yes, the aspect ratio is wrong, this will never not be a problem for screenshots of games on Capcom's CPS boards
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This is where I'm putting blog entries. I'll stick them on one single page until it gets too long, then there'll be a blog2.html, a blog3.html, etc. Entries can be edited after their post date (and probably will be). Updates to existing entries probably won't be in the feed. Entries that have been updated since posting will have a * after their date.
I have also added a miniblog. Unless they get upgraded to main blog entries, miniblog entries won't go in the feed.
My girlfriend wants to play more video games with me, so I've been digging through to see what I can find in MAME.
We've had a pretty good time playing Puzzle Bobble together, but that has been getting stale, so I ended up going through various other puzzle games that we could play. There were a few other games we ended up playing a fair bit of, but one that we ended up on was Pnickies.
Pnickies is a game that is mechanically similar to Puyo Puyo (which is probably no coincidence since Compile's name appears on the title screen), but it seems to not care much about how big of a combo you can make and instead is much more focused on how large of a color blob you can pop at once. The single major mechanical difference is that instead of pieces being cleared when 4 or more touch, pieces are cleared when they are touching two or more star pieces.
yes, the aspect ratio is wrong, this will never not be a problem for screenshots of games on Capcom's CPS boards
As a simple 1v1 puzzle game, it is a lot of fun, and the simple mechanics mean it is easy to get people into playing (unlike Puyo Puyo - a much deeper game, but also a much harder one to play). It's a very satisfying battle of keeping space so you can pop your blobs while avoiding being in a position where you have to pop them early. The visuals are very Capcom and are fairly decent, if also not that special. The music would be nice if there was more than one song. There's a bit of oddness regarding piece locking that I don't like, making it unusally difficult to deal with a tall board while the game speed increases.
Bafflingly, the single player mode is stunningly barebones. No lineup of enemies to face, just a 100 level "keep the board from filling up" mode, and the game speed increases and decreases wildly as it goes on. The game would be vastly improved with a CPU opponent to face. The game honestly feels like they didn't pay any attention to the idea that it would be played in single player, to the point where if someone comes up to the machine while someone is playing, they don't get to challenge the current player, they simply get their own single player game on the other side. It isn't a terrible single player game, but it isn't a particularly good one either.
I wonder what the development of this game was like, since it came out the same year as Puyo Puyo 2. Being a game not made with Puyo 2's influence around, Pnickies also lacks all the nice things found in that game, like being able to flip a piece that is surrounded on the sides and being able to cancel out incoming garbage pieces being sent to you by your opponent. I wonder just how much involvement Compile had in it, or of it was just Capcom licensing game mechanics taken directly from Puyo Puyo. It is just really odd of a game, and it feels like it really should be a lot better than it is.
We found a few other games to play, like Soldam and Teki Paki, and there are a few other games that I had found later that I want to try with her like Land Maker and Emeraldia. I'll probably write a few more articles in the "neat games" category. There are a lot of neat games I've been messing around with in MAME, like Fighting Layer, Panikuru Panekuru (this game is so much fun and absolutely deserved a port to anything else), Puzzle Uo Poko (and the semi-sequel Puzzle Mushihime-Tama), Motos, and Metro-Cross, among others.
Honestly, I'm also thinking about writing a whole bit on how cool Namco is, I have been absolutely enjoying my trip through their back catalog as I discover more games in MAME. You never really hear about Namco fans like you would with Sega, or Nintendo, or even Capcom and Konami. It's kind of surprising the longer I think about it, because Namco's games kick a lot of ass...
I've been getting back into making music!
I'm struggling (as expected), since it has been a long time since I've written anything. Have a listen (.mp3, Catbox) to what I was trying to work on, a Zundamon song written in Toki Pona. It's a bit of a mess right now, hopefully I can clean it up nicely enough. I also hope (assuming I keep the line since it's very cheesy, it's basically "listen, this song can do good to all" semi-literally, it sounds much less dumb in Toki Pona than in English) that I remember to change "kalama musi ni" in "o kute e ni: kalama musi ni li ken pona e jan ali" to "kalama musi mi".
