Feh. This inability to upload is really frustrating, and I'm stuck thinking about these two pics I wanted to put up, which is kinda preventing me from blogging.

And I'm falling behind on my watching. I'm pulling down at least six or seven shows this season, but I've barely watched any of it save for a bit of Neir Automata. I'm finishing up the second season of Shield Hero, which shows you how far behind I am.

As much as I love Spy x Family, I keep bouncing off of episode 17. Right about where Anya is planning to show off the picture of her dog. I keep pausing for some reason, and I have a bluescreen before I get back to it. That some reason is probably because I hate humiliation scenes so much, and I can just tell one is coming.

I actually HAVE managed to eliminate a few causes of my bluescreens. One was that my CPU was running a little hot because the cooling puck was building up a little corrosion and gunk. Fortunately the design I chose is a) easy to disassemble and b) clear, so I could see what the problem was. That dropped a good 5-10 Degrees (C) off my temp, which helps. The second was a crash that happened roughly every other day between 3:00 am and 4:30 am. For some reason I'd get up in the morning and there would be a 50/50 chance I'd have to log in again. Bluescreen View didn't tell me anything useful other than the time, and that it was a K-Mode Exception failure. Well, that time was very useful when I finally looked at the task scheduler. Seems there was a scheduled task to run some Microsoft Telemetry program. Which must be way out of date anyway, and possibly updated to some version incompatible with Windows 7. I deleted those tasks a week and a half ago, and no early morning reboots since.

I still die horribly watching YouTube videos. Oddly that happens very reliably if it's a video about guns. Hmmmm.

On the downside, after reinstalling the cooling puck, I really should have tightened the hose clamps more. A VERY slow drip eventually nuked my 980 card. Fortunately I was able to swap in a 650 card I forgot I had, and that's working okay, games are slow, YouTube still crashes, but it's live until I can finally take a crowbar to my wallet and build a new machine. (My main concern is that Win10 supposedly hunts and kills uTorrent, and I depend on that program's labeling system to track what I'm watching).

I wrote a story for the Jim Baen Memorial short story contest. Got the first round rejection notice with zero feedback a week or so later. So I turned it into my first submission to Analog. Wish me luck.

Posted by: Mauser at February 25, 2023 09:42 PM (BzEjn)

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So I concentrated on finishing up the last of the Winter 2022 season shows I picked.

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Before Spy x Family came along, Marin was everyone's "Waifu of the year", and I can see why.

Gojo is a second year high school student who lives with his Grandfather in the family's Hina Doll shop, and he is learning the traditional craft, which has utterly fascinated him since he first saw them as a child. However this devotion has left him completely socially awkward, and he has no friends. He is still not quite proficient at painting the faces, but he does well at sewing the miniature clothing.

At school one of the prettiest and popular girls is Kitagawa Marin, a blonde "Gyaru" with a gaggle of girl friends whose obsession with game and anime characters does not make her any kind of Otaku.

One day the antique treadle sewing machine at the shop gives up the ghost, so Gojo takes his current project into the unused home-ec room at school to use the machine there. As he's sitting down, Marin shows up. She's been trying to learn to use the machine to work on a cosplay of one of her favorite characters from an eroge she loves. She has zero talent for sewing. Somehow they manage to bond when she begs him to help her make the costume. He's never made clothes for humans before, so it's a bit of a stretch for him, but he throws himself into it.

And the result is stunning. He and Marin go to a Cosplay event and she makes some serious waves and their work is noticed. This later leads to working with another cosplay star, and a LOT of uncomfortable situations for Gojo, who has been raised extremely conservatively and traditionally, and Marin who is basically a total free spirit, flying solo since her dad works someplace remote and her mother is gone.

Interestingly, the experience also helps Gojo with his work on the dolls. Doing Marin's makeup probably has something to do with it.

Marin falls for Gojo because he is such a good and dedicated guy (And this is well before the end of the series), And Gojo really respects her passion for Cosplay, which resonates with his, but they don't quite admit it to each other. It makes you wish for another season just so they can get there.

The animation is lovely, the character designs and especially the costumes are spectacular, and yeah, you're left kind of wishing there was a Marin for you in your life.

Posted by: Mauser at January 01, 2023 08:47 PM (BzEjn)

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So a few months ago, my 100 mbit internet service suddenly started feeding me 230 mbit, more or less. (except for those random times my modem seems to drop to 12 mbits and needs to have its power toggled.) That's quite cool. I can download all the torrents for the week in a matter of a minute or two. Upload speed though, doesn't even come close to maxing out the 12 mbit upload speed, so it can take a week to serve up my usual 2x seed.

