Something

I watched the first episode of Ore no Imouto, which has basically turned my mind to mush, so I am going to collect my incoherent thoughts here.

To start, I've had to Pause to Recover several times during the episode, which usually happens for terrible shows but this one is...good? -Ish?

The opening is called Irony, which is (ironically) a more apt description of irony than the Alanis Morissette's own song, Ironic.

Unlike salt, which is, in fact, rather ionic.

Kyousuke, the main character, is voiced by Nakamura, who is notably the VA for Okazaki (Clannad) and Alto (Macross F). I bring these roles up because it means he's been a harem lead and a tsundere (respectively) before. Uh. Oh.

Kirino, main's sister, is voiced by Taketatsu who was Azusa. Yes, that Azusa.

*pause to recover*

Kirino is basically like having Haruhi for a sister. This one, not the BL one. Yeah, I'm calling that BL. Just look at them! Look at their hair!

In other words she's sociopathic. And a tsundere.

Also, she's a closet otaku.

*pause to recover*

Who pays for her eroges by modeling as a gravure idol.

*pause to recover*

"Why did you buy so many copies of the same thing?"
"As an offering!"

*pause to recover*

So, sucks to be Kyousuke.

On the other hand...


Maybe this is better than squid puns.

I don't even...

So is GQ some sort of welfare Esquire?

It's like a trainwreck, you just can't look away.

Though I am amused that Monteith is remains significantly more clothed throughout than his co-stars. Significantly.

Also, no doubt Grondin has found these pictures of Lea Michele's "tiny" breasts already.

Didn't see it coming

Insane drug laws + right to bear arms.

Who would've thought that was a bad combination?

Well played, America. Well played.

Canadians like chef Michael Smith too much

I spent the day watching Iron Chef America.

The outrage from Michael Smith losing is ridiculous.

First of all, Iron Chef isn't exactly serious business. I mean, I love Jamie Oliver and he lost. Oh well, time to move on. I don't respect him any less because of that.

Secondly, the show isn't that biased towards Flay. His record is 69% (lolol), which is good (~2 wins per loss) but actually puts him percentile-wise in the bottom-half of the Iron Chefs (not including Wolfgang Puck). And a 54-40 point domination is something I've rarely witnessed on the show, so Smith must've put on a really weak defense.

Thirdly the ingredient was a damn avocado, not elephant bushmeat. Don't act like it was super-weighted towards Flay, if you're a world class chef, you should know how to use something like that. Besides, Smith used canned tuna. Really? Really?

Finally, what's all this talk about the American judges not understanding Canadian cuisine? Come on, sauerkraut is more foreign than we are.

Interview with John Sculley

Followed a link to Cult of Mac:

The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.

Whether it’s designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design and even things like how the boards were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve’s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box because he didn’t want people tampering with anything.

In his level of perfection, everything had to be beautifully designed even if it wasn’t going to be seen by most people.

I can attest to the truthfulness of this on circuit boards; I remember when I first cracked open my 'book I was to exclaiming to people about how beautiful it looked in there. But FFS! What a waste of money.

Album Art: Take Two

This time though, I am posting covers that suck.







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Benchmarking

For the record, Grondin, this is small.

Backwards

CiV is as of current broken in half on high difficulties.

Apparently it has REX syndrome worse than CivIII; you can keep settling onto tundra to happiness limit and it does not matter because they are powered by maritime food engine and you just run libraries/specialists in all of them.

The AI is also notorious for its terrible tactical awareness. This is counteracted by its production bonuses as you crank up the difficulty.

"This is feeling less strategic and more tower defense."

Interestingly enough, this runs counter to their selling points of less cities, more strategic combat.

Literal Civ4

<< 15:03:35: immortals are pretty hax
­
>> 15:03:53: raeps archers
­
<< 15:04:25: why does that make any sense
­
>> 15:04:50: YOU try fighting immortals with a bow and arrow
>> 15:05:00: you may have multiple arrows
­
<< 15:06:26: phalanx should
<< 15:06:39: actually
<< 15:06:45: they rape immortals already

>> 15:07:07: phalanx is a formation
>> 15:07:11: should've been hoplites
>> 15:07:15: it was hoplites in civ3
>> 15:07:18: dont know why they changed it­

<< 15:07:52: theoretically when athens builds a hoplite
<< 15:08:04: they are not literally building
<< 15:08:13: one hoplite
­
>> 15:08:27: lol
­
<< 15:08:49: they should pluralize everything to avoid confusion
<< 15:09:08: alternatively
<< 15:09:13: do 3 hoplites­ form a phalanx?
­
>> 15:09:44: you need two endpoints for a line
>> 15:09:47: so i guess 3 is sufficient
>> 15:09:54: it'll be a pretty shitty phalanx though
­
<< 15:11:47: but the thousand nations of the persian empire
<< 15:11:52: will also only have
<< 15:11:55: 3 immortals
­
>> 15:12:00: lol­

<< 15:12:14: each nation is contributing
­
>> 15:12:26: 0.003 men
­
<< 15:12:56: they can't spare too many
<< 15:13:13: they only have 3 pop/nation
­
>> 15:13:19: athens houses
>> 15:13:21: 4 people
­
<< 15:13:35: the 5th one
<< 15:13:37: is a dick
<< 15:13:41: and won't work

New Nano

The UI actually makes me want to seek out some album art for my songs; not like space is an issue on PMPs anymore.

