Don’t you think?

(via)

Around 9.5 years ago, I bought the Japanese DVD release of Otoko-tachi no Yamato, ripped it, and added a set of soft-subs I found online. There were a few minor rough spots in the translation, but it was good enough.

I recently bought the Bluray release of the film and ripped it, only to discover that there are just enough differences to render my existing subs unusable. Applying a constant offset in VLC wasn’t sufficient; it seems there are some subtle differences between the releases that will require real cleanup. For more fun, the three different subs I found on subtitledb.org just now were all missing the last third of the movie.

I’m not going to get around to it any time soon, sadly.

For anyone who really, really wants a legitimage copy and can handle Region B discs, there’s a German import on Amazon Canada with English subtitles.

I suppose it was inevitable that I’d get around to this as a theme…

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…there was a spinoff manga featuring her adventures before the gate opened.

…at a generously-drawn age 14.

File under peculiar the fact that while Amazon is swimming in a sea of rapidly-translated dumpster-fire light novels, Gate is nowhere to be found. If you want to read it in English, there’s a mostly-complete fan translation of the first novel series, but not the eight-volume side stories or the new “season 2” series, because the only group that’s interested can’t find a Chinese translation to work from.

Someone briefly licensed the manga, but abandoned it after releasing the first volume.

Seems there’s a trivial denial of service attack against GPG via the keyservers, and the fix is… well, there really isn’t one:

“​…the SKS software was written in an obscure language by a PhD student for his thesis. And because of that, according to Hansen, ‘there is literally no one in the keyserver community who feels qualified to do a serious overhaul on the codebase.’”

An alarm clock that won’t stop until you put your weight on it for a few seconds:

This wouldn’t have worked for me in college. I had an incredibly loud, obnoxious alarm clock that had no snooze button, which I kept on the first floor, with the switch wrapped in duct tape. When it went off, hitting “snooze” meant I had to get up, walk downstairs, unwrap it, manually adjust the alarm time, rewrap it, walk back upstairs, and go back to bed.

I generally managed to do this four or five times before actually starting the day.

In an idle moment, I checked out the glass-half-empty that is the current anime season on Crunchyroll, and found a series where the weak pun in the title is being mistranslated as Are You Lost? (more sensibly, “Are We Shipwrecked?”).

The first 15-minute episode sets up the scenario quite simply: four busty high school girls are washed up on a deserted island after their student cruise goes wrong, and must survive with their convenient array of tropes. I watched it only a few hours ago, and already I can’t remember anything but their defining clichés and their bustlines.

I think the second season of DanMachi starts in two weeks; maybe that will suck less than the Sword Oratorio side series (aka “Is It Wrong To Make A Deranged Lesbian Fangirl The Protagonist In A Spinoff?”).

Last year, I struggled to find the name of one of the cute, wholesome girls in one of my cheesecake posts. It turned out to be the cute, wholesome cover of a porn flick featuring AV actress Azumi Kawashima(川島和津実), whose popularity lasted a lot longer than her brief career.

And, hey, she’s not even 40 yet!

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Last one of these for a while, but I had to do this one:

Every once in a while, this Sanag 10000mAh battery pack goes on sale on Amazon. I bought one before I went to Japan in April, and it worked great; smaller and lighter than my big Anker charger, faster and more powerful than my old Mophie (which, by the way, loses its charge annoyingly quickly, where the other two can sit on a shelf for at least a month and still be at 100%).

Wednesday evening, I was checking out a recent order, and found a lightning deal had just started, discounting the standard $26.99 price by $4.39, and then adding a 5% off coupon to bring the total, with free tax and shipping, down to $21.25.

