Momoiro Clover Z (yes, them) has collaborated with Kiss (yes, them).

Available on Bluray at the end of January, hopefully only in Japan.

Although, shipping on my last order from Amazon Japan was scary-cheap, and the yen is hovering around 120 to the dollar, so if you want it, I recommend combining it with the recent Babymetal concert disc where they cover Morning Musume…

Another slight classification error:

I’m not sure how you’re supposed to use this with your computer monitor, but I suspect first-person shooters are involved…

I have no idea why, but the order of the output of the permute() function in the Perl library Math::Combinatorics depends on the number of elements in @ARGV. This resulted in a rather frustrating debugging session, in which it was assumed that the output was deterministic, and one could reliably shift off the null permutation.

Seriously, when the mere act of adding a command-line option that is completely ignored by the program changes the output, your library is kinda fucked.

Please stop handing packages over to USPS. Two-day shipping is now four if I’m lucky, on a package that will be completely useless to me soon, since they didn’t even try to deliver on Monday, and then (allegedly) showed up at my office today at 6:04pm and found the front door locked.

No, I’m not actually going to include all of them. Not only would that be worse than visiting an endlessly-scrolling Tumblr full of animated GIFs, the vast majority of them are just plain ugly. In addition to the Carey diagram, I’m just going to post six reasonable ones and six random ones, to give you an idea of what’s available.

I’m not going to try an exhaustive search on 25-strand Shigeuchi; 2^17 was bad enough…

[Note: these diagrams are not compatible with ee0r’s 17-strand taka-on-maru braid, which looks pretty much the same, but obviously has a different braiding sequence. Mine is described at the end of this post, and I’ll do a real step-by-step with pictures later.]

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The most common sageo (mounting cord) for a katana is a 9-strand braid normally done on the takadai, but instructions for making it on a marudai are here (my own instructions on how to make it on a foam disk are here, in abbreviated form). After a little practice (and the acquisition of a set of 240-gram tama), I made a quite nice one for my primary iaito, using DMC embroidery floss (6x 4-meter strands) to get just the right color combination. It’s extremely quick and easy, especially if you follow Tada-sensei’s pictures and lift two tama at once.

Commercial Shigeuchi sageo are only found in two styles, solid and 2-strand zig-zag (221111111). The reason for this is that most of the other interlacements kind of suck. Shigeuchi is an oblique 2/2 twill pattern, and the progression of strands across the braid is much more regular than most kumihimo braids. Here’s the Carey diagram for the front side (the back is just a 180° rotation):

As you can see, every strand follows the same ordering in every column, severely limiting the possibilities. In fact, the standard “clockwise from the top” numbering system obscures the regularity a bit; if you numbered the five strands on the right 1-5 from the top, and the four on the left 6-9 from the top, the numbers in the above diagram would all be in order, which quickly became obvious in my 9-color test braid.

Viable three-color patterns are even harder to find, and the only three I’ve found that are worth mentioning are 111113322 (double zig-zag), 113323332 (crossing double-zig-zag) and 111223332 (sort-of triple-zig-zag). I’m sure there are others, but my script didn’t do a good job of reducing the search space, leaving me with 674 GIFs to pick through.

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My family’s coming to town for Christmas, so I went looking for things to do and places to eat. The most amusing thing to show up was this Freedom Festival, which turned out to be an ad for Diaz Brothers Bail Bonds.

Perhaps someone will want this to help make 2015 brighter…