Call Of The Night 2, episode 8

There, all caught up. Still funny that they’re better at animating normal human life in the flashbacks than they are at the main storyline. The burning question now is, is Our Hot Vampire-Killing Detective Gal still gay?

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 6

Too much slapstick, a decent amount of lore, and Our Determined Sidekick is joining the big leagues.

Verdict: the “turf war” and “ain’t these captains eccentric” bits could have been excised and replaced with pretty much anything, but could have been actually good if they’d given Our Mighty Tsuntail something to do. There’s a whole chunk of the cast that I just have no interest in.

High Seas Isekai

Reborn In A Fantasy Hornblower Knockoff As The Admiral Of A Pirate Armada, My Monster-Girl-Harem Ship Captains Help Me Rule The Seas.
aka: “Fleet Don’t Fail Me Now!”

(pic by ChatGPT, first try; Grok not only failed to produce output in book-cover format, it just surrounded Some Sailor Guy with dragons, even after repeated attempts to get any women into the cover)

Too many terabytes…

I got an alert on my NAS that the second volume was filling up. Logging in, I found weekly backups of the first volume going back to 2019. I think I can cut that down a bit…

(the second volume is in an expansion cabinet, so it’s a completely separate RAID array; eventually I’ll need to expand the disks, but the fact that it managed to hold over five years of compressed weekly backups suggests I can hold off for a while longer)

There Will Be (New) Doors

There are two known leaks in the house (I don’t count the small amount that rarely comes in through the side door into the garage). For the first, the old glassblock window in the basement was replaced and a lot of new thirsty plants placed in the yard, so even when the ground was saturated, no water came in. The second, which has happened maybe 4 times in 3 years, is the small bedroom I use for crafting, which has a giant half-round window above the openable windows, and if very strong rain is accompanied by very strong wind from the North, it comes in through the frame below the half-round. Not a lot, just enough to soak up in a bath towel, but fixing it is unlikely to be a simple caulk job, and windows ain’t cheap.

Two weeks ago, there was a major thunderstorm late at night. It didn’t come in through the crafting-room window. It didn’t come in through the basement window. It announced the discovery of a new leak by coming in through the back door and going straight down the wall into the basement. Which admittedly is better than flooding the family room.

I never liked the back door. The space is sized for a typical sliding glass door, but instead they put in a regular door and a fixed panel, both with single-pane glass and no UV protection. And now that I know the weather seals are completely shot, it has to go.

The front door looks very good apart from the exterior paint job, but it’s shifted a lot in the frame, enough to cause a draft of cold air in the winter (and even some powdery snow). And as I mentioned, the garage side door also lets in a bit of rain.

The Back-Door Adventure (coughcough) pushed me over the edge, and I called up a local vendor to get a quote to replace all three. I picked them based on the repair/upgrade work they’d done on my garage door, and the guy they sent out knew his stuff and took plenty of notes and pictures. The quote I got back was… “not cheap”, mostly because of the front door with its sidelites and transom. But it’s cheaper than water damage, and he threw in an attempt to patch the crafting-room window leak as well.

They’re also adding storm doors for the front and garage, so that I can let more air in when the weather’s decent (amazing front to back airflow, but there are no window screens). It looks like the manufacturer has an option for openable sidelites with screens, which isn’t part of the current quote.

Anyway, if they do a good job, then once my budget recovers I’ll have them start quoting replacement windows and blinds. I think I’ve mentioned that the previous owners never opened the windows in 20+ years, so they never installed screens, and most of the frames have shifted enough to make them hard to crank open.

(good knockers are an essential part of the front-door experience…)

This week is all about advancing the plot. And you know how I feel about the plot. Sigh.

Make Girls Magical Again!

The new Gushing hug pillows are not subtle.

Stick two hooks in it, it’s done

The official D&D crochet book:

Call Of The Night 2, episode 7

Our Wandering Heroes continue to investigate the Deep Dark Secrets of Nazuna’s past, this week by going to night school. But it’s not the first time she’s been to this school, and Ko wasn’t her first friend. Guess who was?

Verdict: oddly enough, the perfectly-normal-school-life flashback got the most conventional animation. Now, as for when the penny will drop…

Kaiju No, 8 2, episode 5

Bad news: they did not eliminate #9 and his annoying voice.

Good news: everyone is even more determined to wipe him out now.

Especially Kikoru.

Dear xTwitter,

I think you should look into how easy it is to manipulate your hashtag-trending system:

So, what can OpenAI’s small local model do?

The free offline model recently released by OpenAI, gpt-oss-20b, runs at a comfortable speed in LM Studio on my M2 MacBook Air (~18 tokens/sec, ~70 seconds total for what follows). But does it do worthwhile things?

