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| | | | | | | | | | | |_) | | (_) | (_| | more stuff that I don't
|_| |_| |_|_|_| |_|_|_.__/|_|\___/ \__, | want to put excessive effort into
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I decided to have a miniblog where I throw some words onto the page. Contrast my main blog, which I use for big feature entires that I want to highlight. Entries there might not be much longer than here, but they have more of a place of prominence and are immediately placed into the feed, unlike here.
Miniblog entries can be promoted to feature blog entries if I think I have a lot more to say; in that case, I will add a link to the main blog page from the miniblog entry.
Miniblog entries aren't immediately placed into the feed; they get put in a digest feed entry whenever enough pile up. There is a colored horizontal line indicating which entires are above where the feed has been updated.
Recently got the EG Wing Gundam, and I talked about it in a post I made at [R-18] Strange World@Heyuri, reposted here for convenience:
I recently finished the Entry Grade Wing Gundam kit. ヽ(´∇`)ノ
It's a very nice kit, and I spent a fair bit of time detailing mine
because it was very cheap, so if I did mess it up, I would only be out
like $12. ъ( ﾟｰ^)
Unfortunately, the biggest issue the kit has is the fact that parts do
NOT separate easily at all on it - this would be a good thing, except
there are several parts you can assemble incorrectly. I fucked up
assembling the knee on one side and I could not separate it without
breaking it completely. (;´Д`) (;´Д`) (;´Д`)
I did rig up something to "fix" it, but it isn't really fixed, the
knee is now very loosely held in place and I have a very janky setup
involving a piece of runner for the knee joint and some C cuts in the
plastic to kinda hold it on. With a little more effort than I can be
bothered with, I could probably seal those C cuts and make it more
permanent (not entirely permanent, you'd still be able to slide the
runner peg out), but it's good enough for displaying on my shelf.
The kit really looks nice, and I touched it up with some Gundam markers
(I really should go buy some actual paints lol). In a handful of ways,
it's better than an HG kit because it's a: cheap, and b: quite
detailed, but it's also worse because of the aforementioned extreme
inability to be disassembled (almost every High Grade kit I have is
very easy to disassemble, sometimes a little too easy), and there are
a few spots that are definitely simplified, either for cost reasons or
for product line differentiation (EG is supposed to be a lower grade
than HG after all). I think it is a little t o o unforgiving for
the target demographic the box seems to imply (people who are totally
new to Gunpla kits). The build is fairly easy, but as I was trying to
fix the knee, the only thought in my head was:
"if this was my first gunpla kit, I would never fucking buy
another one in my life, what the fuck is this bullshit, how
did I manage to attach this upside-down? why can't I get it
apart at all? who fucking designed this thing?" ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ
I spent a lot of time detailing things before assembling them entirely
because I couldn't rely on being able to disassemble things easily; I
had noticed that issue very early on, but had a lapse in judgement
late in the build and managed to stick a part on upside-down.
Would be nice if I could just get the knee part alone so I could
un-fuck it without applying any extra effort. I don't want to buy
another kit just for one piece, even if it would be cheap... (^^;ﾜﾗ
Still, being a very new kit full of very modern Bandai build quality,
it is just better than a lot of HGs and with a bit of touching up, it
looks excellent next to my HG kits. ヽ(´∇`)ノ
It's not a bad looking kit totally bare either; it's quite well color
separated (the pearly green on the kit sucks though, that should have
been done in clear plastic, I covered all of it up with a metallic
green Gundam marker). No stickers. The lack of any black plastic is a
bit odd, but it is a $12 kit (and probably should be more like $8 in
reality, but good luck getting any model kit for the Japanese price
here in the US).
The tl;dr is that it's a nice kit, especially for the price, but it doesn't come apart easily and is thus absurdly intolerant of any mistakes, several of which are way too easy to make.
I am waiting for a few other kits to arrive, namely the 30MP Madoka Kaname kit that I pre-ordered. The kit is already out in Japan, but it looks like US distributors don't have it yet. I hope they do a transformed version of her at some point.
