Dungeon Chibis, episode 9

This one has everything: Shota power! New skills! Rich-girl mansion! Jealous Crush-chan! Easily-distracted Adventure Girls! Soaking wet Crush-chan in clingy outfit! Girl bonding! Cold showers for boys who really need them! Insert song in implausible voice! Victory in battle! …and a payoff on last week’s foreshadowing, as Our Rich Mage Princess collapses. That didn’t take long.

Verdict: I’m pleased that Our Chibi Devil Shota did not get weird and gay this week. Also that Our Chibi Devil Devil is out for another taste of that sweet sweet life-drain that powers up her bustline, er, “powers”, yeah I meant to say “powers”.

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 8

In which Our Cheer Gals discover that turning your hobby into a job creates exhaustion, friction, conflict, and social-media haters. They still live in an idealized world where outcall cheer delivery does not result in being sex-trafficked to Saudi Arabia or Hollywood, and where the haters are mildly rude and don’t make a single lewd comment. But it’s not that kind of show.

Verdict: the summer slump continues.

Pete’s Adventures In MacLand…

I’m amused at the culture shock. I’m actually surprised that Safari isn’t remembering his tabs, since my usual problem is getting MacOS to not reopen everything I had open when I logged out, rebooted, or an app crashed; it’s done in a way that is not useful. The primary thing I remember about configuring Safari is uncheck ‘Open “safe” files after downloading’; this should never have been on by default.

The menubar follies were likely related to one of those settings I carefully disabled years ago and it’s followed me from Mac to Mac ever since. There’s a whole bunch of stuff hidden vaguely under “accessibility”, like not making things translucent to show the colors in your background screen.

I have no idea how he’s getting screencap to launch Photos, since I’ve been using Cmd-Shift 3 and Cmd-Shift-4 since before Macs ran Unix, and the most annoying thing they’ve done to that is put some stupid preview image in the lower right corner for several seconds before actually saving it to the Desktop like Tog intended. Tip: open /Applications/Utilities/Screenshot.app once, select the options menu, and disable “show floating thumbnail”.

As for dingus-click, I hesitated to google that one, but it sounds like Ctrl-Left-Click in Terminal.app. That’s another app where I’ve been using it for so long and copying config files around that I had no idea what the default behavior was like until I got my new work Mac.

(I think I spent about a week de-iPadding that machine and getting it to work sensibly; somewhere there’s a Github page that documents “Macs for Engineers” or some such, but I did it by hand again)

(Update: macOS Setup Guide, a subset of this github repo)

Meanwhile, in a dusty archive…

…I’ve discovered that I still have a double-fuckton of resource-fork Type 1 fonts, and while there are a number of “free” “converters”, they always seem to leave out the part about extracting the metrics files. Converting them to PFB format isn’t terribly useful unless you have the matching AFM or PFM files.

Anyway, I found an abandoned project on my NAS where I was trying to clean up the mess. The files have timestamps from 2002…

(“What’s that”, Frieren asks, “You think 22 years is a long time? Amateur.”)

Surprisingly, the resource forks have somehow not been deleted in all that copying around. Although some of them are in AppleDouble format, some are in the modern MacOS’ vestigial file/..namedfork/rsrc format, and I even found some BinHex and Stuffit files crufting up some directories. Blech. NextStep was the best thing ever to happen to Apple.

(why was I looking through old fonts? because the Adobe suite I pay for that lets me use a pornucopia of fonts for free does not include Barmeno, and Berthold wants $367.99 for the complete family, or $45.99 per weight. Not having won the lottery yet, I groveled over the NAS and managed to find a backup of a backup of a Windows box that had Adobe Type Basics installed on it, with four weights in PFB/AFM/PFM; it also had all the fonts from Illustrator 7 and Corel Draw 4 (the Bitstream/URW collection that replaced their earlier lower-quality pirated shovelware fonts).

“…you other coders can’t deny”

Red Cat Ramen, episode 8

I want the t-shirt. And the girl, although this isn’t that kind of show.