But if it's last week's torrent, it can take even longer. I think this is possibly a problem where the whole Torrent algorithm breaks down a bit. For dozens or hundreds of hosts to serve up little bits, they have to be online and the torrent has to be active. But now, the flurry of activity when a torrent is first released can be fully sated in the first day (Especially when people don't seed). High bandwidth means that you're in and out before the next guy (other than the original seeder) comes along.

Or maybe it's something else that slows down my seeding that doesn't appear to me as any kind of net blockage. I have to say though I've been really happy with Comcast's lack of interference, especially compared to past ISPs. But maybe that is the benefit of huge bandwidth. A few weekly shows has virtually no impact on the network, so they don't need to control it.

Now if only I had the time bandwidth to watch them all! I swear I've been pulling down some of the shows .clue has been posting about, and I haven't even started on them! Urusei Yatsura has replaced Spy x Family as the one show I'm able to get through as soon as it's done. Maybe once Christmas vacation starts....

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Set in Osaka during the Taisho era (~100 years ago) we follow a young tanuki named Mameda visiting the big city. Before letting her go visit, the elders warn her not to try tricking humans, since the old tricks don't really work on them any more.

So of course that's exactly what she sets out to do.

And you can imagine how that goes. Hint, if you're trying to pass off leaves as currency, the illusion drops when they try to look for the watermark. And it only goes downhill from there.

Even worse, she runs into someone who knows exactly what the deal is (She says she's just a Rakugoka - folktale storyteller, although the OP implies something else). And the next day, the jig is already up because the whole town seems to know there's a Tanuki about and they're not gonna take any of her tricks. While running away, she gets swept up in a crowd going into the entertainment hall, where the woman from the night before, Bunko-san, is the star performer.

And she quickly realizes that it's because the Rakugoka is casting an illusion on her audience that puts them in the story she's telling. She shakes it off, because it wouldn't do for a Tanuki to be the one getting tricked.

When the townspeople catch her in the auditorium, she escapes, but is chased up the tower in the center of town. When they corner her, she jumps, remembering how legend tells of Tanuki stretching out their scrotums and gliding like flying squirrels. About halfway down she remembers she's a girl.

Bunko-san catches her mid fall and pulls her aboard a flying boat, and sets her straight about the way of the world, how rapidly things are changing and modernizing. She tells Mameda to go home, and takes her to the boat. But she remembers her father also talking about how fast things are moving in the human world, and that they won't play the Tanuki's games any more, and they will be forced to go into the woods and live like ordinary animals. Mameda decides that no, she won't go home. She'll become a Rakugoka too, and learn to trick humans this way.

Visually this is a very pretty show. The art style is very clean, but not lacking in details. So it very clearly shows its historical context. Most people wear traditional clothing, but there is the occasional western suit.

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If you skipped the pre-credits scene, you might think this was just another "Cute girl goes to her first job at a run-down maid cafe."

If you didn't skip the opening scene, which contains a mob-style hit between rival groups of Maids in a rainy Akihabara side-street, you'd be wondering "What's with all this cute stuff?"

The opening credits won't help you much, because it's a mix of the two (And one girl's face is covered in the credits, which I guess is a spoiler of some kind).

Well, the firearms are lovingly rendered, so I'll give it a chance.

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Oh god, it ended with the funniest bloodbath I've ever seen. (if that's a possible thing). Yor Forger has a rival in Ranko Mannen.

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So I got two upgrades for my laptop, an old HP Envy 6 that used to be one of the most expensive at Office Depot when I bought it (My previous PC died, and I needed something to get online while I built a new one). It's actually been very handy - Three of my published or soon to be published shorts were written on it at conventions. It lives in the bedroom, where it mainly serves to keep me up instead of getting to sleep when I should.

My Desktop, Himawari, was one notch off top of the line when I built it. And I've added to it over time. It used to be a kick-ass gaming machine, but over the last few years it's become increasingly unstable, even with a fresh system install, a move to an SSD for the boot drive, and my homebrew water cooling system. Random bluescreens are frequently associated with viewing YouTube, or launching my browser, and sometimes they chain 2-4 together where it reboots during a reboot. Other times it goes days without a hiccough. BlueScreenView lets me see a summary of the last 50, but it offers no clues.