So now I have two of them. Did I mention we’re planning to go back to Japan in November? 😁

(and, yes, it’s breaking my rule against buying things from randomly-named Chinese vendors, but this one has actually been around for a while now, and their reviews are actually about this item, not like the scammers who build up positive reviews on something innocuous and then swap it out so that the same listing now refers to a completely different product; “900 four-star reviews say this underwear fits perfectly, which is kind of odd for a bookcase”)

One of the more entertaining random quotes in the DanMemo game:

In related news, the movie is coming to (some) theaters on July 23, and the second season debuts July 12th.

Well, technically, 着衣巨乳 means “clothed huge breasts”, but that counts as undercover, right? As long as they don’t have private dicks, I’m okay with it…

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I had heard that the original release of Traveller 5 was “more than a bit of a mess”. Chaotically organized, unedited, missing any sort of guides on how to run/play a game, filled with tables but missing simple things like equipment lists, showing no signs of familiarity with changes in both the industry and the audience, etc, etc. But that was years ago, and plenty of reviewers and forum-dwellers made all those flaws clear. So, along comes a new kickstarter campaign to reprint it with all those quite legitimate complaints taken care of, as Traveller 5.10.

Yeah, no. Reading through the recently-released PDF core books, I find no game here, just a construction kit that, with immense patience and energy, could be used to create a game and a universe to play in. Its 888 pages read like an unconscious parody of rules-heavy, table-driven RPG design, and, oddly enough, it ends up feeling kind of like Spawn of Spawn Of Fashan. As a bonus, if you’re nostalgic for early-Eighties game art, many of the included illustrations are actually from the early Eighties. Combined with the fact that neither the table of contents nor the index contain hyperlinks to the associated pages, I’m forced to conclude that nobody associated with this project is familiar with graphics or layout software released this century.

Mind you, in all those pages, there are no real examples of how to use any of this stuff; it’s just tables all the way down (and, no, still no equipment lists; but you can design every possible kind of hand-weapon from scratch and make your own!). No wonder everyone recommends Mongoose Traveller; despite its flaws, it’s actually intended to be played, not weighed.

Seriously, the table of contents for all three books is shorter than the table of charts in each book (124 in book 1, 125 in book 2, and 121 in book 3), but there are no printable pages of forms to make use of any of the supplied generators. Even the sample sector and sub-sector maps are just low-resolution JPEGs (MuPDF’s mutools extract is your friend here…).

For the previous release, they apparently did you the favor of extracting the relevant pages from the books to create a set of “forms”, which was better than nothing but not terribly useful. I’d hope that they’d do better this time, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in supporting this as a game system.

By the way, how often do you actually need to know each character’s “species scent”?

Update

Just re-read the kickstarter, and it seems the Player’s Manual was promised as part of the original T5 kickstarter seven years ago, and is now promised as a free follow-up to this one, delivery date unknown.

Freebie!

Looks like the closest thing to a modern Classic Traveller is Cepheus Engine. This merges the free SRD from the first edition of Mongoose Traveller (which was deliberately designed to be compatible with existing CT content) with useful ideas from other editions like T20 and MegaTraveller, all wrapped up in an Open Gaming License.

Because it seems Mongoose screwed third-party publishers when they released version 2 of their Traveller, replacing the OGL with a profit-sharing scheme that takes 50% off the top.

So if you happened to find any good ideas in the T5 books, your best bet would be to incorporate them into a CE-based game, with additional content from whatever edition of Traveller books you can find.

Well, this explains a lot…

Which brings to Miller’s point that while he likes the challenge of game design, he doesn’t use the complex game designs he creates. He doesn’t use rules that have rules for everything. He instead uses the simple, straightforward, Referee-driven rules of Classic Traveller.

I’m a big fan.

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The English version of the picking-up-girls-in-a-dungeon mobile game is no longer co-published by Crunchyroll, but is being directly published by the localization studio now. They transitioned the social media accounts a few days ago, and now it’s the app’s turn.

