the main issues, I guess. But I learned my lesson when a SCSI drive failed on my old Mac and took most of my stuff with it. Copies, and copies of copies, before I commit to something I can't go back on.

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So my laptop is named Etna. My desktop is named Himawari. But Himawari is just about dead. I mean, when you're running the Windows 10 installer on to a formatted hard drive and you're getting the equivalent of bluescreens and other system service exceptions, something is clearly wrong with the hardware that isn't showing up on conventional tests.

Thus I've finally gotten out the crowbar to pry open my wallet. Himawari is going to get a Motherboard transplant with a new AMD 7900 cpu, a nice fast 2 TB M.2 SSD, and 64 Gig of DDR5 ram. Oddly, the sum of that is pretty close to the cost of Himawari's initial construction, if you wanna go WAY back and figure out when I posted that. I'm still too penny pinching to spring for a new video card yet. If I can just get a stable system that will run without blowing up unexpectedly when I scroll the mouse in a browser window, I'll be happy. If I can get World of Warships running on it so I don't have to run it on Etna (it surprised me that that worked!) I will be ecstatic.

I might even finally buy a proper desk.

Anyway, the point was to think of a new name. Himawari was named for the computer expert in some anime, Vividred IIRC. So who would be a good computer expert from a more current show?

Posted by: J Greely at September 11, 2023 04:38 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at September 12, 2023 06:32 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: J Greely at September 13, 2023 02:33 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: J Greely at September 13, 2023 02:49 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at September 13, 2023 05:39 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: mikeski at September 14, 2023 10:05 PM (DgGvY)

Posted by: Mauser at September 16, 2023 01:55 PM (BzEjn)

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