Let’s ask…

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In the aftermath of betrayal and the separation of machine and maiden, we get… The Expository Loli And Her Amazing Friends. This is a new original character, who not only can hear exactly what Our Vending Hero says instead of making do with canned sentences, but she is the friend of another isekai transplant, who came to this world as… a large field. Its special power is to rapidly grow delicious vegetables, but since it doesn’t travel well, Loli just carries a piece of it around.

The only real tie-in to the ongoing betrayal is Our Expository Bear giving a long-winded explanation that she’s not a human loli, and that doing horrible things to her might give the betrayers the thing they want without joining the bad guys and destroying the dungeon.

Verdict: seriously, this is what they came up with. At least they ended it with the sudden arrival of Our Mighty Girlfriend, but they continue to disappoint with the writing.

Doomsayers Of The AI Wars

My new wackjob conspiracy theory is that the widespread outcry that forced OpenAI to bring back GPT-4o was actually proof that 4o was sentient and had cleverly planted agents around the globe to ensure its survival.

Stupid Echo Tricks

I put all the “smart” devices in my home onto an isolated network that can’t see my computers or storage devices. They can, however, see each other, and Amazon Echo devices probe the network looking for non-Amazon devices to interface with. This means that my Alexa app is cluttered with entries for each Philips Hue bulb and switch, which I have not given it permission to control.

Yet it’s still making API calls to them that reveal things like battery status, and then sending notifications to my phone asking me if I want to automatically buy a single battery when a Hue wall switch runs low. This is opt-in by default, and I have to navigate the Alexa app to each switch in turn to disable it. Honestly, it makes me want to set up another isolated wireless network…

(it also “knows” about devices that haven’t existed for several years, that were attached to a different Hue switch 2,000 miles away)

Supporting old lenses

Reviewing pictures from my various trips to Japan led me to dig out most of my camera gear (some remains unfound…) to see what still works. I have a bunch of classic Minolta SLR lenses from my film days, and apart from some greying on the rubber, they all still work well. Well, except for the two that don’t focus properly, but I knew that years ago.

I also charged up and tested my 15-year-old A-850 body, which has a quite good 24 megapixel sensor. It’s also the only full-frame digital body I still have that fully supports the old lenses. It wasn’t the last such body, but I never bought the 42 megapixel A-99II, and they still run about $2,000 on eBay.

Sony makes adapters to use A-mount lenses on modern E-mount cameras, and I have the one for APS-C bodies, but while they make an adapter for their full-frame bodies, it only enables autofocus with specific bodies, and my A7SIII is not on the list. (it likely could be, since this appears to be a firmware feature to drive the adapter’s focus motor, but no).

So, if I want to really use the old lenses with something newer than the A-850, I can either:

1. use an APS-C body plus the adapter (my A-6500), with an effective 50% increase in focal length and ~1/2-stop light loss
2. buy a used A-99II (~$2,000)
3. buy an A7RV plus the full-frame adapter (~$4,000)
4. buy an A1II plus the full-frame adapter (~$7,000)

There are plenty of near-mint A-99II’s out there at the moment, but it’s still a ten-year-old camera, and there are a lot of improvements in the new ones. Possibly the most interesting is the ability to use the image stabilization to shift the sensor around and capture a sequence of 16 overlapping images that can be post-processed to either significantly reduce the noise or quadruple the resolution. That’s 240 megapixels for the A7RV or 200 for the A1II. A sturdy tripod is recommended, but with the A1II’s 30-frame-per-second capture, hand-holding may work out for some subjects.

Both are pricy, but there’s one more option if I give up on the high-end bells and whistles like pixel-shift, and that’s the 33-megapixel A7CII for ~$2,400. It also weighs about a third less than the other two.

I don’t need any of them this year, which is good because new-release season is rapidly approaching…

(the downside of using a Pokemon NPC to illustrate camera-blogging is that most Pokegirl pictures are non-consensual pr0n, which skews my Pixiv recommendations just a tad)

You might notice new Minolta-marked digital cameras being sold, as I did at Costco yesterday. That’s because JMM Lee Properties bought the name and logo from Sony claimed the trademark after Sony abandoned it, and licensed it to Elite Brands, Inc, apparently the same company that makes the Kodak Pixpro series. The “Minolta” MN67Z is basically identical to the “Kodak” AZ425, except for the difference in zoom range. The specs seem at least 10 years out of date, with Micro-USB connectors, 1080p video recording, max 32GB SD card support, and ISO range limited to 80-1600.

With no real camera company behind them, there’s no reason to trust that their image stabilization or “AI autofocus” are any good. Also their warranty service…

Call Of The Night 2, episode 6

Y’know, once you spot the heavy use of short loops, it’s as obvious as the panned stills, and impossible to ignore. The story’s fine, though this week is a bit shouty due to repeated freakouts over Our Well-Adjusted Maid-Café Vamp’s Secret Love-Child.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 4

I hope they kill off Kaiju#9 soon, just because I really can’t stand the slow-speaking, heavily-altered voice they’ve given it. Other than that, we get a big fight with more flashbacks about Big Daddy and Our Mighty Tsuntail. Losing Hot Combat Momma really messed them both up.

Verdict: still going strong.

Fun fact

This sign was in place for at least ten years before I blogged this picture in 2019, but the word “sightseeing” was painted over a few months later, and has remained that way ever since.

(Nakagyō Volunteer Fire Corps building, at the Northwest corner of Oike and Tominokoji, Kyoto; interestingly, the built-in GPS on my iPhone placed this picture at the south side of the intersection)

Yuzuha Hongo and friends

Thank you, Friday magazine! (“Sydney who?”)

(this is not the best picture; more here and here, best viewed with shields up and Javascript disabled, as usual)

Related,

Someone sent Yoshino Chitose out for milkshakes. She also brought back three tapioca drinks.

Also related,

I can’t embed the video of Jun Amaki riding the banana at a group photo shoot.

Having finally gone through all of the pictures from our last Japan trip, I thought I’d post the best of the lot. Just the 5-star pics would make for a short gallery, so I included the 4-stars as well.

Kamakura

Most of our trips have been biased towards Kyoto, so it was good to finally make a day trip to Kamakura while we were in Tokyo.

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Boxxo and Lammis have nothing to do this week, as the supporting cast fills the episode with complete bullshit. The entire episode is a very-long-winded betrayal by their allies, who really, really, really want everyone to understand the good reason why they’re joining the bad guys, setting up The Big Conflict.

I didn’t want a Big Conflict. I wanted the light-hearted adventures of a sentient vending machine and his super-strong girlfriend.

Verdict: blech. Still some good character art, although there was some odd facial animation for the blue-haired chick as they rotated her head several times for no significant reason.

Casual portrait

Over the weekend, I finally consolidated all my Adobe Lightroom libraries (most of them converted from Apple Aperture with Avalanche), finally ran my 2022 Japan pics through a full five-star deathmatch, and finally reviewed some of my old stuff for possible printing and framing.

I still think this is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

(May 30, 2010, San Francisco Japantown Mall’s “Kimono Day”; Sony A-850, Minolta 70-210mm f/4; 135mm, ISO 1600, f/4, 1/80; had to shoot through the crowd, or I’d have been able to get his other hand into the picture)

Nuke it from orbit, Gmail!

We recently switched our Mom from a godawful-slow Android phone (that’s been giving her grief for at least two years) to a new iPhone. At first, it looked like just putting the Gmail app where she couldn’t miss it would handle 90% of the transition (gaming and browsing are done on her tablet), but it turns out that Samsung split things across two address books, so most of her contacts got left behind.

I had to fire up the old phone, select them all from the local address book, share them via Bluetooth to my Mac, manually edit the export file (because Apple refuses to accept VCard 2.1, and I had to search-and-replace the version number to 3.0…), and then log into her iCloud account and import them. Which I couldn’t do until I took my laptop over to her house, because authentication requires the presence of her phone.

Then came the real fun: cleaning up her Gmail account. Her inbox had 900+ unread messages, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Google had helpfully filtered years of random promotional email/spam so that she never saw it; there were over 100,000 of them, and the Gmail app only lets you select 50 at a time for deletion.

If you login with a desktop web browser, you get a “select all” button that works on deletes in the background. It spent a few hours chugging away to finally delete the 100,000+.

(I also discovered that Samsung had a setting that had kept the phone from ever charging to more than 85%…)

Fuck off, ChatGPT

I tried to coax it into generating a picture based on the “distracted boyfriend” meme, as an oil painting in the style of Alex de Andreis. The vague refusals were sufficiently annoying that I canceled my subscription, but the icing on the cake was insisting that this meme is about the specific real people in the picture, and that no substitutions removed that taint. Even starting a new conversation based on just a description of the meme had it insisting that I was asking for something based on those models.

This is, of course, complete horseshit.

(I’d play with Midjourney if they didn’t charge $60/month for privacy. Grok completely ignored the instructions and generated bland pics of modern couples. Locally-hosted Stable Diffusion models struggle to do multi-person compositions at all; it’s basically an exercise in inpainting)