I have no idea if I'll even finish that song. I've been working on it, but I feel like the Zundamon part needs to be redone with a more interesting melody. I also started another song (with better lyrics and a better melody from her) and I have no idea what backing to give the singing in that one. I'm not used to writing music with vocals at all, and my workflow is much less convenient than I'd like since the VOICEVOX software doesn't really integrate into anything, it's standalone. I wish it supported ReWire or had a VSTi to bridge things or something...
I've also been messing around with BambooTracker, a tracker for making PC-98 music on your desktop PC. FM synth music is fun, I don't mess with it enough. I have a single pattern of music written and I need to expand on it. The large number of channels on the PC-9801-86 card is excellent, especially with the onboard sampled drums.
Also, at some point I will add a Toki Pona page to this site. I'd like to think I'm skilled with it, but I don't go to the big Toki Pona Discord since I don't use Discord (among other reasons), so I know I'm not well practiced beyond shouting "ko jaki soweli" (horseshit, dogshit, some kind of animal shit) when I see something dumb at work. I'd like to think my Toki Pona is understandable to others and reasonably grammatical (a lot of Toki Pona text you can find on the internet is neither), but again, I don't know for certain...
I've been reading a bunch of manga lately, and it has been wonderful. It has been years and years since I've actively read a lot of manga, so I'm both re-reading series that I'd previously enjoyed and reading things that I probably should have read years ago.
The Mazinger manga was fun (at least, before the Great Mazinger portion, which is kind of lame and the new protagonist is so boring). The scans I found were kinda crap and I'm certain there were chapters missing. It's painful reading a lot of older stuff due to this. I want to read Violence Jack, but apparently there's a big gap in which chapters are translated, unless I can read Italian. I need to go finish Devilman Lady (really, restart it from the top) since it kicks ass. I think I stopped entirely because the tab I was reading it in got closed for whatever reason, lmao. I enjoyed original Devilman immensely a few years ago and I should re-read that too. Go Nagai is one of Japan's national treasures, his works are fantastic.
I'm also reading Mitsudomoe. It's really dumb, but kinda funny. The art style at the very beginning is really really different, and I wondered if I was even reading the right manga. Additionally, I'm reading Bleach still, and I'm also reading Yu Yu Hakusho as well. YYH is excellent so far. Bleach is Bleach. Excellent start, kinda falls off a bit.
I've also been reading Rozen Maiden. I didn't know there was a second part, I thought the manga just ended, but nope! Part 2 seems like it's not a direct sequel at the start, but it all comes together. Saying more would spoil a lot. Some of the plot is a little confusing and I don't know if that's because the translation I'm reading is crap or not, and I'll probably end up going through it from the top again at some point.
Manga is great. I feel like anime takes too much of my limited free time to binge on, but I can read a bunch of manga and start and stop whenever. I tried watching anime in that fashion, starting and stopping whenever, but noticed I'd barely finish 2 episodes in a week, so I gave up on doing that. I still watch quite a bit of anime, but nowhere near as much. Being able to control the pace and check back is excellent.
This is the first miniblog entry that I've upgraded to a full one. The process is pretty nice, I can get my thoughts out there, and if I feel like I have anything more substantial to add or have said enough that it's worth bringing that information together, it's not a particularly hard process. I've already done most of the writing! I had wondered how well or badly this would go when I said it was my plan, but it is a great workflow.
Dave Gauer's website, ratfactor.com, is fantastic. There's just so much information here. This site is the entire reason why mine even has a feed, thanks to his article on manually creating an Atom feed. He's also a fairly good artist, I really liked his Tarot deck designs.
The front page is the list of articles, detailing all manner of stuff he's done over the decades. The writing style is fun and breezy and easily digestable; the topics are often technical, but not always.
There are a lot of cool projects he has there too. One that caught my eye was Meow5, a language that is similar to Forth in design, but with a very interesting implementation: compilation is done by just recursively emitting assembly code for all of the parts within it. If you call a function twice, the code of that function is emitted twice, as if it were inlined. It's not a serious language attempt, but all the details are interesting and the thing is so simple (despite having taken him while to make, since he was learning the whole time). Kinda gives me some ideas, even if I probably won't ever get to them.
