The Mystic Archives of Dantalian episode 1-2 – so much for books

The book-reading part is probably the most annoying part because it requires more concentration to follow. Mainly because I rarely read those kind of books. Or any book, really. The premise is quite weird – about historical, powerful books. And a mysterious tsundere girl to accompany the main character. And reading the books gives the reader awesome power or whatever while epicly confusing the watcher (or just me?).

Animation etc as expected from Gainax. The story being written by writer of Asura Cryin’ assures some quality in the story albeit probably a bit confusing. Much better than that certain Dark Rabbit, I’d say. The whole Latin thingy is quite pretentious. Japanese sure love their Latin. Or French. Or German.

 

Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan: Demon Capital episode 1-4 – o yay

According to Wikipedia (warning: spoiler everywhere), the first arc of this season is Past Arc. The one that tells the beginning of Rikuo’s grandfather – Nurarihyon. Sure seems like there’re some kind of relation between Keikain and Nura. I’m avoiding spoilers so I don’t know what is this exactly. Anyway, seems like there is some kind of difference between some clan members between past and current time. Could it be because their powers have been limited to certain extent? The personality, especially Yuki-Onna which I noticed most difference. Or could her be the grandchild of first generation’s Yuki-Onna (whatever that means)?

 

A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives episode 3 – hmmm

So, instead of explaining things, they decided to add even more mysteries. Riiiiight. Well, I guess it’s just like the previous series – explanation comes really late in series. Though the one, basic question still hasn’t got answered: how the heck did he survive his seventh time death? Did fifteen minutes time passed by the end of that or something? Why did he showed to be apparently “jumped” to school time?

In other hand, Hinata survived is rather obvious though how he managed it is still a mystery. Probably just because he’s too awesome to die. Add the fact that he can send a minion who can stand Spell Error or whatever that is and all.

Basically, this show is quite wtf.

 

A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives episode 2 – whee

She shouldn’t have adjusted her appearance.

Another busy episode with the two couples who initially fights each other joining force to defeat common enemy. Listening to Fukuyama Jun voicing an evil character sure fits him nicely. Some questions answered, some new questions appeared. Great. Especially how Taito can get back alive after dying seven times. Hopefully we’ll get the answer in next episode.

LoLH writer sure doesn’t disappoint (yet?). ZEXCS also seem to be able to keep up the good animation. It’s still at second episode though so it could go anywhere.

Yuru Yuri episode 3 – o/

Loliyuri is sure fine~

The group discovered that Yui is living on her own and so Kyouko decided to visit her on holiday. Hilarity ensues.

This episode is focused on Kyouko and Yui (at least the latter half) as we discover that they have known each other since like forever (including Akari) and how Chinatsu wants to join the group, too. For Yui-senpai, presumably. Hinted at the beginning of the whole event, turns out Kyouko cared about Yui after all and they proceeded to the bed at night in the end.  IYKWIM.

A normal Yuru Yuri episode which is a good thing.

Sacred Seven episode 3 – um what

Lol she actually said henshin. And gg translated it as “Guess it’s morphin’ time.” Also she’s one epic lazy girl. Whatevs.

Also seems like Alma’s case is quite unique seeing how he’s capable of all seven abilities. Including idclip. His true form is also different than other darkstones-infected humans or artificial crystal-using humans – because of the darkstone-lightstone combination? What the heck is lightstone anyway?

On other side, the doctor sure is suspicious. The way he has such kind of trap doesn’t look light-sided enough to me. Ruri also seems to have some kind of hate towards him.

Lastly, poor Kagami and his useless mecha ;_;

It’s saddening how this series is planned for only 12 episodes (single cours) 🙁 Especially because I can’t remember any other single cours Sunrise’s TV series.

Dolls of God episode 3 – the one last faction

Finally, some action! Except that there isn’t actual animation on the combat. And then the mystery character which happens… er, never mind. It’d be a spoiler if I continued that. Anyway, from what I read there will be three factions fighting each other: the village faction #1 / pseudo modern (Kyohei et al), village faction #2 / classic to death (pictured above) and REVENGE faction (that post-teenager Accelerator guy). Volume three covers back-story or something though so there isn’t much more I know with regard to actual fights.

Anyway, the story still going good though there doesn’t seem to be any information about how long this series will be. I don’t have enough knowledge about Brain’s Base so I don’t know how they usually goes with the story. At least their Spice and Wolf II and Durarara!! is quite good but Akikan! is quite a joke and Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera is wat worthy.

As I continue to get distracted, I haven’t watched much and my scheduled post stock is running out. But don’t worry, weekend is coming so hopefully I can finish a certain job and finally watch anime in peace.

Subtle differences between *nix and Windows

One of them is how file removal is handled:

On Windows, attempting to remove a file that is in use causes an exception to be raised; on Unix, the directory entry is removed but the storage allocated to the file is not made available until the original file is no longer in use.

