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Streams of consciousness
Oct. 30th, 2018 04:29 am3D Custom Girl has been out for 10 years now, and it went from something that requires a high-end video card to something that can run acceptably on onboard video on a newish laptop. Not because of software improvements, but because the tech for onboard video has been making incredible progress in the past several years. (It still works better with a standalone video card, especially on higher resolution displays.)
For the ability to make characters in a sandbox environment, the heir-apparent to 3D Custom Girl would be Custom Maid 3D (followed by Custom Order Maid 3D). I'm still trying to figure that one out, if only because there's some actual gameplay involved, instead of 3DCG getting right down to business. With Custom Maid 3D, it does also require much more powerful hardware. The 760GTX card I got a few years ago, that's waaaay more than enough for 3DCG? That's now the low-end requirement for Custom Order Maid 3D, and onboard video isn't an option. On Custom Girl, a dual-core processor was also more than enough. On Custom Maid, a quad-core is the minimum.
Speaking of things around since 2008, they're still making more anime of "A Certain Magical Index". Third season of that, plus another 2 seasons of the spinoff, "A Certain Scientific Railgun".
Recently I watched the "Kizumonogatari" movie trilogy. That means I'm now fully caught up on the "Bakemonogatari" anime franchise that started in 2009, at least until next month when they release even more, while I'm in Japan. There's enough light novel material to make more Manygatari anime for the next 5 to 7 years.
The "Madoka Magica" series has been out for almost 8 years now? Time flies. I remember when that came out, watching it as it aired, and the hype was real.
The "Neon Genesis Evangelion" series has been out for 22 years, having finished airing in March of 1996. There is now about the same amount of time between the end of the original series and the first of the Rebuild movies, as there is between the first Rebuild movie and the present time. Oh, and there's the fourth movie that still hasn't come out and the closest we have to a release date is somewhere in 2020. Also, when the original series first came out in 1995, it took place in 2015. Which means it now technically takes place in the past.
I was into anime when NGE initially aired, but I was only peripherally aware of it as it was airing. A screencap here, a short article there. Maybe a few pictures in one of the NewType magazines that would sometimes make their way to the local comic book store (at a 500% markup, of course). That would be thanks to the glacial lead times from when things came out in Japan to when they finally filtered over to the US, via legal means or not.
"Cowboy Bebop" takes place in the year 2071, so in order for me to live long enough to see that take place in the past, I'd have to make it almost to 100. Not impossible, but I'm not counting on it. For when it came out in the late 90s, 2071 was much more distant. It was far enough away that the people who made it and the first generation of fans seeing it wouldn't likely live that long. Now, anyone born in the past few years has a good chance of living that long. Some of them might even still be working. Perhaps the science driving the plot might inspire them to work on making some of that technology real.
The first time I saw Cowboy Bebop was in 1999 at a party at a friend's house and he had some fansubs of it. Or was it untranslated? Not that it matters, as it was one of the first anime I bought on DVD about a year later. One of the first things everyone there noticed was they had cast Megumi Hayashibara in one of the lead roles. Because in the world of seiyuu, she's one of the most famous, if not the most famous.
I went to AUSA a week ago. My presence there could be measured in hours, but I'll be generous and say it totals to almost a full day. All 3 conventions I went to this year have been like that, including Otakon. Back in the day, I would have gotten a hotel room and partied it up all weekend. Now I just go there to hang out with a few friends, buy some loot, and go back home for the night. Times change, I guess.
Gonna do another trip to Japan soon. A couple weeks from now! Because I want to and I can and that's all the reason I need. I feel like I should be more prepared than I am. It'll sink in the week-of.
As much as I have the option of adding more hard drives to the server, I haven't needed to. After pouring in as much as I can and then clearing out duplicate files, it's still only about half full. And I would have thought the anime files would have taken up more than the 3TB it does. With the right software, I could copy my entire DVD/BD collection to the server. That would fill it up. But I don't see a need to.