I updated the music page a lot, making it much nicer to browse all the file mirrors. I also wrote a new song, oscillatoria. It is nice to have returned to making music. I made it a 4 channel .XM module in MilkyTracker, and that helped a lot with focusing what I wanted to do with the song versus just trying things with infinite channels and effects in Renoise.
The song has a lot of little tricks to pack in as much as it can into only 4 channels of sampled audio. It is also a bit crunchy and lo-fi since I did consider using it for a potential GBA game I wanted to make with Butano, although I haven't really made any progress on using it (laziness).
I absolutely commit the sin of having a cool bit at the end of the song that you don't get to hear more of, but I couldn't think of a good way to keep the song going. I felt like I was at a fairly natural stopping point at the end. Maybe you can go do a remix if you feel like it.
Here's hoping I can keep up with making more music!
I am reminded pretty much constantly that the march of progress has nothing to do with actually advancing the state of the art. I have seen people decry too many things that outright work better, just because they are old. Modern interface design is concerned with being described easily by buzzwords like "fluent" and "beautiful", while Windows from 30 years ago was concerned with being easy to use and to stay the hell out of the user's way, which is something later versions of Windows, even Windows 98, let alone 8 and 10 and 11, have been forgetting. The extensive research that produced Windows 95's interface hasn't been done to the same scale since.
I won't say that there haven't been any interface advancements between the Windows 95 era and now, but it is almost comical how much less pleasant things have become with interface design. Opening up Thunderbird for the first time in years was an eye-opener, and assisting my father who had to use Outlook for his job was... appalling, really, although in that case, it is more that Microsoft is in full rotting decay mode than merely just being "this is how interfaces are designed now".
I remember messing around with SerenityOS a few years ago, and I was a bit shocked at how much it felt like I had finally come home from a long, weary journey. It is a shamelessly oldschool system, but full of modern quality of life improvements. It really wasn't something you could really use as a daily driver and it is still entirely targeted at a very technical crowd to keep it from being bombarded with requests by non-technical users (you have to build it from source, although it isn't particularly hard to do so), but using it felt good.
In some ways, using Haiku feels similar, although a lot of that is because the interface is in fact simply old (the main Desktop shell is a direct descendant of the one that BeOS used way back when), unsullied by the madness of modern design sensibilities.
I recently re-read Consume, a Warhammer 40k story about a young psyker girl living in the underhive whose desire to live and willingness to fight escalates without limit. She already lives in squalor, she is already stuck giving what she has to gangs, and the food supply heading to the underhive has been cut off due to petty noble infighting causing problems with the shipments from off-world. In desperation, the girl, Anya, like many of the other desperate souls trapped in the underhive, turns to cannibalism, and her life is forever changed as she eats the flesh of a Tyranid genestealer.
Our protagonist is the villain. There's no getting over it. Everyone in 40k is a villain to some extent, but she is quite up front about it. Her motivations are honestly well handled. The Imperium is fairly well written as both being dangerous and highly competent, but also rotting deeply, filled with such callousness that survivable situations often turn south, something that Anya is able to regularly exploit. The story also escalates a LOT, going from picking off random underhivers to becoming a dangerous psychic bio-warlord. She is a scared little girl, but one who is aided by the Hive Mind as it conducts an experiment to see if it is worth the effort of allowing a human being such independence and emotion within its collective. It is probably a bit too ridiculous just how much power Anya amasses, although it doesn't feel entirely out of place due to the sheer power of the Tyranids in canon, and Anya's evolution and human nature have made the Tyranids significantly more dangerous than in canon.
Anya is very childish, and the story tries to regularly remind the reader of the fact that despite all of her power, she is arguably just throwing a temper tantrum. However, at the same time, the system she is fighting is so deeply rotten that she ends up having a point with her philosophy... even despite the fact that she is a relentless world-killer who throws herself into conflicts with a smile and a will to prove herself. She isn't in the right, but she's nowhere as wrong as someone who has murdered quite so much should be. She has a warped but generally consistent code of honor that she follows, and the fact that she consistently honors the deals she has made (a remarkable rarity in the world of 40k) ends up letting her get into some really advantageous situations.
