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When I came across The Demon King’s Public Defender, I snorted and said what the hell. It’s the kind of outlandish idea that it’s bound to be amusing whether it turns out to be really good or really poor, and I can’t say that I was disappointed.

In the beginning, we’re introduced to the lead character who fairly quickly gets iseikai’d into another world. The demon king in chains and people expecting the summoned hero to behead them, only god or whoever furfilled the summoning spell sure had a sense of humor. Instead of a sword swinging hero they end up with an exhausted and battered public defender, and he promptly pronounces said demon his client, because reasons that should be obvious. When it turns out that the demon king is a young woman who inherited the power from the fallen king, and promptly used that newfound power to try and put an end to twenty years of brutal war, things quite rapidly snowball from there. That they’re named Johannes Faust and Mephistopheles is just extra icing on the sundae if you’re familiar with classic literature at all.

Having a soft spot for both romanic comedies and iseikai in general, it’s not especially a surprise that things go very, very off the rails with a side of ice cream. A stay of execution is bartered on not the decency of Mephistopheles or punishment for the previous demon king’s campaigns, but on the cold hard fact that ten thousand humans are crying for demon blood. Much fuckery goes into keeping Meph’s head on her shoulders, and for much of the book we’re left with a hero-healer princess, a demon king, and poor Faust in the middle 😂. It checks more than a few boxes. Eventually we’re treated to a lunchbox competition judged by Faust and a perky seven year old, because of course, there is no defeating the judgment of a hungry child, and it it can never be so simple.

Towards the end however, there’s one piece that sticks out far more strongly than most, what really made me feel like adding a note to my journal for it. After what largely constitutes a national emergency, bucking five hundred years of expectation, and likely their first real date, Faust and Meph have a quiet moment between scenes and it is just beautiful.

“Tonight on the marble floor,” Meph murmured, leaning her head forward until the warm curve of her brow nearly brushed mine, “you called our dance by a word from your world. In the high tongue of the Dominion, we have no word for a date, or for a courtship conducted in silk rooms.”

“What do you have?” I asked.

She lifted her right hand from my wrist and touched two fingertips lightly against the side of my jaw, her calloused thumb resting just below my cheekbone.

“Khari-teth,” she said, in a low, resonant cadence that didn’t use a drop of the signet’s magic and still sent a shiver straight down my spine. “What does that translate to when my amulet isn’t guessing at the grammar?” I asked, turning my cheek into the warmth of her palm.

“When two vanguard scouts fight back-to-back in the ash fog, where you can’t see more than a few paces ahead,” Meph murmured, her breath warm against my lips, “it’s the oath spoken before the visors come down. The literal roots mean, ‘Where the smoke clears, my eyes return to you first.’”

She held my eyes from four inches away, utterly unguarded in the tiny room.

“In the guild studio and in the rain under the arch,” Meph said. “And again tonight, in front of six hundred strangers. Khari-teth, Johanns.”

I didn’t have a single statute in my pocket that could beat that. I reached up with my right hand to cup the back of her neck just below the warm silk of her amber ribbon, and I leaned forward until my forehead rested squarely against hers between the smooth black curves of her horns. “Khari-teth, Meph,” I murmured back. “Every room we walk into.”

— Locke, Wolfe; Caliban, Mike. The Demon King’s Public Defender: A Cozy Fantasy Rom-com (The Princess, The Lawyer & The Demon Lord, a Duology Book 1) (pp. 444-446). (Function). Kindle Edition.

IMHO, this is a truly great scene. Meph’s description of Kari-teth in many ways define a key aspect of what a partner is, and quite frankly, I think the literal root offered says so much in so simple a scene.

Yes, I think this book turned out far better than I expected. At least, I’ve enjoyed it so far!

home.arpa meets certificate authority

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After much wrangling, and more than a few profanities in-between, I managed to setup the certificate infrastructure I’ve been wanting for my home systems. That is to say, the joy that is working certificates–and not having to hand manage them.

Beating step-ca into the desired environment took a bit of wrangling, mainly because it wasn’t clear that --pki passed to the init command skips writing out a configuration file under $STEPPATH/config. It’s much less bollocking if you just let it use ~/.step instead of making it play like a traditional unix system service. But provides the key missing link that I’ve never had the last time I suffered rigging an OpenSSL based PKI: support for ACME!

Now that modern operating systems largely restrict TLS certificates to about a year, and projections show it will only get more restrictive, I think it’s essential for a protocol like ACME provisioning to be in place. It’s less setup certs that live the life of the machine and more expect them to be short-lived, transient with the trust relationship to the internal CA being what lasts.