But I really wanted to get back into World of Warships, so I installed it on Etna, and at the low graphics settings, it ran okay. But loading and logon took forever, and sometimes it was late entering battle. It was also running a bit hot, so I went to see if I could take off the bottom and clean it out, but I couldn't find everything holding it together. But I did take off the panel in the bottom for the first time and I saw how easy it was to get at things in there. And so I hied off to Amazon to look for things I could stuff in Etna's holes. I got a WD Blue 1 TB SSD to replace the original 500 Gig 2.5" SATA internal, and a pair of memory modules to take it from 6 Gig internal to 16 Gig.

Since there's only one drive slot, I also bought the suggested SATA to USB3 adapter cable.

Western Digital "Includes" Acronis True Image as its preferred drive utility. It MAY be an okay backup program, but it was a failure as a drive cloning/migration tool. With only two drives to choose from, the select source drive and select destination drive operations each took over three minutes apiece. Adjusting the partition sizes was a counterintuitive nightmare, with the C partition becoming unresizeable, or even disappearing completely (Until you selected the option to clone with the OS for another computer instead of the option to clone for the same computer. There was no difference between those options save for the bugs.) When it finally got going, it eventually figured out it was going to take over a day to clone the drive, but it did finish overnight. But then it complained at the end it couldn't find some file, and the result was non-bootable, and didn't even show up in the file explorer until I went into Disk Manager and assigned it a letter. The data was there, but it couldn't boot.

Etna didn't come with a Windows DVD. (And that would have been 8.0 anyway). I downloaded the 8.1 ISO file, but I think my spindle of DVD-R disks has gotten too much sunlight over the decades (cough). It wrote, but didn't verify. It may have worked, but I didn't try.

While I was messing with that, I searched for the set of Restoration disks I had burned on Etna. I found those eventually right where I'd put them. The idea was to see if I could make a clean bootable drive out of the SSD just to be sure it worked. That failed.

Now I recalled the Samsung migration tool worked very well when I used it on Himawari. Unfortunately that turned out to be brand-locked. Another failure.

However, my regular back-up tool, Macrium Reflect, also has a clone function. Not only was it trivial to resize the C: partition, I was able to skip the fixed D: restore partition. And the whole clone process took less than two hours. And when I swapped the drives, it booted and ran like nothing happened.

And the memory swap? Yeah, that was trivial, and worked the first time. Now what can I do with a 2 and a 4 gig Laptop memory module? Any way to use those with a Raspberry Pi or something?

I still haven't played a round of WoWS yet, but it loaded a hell of a lot faster.

Posted by: Mauser at October 03, 2022 07:35 PM (BzEjn)

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Definite:

Spy x Family season 2. Because the first season was so awesome.

Peter Grill: Because you gotta balance all that goodness with a Trash Ecchi.

Possible:

Isekai Ojisan - Because folks have said it was good, but it was delayed.

Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita - Because Cat girls.

Yuusha Party wo Tsuihou Sareta Beast Tamer, Saikyoushu no Nekomimi Shoujo to Deau - Because Cat Girls.

Akiba Maid Sensou - Because Maid Girls. (Not always a sure fire thing, but the description suggests something more.)
Uchi no Shishou wa Shippo ga Nai - Because Tanuki Girl.

Any better suggestions?

If you wanna see where I'm getting this, check the anime chart link on the side.

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I'm trying to remember another anime I watched a number of years ago where a guy comes to the family homestead in rural Japan, and has a whole ton of computer equipment delivered so that he can take on some hacker in a virtual world - because Belle owes a lot to that show for the visual design of its virtual world. (Basically an infinite white space with cities and avatars floating around in it.) This VR world "U" is accessed through the improbable handwavium of a cellphone app and a pair of special earbuds that somehow link you to a biometrically generated avatar called an AS supposedly based on you, but customizable (which also limits you to only one account). Gotta wonder how mucked-up the biometrics are of some folks, given the avatars they appear with, but at least almost all of the main characters appear as human instead walking hands studded with eyeballs or something.

Suzu has one friend in school, Hiro, who is a really tech-savvy nerd. There are some minor plot points about high-school who likes who stuff that I won't go into. Hiro sends her an invite link to U. She sets up her character, and with a some reluctance, she logs in.

God damn those U programmers should work on their New User Experience. They just dump her into the middle of the space. No tutorials or anything!

So there are basically three plot threads.

1: Suzu/Belle's rise to fame. When she first arrived she was able to sing again, very pretty. A lot of folks found that annoying, but others were all "Who's that girl?" and she memetically rose to fame, partly thanks to social engineering and tech support from Hiro. Suzu is thankful for being able to sing again, but shys away from the attention, and desperately wants to keep her real identity secret, although when it's plot convenient for thread 3, everyone in the village knows its her and wants to help.