I think my biggest issue with the story is the sheer speed. The overall pacing felt fine as I was reading, but I think the events snowball into the hyper-scale conflict of the ending in what is at minimum only 2 or so months in-story, and absolutely less than a year, which is a bit ridiculous (canonically, Tyranid FTL is supposed to be fairly slow, although also canonically, a lot of writing in 40k ignores that lmao). Anya also ends up being a little bit too smart about things, even with the Hive Mind helping, although there are a few things in-story that are reasonable (if not amazing) explanations. I also wish the author had written the promised epilogue. The story has been marked as finished, and I don't think it is ever coming. The story as posted is complete, but I do want to see what happens immediately after the end. I think it also needs a little bit of an editing pass for spelling and formatting here and there, but it isn't too bad. Very exciting story. Definitely a bit of a power fantasy, but one that is executed well.
As an aside, this entry (along with the previous one) was going to be a lot shorter, and then I just kept typing, lmao.
I gave up on Liferea as an RSS reader. There were a few minor issues that consistently annoyed me (in particular, it wouldn't try to open articles in the built-in browser with reader view enabled, it would give up and render the whole page as normal), but I had a big issue I found I could reliably trigger by just viewing an article.
It could just be a combination of the old package in the Raspberry Pi OS repo and the tiny amount of RAM on the Raspberry Pi I was using (2GB Pi 4), but I had to hard unplug that Pi after it locked up and I saw all of the RAM and swap max out and all 4 CPU cores peg at 100% in the little desktop tray applet I had before everything stopped responding and I couldn't SSH in (it was still on the network as far as I could tell, it was just too hard stuck to do anything). I was connecting over RDP, since it's very convenient to just pick up from where I was on whatever actual computer I'm sitting at.
Over in my homelab blog article, I mentioned that I set the 2GB Pi 4 as an always-on machine (which I would totally have as something other than a Pi, but the current state of the computer hardware market has killed all ambitions of that for now). I'm a bit surprised the OOM killer didn't step in and just start slashing, although maybe I didn't wait long enough (alternatively, it sits at nearly 100% memory utilization and slowly keeps trying to do whatever it was doing).
I could reliably trigger it by viewing a specific article, and if I didn't take too long, I could kill the offending process that was spawned (some webkit process that Liferea uses to render pages) that was prepared to eat all of my RAM before things locked up. Sometimes, I could in fact view the article that caused problems, but viewing another one after it would then cause the aforementioned memory and CPU usage spike.
I am now using newsboat. I don't like newsboat much. It isn't the worst thing, it is just weirdly unfriendly, probably in some misguided effort to get the user to read the man page, but the manpage is way too long and I just want to look at my feeds. I also had to manually do touch ~/.newsboat/urls before I could import the .opml file with all my feeds. Why?
My ~/.newsboat/config looks like this:
browser falkon auto-reload yes bind-key LEFT quit unbind-key LEFT feedlist bind-key RIGHT open bind-key TAB open prepopulate-query-feeds yes
which makes life quite a bit easier when it comes to navigation. As a regular user of the Links browser, I absolutely love having left be back and right be open. The unbind-key entry there keeps you from closing newsboat on accident. Binding tab means I can browse with the mouse (it doesn't have mouse support, but I can give it scrollwheel inputs) and have open and quit available on my other hand.
I really do miss having the list view folders in Liferea, although it's the only feed reader I currently use that had it. I also wish newsboat had mouse support. It doesn't matter much on my laptop since the trackpad is right there next to the keybaord, but it is annoying on my desktop.
You can add this however to ~/.newsboat/urls:
"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""
which will add a query feed that pulls a list of every unread article into one view.
I also have the following query feed in my urls file:
"query:All Articles:unread = \"yes\" or unread=\"no\""
which just shows every article in one big pile. Just what I want.
This is the not-exactly-regular reminder to use RSS/Atom feeds when you find them.
