efaardvark

Not (yet) watching but looking for Josee, the Tiger, and the Fish..

This isn't exactly new news but I just came across this video of Falcon Heavy boosters coming back down for a landing. As god and Heinlein intended. I could watch this all day.

My answer would be pretty much the same as for books. The medium is cheap enough that a person - or small group of people - with a vision can enunciate that vision pretty much directly to the reader or viewer without the distortion of too many intermediaries. So much mass entertainment these days is so processed, politically-correct, and focused on the bottom line that it isn't even engaging, never mind things like fun or inspiring. However, anime is one place where interesting content can still happen frequently enough to make it worth making a habit. Not that every anime is good of course. In fact, Theodore Sturgeon - an old-school science fiction writer - once paraphrased Arouet (aka Voltaire) by saying that 90% of everything is crap. (He also went on to say that any genre should be judged by the other 10%.) I tend to agree. But maybe for anime the good stuff is more like 15 or 20%.

(Been looking at latency numbers for the past couple weeks at work. Nice to see results.)

I find that’s true of any story, or at least ones with any depth.

Welcome! I'm a bit of a science & engineering nerd myself. My favorite anime/book genre is hard science fiction. My favorite game is kerbal space program. My job is space and computers, my hobbies include electronics and computer programming, and I know enough physics and chemistry to be dangerous.

Beef barley soup, bread, and chips. Just doing what’s easy for dinner after a long workday.

YKYITFW you see a monkey playing pong telepathically via Neuralink. (Or would the term be telekinetically?)

Was just talking with my brother about the early 'Net days & he sent me this pic.... ... to say nothing about the GPU-killing hamster dance page, or that bizarre Quiznos commercial. (Original 'Net meme inspiration? here .. if you dare. Imagine spending an hour or two downloading that at 56k dialup speeds just to see what the buzz was about. Maybe some moments are better lost.) I also remember Yahoo when it was just a collection of symlinks.

Thanks, now I have that song in my head again. (I prefer the Mio version. If you're a Yui fan go here.)

So I took another peek at Dress-up Darling. So far I'd only seen the first two episodes but I usually watch the first 3 eps of each season to determine if a given anime will land on my end-of-season binge list. My initial reaction based on the 1st 2 eps was pretty negative and I almost dropped but I decided to stick with procedure/principle and watched #3. It didn't go completely off the rails as I'd feared, but neither did it redeem itself. It has potential but based on what I've seen so far it still seems pretty sketchy. I do like the technicals. The voice acting is pretty good, the animating is good, and the story is interesting. Unfortunately the overall execution seems quite a bit off. Too many cringy scenes and distractions of dubious merit from the main story line. Still on the list but pretty much at the bottom.

Welcome! Don’t worry about the language thing. I’m quite sure your English is better than my Polish!

I always have problems coming up with favorites. “Couple” can also be interpreted several ways. That said, and going with the romantic slant, I’d definitely agree that Tomoya and Nagisa would be towards the top of my list as well. Also up there would be Kotoko Aihara and Naoki Irie from Itazura na Kiss. Irie is an ass and Kotoko may be just one step away from Aho Girl territory but I think they’re perfect for each other. And of course Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka from Toradora and maybe also Risa Koizumi and Atsushi Otani from Lovely Complex. Not at the number one position for that last but up in the top five say.

I go all the way back. Teletype-ASCII BBSs in the pre-ANSI, 300baud dialup modem days. Then there came the newfangled Fidonet BBSs. uucp on the unix boxen. Text-only Dragon's Gate RPG on GEnie at a blazing 2400b (and $6/hr) in the late 80s was my first realtime MMO. Then telneting into MUDs & MOOs & MUCKs over the pre-WWW Internet. I even ran my own DIKU-based CircleMUD for a couple years after the 'Net shut GEnie down and Dragon's Gate moved to AOL. Believe it or not I still log in to IRC occasionally even now. I do have discord on my phone however. As an aside, I believe my early experiences with text-based MUDs, MOOs, and MUCKs was good practice for anime and enabled / reinforced a strong preference for subtitles over dubs. Keeping up with anime subtitles is nothing compared to keeping up with online multiplayer text-based melees at 9600baud.

Finished "Faraway Paladin" tonight. (Still not quite sure about how to translate the title.) Pretty good overall. They clearly left it open enough for another season or two, but without resorting to an annoying cliffhanger situation. Appreciated. I would not mind seeing it continued.

I was more into comp.sci back then but otherwise.. been there, done that as well.

Bonus points for appropriate use of the term "sarsen trilithons".

Tesla: We should be afraid of AI Meta: We're giving it control of Facebook. What could go wrong?

Ascendance of a Bookworm, S3. Not yet watching it but it's definitely going on my ptw list.

Welcome!

Had to rebuild my main base/house after it burned down. The old one was wood and cobble like the built-ins for this biome and I think it got involved in a lightning strike. I did have a lightning rod installed but I think it hit a big tree next to it and it spread from there. Anyway, I've been spending most of my game time exploring the new deepslate layers and I had a bunch of it laying around so I decided to rebuild with that instead of wood again as it was. The new one is basically deepslate cobble but with the darker "deepslate tile" as the vertical accents and upper deck a bit of spruce logs for variety. I kind of like it. (Though I wasn't exactly going for asthetics here. I just wanted to take the opportunity? to experiment a bit with the new textures & colors.)

Tough to answer. Guess it kind of depends on how you define "schooling". These days everything "needs" a degree but technically I never finished college. I had 2 years towards an EE degree when I took a summer job changing reel-to-reel tapes - this was back in the 80s - on the data processing system for Voyager's Neptune encounter. It was work a trained monkey could have done but my boss liked my work ethic so he made me an offer after the encounter. The pay was decent and hey, NASA, so of course I accepted. At the time I was thinking I'd save for a couple years then go back and finish the degree in style. In addition to the EE stuff I'd already had personal experience in C programming on my home computer (68k-based Amiga 3000) and when Commodore went out of business I'd compiled a (Net)BSD kernel for that hardware so when they started building out the (then) newfangled, unix-based, "multimission" data processing systems at work using SunOS and Sparcstations I naturally moved over to that as well. I've been more or less following that track ever since. Along the way I learned Perl, Motif, and absorbed a bunch of other unix-isms while writing and maintaining monitor and control software for the downlink data processing systems. Never made financial sense - to me or my bossess - to pay for the degree and 2yo knowledge from a classroom when I could hold my own learning cutting-edge stuff on the job playing with NASA systems. 3+ decades later I'm a data processing systems engineer looking to retire.