(this, on the other hand, is definitely that kind of show)

Cosplay Harem, episode 8

This week, Our Heroes take a stand, refusing to hide what they’re really up to just because everyone’s going to think they’re pervy freaks. This reignites the passion in Our Hot Teacher’s heart, and she backs them up as they head to the battlefield. But first, a good look at the competition, the lickable cosplay queen “753”, Nagomi.

Who promptly pounds Our Heroic Newbie’s confidence into the dust. Next week: drama at the event hall!

Verdict: Nagomi presents as Our First Mean Girl, but they soften the blow by showing what a giant nerd she is, in many ways Our Obsessed Hero’s evil twin. So we not only added more depth to Our Hot Teacher this week, we didn’t get a one-dimensional antagonist stereotype.

(relevant fan-art! and I want a copy of Teacher’s final cos-rom…)

Bye Bye, Bye Bye Earth?, episode 7

Yeah, I have no idea where this is going. Rather than tying up all the strings from last week, it tugs half-heartedly on a few of them and then throws out half a dozen more. And they managed to make a Belle/catgirl bath scene boring.

Verdict: please make sense next week.

Dungeon People, episode 7

I’ve decided that this is basically the same show as Red Cat Ramen. Except for, y’know, the magic. And the monsters. And the willingness to kill. They’re both just cozy.

Fun fact

If you use sort -n -u, it will only consider the first field when deciding if lines are “unique”. That is:

% cat sample.txt
3 pony
1 cat
2 fish
2 dog

% sort -u sample.txt 
1 cat
2 dog
2 fish
3 pony

% sort -n -u sample.txt 
1 cat
2 fish
3 pony

I was not expecting it to eat the dog. Basically, I’ve always thought of sort -u as shorthand for sort | uniq, but that ain’t quite so. -n is actually shorthand for -k1n, and when you specify a key field, -u only considers uniqueness of that field; it doesn’t matter if the rest of the line differs.

“You are my density!”

Major progress on analyzing font color.

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Isn’t this part of the origin myth for karate?

Thirty-six flights were cancelled at an airport in Japan, because a pair of scissors went missing. Spoiler: the scissors weren’t actually missing, they just weren’t in the secure locker where they were supposed to be stored between authorized uses.

International political comparison left as an exercise for the reader.

(this is one of those shows that has a triple fuckton of fan-art, almost none of which is any good)

Back-and-forth on Typeface app

Y’know, I often disagreed with Tog’s classic Apple User Experience standards, and with many of his later recommendations, but it was all evidence-based; his teams tested the hell out of everything, and produced clear, usable rules. Now, with the modern Apple feels-over-facts lack of any standards, I realize that the reason I’m having difficulty communicating with the author of Typeface is that we don’t even speak the same language. Neither in UI design nor in typeface management.

He doesn’t seem to understand why scattering information all over the screen is bad design, or why adjusting the font display with a mix of menus, buttons, popups, pulldowns, and modifier keys, often requiring you to move the mouse 6+ inches between steps, is bad design. Sigh.

Speaking of type…

I’ve completely overhauled my old termanal script that analyzes fixed-width fonts for their suitability for coding (vertical alignment of characters commonly used together in code, common width for math operators, precise metrics, and full metadata), and it now generates JSON output for all the fonts you feed it, allowing me to generate comparison tables for my whole collection, as a technical companion to programmingfonts.org.

All of this is being done by calling the tx and ttx tools from the Adobe Font Development Kit for Opentype (AFDKO). With the right options, they can export pretty much all the usable data from a font, including the actual glyph outlines.

This gave me an idea for calculating something termanal doesn’t do: estimate the color of the font. That is, how thicc are the glyphs, and therefore how dark does a line of text look.

1. ttx exports selected glyphs from a font as an SVG font.
2. I thinly wrap that into a complete SVG file that prints each glyph in a known location at the same (large) size.
3. inkscape renders each glyph to individual PNG files.
4. magick counts the number of black pixels.
5. divide by set-width * (ascent - descent)
6. average the results over N typical glyphs.
7. profit!

