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Upside of testing surround sound with Godzilla Minus One: it’s got everything from dialogue to roars and explosions.

Downside: “I must not turn an entire wall into a projector screen just to enjoy TV…”

😂

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The amusing nature of memory consumption and the modern web. Going by Activity Monitor’s memory page as a measure, wikipedia is pretty darn memory efficient at a couple hundred megs–for a website that’s about 95% content aside from the CMS, I’d call that’s pretty good. For sake of a value, one of the random pages loaded were around 180 – 200 MB.

By contrast my own website (also mostly content aside from the CMS) and Google’s home page, burn around 400-500 MB. Which to me, feels excessive, but to be fair, part of why I started to believe in whole-lotta-memory designs was in the 2010s when I realized 2 GB was not enough to surf the web anymore, unless you loved trashing hard drives. Most content-heavy rather than ad heavy websites, fit that description as well.

Now for comparison? A few common news sites that you’ll see just about any compute nerd visit: around 1.5 – 2 GB for basically any article and easily reaching 3 – 4 GB in activity monitor. Largely depending on the amount of ads, and whether or not it’s a website that endeavors to load the content first. So basically, the modern websites consume so much RAM that we should be charging websites for the resources their advertising consumes rather than supporting them by not running ad blockers 😜

Ya know, if you just throw enough videos modern web advertising may be to computer memory usage what the pop up ad was to the 1990s web browsing experience. Seriously, web ads were Really A Lot Worse Back Then ™ when actual pop up windows were allowed.

At this point, I think the only thing that consumes more RAM than the modern web is working with high resolution graphics and artificial intelligence with loads of parameters, lol.

Takikomi Gohan

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Experiments in the kitchen of late have generally revolved around Japanese food and techniques, specifically applications for dashi broth and miso paste.

Tonight’s dinner plan was pretty much a take on takikomi gohan, based on wondering what rice cooked in dashi would taste like. Honestly, I can say that there is only one problem with this entire concept—it smells awesome while the rice is cooking!

Like really, not only was the food delicious and uncomplicated to make…but it felt like driving with delicious food riding shotgun,you know where it smells so good that it’s almost a form of torture having to wait for it 😂.

Yes, I think it’s safe to say that the experiment was yummy 😋

The simple pleasures of coffee

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Today, I decided on a pleasure I haven’t been partaking of lately: freshly ground coffee. For the last few months, I’ve mainly ran the pour over with pre-ground coffee. One of the things I like about my Chemex, is I can actually use regular ol’ ground coffee out of the store and still get decent results. Grinding is optional, unlike my French press.

This morning on the other hand: beans, grinder, and the sweet, sweet joy of fresh coffee. Also, a Peruvian blend that I’ve never tried before 😀.

I personally find it calming to grind and brew coffee, but I also find that I so rarely do since swapping from the French press to the pour over as my main brewing method. The key reason that I swapped over was the convenience of the pour-over’s filters, it’s a lot easier than making sure none of the grounds go down the drain. Clean up is a breeze. Yet, ironically I also consider cleaning the coffee grinder part of the personal therapy of making coffee. It’s just a darn inconvenient part, when you really want some coffee in the morning, lol.

Well, that makes me feel better

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Today, I decided on a little test that’s been on the back burner for a while. See, being on the shorter side, my slacks don’t really go with my shoes as well as they do my boots. It’s also a bother to roll up the pants legs and keep them from unrolling if I’m out for a while. Meanwhile my house shorts aren’t suitable for my typical on-the-go load, thus the experiment: belted cargo shorts. The perfect combo for comfy shoes and still having the usual stuff in my pockets.

As I was getting dressed and putting my socks on, a thought occurred to me. Women can be quite attractive in knee length socks and a skirt. My hairy legs with shorts and boot length socks on the other hand, I imagine would make someone cringe as not the Zettai Ryōiki that they desire to see 😅. Being more of a boots and trousers type, I haven’t really worn shorts as outside wear since circa high school, but it’s an efficient solution for times where I want to where my shoes rather than gear up in boots just for a quick errand.

To the woman at Publix who complicated my Vibram Furoshikis, thanks, you really made my day a little brighter!

Resident Evil Village – 1980s Live-Action Movie

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On one hand, I pretty much decided to watch this clip because, “I’m damn tired of seeing this as I scroll by.” That really summarizes how I feel about most of the AI generated yada-yada that pops up whenever I visit YouTube.

On the other hand, it both kind of makes me wish that someone would make a good horror movie adaptation of Resident Evil Village, and makes me want to play the game again….

While I can’t say that RE7 really did it for me, so much as I was glad for more of a return to the game’s roots, I really did enjoy Village. Discounting remakes, Village was probably the best resident evil game since RE4.

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Reading “BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn’t,” I’m quite sure I’ve known a few sticks that meet this description.

I still remember the pain and suffering that was the performance of USB sticks, back when I had to do some installation framework goodness for an embedded system. The whole live bootable stick was taking about 2 1/2 hours to load per test, so eventually I reached for the pair of USB sticks I was carrying at the time. One of those $10 sticks reduced the I/O wait time down to about 35 minutes, making for a much faster development cycle; so much so that production bought a bundle of those for use in the lab.

And then there was that other $10 stick, which I never realized was so drastically slower than the first. That sucker was so damn slow that it was “Free to good home USB stick, just don’t bring it back!” and of course, I met that stick more than a few times over the years.

Ya know, I should’ve just used the soldiering iron 🔥

MGS Delta: Snake Eater

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At last, the date is announced!

Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.

Please, Konami, don’t screw this up 🙂

Dino Crisis

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One of those cases of “Remember to check that out” is the news that Dino Crisis and its first sequel are on GOG. As a kid, I was never really that great at Resident Evil. It didn’t really help that the initial U.S. release kinda had borked aiming until the director’s cut and dual shock versions. I was also more of a dinosaurs kid than a zombie fan.

Needless to say, Dino Crisis was probably my next big take on the then-young survival horror genre. One that I actually played quite a bit of and would revisit as a teenager. Compared to the original Resident Evil trilogy, I found Dino Crisis much less stressful and unnerving, and far more curious and mysterious.

Part of me wonders if the plot and setting have held up, or if I’ll just be disappointed. Part of me also wonders if this time, maybe I’ll finish the darn game. :^o