The Evil(?) is defeated

Posted on August 14, 2024 by baudattitude

OK, so.  This is really just a post I’m putting up so I can find it later when I’ve forgotten how to do something.  But sometimes these might be useful to people who aren’t me!  I hope, anyway.

Today’s post is on the topic of .webp images.  Logically, webp is a great format!  It offers both lossy and non-lossy formats and is much more efficient than either png or jpg.  It’s a win-win!  But it’s also really annoying to work with since support for it isn’t universal outside of web browsers, and  I save images from the web intending to work with them in another application.

Hence today’s post, in which I fix this by (a) creating a small shell script:

 

#!/bin/bash
#
# fixwebp - automatically converts any webp files in ~/Downloads to .png
#

	cd ~/Downloads
	for filename in [ *.WEBP *.webp ] 
	do

	filenamenoext=${filename%.*} 
	if [ -f "$filenamenoext".WEBP ];
	then
		sips -s format png "$filenamenoext".WEBP --out "$filenamenoext".png
		touch -r "${filename}" "$filenamenoext".png
			rm "$filenamenoext".WEBP
	fi
	if [ -f "$filenamenoext".webp ];
	then
		sips -s format png "$filenamenoext".webp --out "$filenamenoext".png
		touch -r "${filename}" "$filenamenoext".png
			rm "$filenamenoext".webp
	fi

	
	done

And (b) assigning this to run whenever files are added to ~/Downloads via an Automator action.

The result is that, any time I download a .webp file, it is cheerfully converted to .png and the .webp file is purged.  This often results in a file which is considerably larger than the .webp version, so there is definitely something to the format’s claims of efficiency, but drive space is cheap and always getting cheaper so I am not going to care much.

 

Posted in organization, shell scripts | Leave a comment

Now, for something completely cozy.

Posted on August 8, 2024 by baudattitude

While it’s a pretty shameful thing to admit, I’m getting some more gaming time in after being laid off last month.  I SHOULD be, you know, working on my resume and hitting the bricks… but the severance package was quite generous and I think I have earned some time to chip away at the backlog.

That brings me to Tasomachi.  It’s a short (5ish hours for me, and I am bad at the genre) puzzle platformer that came out like two years ago and has coincidentally been sitting in my Steam library for about two years based solely on screenshots.

I understand there’s a Switch version now, too? And maybe some versions for other consoles? Anyway, it should be pretty easy to find a way to play it.  And I do recommend playing it if you like things that are …well, cozy.  Tasomachi is very cozy.

The gist of the story, if you need a story in your platformers, is that you are roaming the skies on your airship-built-for-one when you run into mechanical trouble and land in a weird town where all of the people are gone and there are little cat dudes that need your help.

Naturally you cannot resist the commands of the little fuzzballs – and also they are the only people who can fix your ride and get you out of there – so you are sent off to collect at least one hundred and fifty glowing orange doohickies which will save everyone and blah blah blah just get out there and start collecting.

These are typically in very high places.  Fortunately you cannot die from fall damage.  You do, of course, die the second you touch water.  This is blatant cat propaganda at its worst, but we will forgive it and move on.

There are three major zones, you have to complete tasks to open up new parts of the zones, occasionally you will get given a new platforming skill that lets you reach orange doohickies you couldn’t get to before.  All very normal stuff.

Also, after you collect the 150 mandatory glowing orange doohickies there are still like 90 or so that you can go back for if you feel like being a completionist.  So you could probably double your playtime if you felt you didn’t get enough value for money.

I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth from one pass.  It’s a really pretty world to run around in, and while I’m very bad at this sort of game the penalty for dying is very minimal so I never got too frustrated.

Also the cats will sell you new outfits.  I’m a sucker for getting to play dress up.  Cozy vibes intensify.

It’s not a perfect game – the platforming is weirdly floaty in places and I had a number of deaths that I do not consider to have been 100% my fault even if I WAS the person in control of the combination of buttons and stick movements that lead to my death… but it was a good use of an evening.

 

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Elden Ring: OK, time for blasphemy.

Posted on August 7, 2024 by baudattitude

I finished* Elden Ring today.  That’s “Finished*” with a big ol’ Roger-Maris-61* style asterisk, because after about four hours of hoping the final boss would get tired of bruising his knuckles with my face I finally gave up and summoned another player to help me get over the last hurdle.

I probably would have stuck with it until I got gud enough on my own, if From hadn’t decided to make the last fight a two-parter where the first boss dies easy but does enough damage that you go through several charges of Estus Crimson Tears before the second boss comes out and spends most of its time running away from you and killing you with ranged attacks.  But, sadly, getting gud enough just didn’t seem to be in the cards and I was getting tired of the hourly reminders from my watch telling me to stand up and, you know, move around just a little bit.