I’ve generally felt that as time goes on the only good reason not to use HTTPS and TLS when available is not wanting to understand how it works, or having to deal with vintage computers. Well, I only have the latter of those problems, and I’m not so inclined to hook up older clients to such infrastructure. It’s never been the understanding part that’s been the problem for me, so much as the ‘dang it, another thing to back up’ and quite frankly, that problem has largely been automated at this point.

Also given how I ended up with 3 name servers around here, I rather figure an internal certificate authority “2nd edition” is worth it.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion

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Tonight’s post-work plans, aside from snarfing a burrito the size of my head consisted of ripping the latest addition to my Blu-ray collection: Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Complete Series. It’s one of those anime from back in the day, that it’s highly likely that I would’ve enjoyed, but never really had the opportunity to watch much of over the years. I only briefly caught parts on Netflix before drifting off and I didn’t catch it on TV as a youth. Never have I managed to watch the entire thing, simply put. Just bits and pieces spread across the beginning.

Well, after a recent reminder of how good it’s considered, I figured why not give it another shot? Plus it’s kinda been on my bucket list for like the last twenty years! I’m finding it to be incredibly good, so there’s fare chances of actually finishing it this time. I’m reminded both just how horrifying it is emotionally, along with how much I appreciate the period’s art style, but you know what I really didn’t expect? The audio mix is insane!

A large part of setting up the rip was deciding how I wanted to encode the audio, after sussing out which chapters map to which episode, because of course someone has to go with the big-ass track for the whole disc (>_<). Ordinarily, I’ll write off anime’s audio for normalization to AAC since it’s almost always a stereo mix on disc. Evangelion? Nope, that’s spatial amazeballs.

This particular edition apparently comes with DTS-HD MA tracks in surround for a modern remix made with tender, love, care, and probably no expenses nor time spared, and a remaster of the original stereo mix. I haven’t tried the stereo mix yet, but I have to admit the surround….oh fuck did someone do a great job. I tend to consider that “Huh, what was that!?” cat-like head turn a strong indicator of how well a mix makes use of surround sound for effects usage. I felt that within seconds of the opening theme. Evangelion’s surround mix is more like constant and pervasive use of surround sound–everything from the theme song to background audios is properly spread out and immersive, not just ya know, the obvious things. This is a stunning example of what a surround sound mix can become.

Good job sound engineer, whoever the hell you were 🫡

Breaking down Rimuru

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My primary intention was to recover the old Samsung 990 Pro, since it’s a 4 TB model and has spent the year “idle.” Since retirement, Rimuru hasn’t come out of its storage closet expect for cleaning purposes. Any useful data aside the OS, is effectively backed up to my file server already.

I’ve gone an entire year without powering on the machine. So, I think it is safe to say, anything needed was going to waste anyway, and I do not enjoy wasted equipment. I’ve pulled the Thunderbolt card for storage along with the the RTX 4070 Ti. The former because it hung over the M.2 heatsink spanning the case, and the latter because it’s kind a difficult to work inside the case otherwise.

My plan is for the storage drive to go in one of my 10G USB enclosures for misc usage, while the PCI-E cards go into /dev/closet with the associated cabling. Rimuru itself will remain in the spare closet, since it doesn’t really fit in the main technical closet. The main things remaining are the fundamental CPU/cooler/power as those are a pain to remove and unlikely to be reused, plus the lone stick of DDR5, because if I do ever power on / repurpose that machine again, I don’t want to forget which of the 4 memory slots “still work” in case I lose my system notes. It was a major pain to determine which slot still worked and what form of bad the three failed slots did.

I suppose in the end, I’m following through on the “Not another motherboard” factor. By the time Ranga is outmoded, it too will be outmoded, and the upgrade path will likely be a different processor. That machine went through too many of them, that I’m not inclined putz with it any further 😂. I feel a little bad that Rimuru turned out to be a 4 year machine (+1 in the closet), given how long Centauri had lasted… and the fact that I based Rimuru’s design on its “10 year” alternative design. Not exactly a success, nor a failure, but surely not the champion its predecessor proved to be. Centauri was originally envisioned as a 3-5 year machine depending on refits, and lasted me for 8 years. Effectively double what its replacement had!

Well, at least I didn’t drop the case on my foot, or the Big Fucking Graphics Card™️. That would hurt!

Backups and Restores

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One of the upsides of being a paranoid bastard is that I keep regular backups, and often system notes. I’ll typically maintain a digital notebook recording the major software setup and configuration, mainly to track “What’s different about this one” and to assist in restoring should it become a manual affair.