One funny sub-plot of this thread is Peggy Sue, the previous most famous VR singer celeb. By being bitchy about Belle, she begins to lose her fame. And at the end reveal, she lets slip that she too is just an ordinary schoolgirl.

2: The bad dragon. When one of Belle's concerts is crashed (literally) by a large dragon avatar, along with a large cadre of the U-niverse's self-appointed (?) protectors, whose ultimate weapon is revealing your true form (Officially sanctioned doxing?!). Belle goes on a Beauty and the Beast plotline to force herself on the guy, and is aided but a number of little AI bots that float around in the system.

3: Life reflects art. Suzu eventually discovers who the dragon is in reality, a 14 year old boy, with his younger brother who loves Belle's music, and his abusive single father. Hiro helps hack the webcam on their computer and everyone helps figure out the location from the view through the window. While the hack is going on, Belle is singing a concert for all 5 billion users, and because she is defending the Dragon, the vigilante squad zaps her so she appears as herself, but nobody in the audience cares. Once they know where the boys live, She gets rushed to a train to Tokyo where she goes towards the boy's house to do what exactly? The father goes to beat the older boy, and Suzu interposes herself between them, and the father ends up tearing her cheek. And through the power of a stoic staredown, the father breaks and slumps off back to the apartment. Is this a lasting fix? Who knows. The movie ends roughly here.

It's a very pretty animation, but probably better seen on a 4K movie screen because there is too much actively moving small detail work to avoid massive video compression artifacts.

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Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 08, 2022 11:46 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at September 10, 2022 10:19 AM (BzEjn)

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This surprised me by being better than it deserves to be.

The hero, Shu Ogata, lives on Bayron City, a floating city over the largest underwater Orgonium mine in the world. Orgonium (who remembers "Orgone Energy"?) is a powerful energy source that has made Bayron City insanely wealthy. Yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.

Bayron City is also beset by Demons, something the local government is trying to keep secret. Classed A through D for their power levels, most of them Contract with and possess a human and, well, that generally doesn't work out too well for the human but they keep doing it anyway. Because of some international anti-weapons treaty, the cops are underpowered for dealing with the menace, so the mayor sends out contracts to the various PMCs, or Private Military Contractors to take out the demons when they appear (another part of why it generally doesn't work out too well for the human involved). One of the biggest is AAA. Shu used to work for AAA, and was dating Ayano, the daughter of the president of the company and a captain among the troops. But three years earlier he left the company and started his own PMC. And even though it's just Shu and Kisara, they are extremely successful and piss off all the other PMCs because they regularly underbid them, and they reluctantly admit he gets the job done. Yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.

Now Kisara appears to be a school-age girl with pink hair, but she's actually the only Class-A demon out there. And Shu made a different kind of contract with her where instead of trading his soul for one desire, he parcels off chunks of his memory (Typically a month at a time) and gives it to Kisara to power her up in the form of a kiss.

Ayano still carries a torch for Shu, but given her Tsundere nature, she must have traded her wooden rake to another villager for it. She's been bailing Shu out with money and information all the time (yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.) And at first she doesn't understand why Shu infuriatingly doesn't seem to remember how much they meant to each other. And all he can do is make empty apologies for the things he doesn't remember he did. But by the midpoint, she learns exactly what the contract with Kisara means, and she doesn't like it one bit.

Bit of background. When he was a child, Shu's dad was participating in a safety inspection of the mine, that was more of a PR outing. He and many dignitaries brought their families, including Shu and his little sister. Then there was a disaster, everyone but Shu died, and Bayron City covered up that it was Demons, and scapegoated Shu's dad. So one of his motivations is to restore the family name. Another is to get revenge on the demon who did it, and the third is that he believes his sister is somehow still alive and wants to save her.

It's kind of interesting because of the way the story and background slowly peel like the layers of an onion. It's a little annoying with the juvenility of Kisara and Ayano dueling over Shu's affection. Especially when it turns out that Shu was also fucking the nun-like demon hunter who shows up to try to kill Kisara about halfway through. (And how he gets out of that mess is just... you have to see it.) Apparently he was seducing his way through the demon-hunting ranks just to get to the point of accomplishing his goals, and that included capturing and contracting with Kisara.

It also reminds me a bit of takt op.Destiny in how the girl's power comes at a cost to the guy.

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