Today’s update, despite the scary error message, strips out the co-branding and downloads the assets for the second part of the preeeeeeeequel story line set 1000+ years in the past (in which not-Bell is more annoying than Bete and Loki put together, his half/step-sister not-Lefiya is a distinct improvement over the original, and the other analogs are a mixed bag). The previous update also added a way to improve characters who’ve already hit the level cap, making some of the nearly-impossible-for-free-players content potentially reachable.

Never change: the smartphone-powered mister. Because nothing says “out of warranty repair” like connecting a water supply to your charging port.

Every once in a while artists delete their illustrations from Pixiv or mark them private. Unfortunately, I wasn’t recording the artist’s ID in my offline database until recently, so for about 2% of my archive, I can’t easily track them back to their creator. In most cases, I suspect they’ve been replaced with updated versions, but I’d have to search by hand, like our primitive ancestors once did.

Instead, I’ll just clean them out, and use my updated scripts to track artist info from now on. If you want to try to search for them, I’ve added my offline copy of their tags (if any) to the title tooltip, and links for the ones marked private.

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“Popular social media site is a toxic dump”

The article refers to a specific physical location at which Instagram users are taking selfies, but I prefer to read it literally.

…laptop backups. I have four independent backups of my current laptop (2x Time Machine, 2x SuperDuper!), one of which is stored on a RAID 6 NAS that backs up to a second RAID 6 volume. Additionally, all source code and blog entries are under source control (Mercurial) and get pushed to a remote server; the blog also gets rsynced to two virtuals in different parts of the country. Which get backed up to the NAS.

I mention this because I just found two external drives containing full backups of my great-grand-previous laptop, plus the actual SSD pulled from it when the board failed. And then I checked the NAS, and found a disk image made from that SSD and a VMware virtual made from it.

For some reason, it doesn’t go over well at work when my first response to someone with a dead computer is, “how many hours ago was your last full backup?”

The good news is that the requirement that we encrypt laptops for people in sensitive positions provided the leverage we needed to get a PO signed for a centralized laptop backup service. Which proved itself pretty darn quickly.

Pity there’s still no cure for people who think that it’s smart to conspicuously put your laptop bag into the trunk of your car when you arrive at a restaurant in the middle of Silicon Valley…

Rune Soldier.

The loosely-related Record of Lodoss War series is collected on Bluray and available for streaming from Funimation, but I doubt RS will ever get a re-release.

Fortunately I have the DVDs, although I suppose I should rip them to avoid eventual bit-rot (and load them onto my iPad for the next trip to Japan…).

(OP video after the jump, because Youtube embeds just keep getting heavier and more intrusive, and I haven’t had time to set up a “click static thumbnail to load video” wrapper).

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Drinks free of charge.

In Traveller 5, you can identify as Goatse.

Just got mail from someone offering $4K for one of my old .com domains. Tempting, since we haven’t updated any content on it in fifteen years, and I just put in 301 redirects to point anyone still using it to a sub-directory on this site.

My first question is, if a random person is really offering $4K, and it’s not just a scam or spam (the use of “cash” in the email sent up a red flag…), should I list it on a site like Sedo instead, to see if it’s worth more?

Second, how does one do this? I acquired it for free when the previous owner no longer wanted the hassle of keeping it up.

Third, “Hey, Bryce, want a piece of this? You did give it to me for free back in the day…”

I really like this image from Hebitsukai; sadly, it’s the only one that just feels detailed rather than cluttered.

It’s been bugging me for a while with Mojave. I’ll be working along in a window, and suddenly there’s a flicker, and the current window is no longer current. Something grabbed focus and didn’t give it back. With all the crap that ends up running in the background on modern MacOS, it’s hard to figure out exactly what might be at fault, but I just had one pop up that can’t be blamed on anyone but Apple.

For my recent trip to Japan, I took along a Western Digital 1TB SSD as a Time Machine backup drive, and put it in my checked luggage for redundancy. I turned on Apple’s full-disk encryption (for the laptop as well), so when I plug it in, it pops up a password dialog box.