One of the reasons why Windows is famous for its reboot cycle on initial setup and configuration (also application installation). Though one can argue that it ensures less confusion on files: in *nix you can let a application access a file, delete it and create a new file with same file name which later cause confusion on why the file isn’t updated properly – you simply can’t do that in Windows. Also if you can delete a file in Windows, then the file is deleted. This is unlike in *nix which if an application still accessing the deleted file, it can be recovered by accessing its file descriptor. Additionally, the space is not freed after deletion, only after all applications accessing the file released the file descriptor or closed – I know some people are confused why the free space doesn’t increase after deleting some files.

R-15 episode 2 – why am I watching this

…I’m not sure why, but this show sure is kinda crap. Well, I guess I can always enjoy the delusion part. The later part of this episode doesn’t quite make sense. Why the heck she undressed at all?

Everything aside, seems like it is going with the pattern of girl of the week which probably end up back to the first one whoever her name is.

Also lol at that other genius having ******* in a conference.

Test post

To ensure markdown works as expected, the following sentence must be block-quoted:

herp derp does it work?

And the following excerpt should show proper symbol:

100x + 5 >= 5

If it fails, then WordPress sucks.

Update: indeed it failed.

Update again: patched and now finally works.

Dolls of God episode 2 – nice OP

Ishikawa Chiaki sure doesn’t let us down. Even though this one probably won’t have as much *impact* as Uninstall, it’s pretty addictive.

Story wise, just as expected. Nothing mind-blowing yet but nothing too bad either. Just about right, I’d say. Though I’m not hoping too much and prepared for the usual unfinished manga adaptation-style ending.

ZFS on Desktop – Which OS?

I’ve been thinking about this lately, especially after seeing this:

[root@einhart ~]# pkg_version -vIL=>
binutils-2.21 < needs updating (index has 2.21.1)
bitstream-vera-1.10_4 < needs updating (index has 1.10_5)
chromium-12.0.742.112 < needs updating (index has 12.0.742.124)
droid-fonts-ttf-20100214_1 < needs updating (index has 20110324)
exiv2-0.21,1 < needs updating (index has 0.21.1,1)
gawk-3.1.8 < needs updating (index has 4.0.0)
gcc-4.6.2.20110701 < needs updating (index has 4.6.2.20110708)
gnutls-2.12.7_1 < needs updating (index has 2.12.7_2)
libidn-1.19 < needs updating (index has 1.22)
openjdk6-b22_6 < needs updating (index has b23)
p5-Net-DBus-0.33.6 < needs updating (index has 1.0.0)
p5-libwww-5.837 Fetching ‘/usr/ports/www/chromium’

To build Chromium, you should have around 1 GB of memory
and a fair amount of free diskspace (~ 1.5GB).

===> Vulnerability check disabled, database not found
===> License BSD LGPL21 MPL accepted by the user
===> Found saved configuration for chromium-12.0.742.112
=> chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.xz doesn’t seem to exist in /usr/ports/distfiles/.
=> Attempting to fetch http://download.goodking.org/downloads/chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.xz
chromium-courgette-redacted-12.0.742.124.tar.x 0% of 114 MB 35 kBps^C

And did you notice that “you should have around 1 GB of memory and a fair amount of free diskspace”? Yeah, it does use that much memory to update a web browser. Something that takes few seconds on Windows and Fedora and few minutes on Ubuntu takes almost hours to do on FreeBSD. Downloading source notwithstanding, compiling it also takes long, long time.

If anything, this is why I hate FreeBSD. And you will mention use package except that there’s no H.264 video support and possible chance of conflicting package difference between my system and the buildbot. As much as I want to use binary packages, they come in unwanted forms:

* GNOME 2 pulls Samba4 for God knows why reason
* Some pacakges don’t have optimization enabled
* Mplayer doesn’t have VDPAU
* Some packages must be installed manually (Java, Opera)
* Portupgrade takes minutes to compute what to do (something which is done in seconds in Ubuntu)

As much as I can tolerate this shit, the very fact that VirtualBox under FreeBSD takes much more CPU certainly doesn’t help.

So, I guess I’ll try yet another OS. There are several options so here are overview of current choices.

FreeBSD
——-
Pros:

* Extremely simple
* Up to date packages
* Highly customizable
* Stable ZFS

Cons:

* Customization comes at cost: compile time
* No good virtualization option
* A package management that is comparable with slowpoke
* No flash (yes there’s linux flashplugin ports but it’s a joke)
* Awesomely slow video playback even optimized on Firefox

PC-BSD
——
Pros:

* Based on FreeBSD, has some of familiarity
* Binary packages that’s not too slow
* Stable ZFS

Cons:

* Also no good virtualization
* Epic size of packages (eg. [a hundred megabytes for Firefox](http://www.pbidir.com/bt/pbi/49/firefox))

OpenIndiana
———–
Pros:

* Stable, greatest ZFS
* Zones
* Good VirtualBox support
* Flash support

Cons:

* Complex
* Doesn’t survive trivial hardware change without Live CD/USB
* ACL
* Outdated packages
* Non-existent packages
* Manual compiling of `mplayer` is a must since the defaults on various repositories are crap
* Still beta
* Doesn’t recognize FreeBSD’s GPT (at least on `oi_148`)
* Ugly freetype2 (no support for subpixel hinting apart of manual compile)

Ubuntu Linux
————
Pros:

* Latest, greatest software
* Good software support
* Good virtualization

Cons:

* Unstable ZFS
* Linux

Note that I only include Ubuntu in Linux category since it’s the only OS having both working nvidia driver and precompiled ZFS module, saving me lots of headaches.

