“Creation science” has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage—good teaching—than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
— Stephen Jay Gould, in The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, page 186Cop Craft episode 4
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.
OMC: Asuka Kishi
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.
Re: Universal Appeal
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:
Graphics card bleg
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)
Not a pick-up line (2)
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.
Dockerizing DeKindle
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.
Faster, please.
A Glorious Future Approaches!
You know what this means:
Service Elf
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!”