And it even worked on the first try, more or less, although the launch overhead for inkscape seems to dominate, producing the odd result that it takes twice as long to render everything at 10% of the size, while 50% is twice as fast. I’m going to tinker with batching things up so I can call inkscape and magick only once and have them work from tempfiles instead of directly piping from one to the other. This might involve switching it to Python, since all the components appear to have some degree of API support.

I named it coloranal, of course.

Anyway, have some cheesecake:

Clarification:

Inkscape doesn't actually support SVG fonts (in fact it silently ignores them, hence the "more or less" for my first try), but the "d" attribute of a glyph is identical to the "d" attribute of a path. They're just vertically flipped. Which, honestly, doesn't matter for this use. 😁

<glyph unicode="y" horiz-adv-x="600" d="M131,-217C241,-217 300,-140 338,-42l213,552l-78,0l-106,-287C350,177 332,124 315,76l-4,0C291,125 270,178 251,223l-119,287l-83,0l227,-512l-14,-36C236,-105 196,-149 128,-149C113,-149 97,-146 84,-142l-17,-65C84,-213 108,-217 131,-217z"/>
<path id="y" d="M131,-217C241,-217 300,-140 338,-42l213,552l-78,0l-106,-287C350,177 332,124 315,76l-4,0C291,125 270,178 251,223l-119,287l-83,0l227,-512l-14,-36C236,-105 196,-149 128,-149C113,-149 97,-146 84,-142l-17,-65C84,-213 108,-217 131,-217z" transform="scale(1,-1)"/>

Finally, a reason for the Chubby Elf series to exist:

So Ai Shinozaki can cosplay her (site not safe for work or Javascript):

…without the “chubby” part…

NSFW

Drinks I won’t buy again…

Before I bought my SodaStream, I was a regular consumer of the Sparkling Ice pink grapefruit drink. It was always a hassle to find an adequate supply in stock locally, largely due to the same problem Snapple has: shipping mixed cases to push flavors that don’t sell.

Recently, they released a bunch of branded Starburst flavors. I bought a few, and I regret doing so, because they tasted like melted creamsicles.

Accessibility Lite

So I sent feedback to the author of Typeface, and he already had a beta update that increases contrast. Good: I can now read the nearly-black-on-nearly-white tinyfonts in the sidebar, and usually tell the difference between the dark-gray inactive tiny dot and the blue active tiny dot. Not so good: the nearly-black not-in-font placeholder characters are basically impossible to distinguish from the black preview characters. So, baby steps.

He also asked what I meant about wanting more detailed views, so I fired up FEX for some screenshots that demonstrate the difference between visualizing fonts and managing them. We’ll see what comes out of that.

File under amusing that while the normal state of font activation is two slightly-different tiny dots, hovering the mouse over the dot changes it to a larger distinctive icon showing the state you can toggle it to (minus-sign if it’s currently active, sunburst if it’s currently inactive). There’s also a padlock to indicate system fonts that can’t be deactivated, which you almost never want to see, and can filter out by the obvious method of Option-Right-Clicking on the “Font Book” collection in the sidebar and selecting “Add inverse to filters” (or manually typing the equally-obvious “#!//font-book” in the search bar).

Chibis-A-Go-Go, episode 8

Our Severely Chibi-Whipped Hero almost loses a chance at another rare slime while negotiating with appeasing his mistresses. Then Our Hot Adventure Gals show up, putting him right back in the doghouse, and Hot Naginata Gal offers private tutoring. Gosh, she seems a bit disappointed when he invites Crush-chan, and then her pals want in as well, even the one who isn’t taking the entrance exam.

As if that weren’t dangerous enough, they run into a helldoggie that shouldn’t be on this level, and as soon as they barely manage a victory, its master shows up and curb-stomps them. With everyone about to die in a slow-motion overtalky battle, Our Hero frantically reviews everything he’s got left and finds a trump card: Chibi Devil True Form (powered by his rapidly-dwindling HP).

