Year: 2019

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Catching up on my backlog of Fruits Basket, I’m kind of glad to see episodes 16 and 17 tell some of Uotani’s story.

Uotani is a very nice supporting character. Despite the gruff personality that comes with her rendition as a delinquent, there’s also a kindness that balances the character out well. Long before this part, you can see how Uo and Tohru could end up great friends. As usual, Tohru’s late mother is a source of wisdom.

Most often the strength of a story rests upon it’s characters, and I’d say the characters make this series far more than the concept.

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Comicbook.com: Marvel Comics: Who is Death’s Head?

Surprising thing to come across, scrolling through my Google News feed. Don’t recall Death’s Head seeing a lot of exposure here in the United States, but when I was a kid I found the series quite entertaining and hard to come by. We never got to read many issues, and I’m a little surprised anyone remembers the character at this point. I at least enjoyed the character ^_^, although more so ‘II and his sidekick Tuck I suppose.

In fact, somewhere in my closet is a small cache of DH/DHII comics from my childhood neatly tucked away for easy reach. Where most of my other comics from back there are stuffed in a box in a dusty corner, lol.

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CNN: Libraries are fighting to preserve your right to borrow e-books.

Generally my habits with e-books lean towards purchases more so than lending: but even so, I find the option of checking out an electronic copy useful once in awhile. In my neck of the woods that usually takes the form of OverDrive.

I imagine that as time goes on the issue will only get worse.

E-books are not going away, and most of us don’t want public libraries to go away either. Eventually, I expect the amount of books only available in digital form will go up over the decades not down. Authors and publishers still need to make coin but I don’t think that being a dick about it will help anyone, least of all in the long run: the one being a dick.

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Google’s new Android phone feature may help save your life

It’s kind of sad this has taken so long. Features like these might not be popular on the mind of mostly healthy, mostly young engineers who probably won’t see an ambulance ride for most of their lives if at all–but it’s damned nice use of technology.

We all have location and voice synthesis services in our pocket. Why not make use of it?

That fact that in my country, the cost of an ambulance or a serious hospital stay would probably give you a heart attack, is a different problem 😜😂

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Every now and then, I’ll stuff a few frozen pancakes in the toaster to make a quick breakfast. Usually followed by coating them in peanut butter and creating a sandwich. Today, since I skipped the PB, I opted to give the peanut gallery a taste.

Which was welcomed by the peanut gallery but I was reproached for it being the last of the pancake, lol. I will skip sharing the stare I am now getting from Willow….

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Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Hands-On: Keyboard and S Pen.

I’ve never really been a big fan of Samsung’s cases, be them the flappy cover or the same with a keyboard stuffed in. But I’ve gotta admit that keyboard/kickstand approach makes an interesting case.

This also gives me some hope, since my Tab S3’s cracked screen ain’t going to get any better and the alternatives are rather few without migrating to an iPad Pro.

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Sadly doesn’t look like SWAT 3 runs on modern systems, compatibility modes for XP and 9x don’t help nore does dandy tricks emulating an old GPU in software ala dgVoodoo. Although I suppose, loading Win98SE into a virtual machine might work.

That’s a great shame because the game was both pretty well done and ahead of its time nearly ~20 years ago. It remains the best tactical shooter I’ve ever played, and that’s probably been a lot over the years.

On the flipside with a little lovin’ the original R6 runs pretty well. The only technical issue I’ve had is a ghosting between the mouse cursor in and out of game which makes using the menus a hard on the eyes. Rather than taking my chances: I stuffed dgVoodoo’s Direct3D libraries in to begin with. R6 is so old it still offered a software renderer, so might not be so necessary.

I remember first playing Rainbow Six and finding it both intently interesting and quite frustrating as a kid; mainly for the laser-eyed snapshot of death effect, which is not as big a problem decades later. What remains irksome though is that path finding was effectively infantile back then. Thus in a game that resolved to plan a strike with multiple fire teams — you’ve got an A.I. that can barely avoid walking into walls just trying to follow you around. Aside from that, I’d say it remains a good game.

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Scary advances in time and drive tech: when you plop in an old game CD and it feels like most of the install time is how fast you can read unpack the data off a CD-ROM.

Rummaging through the bin in my closet, I went looking for my old tactical game of the year edition of SWAT 3. Along side it of course the sequel, my original copy of R6 III: Raven Shield and the first Rainbow Six. Needless to say when these games originally shipped most people had IDE hard drives and Windows 9x still had a very large market share. SSDs didn’t exist :P. Installing games off CD-ROM took quite a bit longer when SWAT 3 was a young game; I think I just spent a whopping five minutes counting disc changing.

Hmm, kind of wonder if there’s still a copy of the patch file for R6 anywhere. I still remember downloading that 33~35 meg file once upon a dial up life and being glad that no one had called our phone number for nearly four consecutive hours ^_^.