100% of the time, this dialog box steals focus, and then doesn’t give it back. The front-most application does not have an active window, and I either need to click on it or switch to another app and back again.

The drive is fantastic, by the way. I prefer it to the Samsung T3 and T5 models I’ve used, not the least because it comes with the only high-performance USB3(male)-to-USBC(female) adapter I’ve found, carefully designed to mate securely with the supplied short USBC cable. All the other small adapters I’ve tried significantly degrade performance despite claiming otherwise, but if I could buy a dozen of these (with or without the matched cable), I would. Sadly, WD doesn’t offer them separately.

Related, if you have multiple Time Machine backup sets for your machine, and you want to manually kick off a backup to a specific one (say, /Volumes/BackMe), the script looks like this (note that this requires the third-party jq tool in /usr/local/bin, because Apple plist format is garbage):

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

VOL=BackMe
if [ ! -d "/Volumes/$VOL" ]; then
        echo "TM backup '$VOL' not mounted!"
        exit 1
fi

ID=$(tmutil destinationinfo -X |
	plutil -convert json -o - - |
	jq -r '.Destinations[]|select(.Name == "'"$VOL"'").ID')
time tmutil startbackup -a -b -d "$ID"

My sister has booked the flights for our next Japan trip, which will now be in March; this Thanksgiving just wasn’t working out for her schedule. That gives me more time to build up my cash reserves, more time to get my knees worked on, and more time to finally go through all the pictures from the last trip…

We’ll be flying in and out of Haneda again, but spending most of our time in Kyoto; this adds two shinkansen trips and luggage transfers, but makes sense because she could get us free business-class upgrades for Haneda, but not for Kansai. So we’ll ship our bags directly from the airport to Kyoto, spend the night near Shinagawa Station, take an early train the next morning, drop off our carry-on bags at the hotel, and spend the first of our 10 days in Kyoto. Then it’s back to Tokyo for a few days of museums, shopping, and penguins.

I’ll be driving up to Mount Hood next month for a week of kumihimo, but that’ll be it for this year, I think. We’ve got a week-long family thing in Sedona in February which will be another long drive, but low-stress.

23 33 confirmed dead in arson attack at Kyoto Animation’s studios. Many more seriously injured.

Thoughts and prayers.

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Japan Times says at least 33 dead, but there’s no link to details. Sentai Filmworks has a GoFundMe page that’s already raised nearly $700,000.

BBC agrees with the 33 number.

ANN has details with links to sources.

The Universe-As-Written is a terrible place to visit, and it probably doesn’t have catgirls.

A while back, as I was adding examples to PDF::Cairo, I made a comment along the lines of “if I were really going to revive sec2pdf”. Well, I’m not quite doing that yet, but I did extend the example I wrote to do something related: display the distribution of interesting systems in a starmap.

What happened is that I started reading the Giant Tome Of Tables that is Traveller 5.10, found the section on generating systems and sectors, dug out the dusty old scripts I wrote around the T20 rules, managed to successfully reset my password on the CotI forums, looked up the various debates about the available and abandoned systems, and realized something:

The problem isn’t the generators for a single world/system (despite the fact that many of them create nonsensical things like tiny rocks with no water or atmosphere that support a population of millions of bronze-age peasants in a police state…), it’s the fact that the rules to populate a region of space are pretty much “roll up a world in X% of the hexes on the map”, with some vaguely-handwaved suggested percentages (“rift = 3%, standard = 50%, cluster = 83%”).

Like most RPG systems, it’s not in the books because it’s good, it’s there because it’s easy to describe in terms of pencil, paper, and dice.

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The Naming Of Cheesecake’s a bit cloak-and-dagger,
  It isn’t just one of your image search games.
You may think that I’m just a lazy-ass blogger,
  When I tell you, these models have actual names.

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I don’t think it’s possible to parody the isekai genre, so clearly it’s time to make my own…

(art by Milkpanda; swiped from Pixiv without permission)

1: This Clumsy Princess Is Falling All Over Me!

