Year: 2021

Remarks on The Slime Daries – S01E6 – Changes

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This week’s episode of Slime Diaries basically had me bust a gut from the first scene.

Shizu’s spirit comes to visit Tempest for Obon, and comments that she’s heard rumors that Rimuru now has a human form similar to her own appearance. Oh, how embarrassing! Clue Rimuru dressed as a bunny girl, crying and running away from Shion and Shuna, whom are chasing him with a swimsuit and maid outfit.

As usual a multitude of amusing stories, but this joke basically runs through the entire episode. Again with the three adventurers visiting the town to pay their respects, and ask Shizu to continue watching over them. In walking off discussing having dreamt of Shizu, we learn that it involved her running in a bunny outfit and their thoughts on how well that suited her. If a ghost could die of embarrassment, I’m pretty sure Shizu-san would, lol.

The view of Shizu watching Rimuru and the others at the festival, is a beautiful and heart warming render. After which a good short summary of her life is inserted. That’s quickly followed up by a cut to Rimuru in front of a mirror, again being tormented by Shion and Shuna. I kind of like the final scenes where Rimuru pays his own respects, and the “Tell that to them” moment pops up, hehehe.

Slime Diaries is definitely an amusing spin off 😃

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One great mystery solved: why corky likes to nap and lounge in the middle of the floor by the bathroom.
Theory: this seems to be the perfect spot where you can feel the most effect from the air vent across the room.
Smart dog.
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It’s probably not a big surprise that I made pasta for dinner, and Willow was inclined to be a hungry helper hoping for a piece of rotini to hit the fooor.

Likewise fooooood

 

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As it turns out there seems to be more upsides to building a demon lord class machine than expected. A while back, I discovered the massive improvement this makes in H.265/HEVC encoding times.

Series currently running has been averaging about 6 minutes per episode, since it’s one that’s more talky and less stabby than some. But the interesting thing is the responsiveness. See, Centauri could do video encoding at a modest pace but HandBrake would render the desktop hardly usable and nicing it out to take over the whole system didn’t help much because there was no head room above the encoding. Thus leaving the system rather lethargic even if you tried to keep it usable. Rimuru, just doesn’t care.

Rimuru on the other hand remains functional and responsive despite running full bore, it’s spare cycles just breeze through. To the point that I was able to pipeline my work by having MakeMKV start ripping the second disc while the first was still encoding in HandBrake. I couldn’t even tell that my system was under load, as opposed to the “Gah, I’ll come back in half a day” approach that Centauri could offer.

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While I’m probably less harsh on the new films than some, I think this illustrates a bit of a trend as well. As time as gone by, I’ve really come to appreciate how awesome sauce CGI became in my life time. Some films and shows have aged vary differently based on their CGI, meanwhile Jurassic Park is one that has aged pretty well overall.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that our norms of cinematography have changed with the times. Films like Spielberg’s benefit from a master at the helm, and we’ve more than a few great film makers. But some films as they age, you look at, and scratch your head at how they were filmed. A prime example for me was watching the original Terminator for the first time in some years, and thinking no one including James Cameron would shoot some of those scenes the same way because of how tech has changed. Some have also held up better or worse when you consider the budget, and the era behind those special effects. Some are obviously, because they had to figure out how the heck to shoot the scene at all.
Part of me appreciates how awesome CGI has become. Part of me debates what we will lose whole when generations of film makers come and go in the world it created. Jurassic Park kind of was a perfect storm between the state of technology and production talent. In the future, I’m sure we will continue to have story tellers using the camera with care, but I wonder what we’ll miss out on.
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There’s not a lot of films that make me feel like best movie ever, but The Mitchells vs The Machines rather had that effect. I’m pretty sure that it’s at least the best weird family adventure slash road trip movie ever made, lol. There is so much awesome in this movie I had to update my rather rarely updated list of favored movies. Hopefully sometime after the Netflix release, we’ll see it available on Blu-ray as well.

Remember the family that weirds together, saves the world together ;).

Little Smiles

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One of the things I’ve generally adapted to is using a local mail client again at home. Something, I sort of blame on a mixture of work and my tablet-first life style. As such, given my deep annoyance for most mail clients above the scope of mailx and mutt, I’ve mostly suffered the native Windows mail app. In particular because such applications are about the only good way to integrate my contacts and calendar accounts with the modern desktop. For me it’s worked out, since I also hate clients like Thunderbird and Outlook but suffer them just the same.

Something that has long irked me is how Windows Mail defaults to showing a couple folders (inbox, drafts, sent) and none of the many folders my mail accounts are organized into. Thus, I get a little smile when I realize the fancy spancy modern looking menu supports right clicks and defines this ridiculously short list as “Favorites”.

That’s at least one less annoyance :).

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Evernote rolling out their home screen feature to iPad OS reminds me that Nerine was my most powerful computer before I built Rimru, and it kind of pisses me off now that I think about it.

One of Stark’s weaknesses is that it runs full bore. The move to an Electron style app means that between Docker and Evernote, I have two Fat Pigs that can cause me to out type my laptop at startup. Centauri since retired and sent to work as a Stark replacement slash augment, is roughly twice as powerful as my laptop and handles startup much better. But doesn’t really breeze through Evernote.

Nerine is more powerful than Centauri at CPU oriented tasks, and pretty much wins at anything that isn’t summed up by the iPad Pro having less memory. As such, of course, the Evernote home screen is super smooth and fluid and doesn’t even make Nerine blink. Kind of like how Rimuru breezes through everything with its demon lord class PC hardware, and all the portability of an Imperial class star destroyer.

It kind of irks me in a way how much Stark and Centauri fail to “Lead the pack” in performance, despite remaining heavily used computers in my workflow. But I am kind of glad that Evernote performs superbly on my iPad Pro and my desktop that’s not years beyond its designed retirement age, lol.

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You ever think about how Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC”

For me the era of the netbook is a mixed but mostly happy one. I remember the sales guy trying to convince me that they were such low end computers that they couldn’t do much of anything. Compared to my six year old laptop that was depending on how you count sold out models, either the second or cheapest one at Best Buy: the 1015PE was sufficiently capable for my programming needs.
Encountering Windows 7 Starter Edition made me accuse the operating system of cheating for how quick the suspend and resume worked compared to my old laptop. While adjusted for age the Atom wasn’t drastically different from my old Sempron: it did come with modern buses and standards like DDR2. So for all practical invents and purposes it worked really well as long as you weren’t multitasking several heavy tasks, at which point the Ubuntu setup I had installed would become quite lathargic from the lack of resources.
In fact one of the reasons I loved the Transformer Pad EeePC that replaced my netbook was how smoother Android on a Tegra 2 handled multitasking than the Atom N450. The other reason was insane battery life able to handle a cross continent journey by air, while my x86 netbook couldn’t make it past the first flight when being used as little more than a high tech typewriter.
While my opinion of Chrome OS is a bit harsher than my view of netbooks, I find it interesting how technology grew from there. Chromebooks proved of all you really wanted to do was run a browser then the netbook concept was a superb form factor for typing and surfing. Meanwhile Apple’s iPad and various far more affordable Android powered tablets came to prove that you could do plenty of you didn’t need to run a bunch of old Windows software.
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“The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.” — Julia Child

While scrolling through an article on French recipes, I saw this quote and nearly snortled so hard through my nose that I needed a Kleenex. Have no recollection of Julia ever saying that, but I can’t say that I’d be surprised. It does also sound like a rather good idea 🤣.