So if anime takes up only 3TB out of the 9 or 10TB used, what the hell is the rest of it? Or are there some veins of anime that remain un-mined? I'll figure that out later. I think a lot of it is music, in the form of duplicates of whole music libraries, where I'd make a backup of the main one by just drag-and-dropping it into a new folder on an external. As messy and inefficient as it is, it worked. And I'd rather have it take up extra hard drive space, instead of attempting to recreate a music library of almost 60k tracks that was compiled over the course of 15 years. Yeah, I'm also making backups of the itunes' .itl file, which helps too.
Recently at work I had to perform some necromancy on an old computer, as I'm sometimes tasked to do. It was an old 486 board, doing what we have a 486 tasked to do, what with its old-timey ISA slots to interface with a machine of a similar vintage. For some reason it wouldn't boot up at all, and the initial diagnosis was to replace the motherboard. Except replacements in the Baby AT form factor are not easy to find. After re-squishing chips back into their sockets, making sure cards were properly in their slots, and replacing a cable, I got it to boot up again. I'm not sure which of those was the actual fix. I'll take whatever win I can get.
Meanwhile in much newer hardware, I upgraded one of my hard drives from 250GB to 1TB. The 250 was getting kinda full, and I have plans that would likely make it more full. Since both drives are SSD, it took about 10 minutes to move everything. The only thing that came close to being an issue is when the motherboard no longer saw the original hard drive and needed that setting changed.
Computers are like toddlers. They're happy when everything is perfect, but as soon as one bit gets out of place, and it doesn't take much to cause that, they lose their minds and all hell breaks loose, and they don't really say what's wrong, they just scream. If you are able to correct the situation, more often than not you're not really sure what worked or how you did it, and you're just grateful that episode is over.
I am not sure where I put my spare checks. They're somewhere in the catacombs of catastrophe and I can't be arsed to look for them right now. They also have my old address on them so I might as well get new ones. I do use them, though. Anyone who says nobody needs checks anymore has never had to deal with any government agencies in the US. That goes for computer printers too. There's probably some obscure yet essential agency that still requires access to a fax machine. Where I work, they turned off the fax service years ago. They're still a big thing in Japan, though.
Pumpkin spice flavor isn't made of real pumpkins! It's just a mish-mash of various spices that are widely available year-round. I mean, mix some cinnamon and nutmeg together, and that's about half of it.
Alright I think I'm gonna stop rambling now and go back to preparing for my trip to Japan. Or watch more Gridman. Or both.
For the ability to make characters in a sandbox environment, the heir-apparent to 3D Custom Girl would be Custom Maid 3D (followed by Custom Order Maid 3D). I'm still trying to figure that one out, if only because there's some actual gameplay involved, instead of 3DCG getting right down to business. With Custom Maid 3D, it does also require much more powerful hardware. The 760GTX card I got a few years ago, that's waaaay more than enough for 3DCG? That's now the low-end requirement for Custom Order Maid 3D, and onboard video isn't an option. On Custom Girl, a dual-core processor was also more than enough. On Custom Maid, a quad-core is the minimum.
Speaking of things around since 2008, they're still making more anime of "A Certain Magical Index". Third season of that, plus another 2 seasons of the spinoff, "A Certain Scientific Railgun".
Recently I watched the "Kizumonogatari" movie trilogy. That means I'm now fully caught up on the "Bakemonogatari" anime franchise that started in 2009, at least until next month when they release even more, while I'm in Japan. There's enough light novel material to make more Manygatari anime for the next 5 to 7 years.
The "Madoka Magica" series has been out for almost 8 years now? Time flies. I remember when that came out, watching it as it aired, and the hype was real.
The "Neon Genesis Evangelion" series has been out for 22 years, having finished airing in March of 1996. There is now about the same amount of time between the end of the original series and the first of the Rebuild movies, as there is between the first Rebuild movie and the present time. Oh, and there's the fourth movie that still hasn't come out and the closest we have to a release date is somewhere in 2020. Also, when the original series first came out in 1995, it took place in 2015. Which means it now technically takes place in the past.
I was into anime when NGE initially aired, but I was only peripherally aware of it as it was airing. A screencap here, a short article there. Maybe a few pictures in one of the NewType magazines that would sometimes make their way to the local comic book store (at a 500% markup, of course). That would be thanks to the glacial lead times from when things came out in Japan to when they finally filtered over to the US, via legal means or not.