2: A Wild Loli Appears!

3: Holy Shit Those Tits Are Huge!

4: Her Cooking’s Terrible, But At Least She’s Naked!

5: All The Maids Wear Glasses!

6: Everything’s Better With Catgirls!

7: This Butch Palace Guard Secretly Collects Plushies!

8: My New Robot Girlfriend Needs An Off Switch!

9: Naughty Elves Need Love Too!

10: The Secret Valley Of Monster Girl Sex Slaves!

11: That Alien Nympho Is Over 18 Officer I Swear!

12: There’s Always Room For Slime Girls!

13: Trapped In The Lyin’ Witch’s Wardrobe!

14: Turns Out My Little Sister Is A Succubus!

…

23: Where Does The Third One Go?

…

29: Hers Is Bigger Than Mine But She’s Still A Girl So It’s Okay!

…

37: Mom Is That You?!?

…is mostly disappointed with this season.

I gave the obvious pandering-fan-service series a look: Are You Lost?, Magical Sempai, and Hensuki.

Sempai is just a weak premise poorly executed; I gave it two episodes, which is two more than it deserved. The writers of Lost seem to have already forgotten which trope each girl is built around, except for Survival/Exposition Girl; honestly, the high point of the third episode is that they finally stopped making urine-drinking references. Hensuki at least has well-drawn girls who are visually distinctive, with a premise that’s more chūnibyō than kink-of-the-week. Our Hero, however, is duller than stale white bread, so as each girl reveals her “kink”, she also has to spend several minutes telling this dateless loser why he’s so amazing that she fell for him. I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet $10 that clingy little sister is behind it all.

Not sure if I’m up for watching the Accelerator spinoff of the Railgun spinoff of Index. I kind of lost interest in the whole franchise while trying to catch up a while back.

The OP for DanMachi season 2 gleefully spoils the outcome of the first story arc, but since I already knew it was coming from the light novels, it’s no big deal. The opening act’s a bit of a slog, though. The bright spot is that Lili now shows off her figure without being beaten to a pulp first. This is a distinct improvement over the first season, where the combination of casual brutality and Lili-service was jarring (yes, someone turned those scenes into a doujin porn comic or three, sigh). I could do with less Snidely Whiplash from the villains, but I’ll just have to grit my teeth and hope that the upcoming damsel-rescuing makes up for the mustache-twirling ugly people spitting into the camera.

Speaking of pandering fan-service, I recently got around to watching the second season of Rosario And Vampire, which had all the flaws of the first season and a few new ones, but was worth it for Kurumu. I also skimmed the wiki for the manga, and it sounds like the attempt to reconcile fluffy and dark went about as well as you’d expect, with increasingly-convoluted plotting and power-ups leading to Our Hero Becoming The Strongest Ever and Getting The Girl But Not That Girl.

I also rewatched some good stuff: various episodes of Endro, Dog Days, Manaria Friends, and Restaurant To Another World, as well as the AsoIku OVA (nekkid alien catgirls!). I think what makes these series stand out for me is the obvious affection the creators have for the characters. It’s like the anime were just created as an excuse to spend time with them.

In live-action news, I’m already two weeks behind on Krypton, because even though Lobo appears to be out of the picture (woo-hoo), it feels like they hired a bunch of old-school soap opera writers for this season. Like when Seg makes a desperate attempt to turn Lyta against Zod by schtupping her like there’s no tomorrow.

The Writer Beware blog is an excellent resource for learning about the many con artists and general scum preying on would-be authors. Sometimes, however, there’s unintended comedy (emphasis mine):

There’s some disagreement over whether there actually is such a thing as a hybrid publisher–a company that charges substantial fees yet provides a service that’s otherwise equivalent to traditional publishing, including rigorous selectivity and editing, high royalties, offline distribution, non-bogus PR, and more.

