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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: December 2024

  • Anime Year In Review: 2024

    Normally I’d write a music round-up at this point in the year, but 2024 was kind of dreary for my music library. I bought a new album by PSB (the boys from the shop full of pets) and a new album by PSB (the broadcasting that is a service for the public) and neither of them really stuck in my mind very well. (Sorry, gentlemen.) So let’s talk about anime instead.

    Promotional artwork for the anime, "Dungeon People," showing the two leads as well as various other dungeon dwellers engaged in various dungeon-maintenance tasks.

    I don’t do that here very often. Which is odd because I used to have an entire secondary blog about it. And: Why didn’t I just fold that content into the main blog instead of deleting it? Dingbat.

    Anyway.

    So, 2024. What kind of year was it for watching Japanese animated TV shows?

    Eh? Much like with the music of the year, “Not as good as 2023” is a valid answer. (Your mileage will, of course, vary. I am led to believe that for pop music at large, 2024 was bountiful. I’m happy for y’all enjoyers!) I mean, last year we had the start of both Frieren and Apothecary Diaries, each of which will probably feature on best-of lists for years to come yet.

    (more…)

  • The (al)Lure of Static Site Generators

    So, with all the argy-bargy in the news about WordPress and the guy in charge of it and the ecosystem being affected by that guy’s shenanigans… why stay on WordPress? Why not, for instance, jump on the bandwagon of the last few years and change over to a static site generator (or SSG)? This site could load much faster, and with vastly less server processing overhead! No more SQL database, no more finicky plugin shenanigans… easy peasy, right?

    I spent most of my morning today reading up on doing exactly this, and while it might still work for the webcomic (provided I never update it again… which is admittedly all-too-likely) it won’t work here, and it took hours of reading before I finally found someone who pointed out why:

    When you update the site, you have to regenerate every page on the site. Every time. A lot of these guys (and it’s all guys, yes) have maybe a couple dozen posts, tops. Regenerating the flat files from Markdown sources could take them maybe a minute or so! Who cares, right?

    The current count of entries listed as “posts” on the website you’re reading right now is well over 2,500. And that’s not counting “pages” and other such additions.

    Yeah, nope. I can’t take that seriously. I want to be posting here more often, not less. And if I find myself dreading the rebuild time every time I want to publish, that’s not going to help. (Never mind if something about one of those several thousand posts breaks the generator!) So if I migrate off of Dubya Pee it’ll have to be to something more… CMS-y.

    Such is the way of things, I suppose.

  • Ducks: In Enamel Pin Form

    I wasn’t actually expecting them before Christmas, but here they are: The Frost Dragon Designs “Yellow Duck RPG” enamel pin set, mounted on the corkboard panel that Vyx gifted me (since she knew the pins were coming at some point).

    Twelve enamel pins mounted on a corkboard panel, four rows of three, each pin a different Dungeons And Dragons themed design (wizard, bard, various monsters, etc).

    How could I not have, right? Right. I’m glad we’re on the same page.

    Merry Christmas to all who celebrate in whatever way you choose to, and a delightful regular (if potentially off-kilter) day to everyone else.

  • Rascal Does Not Dream of a Sister Venturing Out

    Say you’re a high-school-aged boy, and for whatever reason you’ve turned out to be a kind of magnet for really weird stuff going on with various people around you. Like, pulling an example purely out of thin air, there’s a girl who wanders around in a bunny-girl outfit to prove that nobody can actually see her… except you, of course, or there’d be no plot to this story.

    This is basically the core premise of the Rascal Does Not Dream light novel series that later became an anime series followed by a string of theatrical release movies. Most folks refer to it as the “bunny-girl senpai” show, since that’s the first novel installment from which the anime series takes its name.

    Following on from the televised show that covers the events of the first handful of novel installments and an absolute tearjerker of a film dealing with the contents of the paired novel installments after that, Sister Venturing Out is… almost anticlimactic.

    It’s still very good, though.

    One of the theatrical release posters for the film, "Rascal Does Not Dream Of A Sister Venturing Out"
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  • Just Plain Getting Older

    I went on a long, long train ride to SE Portland and back last week to visit Dad, who’s in the hospital on account of… well, I’m not entirely sure what got him there but “just plain getting old” is what it boils down to. He may or may not remember that I was there, that’s how out-of-it he was, but I made the trip and did my best. And yes, I kept my Flo Mask on the entire time.

    We’re not a close-knit family, but that doesn’t make it any less gut-wrenching to realize that we’re also all just plain getting older. It’s the way of things, I suppose.

  • Satisfactory: FICSMAS Takes Its Toll

    Well, this is moderately embarrassing.

    Satisfactory video game screenshot: A player character lays sprawled in desert sands, with an instructional message overlaid which reads, "Press RMB to Respawn."
    Insert “record scratch” meme, here.

    There I was, minding my own business, preparing a new site for a couple of electronics products (Remote Control Units and High Speed Connectors) when I saw something shiny.

    We all like shiny things, right?

    (more…)

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