How did I spend the last two days? Discovering that a machine that was powered off was sending a two megabit/second stream of SMTP traffic out through our firewall to another machine that had been powered off four days earlier, and that would have been on the far side of a VPN even if it had been turned on. And the VPN configuration had been removed from the firewall, which by this point was a completely different machine (hardware and OS) from the one that had been there four days earlier.

So, there’s an upcoming tv anime series based on the manga Rosario + Vampire, and they’ve put up a promo site that makes it look like a fan-service comedy with schoolgirl vampire hunters. This has a certain Buffy-esque appeal to it.

Except that I own one volume of the manga, and it’s filled with blood and murder. Also fan-servicey schoolgirl vampire hunters, but the bad guys aren’t at all cute, and neither is what they do to their many victims.

Even if they tone that down for the anime, I don’t think I’ll be looking forward to this one.

[Update: the title says it all, really]

I’ve been getting a little Youtube-happy around here recently, which slows down page-loading, but I can’t resist the megadol:

A Chinese online game is enforcing gender in character creation. Want your online avatar to be a girl? Prove you’re a girl. Using a webcam.

In their next release, players will be required to provide proof that they’re elves, dwarves, trolls, warriors, wizards, thieves, heroes, assassins, or demigods before they’re allowed to select anything but the “geek living in mom’s basement” character class.

By the end of the year, they plan to require all characters to be exact replicas of their players, leading to 1000-man raids on the Lord of Cheetos and endless camping of the Valley of Free Porn.

Two guys working alone in an electronics factory at 1:30am, and one of them falls into an open vat of sulfuric acid?

It’s nice to hear that OSHA is investigating, but I can’t help but think that a company that lets unsupervised 18-year-olds work around a waist-deep vat of acid in the middle of the night should have been shut down a long time ago.

[Update: nice trailer]

In the commercial for your upcoming live-action show, you say “I’ll use my magic to make my students happy”. Having read the comic, I’ve got to tell you, it ain’t your magic they’re after.

At first glance, it sounds like a recipe for failure: take one of your idol singers whose career has been languishing since her partner was kicked out for being a bad girl, team her up with a bikini model and a professional eater, dress them all up in Gal styles, and have them do para-para moves as they sing their dance tunes.

Okay, maybe it was a recipe for failure, because in the middle of the hype leading up to their first single, lead singer Nozomi Tsuji abruptly dropped out. Why? She’d been knocked up by Ultraman (more precisely, the latest actor to take on the role).

The powers that be quickly replaced her with one of their best-known idol’s little sister, who’s certainly appealing, but lacks the desperately hungry fanbase that Tsuji provided. Result: the one-hit wonder Gyaruru.

Mildly amusing, but the real draw for me is that bikini idol Ami Tokito is a curvy meganekko…

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I guess we do this: