Himariiiiiiiiii!111!

I told you stupid writers that I couldn't take it if you did this to Himari again!

This episode was too psychedelic and metaphorical and I’m too illiterate to say anything about it. Even if I had waited for English subtitles to watch it I wouldn’t have understood shit. At least there was a bright red glowing orb that looked like incest.

Working!! isn’t as boring as I thought when I initially tried to watch it

I tried watching the show when it aired originally but then I got distracted by something and dropped it. I kept current with the show back then for only about two or three episodes and then dropped it. I didn’t pick it back up again until now because I was under the impression that I had found it boring the first time I had tried watching it.

Since the BDs are out though and the second season is airing soon I figured I’d try watching it again. Everyone seemed to like it quite a bit so I thought perhaps something was wrong with me. My opinion of it has improved now that I’ve watched the whole series. It’s still not one of my favourites, but it’s not so boring that I have to read email or watch torrent RSS feeds or write a sub-par essay for school while watching it to keep from killing myself out of boredom. That may not sound like high praise, but I’ve been bored enough to feel the need to multitask even during shows that I like quite a bit, like Star Driver. It’s not rare at all for me to enjoy something and even find it pretty captivating but, nonetheless, still have my System Idle Process at about 50%. To reduce this number I browse eBay for good deals on things I don’t need or stare at progress bars, IP addresses, and hostnames in my torrent client until it’s down to about 10 to 20%.

Working!! is fast-paced enough so that my System Idle Process is at about 25% just by watching it. While it’s not quite ideal — there are still plenty of moments when I feel that a joke has dragged on for long enough — it’s not tedious enough so that I absolutely must multitask to make watching it bearable.

No matter how many times I see it, her haircut is irksome.

Taneshima is probably my favourite character, as I’m sure she’s designed to be. Her CV, Asumi Kana, sure does get that squeaky little girl quality in the voice right. My biggest complaint about the show though are those two thin strips of Taneshima’s hair that hang forward over her ears in a really unnatural and ridiculous way. This bothers me way more than it should, but I can’t help it. Hair just doesn’t do that in the real world! It’s as though she uses the same hair mousse as Goku but only in those two narrow strips of hair, which makes it even more annoying than when the entire haircut a character is consistently unrealistic or gravity-defying. That it’s just one small feature of her haircut that’s ridiculous is what makes it so aggravating.

An imouto in whose sewa the protagonist is habitually in is always a plus.

There are, of course, a couple of features of the show that automatically garner it points, such as crossdressing. Whether it’s men dressing as women or women dressing as men, this always improves the point ranking of a show in my scorebook, no matter how well or poorly the scene or scenes containing the crossdressing are executed. In this particular case, however, it should be noted that I thought the crossdressing was pretty well done, at least on the cuteness and humour metrics.


The show also receives points for the presence of a cute elementary school imouto who is responsible and caring beyond her years and cossets the protagonist like a child. Every protagonist should have one of these.

Androphobia also earns any work some automatic points. In this case, however, the androphobia is inextricably linked to the protagonist getting beaten to a pulp, which is frightening and detracts points. Though humourous to the extent that violence and injury are always funny, the viewer more or less identifies with Souta as the “normal” human male so it causes me to wince every time he gets beaten up. No harm no foul on this one.

But oh, look: RSS tells me that Hansaet beat the Japanese encoders again and episodes 12 of Penguins is out. Now to quit wasting time writing about this average show and watch that fabulous show. FTTH sure has made me impatient.

Argh! Fucking eBay glitch fucked me over again

I never would have considered myself a “sniper” prior to a few weeks ago. Now, I’m no Lee Harvey Oswald, but I’m now forced to acknowledge that I am, indeed, a “sniper” since I heard the word used some weeks ago to contrast Yahoo! Auctions and eBay. I never knew there was a term for the practice of waiting until the last few seconds to make a bid on an auction. I always figured it was just common sense to wait until as close as possible to the last second to place a bid. At least that’s how I’ve always done it. Apparently this isn’t how it’s done on Yahoo! Auctions though. I, of course, not being a user of Yahoo! Auctions, don’t know for certain if that’s true since, even if more sellers did ship internationally, I don’t have a Japanese credit card and most sellers don’t accept PayPal. I suppose if an eBay auction ended in the middle of the night or during a time when I’m without Internet access I would bid whenever I could, but usually I’m able to bid when there are only a few seconds left.

That’s why it so frustrating when eBay kicks you off because of this glitch I’ve noticed. Granted, it’s possible it’s something to do with my browser settings about cookies, but I prefer to think that it’s eBay’s fault and I’m blameless because I prefer deluding myself to acknowledging my shortcomings. There were about ten seconds left in an auction for a 160GB laptop hard drive and the price was only USD 16. I had finally tasted success and had zombied together some parts I’d had lying about for months into a functional PS3 so I needed a hard drive for it. The nice part was that, rather than requiring a costly power supply replacement as I had initially supposed (~ USD 30), the system just needed a power switch replacement (the thing to which you connect the AC adapter which cost me only USD 1). This was perfect. The glitch, however, occurs when you open an auction page after your login has partially expired. That is, your username still appears at the top of the page and, if the item is in your watchlist, it will still appear in blue, but it’s been long enough since you logged in that, when you try to place a bid, eBay will ask you to enter your password. At least, this is how it’s supposed to work. However, if, while you have the auction page open, you open another browser tab and visit a different page within eBay and do something that requires you to enter your password in the new tab (such as visit “My eBay”) then, when you go back to the first tab to bid, instead of letting the bid go through or prompting you for your password, you get logged out of eBay immediately, without explanation.

This is what the expression “kick in the teeth” was invented for.

Kamisama no Memochou made me yearn for that OSX86 setup I once perfected

The only thing I can say now that I’ve finished watching this show is that it made me really want to buy a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini, an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad.

It’s always been more or less hit-and-miss installing OS X on AMD hardware. You’d think that, being the compulsive buyer that I am, I’d have a Core 2 Duo system around here somewhere but, for some reason, I don’t. I’m glad I documented everything I did to get it working on my A8N5X since I’m hopelessly out of the loop now. The HDD that had my working OS X installation on it exploded one day along with several hundred gigabytes of stuff I was seeding, so if I want OS X now I’m going to have to start from zero. That’s what I get, I suppose, for using for bittorrent a partition on a disk that had an OS on it. It’s just not the safest thing in the world.

Now I’m waiting for an HDD to arrive so I can see if I can install Lion. That would be very, very satisfying if possible, but, from what I understand, there’s not yet a modified Lion kernel available that works on AMD processors. If that’s the case, I’ll try Snow Leopard. I have a retail Snow Leopard installation disc anyway and there is more information available about it.

I’m so totally buying an Intel processor next time I revolutionise my setup here. I hate how all of the nice things you can do on a computer are Intel-only. It’s not just OS X; I have to use real PS2 hardware to play PS2 games because, regardless of how much RAM I have, which video card I have installed, or how many cores my processor has, PCSX2 performs poorly on AMD systems.

I find Murdoch as repulsive as the next guy…

but I was watching the local news on Fox because it’s on at 10:00 instead of 11:00 and I need my beauty rest. The anchor is also much better looking than the anchor on WPIX, the only other channel with local news at 10:00. The news is mostly promotions for other shows on Fox, but they mentioned in a fluff piece that parents are up in arms over “in-app purchases” on Apple devices. Like this:
8-Year-Old Girl Racks Up $1400 Bill Buying Smurfberries in Smurf’s Village

Well, that’s nothing. I can spend that much on smurfberries in sixty seconds on iSRO.

My CPU usage keeps shooting up to 100%

This picture is obviously old, but this is more or less what the graphs looked like for days


I’m not sure what’s causing this. I assumed that I got “hacked” again and that there were some malicious files somewhere in this website that I hadn’t known about. That wouldn’t have surprised me; this site is probably already in a lot of blacklists. I have to disable the Network Shield in Avast when I want to visit this site. Interestingly, it doesn’t bother me if I visit the homepage or access the site via FTP, but if I try to visit the WordPress dashboard or access cPanel, the alarm bells go off. I know some of those web-based tools in which you can type in a URL to see if it’s in any blacklists always say this site is associated with malware. robtex used to say that, but it looks like this site has been removed from whatever list it was in because robtex now says it’s not in any of the blacklists it checks in. All of that is well and good, but it didn’t answer what was eating up those CPU cycles.

Rather than fix the source of the problem I installed W3 Total Cache. That stopped the CPU spikes. I’m still worried though because I get absolutely no visitors other than bots from Google, Baidu, and Yandex so there’s no reason I should be using much CPU at all. I installed a fresh copy of WordPress, replacing everything except the config files I’ve manually edited. That should have put my fears to rest, but it hasn’t. While I was still worrying about all of this, the site went down for two days due to DDoS. I sure hope that’s not my fault. I just want everyone to get along. Maybe I’m just paranoid. As though that wasn’t bad enough, I noticed just now that my IP address has changed. Now I have to go and change some DNS records. I really enjoyed having my IP being with a 96. Now it begins with 71.

Poor Shouma

You silly duck; that's not how you eat pudding!

He didn’t ask to be involved in this mess with Ringo, penguins, and kidnappers. I’m not very smart or observant, so I don’t have any criticism of this episode, but it was fun and I’ve now developed a feeling of obligation to take amusing screenshots every week while watching the episode and make obvious and inane comments about them, even when I didn’t pay much attention to the episode. Now we know who that orange-haired girl is. Well, we still don’t know who she is exactly, but she and her penguin are up to no good at least.

I also feel bad for Ringo now. She’s not a villain. Yes, she did cause Shouma to get hit by a car, and she is more or less to blame for his life being put in danger, his getting kidnapped and having this and that done to him, but now that we know her sob story about rejection and Momoka and her daddy issues, I feel bad for her. She doesn’t need to go through all this.

I’d also like to know what the hell kind of hospital Shouma is in. It looks like a printed circuit board. Or the inside of Manhattan Mini Storage!

As Kanba progresses from one storage unit to another, descending the stairs into deeper and deeper levels of his memory, as it were, I was reminded of Kaiba, which I just watched for the first time this week. It reminded me of how Warp uses that gun thing to open what looks like a thought balloon above the head of a person whose thoughts he wants to enter.

I still don’t remember the name of that orange-haired Pigeon Blood lady. I don’t even remember if we ever learned her name and I’m too lazy and important to go check. I think she’s called Masako, but I’m not sure. Is she just another of Kanba’s many ex-girlfriends? One thing is for sure: it seems she went to medical school with Dr. Irabu: