Year: 2019

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Well, it has taken a good sweet time but I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Earlier this year, I replaced Centauri’s system drive. Going from the first small SSD I ever bought, to a shiny 1 TB able to replace its hard drive. Since then, I’ve largely migrated all data over from the hard drive.

My plans for the now redundant storage capacity has been to fix the actual thorn in my storage side. Since repurposing my best portable drive to deal with my laptop’s backups, my xbox has had to make due with an old and extremely slow 300G laptop drive for its external drive. One that sucks so much that it actually makes Deathstar One’s internal 500G look sexy, and the original Xbox Ones are not equipped with sexy drives.

Hauling Centauri out was mostly leg work rather than effort. The only real pain in the arse is that the gigabit cable doesn’t have enough extra length for me to “Pull” the tower out, rather I need to connect/disconnect the cable before moving the tower more than an inch or so from final resting place next to the wall. Yeah, bollocks to that.

Of course plugging the drive into one of my spare enclosures is as easy peasy as pulling out the screw driver set; it helps that I kept one spare within quick reach and my second spare in deep storage, last time I redid /dev/closet.

Now the real irksome ribbon was the Xbox. It decided to disavow all knowledge of how to format the sucker. Because Microsoft in all their glory, eventually decided there should be a ~200M magic partition ahead of the NTFS volume. And Xbox, no likely. Enter Linux powered laptop, GNU parted, and cursing at HDMI cables finally falling out the back of Deathstar One (>_<).

In theory, by morning most of the data should now be transferred over to it. Allowing me to decommission the 300G laptop drive to virtually anything but video game storage, and it’ll be nice not running 97+++++ percent full all the frickin’ time.

Even my lazy ass can get around to juggling parts around if you piss me off enough.

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With MechWarrior 5 finally launching, I find myself torn.

On one hand: a decent MechWarrior game basically guarantees that I’ll pry open my wallet and fork over the cash. And there’s few enough games in the past twenty years that fit that definition for me.

But on the other hand: my policy towards Epic exclusives tend to be No Steam Version Equals No Purchase. Of course, someone had to go and test this resolve by launching the kinda game I’ve been waiting eons for….. bastards.

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The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo

I’d really like to imagine that the banker must have shit himself when Bergsten bro he’s the topic of the 10,000 units. But I reckon things turned out pretty well for everyone in the end, lol.

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Things that are probably kind of sad, in their own way.

Ended up watching Red vs Blue, which I rather skipped when it was young.

Thinking back to the days when graphics looked like that Blood Gulch.

Legendary was fun, but no chance in hell I’m doing that with an Xbox controller.

Remembering that I still have my Halo: CE disc.

Thinking that buying the Master Chief Collection again on PC, would be a good way to play Halo 3 and 4 with a mouse.

Thinking that for $40, I’d rather buy my iPad a keyboard case or add to my anime collection.

If I actually got to play games more often, I’d probably just Game Pass.

Did I mention, I originally bought Halo Combat Evolved because I thought the Assault Rifle looked cool? Yeah, I was probably a nitwit when I was that young.

Post Script: Huh? The storage requirement for MCC on Steam is marked 20 GB? I could swear that my Xbox dedicates several times that much to it.

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While my back isn’t overly happy with a day spent camped in front of Deathstar One, I at least enjoyed binge playing Halo: Reach.

For the most part, the story is a sad one given the fate of Noble Team but the result makes a rather great Halo game. Spartans might not be killed in action, officially, but there are no survivors of Noble team by the end.

Noble Six is a rather interesting one. He exhibits many of the same qualities as the Master Chief, but perhaps lacks his luck. His fate isn’t the saddest though, that probably goes to Daisy-023. Aside from that, Noble team is full of far more developed characters than other fireteams in Halo games. Kat, may very well be the most intriguing Spartan I’ve seen.