Here are some covers that I like:













I'm giving a special mention to the Cowboy Bebop OST 1, because I love that they made it in the style of bebop era jazz albums.

Panty & Stocking Quite Something

Actually, quite good.



Also, I liked the BGM there. Apparently, Gainax is barely avoiding the banhammer from censors with this one.

Just found out that Cal U is in California.

California, Pennsylvania that is.

Fuck me!

Richard Stallman et alii are crazy et cetra

The usual arguments aside, has it ever occurred to these guys that software often needs to leverage proprietary technologies outside of the software realm entirely?

How are you going to deal with that kind of third party licensing?

Answer: you don't.

That's why GIMP will never support things like Pantone colours. Hell, they're barely competent enough to have CMYK support at all.

Good luck being taken seriously.

Also, Inkscape sucks and people should be ashamed of using it.

Who'd have guess that well paid developers make better products?

Justin Timberlake is the best

Anecdote of the Day

Differentiating things in Matlab will often give you fucked up results depending how you phrase the input.

But integrating in Matlab will usually give a fairly clean result that is often identical regardless of input. And one that's usually nicer than what you get manually.

Which is good because integrating is a hell of a lot harder by hand.

The real reason I quit music

I have too many friends that are musically talented.

There's Mr. Professional Composer Marius "Dickhead" Masalar himself. I will speak no more of him because his ego is doing just fine.

Axon is really good at piano and majoring in such; I guess it's all part of being in a music family.

Mike is godly on sax and then he just decides to quit for no reason.

Dan is dece, I think he's sax RCM 8; he's complained about losing auditions to people crappier than him because school bands tend to favor music majors. I envy his Super Action mostly.

I guess Crobert is pretty good at guitar, but not like Matt Tsang, who is Pretty Good at guitar.

And as much as I hate Kaiser, I was impressed with the diverse number of Not Easy¹ instruments he managed to pick up².

Justin is okay³, I'm giving a shout out to him just because bassoons are hilarious and amazing.

I'm not going to bother counting the number of people that finished Royal Conservatory on piano because among my Asian homies, that's not even an impressive metric anymore.

FFS, even Anya is RCM 9 piano and she's not exactly what I think of as musically inclined. Plus Serbian handicap etc etc.

At least with visual art I only have to compete with people that kick my ass on the internet.

In other news, if I found out Eeshan played Civ4 on Deity, I would've quit the game forever. Right there. Good thing he apparently sucks and doesn't know how anything works.

Or bad thing, I don't know.

1. {Sax, Piano, Flute} ⊂ "Easy"; {Violin, French Horn, Trumpet} ⊂ "¬Easy"
2. Competently AKA not half-assed AKA not like me
3. AFAIK reached level cap with RCM on piano, but bassoons are so much more interesting because if you ever picked up a bassoon you'd understand that none of the finger mappings make any sense. At all.

The Apple Premium

The New Yorker has come out with a new iPad app.

It costs $4.99 an issue on the iPad.

But wait, if you subscribe to the magazine in paperback form, it's less than a dollar an issue.

Ellipsis.

Ellipses.

Civilization V

I think a problem with CiV is that it doesn't iterate on what made things work in the previous games.

It had a fresh new designer without the experience and talent of Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds or Soren Johnson.

As an example, consider Starcraft 2. After the competitive community discovered walling as an effective Terran strategy in the first game, Blizzard maintained it as a defining trait of the race in SCII with lowering Supply Depots. Unbalances can be patched out if the core gameplay is there.

Civ 4 built on Civ 3's successes and corrected degenerative strategies. Maintenance costs were introduced to stop settler fast expands. Wonders were weakened to stop wonder spamming. Overflow was introduced so people didn't need to micro their tiles for resource optimization¹. Of course this made certain old strategies nonviable, but their most devoted players were brought on board to playtest and make comments.

And they backpedaled when the changes were too much. Early prototypes had more natural terrain, but they went back to a more solidly defined tile system when it became confusing for players to understand tiles, which made it hard to develop strategies.

Of course Civ 4 wasn't perfect. Sushi engine was overpowered while most of the other corporations were useless (Standard Ethanol, moer liek Standard EthaLOL m i rite), Inca fast-expand is broken at marathon speeds, diplomacy was easy to game and cottage spam is...well cottage spam.

Hex tiles and new combat rules help fix Civ 4's stupid Stack of Doom mechanic. But where Civ4 fixed old mechanics, CiV gutted them instead. Corporations, religions and espionage are out entirely. Cottages were removed because the culture mechanics were changed. Civics are an entirely different mechanic now.

Perhaps most contentiously, diplomacy is entirely black boxed now. The old system had flaws, and maybe the new system is better. But if you want a serious strategy game, it's never a good idea to obscure mechanics from the players. Maybe they wanted the AI to behave more like people, but that was something Soren Johnson explicitly cautioned against when designing game AIs. If I wanted realistic diplomacy, I'd play Diplomacy. Against people.

CiV is still a new game, so it's a bit early to call it bad. But it's definitely a wait and see at this point.

Certainly good looking though.

1. You can still do stupid things though: barracks, swap queues @ 1 turn to complete, 2x chop, swap back @ chopping complete + whip => $texas. Which goes to show, you just can't keep a good scheming player down.

Bird's Nest MkII

Aviva stadium in Dublin.

I for one think it looks pretty good.



From the sides in any case.

Hang on

TLC is still recording?

They're like 40 now.

Stop.