Category: Geekery

Ryoko, More Or Less

I went through some of my storage bins Saturday afternoon as part of my ongoing effort to actually, you know, move in to this new house properly. Put stuff on shelves, put stuff in storage, live a bit less “in boxes.” That sort of thing.

In the process I came across some of my old Tenchi Muyo merchandise purchases, such as some “super deformed” figurines and a 6 inch tall McFarlane Toys rendition of Ryoko (complete with small companion Ryo-ohki).

On the back panel you could see the entire “Animation from Japan” line from this run of McFarlane Toys: Two characters from the movie AKIRA, Vash from the show TRIGUN, and Ryoko here. That’s it.

Then I realized… I have shelf space now. And it’s not like I’m keeping this for resale value as a collector’s item. Why not just… get it out of that packaging after all these years? So I did:

Poor Edelgard. First Holo the Wise Wolf, now Ryoko the Space Pirate. It’s getting crowded on that shelf.

The quality’s actually fairly decent overall. The “flowing robe” is sort of a rubbery plastic and holds its shape pretty well. Getting the “beam saber” into her hand was tricky and I nearly broke the thing in the process. Having the entire figure kind of leaning forward in an action pose isn’t the worst choice they could have made. All things considered, though… something looks off about her. It’s like some other figurine is cosplaying as Ryoko, which is a weird-assed thought to have but that’s what I’ve got. My brain is the way it is.

Anyway. Another fandom represented on the display shelves, this time one of the oldest of all my anime fandoms over the years.

Oh, right, I also unboxed my Zentraedi Officer’s Pod. Did I forget to mention that?

Alas, the regular Zentraedi Battlepod is in really bad shape and cannot stand on its own two legs. In the box it remains. By the way: Bonus points if you recognize the foam pickaxe…

So that’s the absolute oldest anime fandom of my life (Robotech!) represented. I’m such a nerd.

15 July, 2024
State of Play – July 2024

I’m basically just working, playing, and occasionally doing home improvements along with the regular daily/weekly chores. The big work project isn’t at a point yet where I can really talk about it much (not a matter of secrecy, more a matter of being in a state of flux) and chores are boring, so let’s talk about games.
(more…)

13 July, 2024
Hello, Summertime

It’s been a slow posting month, probably not helped by the fact that I’m essentially on a Satisfactory hiatus. (I’m expecting 1.0 to drop early in autumn but we don’t know for sure yet. Whenever it does, it’ll break all existing saves, so… why bother?) Is it time to find another game to post about? Maybe. Or perhaps I should post about a variety of games, since that’s actually what I’m playing now. Honkai Star Rail, Gems of War, Titan Quest (yes, the precursor to Grim Dawn which I like far better), FFXIV (some day I’ll reach level 50)… I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.

Oh right, Unicorn Overlord, which I keep trying to gel with and just can’t for whatever reason. That reason is probably something to do with the fact that most of the actual strategy is in setting up “unit” compositions because once you’re in a battle scenario the outcome of any given clash is predetermined. How exciting. How fun. Let’s play 12-directional rock-paper-scissors without even the fun of directly controlling the output of a combat clash.

Anyway. Living in the new house is still going great aside from the screeching dishwasher, and while it’s a bit annoying to need to don two layers every time the AC comes on… I’ll take that over the AC simply having almost no effect (and being too loud to hear yourself think, on top of that).

Work is progressing along. The odds are good that I won’t be getting any time off for the next few months as we have a big migration looming. Yay? We’ll see.

Anyway. I hope your summertime is cool and cozy.

26 June, 2024
What’s starting, when, exactly?

If I had to see this, then so do you.

Arrows added via screenshot utility for emphasis. Names NOT changed to protect the guilty.

A few minutes ago I received a marketing email in my work account from SkyKick, an outfit that does some cloud-related stuff related to Microsoft’s cloud offerings, like migrating email from local Exchange to Microsoft 365. We do business with them so actually blocking them would be counterproductive (supposedly), fine, whatever.

But. At 4-something in the afternoon (the day before, and a federal holiday no less) I have a very, very hard time believing that they have a webinar starting 2 hours from right now. Especially since the start time is also clearly stated as 11 o’clock (Eastern, because the entire business world operates on US Eastern Time, right?) tomorrow.

All I can figure is that somehow it being 6pm Eastern right now is translating to… two business hours before 11am Eastern tomorrow? I guess? Dunno, seems wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to me.

Not that I care. They’d have to pay me serious money to get me in attendance for a Microsoft Copilot (hawk, spit) presentation. Yuck.

19 June, 2024
Re-Foundry

Given that we’re never, ever, going to use the Starfinder stuff I set up in the Foundry VTT rig, I figured I’d get all that cleaned out. So I did. All of the systems, all of the modules, everything. In addition, I performed an upgrade to version 12.

It’s clean, it’s tidy, it’s ready for… somebody to make use of for running some kind of tabletop-RPG-type game. Dunno who, when, or what, but hey… if you need a Foundry rig and don’t want to shell out for it, I already did so maybe you won’t have to?

Wheeeee.

11 June, 2024
Duo Universal

Just a quick heads-up for other WordPress admin types who installed the Duo plugin years ago and kind of forgot about it… apparently it’s been deprecated in favor of a new plugin which supports the new “universal prompt” system. It’s not hard to upgrade (deactivate old, install new, activate new, enter the same token/passkey/hostname as you did before into new, authenticate, delete the old once you’ve confirmed new works) but I wish there’d been a bit more communication about this.

Also be aware that Universal Prompt defaults to an immediate push notification rather than giving you a button to click to initiate a push. Other than that, it’s basically the same, and works just fine. Hooray for security.

1 June, 2024