Our Cute Chibi Hot Busty Devil’s life-draining accelerated puberty unlocks powers well beyond her official rank, leaving the villain baffled. And dead. Her personality hasn’t changed, though, so she demands praise before reverting to chibi form and letting Our Hero live to sub another day.

The helldoggie drops a premium crystal that Our Rich Mage-Maiden quietly states isn’t the one she’s looking for, so we’ll call that something like foreshadowing. Being all Rich Gals, they don’t care about the money from the crystal, and they award the big prize to Our Hero as well: a servant card of the defeated villain.

This should be worth orders of magnitude more than the crystal, but the girls don’t care about that either, and, impulsive as ever, he summons the mighty villain from the card and gets…

Verdict: so much for getting any info on Crush-chan’s missing Dad, and now the villain from the credits has become Our Kinda-Gay Chibi Devil Shota. Yeah, Our Hero regrets the summons.

(maybe he could hand off Snatch-cleaning duties to his new shota)

Cheer Gals, episode 7

Our Cheer Mercenaries are bummed about not getting any orders, until they receive a special request: join the cheerleaders for a losing high school baseball team as they take on Their Rivals, who just happen to be the team from Genki & Wheels’ school. Tropes go wild in this infodump-heavy cheer battle that impresses the roving reporter more than it does the crowd. (note: it must suck to have games scheduled during summer vacation)

Verdict: let’s just call this the summer slump episode, and hope it gets better next week, when Wheels tries out her legs.

Font-manager update

FontBase (even with an “awesome” subscription) is limited to very basic functionality. Worse, it has a two-years-and-counting bug where it will just stop working on a Mac until you completely wipe its configuration and start over (rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/FontBase"). So that’s a big no-can-do.

Typeface, the Mac-only app that directly imports from FontExplorer X Pro, makes extensive use of tiny gray fonts, with the sidebar putting them on a slightly-lighter-gray background, so a giant go-fuck-yourself from 20-year-old app designers with perfect vision. It also uses tiny low-saturation color dots to indicate font-activation status, so that’s a double go-fuck-yourself.

And its focus is very visual as opposed to technical. The only view option is to see large numbers of fonts presented as rendered preview strings. Not, say, a nice tabular layout containing useful information about the fonts you have. And if the font doesn’t have the characters you ask it to preview, it renders them in a default font in (wait for it…) gray. That isn’t even a “preview”.

Sigh. I really, really miss FontExplorer X Pro…

Red Cat Ramen, episode 7

This week’s lessons: be very nice to the cranky-looking old lady, but go ahead and tell off the jerkwad CEO who tries to buy you out. Also, tigers shouldn’t try to eat half a watermelon in one go; something-something red-stained muzzle.

The real drama, though, is that Human-chan is starting to feel a little hurt that Waitress Cat is still not fully accepting her as family.

Cosplay Harem, episode 7

Our Hot Teacher is made of pure awesome. And I’m not just saying that because she’s willing to carve up anyone who threatens to reveal her naughty cosplay past. And as if that’s not enough, she gets a late-night fan-service call from Hot Elf of The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pantsu, who refuses to believe that she threw away her “masterpiece” costume. Foreshadow me harder!

Verdict: I expected her to be my favorite character. I was not disappointed. There were definite LoLs.

Quest For Fur, episode 6

I have no idea what just happened, but I guess we won? Most of the characters I didn’t care about died, anyway. Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting Gandalf The White to be played by a smirking bishie catboy.

Verdict: why do I feel like this was just the prologue, and the actual story starts next week?

Dungeon People, episode 6

Our Miss Clay finally finds a reason to doubt some of her dad’s advice. In fairness, it was really bad advice. Anyway, now that they know how not to burn water, she and Our Dungon Belle can share a friendly meal. Then Our Gal In Black puts on the last suit she’ll ever wear, and we find out exactly why high-level female armor is so skimpy.

Verdict: still fun.

Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead

Pete mentioned an app called Zed, which bills itself as “a high-performance, multiplayer code editor”.

By high-performance, they mean that it needs to leverage your GPU to function at acceptable speeds at the challenging task of displaying a text file.

By multiplayer, they mean real-time collaborative editing with anyone in the world who you can trust to not wipe your hard drive. Because they can:

Since sharing a project gives them access to your local file system, you should not share projects with people you do not trust; they could potentially do some nasty things.

Down the road, they say, they may implement some form of security or sandboxing, because adding it later always works out. They use standard connection encryption, but they’re a bit cagey about exactly how bytes flow between your laptop, their cloud servers, and someone else’s laptop. Which means I should probably give the folks in IT a heads-up, since we all know there’s that one guy who’ll download anything that looks cool and shiny and mentions “AI” and “the cloud”, and there goes our IP.

Oh, yeah, they go there:

Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box, and you can use GPT-4 to generate or refactor code by pressing ctrl-enter and typing a natural language prompt.

I’d say more, but the web site was designed by 20-year-olds with perfect vision, and my eyes are already tired.

uc2p update

I went with Poetry for packaging everything up; it took very little to get it working, including bundling the fonts and making the code locate them. This freed me up to focus on ripping out all of the useless broken bits of Reportlab’s FontFinder class and replacing it with something that allows the user to sensibly select fonts at runtime. This also led me to review some new entries on Programming Fonts (TL/DR: I’m sticking to IO Terminal).

Speaking of which, I rebuilt IO Terminal from the latest version of Iosevka; there’s a lot of active development on it, enough so that I was 8 major revisions behind. I didn’t play with any of the new variants that are available, just rebuilt from tip-of-tree.

…and take it over completely. Patch time!

(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

It would be really nice if DNS worked. Here we are, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and I’ve still got to periodically run a command-line tool to flush stale DNS entries that prevent simple functionality like, say, connecting to Gmail’s IMAP servers. (sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder, that is)

Of course, with how often iCloud mail randomly goes offline, maybe you just don’t know if email breaks…

Totally different show…

Every time I see mention of this season’s Pseudo Harem, I find myself thinking it would be better as a hentai titled Sudo Harem, involving one of those brainwashing smartphone apps that constantly turn up in consent-free fan-art and games.

(classical reference)

It lives…kinda!

Monotype killed off FontExplorer X Pro so completely that the final version they shipped crashes constantly on the last two releases of MacOS. The primary long-time competitor, Suitcase, went full-on with mandatory monthly subscriptions and The Cloud, which, fuck ’em.

A popular cross-platform alternative (with no support at all for legacy font formats), Fontbase, is free for basic use, but charges $3/month for… slightly-less-basic use. I don’t think anyone involved has ever had a large collection of fonts, or even been in the same room with a copy of Font Explorer X Pro. In fact, the only current non-monthly-fee alternative that does have a useful feature set is Typeface, which is… Mac-only.

(FontAgent doesn’t have a monthly fee, but also hasn’t actually implemented some features fully, like “being able to correctly count the number of glyphs in a font”)

Anyway, if you have a license and find a copy of FontExplorer X Pro 7.3.0, and you’re very quick, you can get the Preferences window open and shut off all attempts to connect to servers for updates, the store, etc. It still doesn’t actually work under Sonoma, but you can export all your configs and collections, and manually import them into another font manager. If you can live with the Mac-only thing, Typeface will import everything directly, including all the organization you may have done.

(okay, the connection between poor font-management and collecting the whole set of Molesting Magical Girls heroines in their “SM Big Thanksgiving” form is weak, but so am I)

And I’m thinking about font managers because…

Since Reportlab only handles Type 1 and TrueType, I needed to sort through all my fixed-width fonts and figure out which ones were compatible, so I could test uc2p with a decent variety. I wanted to gather up all the coding fonts I collected and tested several years ago, and they’re all in FEX, which has been crashing since I upgraded to a non-Intel Mac running the current MacOS.

At this point, I’ve pretty much decided that I’ll bundle IO Terminal with the script to guarantee that anyone who downloads it will have at least one known working font, but I’d like to list alternatives, and file some bugs for the problems I’ve seen.

Chibi Life, episode 7

The most surprising thing to happen this week is that Crush-chan did not explode, despite her clear displeasure at her man hanging out in the dungeon with Our Hot Adventure Gals, all of whom are starting to develop a special tingle around Our Action Hero. Yes, even Hot Naginata Gal, and she’s self-aware enough to know what she’s feeling about a boy at least two years younger, although her friends haven’t figured it out yet.

He remains completely oblivious, of course, and even his realization that Crush-chan is the platonic ideal of “his type” isn’t enough to get her out of the friendzone when she hints that maybe he could consider himself close enough to her to finally use her first name. He dismisses the concept of her being jealous that he’s close to other girls as absurd, and focuses on what’s important: how to placate the chibis after skipping a day.

No chibis this week, but we got a new ED song set to stills of the light-novel covers. (note the impressive cleavage on Our Chibi Valkyrie, one of the things they toned down for the anime character designs)

Verdict: first Crush-chan casually gets him to admit he’s been in the dungeon, then she silently accepts being dismissed as just the childhood friend next door, and maintains a frosty silence as each new revelation comes out, all while keeping up a cheerful facade in front of the gang. This chick is damaged, and if this keeps up there’ll be blood on the walls. Next week, a wild villain appears!

(maybe someone should explain to him that that’s not what the “platonic” in “platonic ideal” means…)

Cheer Life, episode 6

“Okay, now that we’re at the hot-springs resort, we need to put on our costumes and go looking for people to cheer for to make videos!”

“No, Smoochy, you need to get into the bath and start selling Blurays.”

Yes, it’s that well-worn trope about winning an onsen vacation for the whole group in a raffle (tickets donated by the record store owner last week), but instead of changing into yukata and heading for the bath, they go out on the town, to cheer!

As for the bathing, hope you liked Smoochy’s painted-on travel outfit, because apparently this is the only hot spring in Japan where girls wear red cocktail dresses into the bath. It’s like it was supposed to be fan-service, including Parkour Gal being shy about stripping in front of others, but someone chickened out at the last minute.

Anyway, an assortment of plot points are sprinkled on the water, including a very mild yuri tease, and Our Pom-Poms formally announce on their new channel that you can call them up if you need a cheer, anytime anywhere. In any realistic universe, they’d show up at a deserted parking lot and never be heard from again.

Verdict: it appears this will not follow the standard underdog sports story. Even when they meet up with the “rival team”, they’re not actually competing in any way; Wheels Gal even promises to join their team once she gets her muscle tone back. That just leaves the cheesecake, and if this is how they do the hot-springs episode, there’s not much hope for a seaside episode with gainaxing beach volleyball.

(which reminds me that they can all be summarized with one word each: Smoochy, Parkour, Princess, Yoga, Genki, and Wheels)

uc2p: cutting over

For many years, my dotfiles included the following aliases:

dlpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -2rGL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -GL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

Cruftily overriding auto-duplexing and European default paper sizes are exactly the sort of things that people don’t want to type every time. -M for media size was another. When Apple ditched PostScript for good, I had to add GhostScript’s ps2pdf - to the pipeline, too. But as of today, it’s just:

dlpr () {
    uc2p -2rL66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    uc2p -L66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

(I made gaudy headers the default, since I always use them anyway, and I haven’t actually written a “simple” style yet)

Not ready for distribution, yet, since Reportlab’s font-handling is a mess. The API for loading custom fonts is awkward, but I could make it work… except that for some reason the font-search functionality is storing all the metadata as byte arrays rather than UTF-8 strings, and it’s failing to reliably extract simple characteristics like “bold” and “italic”. For now I’ve just hard-coded it to use my IO Terminal fonts for everything.

Gate manga, volumes 13-15

Amazon took two weeks to let me know that a series I’d already bought twelve of had three new ones: 13, 14, 15.

(this recommendation is a lot more useful than their relentless promotion of The Little Big Book Of Chatting Up Kids About Sex)

Speaking of Amazon…

…the “four-star styles recommended for you” section keeps getting worse. These were all from one set:

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