A Dark Rabbit Has Seven Lives episode 1 – …

It doesn’t waste time introducing characters. Well, it does have some kind of character introduction but the core – the story itself – also moved quickly. I mean, the ending already tickled curiosity especially the relation with characters introduced earlier. Stabbed on the ending is quite wat-worthy. I guess that’ll double as more backstory explanation. We’ll see.

Promising, yes. It’s ZEXCS handling this though so we still need to be careful.

Yuru Yuri episode 2 – HHNNNNGGGGGGGH

*Death by yuri*.

As hoped, the second episode delivers. **And more**. An explicit version of Tsumugi is one thing but the yuri-tsundere-couple is also great. I mean, seeing a tsundere character isn’t all new but in this, there are two – attracted to each other no less. As Kurogane said, [restraining their homolust for each other and channeling it in to spiteful actions between them](http://kurogane.animeblogger.net/2011/07/12/yuruyuri-02/).

Conclusion: crazy brainless yuri fun.

Steins;Gate episode 14 – woo

The episode which we see dere-est Makise Kurisu ever. Well, finally things get SERIOUS and we see that Okabe actually did something crazy and his ability is not to be underestimated. At least the future version. /hahahah

Things should (hopefully) just get better after this which is quite an opposite to its somehow-related `Chaos;Head` – a series which I facepalm’d. Probably because of the main character. A mad scientist is surely much better than a delusionist – the latter just doesn’t make enough sense.

Cat God episode 1 – Gods everywhere

Powered by Satomi Arai. Seeing her voicing a non-loli role (and humanoid) is rather weird but still win.

The first episode of Cat God basically explains the characters and some of the back story. I certainly did not expect a yuri undertone in this series. Amaterasu Omikami approved a girl-girl pair? HAHAHAHA. Japanese sure like mocking their own God. Apart of that, this could help understanding various Gods worshipped in Japan (or whatever the term is). The names are fucking long though so I don’t think I’ll ever remember any of them by the end of this series.

It’s animated by AIC PLUS+ so we can hope for something resembling story in this series. Or not. At least they won’t horribly mess up thing like that certain random animation studio (pun intended).

The ABCs of Blooming episode 14 – still going strong

Unlike the other series I can barely watch despite its new twist (Nichijou), this series is still enjoyable. The animation was kept stable and pleasant. The new theme song aren’t too bad either though not as memorable as the first one (yet).

The latter half of this series is started by how the Kissou Inn staffs differ to other inns. In how they actually love the jobs and how the other inn failed to make enjoyable atmosphere between staffs. There’s good chance of the first staff temporarily takes up job to show _how it should be done_.

Yeah, this post is late and the fact that I scheduled this didn’t help at all.

Let’s Play! OVA – um what

Aliens learning the strip-[insert game here].

Relatively story-free episode themed around aliens learning human’s games. The captains really topped it up by playing strip variant of all games while the main team only has one such themed game. I’m glad(?) they didn’t forgot the epic film shooting which happened in the actual series and amazed how they can make an entire episode based on that.

Mayo Chiki! episode 1 – okay

I actually hoped this to be the same type as [Shitsuji Shoujo to Ojou-sama](www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=44449) but turned out to be something generic straight. I mean, an S princess, a reverse trap and a gynophobic (is it even the right term?) boy. Riiiiight.

Well, not too bad overall with good amount of well-placed fanservices here and there. I mean, lots of em. Turning off brain is necessary for this kind of series.

Also, [first episode and someone is dying already and most likely on his way to become an M](http://kurogane.animeblogger.net/2011/07/08/mayo-chiki-01/).

R-15 episode 1 – Unlimited Delusion Works

So, basically his talent is imagining _things_ (like, picture above) and actually writing it. On paper. Or stone.

As expected there are lots of white lights on this series. Heck, not even past a minute there is already one. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be much development happening yet. Not even character introduction apart of the quick hack job at the beginning.

Surely not hoping for anything extraordinary but probably will be a mindless fun.

God’s Memo Pad episode 1 special – hmmmm

My mistake when watching this is that I didn’t watch it fully focused therefore apparently I have missed some important bits here and there. I made sure to not miss any scene with Alice on it though – except the dialogue which escaped me.

As usual, I didn’t read the source material so I don’t know how it goes in there. Not that I’m interested to, either.

Overall pretty standard business for a mystery series. The NEET thingy is rather amusing and the helpers kind of remind me of Baker Street Irregulars. Anyway, being animated by J.C.Staff there’s at least a 1d2 (number pulled out of thin air) chance of it being good. 1 episode is basically not enough to fairly judge anything and guesses can be wrong sometimes.