Also worth mentioning is the Box of Cards: a huge pile of linked pages with short snippets of information. It's laid out like a personal wiki of info that he found worth taking note of. It's not literally a wiki since it doesn't have the collaborative editing, but the layout is very much like a non-Wikipedia style wiki (like c2, at least before the layout went insane and then became locked, or the gikopoi wiki), and apparently he does edit the site like a wiki.
I don't have enough good things to say about the site, and there's a lot more than I've talked about in this article. Seriously, check it out, and subscribe to the feed.
I'll probably do a spotlight on Marginalia next. I have similarly good things to say about it. I'll probably also do a spotlight on Heyuri CGI at some point, who knows.
PixivUtil is great. yt-dlp is great. Having access to information and media without having constant internet is great. Disk is cheap, and there is way more stuff that I have saved than I'd like that has a non-zero chance of being the last copy of. I doubt any of it is truly only held by myself, but again, it's a non-zero chance rather than a certainty, and a non-zero chance is way too high to be reasonable, lol. There are a ton of cool music mixes I have that are long gone from YouTube, and a handful of other videos I know are gone.
I really like how yt-dlp works on a lot more sites than YouTube, it's just absolutely incredibly useful. Even if it doesn't support a given site out of box (and it is very likely to), if you can find the .m3u link being used to actually stream the file, you can feed that to yt-dlp and save the video/song/whatever anyway. I think I've only needed to do this on a JAV site though, lol, yt-dlp supports a lot of media sites.
There are a fair few artists that either deleted their stuff or got disappeared from Pixiv, so PixivUtil2 has been a godsend. Yeah, you'll probably find it on Danbooru/Gelbooru/Safebooru/whatever, but you might not be that lucky. There are a ton of pictures I have saved that are long gone from Pixiv (often as a result of artists who deleted their accounts).
I really need to remember to save instructions that I search for to .pdf so I don't need to hope it's still up if/when I need it later. There are other ways to save web content, but PDF just works everywhere. I had an issue not too long ago where I realized I couldn't open .mhtml files in Firefox (why?), and was saved because I was smart enough to also save the pages as PDF.
It's kinda hard to describe, and I constantly wonder if it's just me instead of it being an external problem... but every time I think about it, I end up coming to the conclusion that it isn't. At the absolute least, the conclusion is that it's not just me feeling down; I'm not going to pretend that I don't feel somewhat negative lately. There's a post over at marginalia that expresses a similar sentiment, which is kind of worrying. I'd started writing this entry before having found his blog, and while that doesn't discount it being potentially being a perception thing, it lines up way too well with the way I've been feeling.
Search engines suck a lot more. Website algorithms produce worse and less interesting results. Personal sites are fewer and fewer in number as time passes, or at least your ability to find them is. Post quality on various platforms is in decline, much more anger or complaining or canned responses. I left 4chan a while ago, but the problems that made me leave there seem to have spread to the whole internet.
I don't want to sound like a bitter old man. I'm still finding fun things to do, cool sites, cool videos, etc... but I absolutely feel like things online are in decline. Honestly, I feel like things offline are in decline too, so maybe that is feeding into it, regardless of if the effect is real or imagined.
The sites I go to these days are great (check my links page!), but stepping out of that bubble is increasingly painful since things seem to have changed so much online in the last decade, but in particular, the last 5 years.
God bless everyone trying to make things better, and god damn those who are making things worse. Shit sucks, but it doesn't have to. Getting into RSS/Atom and finding feeds has absolutely made me feel better about the state of things online than I have in a while, but I still feel down enough about my online experience these days that I decided to type this post.
I've recently gotten into subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, and recently added an Atom feed to this site (available here). It's so convenient, seriously. No checking sites manually for updates, you simply open your feed reader and site updates come directly to you. Subscribing is as easy as copying a feed link into a feed reader, usually indicated by an orange icon like this one:
I wish I'd done this earlier, but looking up "RSS Feed Reader" in a search engine generally gives terrible results. In particular, all the top listings are for online reader services with payment options for features like Feedly ("Feedly is free up to 100 feeds", L-fucking-MAO). You don't need some paid service for your system to just check for updates! That's some seriously psychotic nonsense!
I use Feedbro as a Firefox extension on desktop and Feeder on Android (scroll down on that page for Play Store and F-Droid links). You can also use Mozilla Thunderbird too as a separate standalone program. It's mostly for email, but it handles RSS and Atom too. Here's a guide for setting Thunderbird up for reading feeds.
If you're running your own site and want to get in on using Atom or RSS on it, generating a feed for your pages is usually automated if you're using a templating system of some kind and you should check your templating system's docs on how to do it if it's supported. Unfortunately, I'm stuck doing it manually since every single page on this site was made by hand, and Neocities doesn't support PHP or anything so I can't automatically generate a feed that way.
Since writing this entry, I've made a utility called meeat that makes it extremely easy to add a feed to your own hand-written site. I'm so glad I did this, because hand-editing the feed was a pain before, but now it's an easy, fill-in-the-blanks operation. I do some copy-pasting here and there, and I'm golden.
There's a very nice guide by Ratfactor that helped me out immensely in this endeavor (check out the rest of the blog too, it's pretty good). You should also read the .xml source for my feed if you're running a site and doing things manually, since I commented it and indicated a few pitfalls I had.
The pre-Z part is genuinely the most entertaining. The world seems livelier and more full of adventure, all kind of weird legends and creatures and things, animal people, demons, movie monsters, the Red Ribbon Army, etc. There's all this weirdness in the world and a sense of levity to the work that mostly disappears by the time of DBZ, which is a real shame considering they literally go to space and the realm of the gods and even though the Buu arc is supposed to be a goofier one more in line with the earlier stories in tone, it doesn't quite feel it. The manga overall does feel goofier than the anime, at least.
The first arc that feels more like DBZ than original DB is the Piccolo Jr arc, which is where you can absolutely feel the story being less about the crazy adventures and more about Goku fighting. It's still good (the whole manga is quite good still), but it's a definite shift, a very clear end-of-an-era.
My favorite Z-era bit was Cell. It's the last time the non-Saiyan fighters are really relevant, Cell is a fantastic villain, and it didn't drag on like when they were on Namek (which is WAY too long even in the manga). Goku is visibly being a bad father during it, although the writing is good enough that you can see that he absolutely has his reasons and he did think things through (if not nearly enough), and he's not just being a moron.
I don't know what my favorite pre-Z-era bit would be, it's really hard to choose. They're great.
I got to read it in color too, and the color job is fantastic. Absolutely gorgeous work. I wasn't a fan of the palettes they decided to use in the Buu saga, but just about everything else, the color job looked great. I had previously read DB in B/W, so it's extremely satisfying to see just how good a job the color release was. I've seen a lot of colorized manga, and it generally isn't anywhere this quality
Next up is going through Bleach again. Or rather, not again since I didn't finish. I had caught up in the 400s furing the Fulbring arc, and didn't continue, lol. Didn't hate it at the time, but that was years ago at this point. Not as long ago as when I last read through Dragon Ball, but still quite a long time.
Bleach definitely has the issue DB has but worse, where the start is great and then it just becomes a lesser work and never recovers, and the power level goes to the moon without even slowing down. Probably still gonna be entertaining enough, but 686 chapters is a lot to go through.
I'm going through random Neocites sites to see if I can find anything interesting and I'm noticing a trend that I've seen elsewhere on the internet: there are pages up, but nothing really there. Content comes first! Throw some words on the page first and fix that up later. Don't just have an "about me" section with nothing about you!
Design is important, but content is king!
As an aside, I don't like the general term "content" that much to refer to someone's works, but it's useful sometimes.
I'm having a blast re-reading Judge Dredd. It's been something like 10 years since I've last tried my hand at reading through it.
I'm currently on the Judge Child storyline, and although there are a few stinkers in it, it's a very fun romp through space with all manner of strange alien planets and people.
It's not as good as the Cursed Earth storyline earlier, which was a wild and wonderful vehicle for delivering all kind of lawlessness and bizarre situations (arguably more bizarre than what I'm reading despite Dredd literally travelling the galaxy). I partiularly liked the Macdonalds (sic) vs Burger King war bit, along with the one featuring the man whose twisted experiments brought brand mascots to life. Very on-the-nose in terms of pushing a message, but still very entertaining regardless. The bit with Satanus, the black (well, they inked him purple, even if he's routinely described as black) T-Rex was very cool too. Just a great adventure, and Dredd's partner in his quest, Spikes Harvey Rotten contrasts extremely well against Dredd's personality.