The Spartan II on the team reminded me of Dr. Halsey’s rather unique relationship to the older Spartans. I’ve always found it curious that Halsey is portrayed as a more motherly figure, despite being far from compassionate. Cold and pragmatic might be a better description of the doctor. Actually, I’d like to think that she has a special place in hell, for what she did to them—what was done to those children was pretty damned wrong, and definitely overkill from the pre-Covenant war problems.

On the flip side: her children did go on to significant success during the Human-Covenant war. Jorge-052 being far from the least of them. As far as I know, only a dozen or two of that generation survived the Human-Covenant war, in contrast to ONI’s later efforts to mass produce Spartan III and IV warriors, which are pretty plentiful by Halo’s second trilogy.

Noble team’s effort certainly makes for a surprising amount of success, compared to the S.O.L. it leads into with The Pillar of Autumn’s flight from Covenant forces. I suppose when you have a fire team full of Spartans instead of a bunch of hopelessly screwed, you’re likely to see thousands of Covenant go down long before the Spartans breath their last breath.

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I have to admit, when I had bought Texas toast for making Ruben sandwiches , it was just as a work around to avoid going to two stores. But I think it may become my standard bread, lol.

It’s proven ideal for making a sandwich full enough to be worth eating, without becoming as hard on the economics and storage  space as going to hoggy rolls and the like. You can stuff a pair of slices in the toaster and load up a sandwich like my momma used to make, and the bread is something like $1.35 a loaf.

Another win is that one slice of Texas toast is enough for breakfast. Usually I would make two slices of toast is on the menu. Combined with trying to use up some old eggs, and sausages to share, let’s just say that Willow and company only care about their share, lol.

Pretty much the only reason I buy the breakfast sausage when they’re on sale, is I know three plump partridges starving doggies who would like some.

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https://youtu.be/HAaEwR3NZSs

I remember reading about the bento box design of the ThinkPad some years ago, and not really seeing it. Because most of the devices I had seen were from the stack-of-notebooks era of design, and then one day I came across what these old as !@#$ models looked like. And then I thought to myself, yeah, I can see that now.

This video is one of those kind of ThinkPad.

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10 Best Tsundere Characters In Anime, Ranked

Not a bad list, IMHO, and mostly from series worth watching.

Most of the characters also have particularly strong relationships and interactions with others, rather than just being your typical tsundere fodder.

Kirisaki Chitoge and Alaska Tiga in characters that I’ll probably remember well beyond how long I remember their respective series, lol.

Chitoge and Raku’s largely antagonistic relationship is what really makes Nisekoi worth watching, and cackling at. Meanwhile the plot stretched over two seasons might be reason to smack people upside the head. Incidents such as the locket search early in the series, and the great mother problem towards the end, are very telling of the characters’ respective natures. I find it kinda awesome how much those moments really tell about them, despite the hilarious antagonism, lol. Combined with her personality, which is pretty awesome. One of the few characters that got a footnote in my anime worth remembering, as being a character quite worth the remembering.

While I’m not a big fan of drama, Toradora! is kind of hard to forget. Taiga and Ryuji both have a few screws loose, and their undeniable partnership is pretty fricken amazing. As oddballs, more than a few good jokes are also generated along the way. I doubt that most people actually have someone in their life with a relationship like Ryuji and Taiga’s, and those that do are probably better off. Give or take if either of them are tsunderes. Compared to most anime, they also become very well developed characters by the end of the story.

On the flip side, I identify with the Toradora character, Ryuji, far more than most anime characters. So I consider the series even more worth watching than most, lol.

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10 best skateboard stickers for defiling your new 16-inch MacBook Pro

While I’ve always felt covering laptop lids in stickers was kind of tacky, I’ve got to admit: I’d so put that Bones Brigade Ripper on a laptop. And probably can blame this article for my sudden urge to play Contra 3.

Full disclosure: I’m tacky enough to have finally done the sticker thing when I got my old Latitude. Had a Hulkbuster decal laying around, and it struck me as the kind of laptop Tony Stark may have been issued and tossed in a desk drawer somewhere. Thus the host name and lid sticker begging Iron Man references.