Well, as it turned out, I recently had the opportunity for this as part of migrating my host environment to a newer OS. It’s been on my backlog for a while, waiting for a few kinks to be ironed out. So long in fact, that I said screw it, and just did a full restore the long way. In the process, I also discovered that my provider’s billing for backups and snapshots are pretty cheap, so I opted to take a snapshot in case things went sideways 🤣.

Amazingly, not only was it a relatively painless restore, but it also proved that a “real” operational restore from my nightly backups actually works in the production environment. These at best, have only been tested for offline cases not the live site, which for me is almost a cardinal sin, but a practical one.

Of course the part that was the real wrinkle? It wasn’t the nightly backup, or the OS change, it was misplacing or having failed to keep a proper system notebook. So rather than playing the “how the fuck do I …” game it was more an exercise in writing down the “that’s how the fuck it’s done.” Because it’s been a good while, and while care was taken to make the process largely obvious, it’s not good to not have a punchlist–so you know you didn’t bungle anything.

Yes, I’m paranoid like that (^_^)

The coolest toy I’ve ever seen

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I may have watched most of this jaw hanging open in shock at the sheer amazement. It’s probably a great thing this didn’t exist when I was a kid. Both for me, my mom’s sake, and her pocket book 😂

*covers eyes, locks wallet in a safe, and throws away the key*

Random reminders that Babylon 5 was awesome

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Don’t think I’ve really seen a lot of the series since the it reran on Sci-Fi in the early 2000s. Every now and then, I happen across reminders of just how awesome (and occasionally ROFL) the series was. Also, I totally need to use this paragraph reference in the future someday….

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Sitting on the couch, I was amused when Shion gave a warning about reaching 2% battery. Turns out that after being unplugged and still in use most of the week, I hadn’t charged it since October 28th–I almost feel like saying, “Huh, you mean there’s a battery?” or making a quip about hydrogen fuel cells. My M2 MBA has only been plugged in the past week for brief stints of using my monitor, while Ranga’s been hooked up.

I guess binging Ace Combat 8 actually took longer than expected. But I still have to snortle at how rarely my ‘Air runs low on juice. ARM battery life for the win!

Far better than expected

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Finally watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), I must admit that was both entertaining **and** way better than I had expected it to ever be.

Somehow, it manages to both cover a lot of ground while remaining largely on target. That’s no small feat for such a frantic amount of visuals. I’m especially fond of the various characterizations, and the notion that Mario simply doesn’t give up–that’s a lesson any platformer or ‘NES player learned. Plus in the beginning he sucks at least as bad as all of the rest of us do. There’s so many nods dating back at least as far as the original Nintendo, that it would take a wiki to catalog them all. Plus, we get a Princess Peach that’s awesome and Jack Black as Bowser… what’s not to enjoy? 😉

A switching of tracks

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Looking back, my experiment with the Switch 2 has gone exceedingly well. When I picked up the console over Memorial Day weekend, my biggest concern was that it would be a very expensive dust collector; two factors I consider major negatives. However, it’s actually become my primary gaming platform since then.

I’m finding that it’s also a much more focused platform. Steam experiences such a new influx of games, it’s mind boggling. Some are worth focus more than others, but content, there’s loads of by any measure. On the Switch 2, I’m finding that I typically buy fewer games and play longer–which is great until you consider the cost of them. If you want cheaper costs, Steam and GOG are there places to be. The eShop frequently sees decent sales on third party games, and you should just treat anything on a Game Card as cost of game + memory card, and assume Nintendo’s own games are plated in gold.

But, I will also admit that I’m appreciating that focus. Sometimes it’s a quick game, and sometimes it’s a reminder like refusing to count how much time I’ve spent in Skyrim across multiple platforms. Often I feel like I wish the system had a browser, but it’s very much a time to play and tune out. I’m less likely to scrounge around the eShop and just play games.

I’ve also found that honestly, I forgot how nice it was to just lounge on the couch and play a game. That’s something that I haven’t done much since the GameBoy Color was relevant, not to much Pokemon Red/Blue and Silver/Gold 😅. Yeah, you don’t really get that with a desktop PC and ten pounds of Nvidia; nor can a SteamDeck compete with that on visual fidelity, even if it can achieve an impressive Xbox One level power in a portable package.

Only time will tell where the road goes, but so far, I’m inclined to conclude that the experiment was successful. Outside of remembering Campaign Evolved released, I actually don’t remember the last time I powered Ranga up in recent weeks… lol