I started using Liferea for following my feeds on a Pi 4 since it's not as heavy as using Thunderbird or something on the machine. It's in the default repo, so you can just sudo apt install liferea You probably want to change the view mode to Normal View instead of Automatic in the settings, since it doesn't switch between the two modes at reasonable window sizes (it switches to the wide view way too early).
If you haven't subscribed to my feeds, here are the URLs you want to put into your feed reader:
Keeping up with both is the best way to keep track of what I'm doing. The Neocities auto-feed is very lacking but up-to-date, while the manual feed lets you actually see the post contents (very useful if you're somewhere without internet and you just had your feed reader download everything beforehand) but is only updated when I feel like it since it is mostly manually edited via a template I made.
If you have no idea what to do with these, install Liferea (Linux) [edit] see the entry above or Thunderbird (most platforms) on your computer (instead of adding a mail account, you'll add a "feed account", which is totally local and just puts all your feeds under one heading like if it was a mail account), Feedbro as a browser extension on Firefox and Chrome, and Feeder (F-Droid link) if you're on Android (Google Play link here. If you have an iPhone, I've heard good things about feeeed but can't actually recommend it from experience.
[edit] In favor of Thunderbird, I have recently found out about (and installed) Betterbird, which fixes several long-standing issues in Thunderbird.
This is basically an update to an older blog entry dealing with this that might still be useful, although the advice in this post is more up-to-date. Have fun!
First entry of the new page, so here we go!
I pre-ordered the 30 Minute Preference Madoka model kit, along with a few other items. I will probably have to wait for a while, since even though the Madoka kit is supposed to come out this month, it could be any time whatsoever this month. Worse yet, since I didn't feel like double-paying for shipping, I will have to wait for it to come out before I get my other items. I really can't wait, but I have to wait. I totally overpaid, but all of the character kits are way more expensive than they should be in the US, like 60% more expensive. I also bought the GQuuuuuuX itself, even if the ending of that show is stupid. I held off on buying any gunpla kits from it until I had finished.
The new Pop'n Music has hit the USA, but I have no idea when it will come to Florida. As far as I can tell, there are no Pop'n Music High Cheers cabinets east of Chicago yet. I need a nearby Pop'n cab so badly, it's so much fun. IIDX, maimai, and Pop'n will absolutely end up being the games I play the most when I go to the arcade.
FukuokaBBS has returned from the grave! I am glad there is a second English-speaking Strange World instance once more. I really do like the format of Strange World a lot. It also still features a 2ch style lounge board for organized, threaded discussion.
Lastly, I've been playing the NES release of Dragon Warrior (you know, Dragon Quest). It's honestly worth playing. Definitely obnoxiously grindy at times (the grind needed to face the Green Dragon is stupid), but a lot of the specific limitations it has end up coming together into a fairly cohesive whole for what is a very early console RPG. The simplicity of it helps a lot too; just about everything in DQ1 can be pieced together without a guide fairly easily (with like two exceptions), although I will not blame anyone for looking up a guide. I also won't blame anyone for playing an updated release, like the Super Famicom or Game Boy Color releases, and I might end up doing the GBC release to play DQ2 when I get to that. Might. Dying isn't much of a punishment in DQ, which is nice. You lose half your gold, so one thing you end up doing is spending a lot so you don't lose so much when you venture off into the unknown (or if you are really lazy/pressed for time and don't have the wings or the spell that sends you home, you'll deliberately die to go back to the castle so you can save).
It's interesting to find out that Dragon Warrior features a lot of visual enhancements over DQ1 on Famicom (most notably, character sprites now face all 4 directions, which is something I had never considered to be something that would need to be enhanced), along with having a save battery (DQ1 on FC had passwords, and they're long).
I had a few more things I wanted to post, but I forgot what they were. Oh well, they'll come to me if they're important. Also, I'm still thinking about just how hyper-rushed GQuuuuuuX's pacing was combined with the extreme dependence on having watched 0079. I enjoyed watching the show while I was watching it, but it's such a mess the longer I think about it.
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