"Cowboy Bebop" takes place in the year 2071, so in order for me to live long enough to see that take place in the past, I'd have to make it almost to 100. Not impossible, but I'm not counting on it. For when it came out in the late 90s, 2071 was much more distant. It was far enough away that the people who made it and the first generation of fans seeing it wouldn't likely live that long. Now, anyone born in the past few years has a good chance of living that long. Some of them might even still be working. Perhaps the science driving the plot might inspire them to work on making some of that technology real.
The first time I saw Cowboy Bebop was in 1999 at a party at a friend's house and he had some fansubs of it. Or was it untranslated? Not that it matters, as it was one of the first anime I bought on DVD about a year later. One of the first things everyone there noticed was they had cast Megumi Hayashibara in one of the lead roles. Because in the world of seiyuu, she's one of the most famous, if not the most famous.
I went to AUSA a week ago. My presence there could be measured in hours, but I'll be generous and say it totals to almost a full day. All 3 conventions I went to this year have been like that, including Otakon. Back in the day, I would have gotten a hotel room and partied it up all weekend. Now I just go there to hang out with a few friends, buy some loot, and go back home for the night. Times change, I guess.
Gonna do another trip to Japan soon. A couple weeks from now! Because I want to and I can and that's all the reason I need. I feel like I should be more prepared than I am. It'll sink in the week-of.
As much as I have the option of adding more hard drives to the server, I haven't needed to. After pouring in as much as I can and then clearing out duplicate files, it's still only about half full. And I would have thought the anime files would have taken up more than the 3TB it does. With the right software, I could copy my entire DVD/BD collection to the server. That would fill it up. But I don't see a need to.
So if anime takes up only 3TB out of the 9 or 10TB used, what the hell is the rest of it? Or are there some veins of anime that remain un-mined? I'll figure that out later. I think a lot of it is music, in the form of duplicates of whole music libraries, where I'd make a backup of the main one by just drag-and-dropping it into a new folder on an external. As messy and inefficient as it is, it worked. And I'd rather have it take up extra hard drive space, instead of attempting to recreate a music library of almost 60k tracks that was compiled over the course of 15 years. Yeah, I'm also making backups of the itunes' .itl file, which helps too.
Recently at work I had to perform some necromancy on an old computer, as I'm sometimes tasked to do. It was an old 486 board, doing what we have a 486 tasked to do, what with its old-timey ISA slots to interface with a machine of a similar vintage. For some reason it wouldn't boot up at all, and the initial diagnosis was to replace the motherboard. Except replacements in the Baby AT form factor are not easy to find. After re-squishing chips back into their sockets, making sure cards were properly in their slots, and replacing a cable, I got it to boot up again. I'm not sure which of those was the actual fix. I'll take whatever win I can get.
Meanwhile in much newer hardware, I upgraded one of my hard drives from 250GB to 1TB. The 250 was getting kinda full, and I have plans that would likely make it more full. Since both drives are SSD, it took about 10 minutes to move everything. The only thing that came close to being an issue is when the motherboard no longer saw the original hard drive and needed that setting changed.
Computers are like toddlers. They're happy when everything is perfect, but as soon as one bit gets out of place, and it doesn't take much to cause that, they lose their minds and all hell breaks loose, and they don't really say what's wrong, they just scream. If you are able to correct the situation, more often than not you're not really sure what worked or how you did it, and you're just grateful that episode is over.
I am not sure where I put my spare checks. They're somewhere in the catacombs of catastrophe and I can't be arsed to look for them right now. They also have my old address on them so I might as well get new ones. I do use them, though. Anyone who says nobody needs checks anymore has never had to deal with any government agencies in the US. That goes for computer printers too. There's probably some obscure yet essential agency that still requires access to a fax machine. Where I work, they turned off the fax service years ago. They're still a big thing in Japan, though.
Pumpkin spice flavor isn't made of real pumpkins! It's just a mish-mash of various spices that are widely available year-round. I mean, mix some cinnamon and nutmeg together, and that's about half of it.
Alright I think I'm gonna stop rambling now and go back to preparing for my trip to Japan. Or watch more Gridman. Or both.