I forgot how weedy Dredd looks in the earliest comics. It doesn't take that long for him to gain his expected tough-jawed and bulky appearance, but early Dredd looks like a totally different man. He also seems a little bit more personable at that point, much less of the machine-like guy he's routinely described as. Dredd still retains his humanity, but he seems a lot more serious with the change coinciding with his tougher appearance.
I do wish there was a little bit more consistency between stories, it's always jarring seeing something said in a story that doesn't make sense given the events of an earlier one, but I doubt they had anyone sitting down and reading every strip in a row to see what happened.
The only storyline that I really disliked so far was The Day The Law Died, which has an excellent premise... but I just don't think it was executed terribly well. It had its moments, but I really felt like things just dragged during it.
It's a bit of a shame. I like the characters somewhat (mostly Komugi and Satoru), but it feels like they wanted to buck various Precure season trends, like how there were no enemy generals to direct the conflicts for most of the show's run, or how the show is easily the least violent Precure season, or how long it took for Niko, the mascot fairy, to show up... and they didn't really know what to do as a result.
Battles with the Garugaru enemies are fairly dull and often have contrived or nonsensical solutions. Having no generals means no banter with the Precure. No physical fighting makes sense in the context that the enemies are innocent animals under control, but it just makes for a duller show. You can have a good show with weak fights (I love Kirakira Precure a la Mode), but the episode writing just isn't there, and it feels especially bad coming off of an exciting season like Hirogaru Sky Precure (a show that also has its fair share of problems like the fact that a lot of plot points brought up just never come together in a sensible way, but it also had a great cast and setting and I had fairly few complaints until the very end).
We're most of the way done with the season, and it feels like things that needed to happen 20 episodes ago are only now happening and I hate it. I probably won't drop the show, but it's probably my second least favorite Precure season. My least favorite of the ones I've seen is probably Healin' Good Precure, a show that I thought was okay for half of its run and took a nose dive in the other half.
I kind of don't just want to blog about things I don't like, but hey. Here's hoping next season is better. Komugi is incredibly cute at least, I love that goofy dog.
[edit] We're near the end now. The show is a lot better so far, but it took way too long to get to this point. The show feels like it only just started by the halfway mark and has finally kicked into gear. I hope next season is better.
Firefox on desktop regularly attempts to achieve feature parity with Chrome via discarding features that it has that Chrome doesn't. Mozilla's funding is quite literally almost entirely Google paying them to make Google the default search engine in it, so it's not like I'm unwilling to believe that there are other under-the-table terms or incentives, although you can't discount a sheer lack of taste from those heading the Firefox project. Chrome closes its fist on the internet as everyone other than Mozilla abandons their own rendering engines. It all just sucks.
Firefox on Android sucks and I only use it because it supports addons, it's unstable (or at least was -- I think an Android update solved the regular crashing/freezing issues I'd been having across, rather than Mozilla actually fixing anything) and it takes upwards of a literal minute for the interface to properly respond when being cold-started. I can interact with a single open tab, but I can't close or open other tabs while waiting for Firefox to actually finish whatever the hell it is doing. I absolutely need to find any other browser, but there just aren't any real options at this point...
The words "controlled opposition" refuse to leave my head when I think of the entire situation. Mozilla makes a LOT of money from their deal with Google, but it's clearly not actually going into improving their software.
I should have a blog, shouldn't I?
For now, I'll mention that I got to see a bit of Galaxy Angel recently (this was typed on August 18th, 2024) during a watchparty over at Heyuri. There's multiple seasons, we got to see the first. I was at work for like 60% of it... once I actually watch the whole show, I might make a proper entry about it.
The show was fun! The entire cast was very dumb, but it's entertaining.
On a closing note, have you ever thought about how fucked up it is that everyone just accepts the term "blog"? I remember when it was a fairly new word and everyone was desperately hoping something else would overtake it in the common lexicon, lmao. It's easily one of the ugliest words in common use. :P
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