I broke up with my fiancee a few days ago. (On the first, to be specific... didn't want to post on that day for the obvious reason.)

Communication issues - neither of us did a good job of finding out what it was the other wanted out of the relationship. Fault on both sides, and while it's awkward, we're not angry. Just wasn't going to work out long-term.

I'm still here (by which I mean, living at her house) in the meantime, though naturally that's not the long-term plan anymore. Thinking of finding a place locally and taking a year, basically making a nice long-term vacation out of it.

Obviously not really happy with the situation, but eh, them's the risks, better to have loved and lost, all that jazz. Pretty cold comfort but I'll take what I can get...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:35 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It's a truism that current photovoltaics aren't quite cost-effective at current power prices. You can get systems that show a break-even in a decade plus, but that's highly dependent on the mean time between failures estimates being accurate to that kind of time span; if they're even a little short, you pay more for the panels than you save on the juice.

But that's only the case if you're paying US prevailing power prices. Electricity is a lot more expensive here, for a whole slew of factors some of which are thanks to the gummint, as usual. Which means... that PV power pays off a lot faster, because the panels aren't more expensive here (and the installation ain't that much more either).

This means there are a lot of panels on rooftops around here. Enough, actually, that the utility had real problems with entire neighborhoods which had negative power consumption during daylight hours. (Not just one or two - apparently it's something like 100 of the 451 stations on the grid.)

This led to a really stupid result - the government actually mandated a limit on the number of houses on each block which would be allowed to have a PV installation. It looks like the utility has finally gotten its head out of its rear and is signing on to allowing additional installations so long as the proper gear is in place to prevent a voltage spike of incoming power from blowing out a substation transformer not built to deal with power running the other way. Fortunately, we've already got our panels installed...

Apparently "the government has enacted a really dumb regulation" is not uncommon here. They have a ban on sparklers...

That said, they did give me credit for having my car registered in Texas - I only had to pay the modest plate fee to get registered here until my renewal period in June. At which point it becomes $300/year... oy!

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 07:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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So one of the side effects from working from home is needing a home office. This wasn't a particularly big deal back in Dallas because, hey, that's just wherever my computer was. It's a bit more complicated when you're sharing living space, especially already-set-up living space.

There's a room for it and the furniture aspect isn't a problem. However, we need to get data into that room, otherwise the "log in remotely" aspect won't go so well. Complicating matters, I also have an IP phone that I need to plug in - so while I could get the PC to just use wireless to connect, it's not that easy for the IP phone. Complicating matters still further, the intake router is across the entire house from the office.

It's POSSIBLE to route the computer's traffic through the phone so that I only need one connection, but I'd prefer to avoid that if I can.

So here are my options:

-Have someone come in and run wire through the ceiling to the office, and put in a secondary router in the office. (Theoretically I could put two wires in, one for IP phone and one for PC, but the intake router is short on ports to start with, so there's a new router purchase involved either way...) This is probably the best long-term method but is also the most restrictive if I end up moving stuff around.

-Run a cable along the ceiling into the office, into a secondary router in the office. Would result in a pretty long length of cat-5 running around the ceiling of three different rooms, plus we'd still have to drill it through the wall of the office if we ever want to be able to close that door. Easiest solution in the sense that it doesn't really require anything from a technical perspective, but also dead last from an aesthetics perspective.

-Look for a way to hook up both PC and IP phone wirelessly. What I suppose I would need is a router which would hook up to the wireless already in place (or, failing that, a transmitter and receiver router). This... sounds like something that has to be a solved problem somewhere, right? Is this something that your generic router with wireless is capable of doing if you change the configuration settings, or do I need to get dedicated hardware to make it work? Or is this in fact a dumb idea that I should ditch, and is it time to go buy a big spool of cat5 and get working on the ceiling mount?

(I'm not too worried about the performance end of the wireless - I'm pretty sure that any added lag would be more or less transparent for playing MMOs and the days when I played twitch shooters online are mostly over. But I would like reliability, if I'm going to be VPNing in to a company network for several hours a day...)

Anyone have any advice?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:37 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Road trip is done, holidays have been celebrated with the family, which is a little bigger now - yesterday Rohan Kent was born, making me an uncle. (Probably the weird uncle... no real prospects of avoiding that at this late date!)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:24 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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More to the point, the last one for a long while.

Moving out on the 20th. Am I all packed? Nope. I've got most of the fun stuff packed away, but I still have to pack up the display cabinets and the art. I've got plenty of old clothes to take to a charity drop-off (and some that are in no shape even for charity that will be given the heave-ho). I have a number of items of furniture that need to be divested, sold off, hauled away, or otherwise gotten rid of. The computer's not packed. The BACKUP computer isn't packed. The orks, though, are all packed.

I'll be road-tripping for a few days and then spending Christmas in San Fran with the folks, hopefully coinciding with the arrival of my first nephew, Rohan. (Ask my brother, not me...)

And so of course now is when the Starbound early access opens up. Go figure.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:18 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Went into this with low expectations. Otaku brought in to flog otaku goods to a fantasy world? Cute maid and princess characters? Yeah, yeah, just another otaku validation show where the hero's utter lack of other redeeming traits is glossed over because he's a generic nice guy, which makes him the most desirable target for every female in the show...

And this show isn't particularly different from that. Shinichi's just a short step above a hikkikimori - he filled out a job application and went to an interview - but ridiculously out of his depth, thrown into the position of cultural ambassador by virtue of the Japanese government not trusting its own export-promotion planning (worth a chuckle but a fairly thin premise for the show).

And yet it's working, so far, mostly because it's not pulling any punches on the class issue - Shinichi is spending less time feeling up the maid and more trying to figure out how to sell manga to illiterate peasantry with no disposable income or free time. In a way it's a little cheap (Shinichi is a nice guy not because of generic inoffensiveness but because he's horrified by the concept of beating the servants and doesn't have racial prejudice against pointy-eared maids or lizardmen...)

But it also gives the show something to do besides devolve into the typical brew of romantic comedy misunderstandings, and there's the opportunity for some real reflection... to what extent do you have to share the values to enjoy the entertainments? Will they have to import their values along with their anime? (Or for that matter, is the whole thing a smokescreen for a resource-hungry Japan to finish preparations before it rolls in the tanks?)

I'll give the show two additional good points - it tackles the literacy problem head-on, and it's not afraid to spoof some recent stuff (that's Attack on Titan they're reading there...)

Could get good, could throw it all away with maid grab-ass and beach episodes, no telling which it'll actually do yet. Pleasantly surprised so far but mostly because I wasn't really expecting anything from it.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:49 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It's like drinking a double espresso of Go Nagai. Holy throwback, Batman!

Not good in any kind of conventional sense, but it taps a thick vein of that cracked-out logic-what-logic gimme-some-boobs-and-blood stuff of the early 80s. Cutey Honey by way of Subekan Deka done as an homage by the staff from Gurren Lagann...

I'm amazed. A totally unexpected bit of goodness.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:12 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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No, my family's not eccentric (well, the rest of my family isn't... your not-humble-at-all correspondent excepted!)

I'm always hesitant to say things like "anime of the season" because, frankly, everyone's mileage may vary. But I don't think I enjoyed any of the anime that I've watched this season quite so thoroughly as this one. Very simple character art combined with extremely realistic backgrounds, a cast that delivers comedy without being comprised of a series of moe tropes, and a solid story arc with a few surprising and well-executed twists along the way.

Oh, it's weird - thoroughly weird, though not randomly in the sense that something like Excel Saga was. Does a good job of keeping you surprised without breaking its own internal consistency.

If you've got any patience for the odd, do give it a try.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:18 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Part of the good luck lately has been a run of takin' care of myself. Made it out to various doctors and got a few things taken care of (the acne medication is surprisingly effective...)

One of the things I'd wanted to do was get my hearing checked, because bluntly, it's never been good. Went in and had it screened, and it turns out my hearing's actually quite excellent - any problems I've got in hearing people are in my brain, not my ears. Well, they can't fix brains yet, but eh. Interestingly enough, though, the ear-nose-throat doc who was examining me easily guessed that I had pretty lousy sleep full of snoring, and recommended that I go see a sleep doctor.

A few tests later, it was determined that I have sleep apnea, which frankly I was pretty sure of before I'd gone in. The doc suggested that I try a CPAP device, which forces a little extra pressure into my airway to keep it open. Downside is that I've got a funny little nasal mask. Upside is that I sleep quite a bit better. Not just a little - I'm waking up much, much more easily in the morning, and hardly waking up during the night at all. I was a bit worried that it would bug Jessica, but she's happy with the results ("you don't quit breathing in the middle of the night anymore!") and, frankly, the machine is pretty quiet too. Took a little getting used to - pretty much gotta sleep on my back, but eh, I can manage that.

There is one other downside - a positive diagnosis of sleep apnea means I can pretty much forget getting life insurance. It's a big ol' heart attack risk, though apparently a lot less nasty if you're getting treated.

Also picked up a nice, new, biiig bed which the two of us can fit on without fighting for space. Alas, it is waiting for me in Hawaii, and now I'm back on my ol' saggy mattress. Ah well, one more thing to look forward to, hm?

I'm hardly in perfect health... frankly, I could drop about fifty or sixty pounds and not miss 'em one bit. But I'm feeling better than I have been in a long time.

Next time I'll do an anime post, promise. ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:18 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The problem with posting infrequently because you have nothing major to talk about is this: when you have things happening, you're out of the habit and have even less time than usual to talk about them!

At any rate, things are moving along swimmingly over here. Biggest piece of news is a change of locale. I'm shipping out to Hawaii this winter, there to live with my lady-love (and prospective mother-in-law, heh). This is, not surprisingly, my first move off the continent, and so there are a lot of details I've got to deal with. Plenty of stuff won't be making the trip, so I've also got to find good homes (or the dump) for some furniture and lots of excess books, manga, etc.

Gonna be quite a big change, but fortunately I don't need to look for new work - my current employer is perfectly happy to have me do my same job from a few time zones away. (and since I'm on the evening shift as it is, that's even more convenient...)

I'd resisted the idea for a while, but after some thought, it hit me; I don't really DO anything local here in Dallas, it's just a city I'm in for work. I don't have a lot of friends here and I almost never see the ones that are; I don't do anything local that I couldn't do somewhere else; and it's not like I'm here for the weather! (not that Hawaii's weather is particularly superior in that sense - it's hot and muggy, if not nearly as bad as Houston, but in Houston people adapt by not doing damnfool things like going outside.)

Hawaii's a lot more expensive than Texas, naturally, but all told my total expenses will probably be going down (certainly my FOOD expenses will be, given how often I go out to eat here, which is "essentially every meal"). And it's not like my commute will be expensive...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 10:39 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Really ought to grab some screen shots next time...

Basic setup is bog-standard simple. Evil demon lord tries to take over fantasy world, heroes beat his forces back and attack him, he retreats to another world with a promise to return one day and conquer it. In the meantime, he and his minion will bide their time... in Tokyo, as it happens.

The remainder of the episode is adjustment humor. Minion spends time trying to figure out where to get magic out of a world without any, while Satan (yes, that's his name) buckles down and takes work at a McD's clone. He's improbably good at it. With absolutely no sense of just how far down the totem pole he is, he's the kind of employee that everyone wishes they had (because, of course, for him it's An Important Step On The Path to World Conquest!)

And then the end of the episode introduces one of the heroes, who have followed him (presumably to finish him off), and who the heck knows where the show is going to go now. Could get fanservice-y. Could just get Odd Couple. But it has some charm for now, mostly in that Satan is a genuinely nice person (though so far with no description of how someone like that became a world-conquering demon lord...) Playing against type can't carry the show all the way, though, so we'll have to see what direction it goes with the next ep.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:40 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Needed that... almost two weeks in Hawaii. Notes:

• Girlfriend is doing fine.
• Maoyuu bogged down a little, but is still pretty decent.
• Problem Children was pretty good, but suffered from being as short as it was. An intro arc, Asuka's character arc, and then... that's it? Surely not. It's okay to keep your powder dry, but there comes a point where you ought to fire it. We have a pretty good idea about Asuka's motivations and reactions, and some about Kasukabe, but Izayoi is kind of... we know next to nothing about him, save that he's apparently invincible and invulnerable. You know, that's not good for maintaining dramatic tension, guys - even Superman has to worry about kryptonite.
• Senyu is a good way to spend two minutes a week. Most of the other shorts were forgettable.
• Polar Bear Cafe ends this week, proving that there is in fact no god.
• Spent the first weekend in Oahu helping an old friend run a booth at Kawaiikon. I'll do a separate post on that later - was interesting, definitely different from the normal con experience.
• Who would have thought that the best luau show in Hawaii was the one that was put on by the guys at Brigham Young? If you get the chance, GO.
  

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:15 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Reported at ANN.

I didn't know him personally, though he commented here a couple of times and more frequently at Steven's blog. Still, anyone who enjoys anime or manga as a hobby owes him a kind thought. He was one of the people who broke the trail that made so many things possible today. I've several of his translation works on the shelf too - on top of pioneering the American business, he was also a fine translator.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Still alive! Been kept busy with vacation, with an old cutesy MMO, and with lots and lots of work (promotion good, insane OT not so good.)

Lately on the anime radar:

-Chuunibyou, still have a few eps to finish out. Much better than I anticipated from the concept. Probably helps if at one point you've had a rich internal fantasy life of your own, though hopefully one you didn't share with people to this degree.

-Maoyuu, ep 2 just hit Crunchy. I've liked it ever since I stumbled across one of the manga series a year ago. It's a send-up of the traditional fantasy genre, but at the same time gets into the details of medieval economics. Think Spice and Wolf meets Dragon Quest written by Milton Friedman. The demon "king" has a refreshing distrust of top-down solutions imposed by government!

-Polar Bear is Polar Bear. At this point you should know if the puns work for you or not...

-Watched some Pet Girl of Sakurasou with the girlfriend. Was worried that it was going to be pretty creepy; the entire hook is that the protagonist is caring for a girl who needs to be reminded to do things like dress and eat. But it comes off as sweet, partly because the girl isn't retarded, just detached, but still human for all that... and the creepy is drowned out by the wacky ensemble anyway.

-Tried an ep of Mangirl and it was kind of... eh. Inside baseball jokes for manga publishers. Maybe if you've got five minutes to kill...

-...and you already watched Senyu, another fantasy parody that's much more entertaining. Lotta RPG jokes in this one, it'll be interesting to see if it can retain the funny.

-Tried an ep of Ishida and Asakura, another short (Crunchy really got a load of them this season, huh?) Wasn't impressed. The Cromartie vibe just isn't there.

Still to watch from this season: Encouragement of Climb (gack, gotta love Japanese-translated titles), Vividread (you can't describe a show as "Strike Witches meets Nanoha" and not have me interested!), Tamako Market, more Shin Sekai Yori, more Magi.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Still need to take some better pics - about 2/3 of the ones I snapped of these guys I dropped for being out of focus/blurry/shaky, etc.



Quite satisfied with the results, though. Gotten quite a bit better with skin, but I still need to work on my highlighting some. The tiger stripe experiment worked pretty well, too...



In the end, I'm glad I went back and did the balaclavas as well as the pants with the stripey orange. JUST the pants ended up looking pretty odd - obviously you're trying to draw the eye to them, but with the equipment load of most of the orks, you really can't see them well from a lot of angles. Pulling the eye toward the head helps a lot!



It would figure that the one group shot that came out well would be the rear view!

I wasn't able to stripe the balaclava of the boss since, well, he doesn't wear one. The color balance is quite different on his model too, since he's the only one not wearin' a shirt (the rest of them are unusually bundled up as orks go, for that matter.) At the same time, the boss is holding big jagged knives and I was unsure what to do with them. One problem solved the other. The tiger stripe knives tie him into the rest of the squad better than pants alone would have. I've also put some dark green stripes on his arms and back... considered going "full camo" with the rest, but eh. Not really up for repainting them all at this stage.

Now to decide what unit to paint next...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Spotted on Steam.

What the heck?

It's... Mario Kart with licensed F1 names and teams. What's the market for this? I'm not sure if it's heretical or awesome.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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From a thread at Steven's blog.

In the beginning, it -was- Dog Shit One, "dog shit" being the term used by veteran troops to refer to green lieutenants on their first deployment (presumably out of their hearing, though). It was not anthropomorphized, and drawn in realistic style; very Western really. It was reprinted at the end of Apocalypse Meow vol. 3. Nothing special, but it had good attention to detail.

At some point someone convinced the manga artist that it would be a good idea to do the same story with cats and bunnies. That's Cat Shit One (the manga). There is no rookie lieutenant, just two experienced deep-insertion-patrol types and their newbie radioman/gunner.

The tone is pretty dark... but it's a pretty fair portrayal of Vietnam. The protagonists get their hands (very) dirty, the VC are evil as hell, the Russians and Chinese are lurking in the background, the anti-war protestors are clueless, and it comes down to a couple of bunnies trying to make their way in a screwed-up situation.

Cat Shit One (the anime, in its current incarnation) is not the pilot episode - I had a tape of -that- sitting behind my desk for years at ADV.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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My team was infiltrating the gutted wreck of an alien craft, the largest we'd ever picked up on our radar. The Skyraven had set them down almost directly inside the wide-open remains of the nose of the craft. A couple of Outsiders put up little resistance, but a group of nasty Floaters tangled with the team as they breached the main chamber of the craft. The sniper was off securing the perimeter to the right, and one support sergeant had worked his way up on the left, downing no less than three of the Floaters and earning himself a promotion when he got back to base... assuming he did, of course.

The chamber was full of stasis equipment, surgeries, all sorts of stuff we'd never even seen before. Morale was high but ammunition levels were low. But before the team got their power cells swapped out, three six-legged insectoid aliens burst from the door at the other end of the chamber.

I hate Chryssalid. They're incredibly aggressive, tough enough to shrug off anything short of a full laser LMG burst, and they can generally one-hit-kill any poor bastard they can catch. (And, naturally, they're fast as hell too!) Before you know it, they'll turn half your team into Chryssalid Chow and you'll be on your way to the reload button.

The team could have managed to down one Chryssalid with the dregs left in their power packs, but three was totally out of the question. We only had one hope - the anti-personnel rocket slung on the back of Major Sanchez, the squad's heavy and current world-champion alien-killer. But firing the warhead into the three bugs would also frag half the squad (probably not killing them outright - all except the FNG were wearing the latest carapace armor - but laying them up for a month healing would be a serious blow to the XCom program nevertheless.)

I made the snap decision, and Major Sanchez fired his frag - directly into the middle of the chamber, killing two of the bugs and incidentally wrecking most of the equipment. The lone surviving bug staggered over to the FNG and tore him in half before being brought down by the rest of the squad. Ah, well, that's what they're there for...

The howls from the research team were cut short when they realized that, even though we failed to recover most of the alien experimentation equipment, the -engines- were all intact... filled with priceless Elerium. And within hours, our techs had the hull stripped apart, its supply of alloys busting wide open the research bottleneck I had been worried about. Now they're fighting over whether to start working on plasma rifles, a laser gunnery tank, or powered armor.

I'm starting to bend the difficulty curve with better technology, but at the same time I've taken big morale hits in Europe. No telling if I'm going to be able to pull this off long-term.

So, yeah, game's pretty good. "Worthy successor", even, for all that some of it has been simplified.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 04:48 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Related to the extremely cute web comic nemu*nemu. The artist is asking for people to share what they have in their art bag.

Well, hey, I have one of those!



Okay, so I'm stretching the definition of "bag" a little. Our local game shop does build'n'paint stuff on Sundays, along with miniature wargaming, so sometimes I go down there to get some painting done. I got tired of throwing stuff in a box top and then realizing that half the paints I wanted were still at home, though, so I thought "hey, why not just pack them all?"



Contained within:

• Plenty of Citadel paints (you can tell the newer ones with the see-through caps)
• Plenty of Reaper paints (very different consistency, also a lot of unusual metallic colors, and an absolutely dynamite white)
• superglue and plastic glue
• pieces of slate for bases (sometimes supplemented by sand and tufts of Silflor buffalo grass if I'm basing at the moment)
• xacto knife
• plastic nippers
• two file sets
• brass rod for pinning joints I don't trust to stay glued
• spare drill bits matching the brass rod (snapped two in one day once)
• PVA white glue for gluing sand on bases
• some of my odder brushes (the everyday ones are drying at the moment)
• a bit of foam I can use to make patchy paint jobs (used this on the kans I posted)

Not exactly the kind of art supply that the artist had in mind, but eh, illustration is not my forte. (Truth be told, I'm not much better at painting, but it's still fun!)

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:56 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Holy moly!

I've been pretty skeptical about the Kickstarter stuff - I figure the musical chairs are eventually going to stop and someone's going to get screwed. But I don't have any trouble trusting Reaper, local boys from Denton that they are. I already use their paints and I like their models even if they're not from the games that I play.

But $100 getting you two hundred fifty five models? (Free domestic shipping too!)

It's kind of kicky that they started off with a goal of $30,000 and are currently cruising near $2,750,000. That's a company-changing amount of money, and I'm sure they'll have a ball with it.

If you want in (and if you do any miniature gaming or D&D, you want in!), it's open until Saturday night at 6 PM...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:27 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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