Perhaps they should post a list of precisely which traditional publishers qualify under these guidelines, which are widely reported to be more often promised than delivered…

As vaguely promised, here’s what happens when I take the sector data for The Spinward Marches and run it through my scripts to create a completely new sector.

But first, a slight tweak: the Importance stat I mentioned ranges from -3 to 5, which is sufficient for my basic goal of separating the wheat from the chaff, but I decided it doesn’t have enough granularity to truly spread the best systems around the sector, so I multiplied it by another derived stat, Resource Units (“stuff to grab”), which ranges from rather negative to quite positive. Avoiding zeroes for both, the exact scoring method used was: ($ix + 4) * ($ru||1)

(yes, the Importance stat is called “ix”, or more precisely {Ix}, because Marc Miller apparently has an affection for chartjunk; there’s also an (Ex), and a [Cx], and if he ever writes another version of Traveller, I imagine it will have , ‹Yx›, and «Zx» as well)

Now, let’s respin The Spinward Marches, with data and PDFs courtesy of The Traveller Map!

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He’s a jaded chain-smoking detective out to avenge his partner.
She’s a loli knight elf with a chip on her shoulder.
THEY FIGHT CRIME.

From the author of FullMetal Panic! and Amagi Brilliant Park, with character designs by Range Murata (who also illustrated the light novels). The first two episodes were better than I expected, so I watched the third as soon as it was released on Funimation. There’s nothing terribly new here if you’ve heard of Alien Nation or Bright, but so far the execution looks solid, if a bit rushed. I doubt it will get as lively as the OP animation, however.

They’ve got 6 light novels of source material to work with for 12 episodes, so they shouldn’t run out. Just in case, though, the credits promise loli-elf-service, and episode 3 delivers a bit of it. Caveat: there are some gaps in the storytelling that feel like they were a little too focused on making sure they only spend four episodes per book.

On that note, it looks like book 7 is timed for mid-season, after a three-year hiatus.

Short clip after the jump.

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The Pixiv tag “R-18” means different things to different artists. For some, it’s equivalent to “NSFW”, but for many, it’s closer to “includes censored penetration”, and quite often “my mother would kick me out of the basement if she knew I fantasized about this”, with anything not quite as raw left open for all to see.

Gratuitous Mahoro to make it clear that this set has work-safety issues:

[amusing note: Google image search thinks this Mahoro image is related to the Mongolian Society of Interventional Radiology]

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Please stop putting things in the “New Releases” recommendation list three months before they’re released. This has been showing up on my lists for weeks, and not only does the Kindle edition not come out until September, the paperback edition doesn’t come out until December.

“​…until the recording studio explodes.”

(via)

Pet peeve: romanizations from the Japanese creator that don’t match their own text. For instance, the heroine of Cop Craft is named ティラナ, which is pronounced Tilana or Tirana, and that’s how everyone in the anime cast says it. But in the color art supplied with book one, it was written “Tilarna”, which makes that The Official Name.

I bought the Kindle edition of the novels on Amazon Japan, grabbed the latest version of DeDRM and KindleUnpack, and dusted off my Yomitori scripts (last updated in 2013…) to extract the pictures and make the text easier to read. To my surprise, the scripts mostly still worked, except for the one that uses dviasm.py to optimize the furigana, a tool that no longer handles uplatex output correctly (looks like I’ll have to switch to dv2dt/dt2dv to molest DVI files now).

After the jump, the magic words are: “She’s 26 In Elf Years!”

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A Glorious Future Approaches!

Japan approves first human-animal embryo experiments

You know what this means:

DeDRM and KindleUnpack are packages designed to extract the contents from ebooks purchased through Amazon, with multi-platform point-and-click GUI wrappers. (DeDRM includes decrypters for many other platforms as well, but I don’t need any of them)

My Japanese-book-hacking workflow doesn’t play nicely with point-and-click, and now that I’ve gone to the effort of resurrecting and updating it to work with modern versions of Perl and TeXLive, I thought it was time to dig out the core of the extraction tools and repackage them in a format more useful to me.

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Unrelated to this picture, the DanMemo mobile game is currently running bonus drama vignettes related to each episode of season 2 as they air.

Some of the many side stories in the game are focused around the waitresses at Bell’s favorite pub. They might collectively be called, “Is It Wrong To Force Level 4 Adventurers To Wait Tables In A Dungeon Town Restaurant?”​.

Pro tip: grabass == permadeath.

What’s the best-bang-for-the-buck gaming graphics card that I can put into this?

Current specs:

• Intel Core i7-6700, 3.4 GHz
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, 4 GB RAM
• 32 GB RAM
• 256 GB SATA SSD
• 1 TB SATA SSD
• 500 Watt power supply

I’m tempted to replace the original small SSD with an NVME PCI Express card and one of the many ridiculously-affordable M.2 NVME SSDs. (never mind, the free slot is only PCI Express x1)

Brickmuppet hand-assembled a list of popular Pixiv pics on both the Male and Female lists. Naturally I scripted it with PixivPy, and included their relative position on the two lists…

The core of the code looks like this (delete “_r18” from both searches to see the clean-ish images); output is suitable for including directly in a Markdown-based blog like mine:

url = 'https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id='

result = aapi.illust_ranking(mode='day_male_r18')
male={}
mcount=0
for i in result.illusts:
  mcount = mcount + 1
  male[i.id] = mcount
while result.next_url:
  next_qs = aapi.parse_qs(result.next_url)
  result = aapi.illust_ranking(**next_qs)
  for i in result.illusts:
    mcount = mcount + 1
    male[i.id] = mcount

result = aapi.illust_ranking(mode='day_female_r18')
fcount=0
for i in result.illusts:
  fcount = fcount + 1
  if i.id in male:
    print '* [F: %d, M: %d](%s%s)' % (fcount, male[i.id], url, i.id)
while result.next_url:
  next_qs = aapi.parse_qs(result.next_url)
  result = aapi.illust_ranking(**next_qs)
  for i in result.illusts:
    fcount = fcount + 1
    if i.id in male:
      print '* [F: %d, M: %d](%s%s)' % (fcount, male[i.id], url, i.id)

Rankings and links after the jump, because about a third of the clean sets of 500 and more than half the R-18 sets of 300 interest multiple genders:

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As popular and photogenic as she is, it’s a bit surprising that they just keep recycling the same handful of photoshoots of Asuka Kishi (岸明日香). Then again, she’s only had 3 photobooks in six years compared to 15 DVDs, so perhaps her fans just want to see them bounce.

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The OP and ED songs have been stuck in my head all week. I’ve rewatched episodes 1-3. I lightly skimmed the first light novel to see how faithful the anime is. I watched episode 4 when it came out this morning, then read the epilogue to see what they changed (mostly same events, different actions and implications; Tirana’s outfit was not described in the book…).

As expected, they finished off book 1. Unexpectedly, they finished it early and went right into book 2. All the other books are about 20% shorter than the first one, though, which means they’re either going to try to get all the way through book 4, or spend extra time on 2 and 3; not sure how either plan would work out based on how they handled this one.

It has some flaws (including the animation budget), but I like it.

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Stop digging up dead idol singers and start stocking up on dried squid, because Zombieland Saga Revenge is coming!

Abandoning the streaming rights to the Japanese version of a recent show while keeping the dub version online is not interesting to me. I just removed half a dozen recent shows from my watchlist because of that. I can still watch them on Crunchyroll, but your FireTV client actually works. If only you two were partners or something; oh, wait.

No idea how this ties into “Cycling”. Unless she’s a personal trainer.

Also, what have I purchased that made you think a “Cycling” category would be a good set of recommendations?

Then again…