Anyway.  I have confessed my cardinal sin, and now I’ll move right on to the blasphemy:  Of the six From Software souls-and-souls-like games I’ve played, I would 100% play any of the other five again before even thinking about starting Elden Ring a second time.  It’s just too dang big, and in a way that seriously dampens down the fun factor.  The first twenty hours or so, when you’re just getting established and exploring and accidentally taking portals to places you should not be and meeting other people for jolly co-operation, those are great.  And the last twenty hours, after you finally get into Leyndell and discover this massive sprawling maze of a dungeon/city with really cool bosses, those are great too.

Unfortunately, I played for about 80 hours, and the middle 40 hours were spent mostly picking the game up again every few months, trying to figure out where to go next, killing a boss or two and then putting it down with a vague sense that I was just playing because I’d paid full price for the game and SHOULD be loving it.  It took me like 2 and a half years to finish.

A lot of that time and frustration can be attributed to a specific, very inconspicuous ladder.  I got to the Atlas Plateau, ran into an obviously broken bridge, couldn’t find any way to get across it, assumed it was a dead end, and then spent hours roaming the map looking for an alternate way to get to the other side of the chasm.  I confess I am harboring some unkind thoughts towards whoever decided to make it blend in to the cliff face so very nicely.

Frustration with that and with the final boss fight aside, I’m not calling it a bad game.  For one thing, I don’t actually want to look out my window and see a mob with torches and pitchforks, and for another it’s an absolutely brilliant piece of work.  It definitely earned every one of those awards it racked up in 2022.  For me, though, I think I’m definitely a fan of From’s earlier and more linear experiences.

I did wind up marrying a blue chick with four arms.  I think we got married, anyway.  I’m not sure I had much choice in the matter.  10/10 would recommend for that.

Posted in Souls, videogames, Xbox Series X | Leave a comment

Let’s (not?) Get Physical.

Posted on August 5, 2024 by baudattitude

A few years ago – like, maybe 2017, 2018? – I decided that I was done with physical media.  Games, books, movies, music, you name it, it was going to be ephemeral digital downloads from now on.  No more shelves and shelves of STUFF to keep track of and keep the dust off of.

And I’ve (mostly) stuck to this, even at the expense of, well, expense.  Buying digital is often more expensive than physical, though things like iTunes or Kindle sales can help a lot if you don’t mind waiting a few months after the release date.

I did keep exactly two (2) blu-rays.  AnimEigo’s release of “Otaku no Video” and a region B import of “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie”, both of which are foundational to building the person I am today.

I’ve been happy!   Or, well, have I?  For a few months there, twitter was feeding me tweet after tweet from people on the other side of the physical/digital divide, especially around the time Funimation decided to stop their streaming service and basically render inert all of the digital copy codes they had been inserting into their disc packages.

So, faced with the notion that I might have, in fact, been wrong, I decided to buy some discs.  And wow, at first this was looking like a winner.

Boosting my Blu-ray collection from 2 discs to 9 didn’t take that much more space on the shelf.  I wound up with six seasons of anime and a movie, none of which were more than like, 12 bucks.  That’s really cheap!

Also, I don’t think a proper (subtitled) season one of High School DxD was ever released for purchase on any digital service, and there are conflicting reports on whether seasons 2 and 3 on iTunes have the annoying overlays.

So, strong points for physical: cheap, better language options, uncensored.

They even came with these code sheets, which were already just garbo to throw in the recycle bin.

Note: the digital code with “Legion of Super-Heroes” redeemed just fine via MoviesAnywhere, so I have it on iTunes now.  It was cheaper than buying the digital version, though I only got a 1080P version.  Buying directly on iTunes would have given me 4k.

After a few more months, and a trip or two to Japan, I had another stack.

Thanks to the end of year sale at The Company Formerly Known As AD Vision, and a couple very cheap purchases from Book-Off, I now had 14 Blu-rays and a couple DVDs.  Again, not a lot of money spent but a whole lot of hours of entertainment gained.

…but the shelf space was starting to get a little bit tight.  It certainly didn’t help that my other vice was picking up physical copies of Switch games, especially because the Yen exchange rate meant that buying a new-release game from Japan was like $35 compared to $60 for the same game in the US.

I’ll play some of these someday.

Also, the experience of watching a disc wasn’t… great?  Like, if you just want to sit down and watch a movie from start to finish it’s fine, or if you want to binge-watch a show it’s also fine.  But I was watching a couple episodes of Aura Battler Dunbine every day and it was kind of a pain to get the disc, boot the player, sit through the unskippable intros, change the language, blah blah blah.

It also didn’t look appreciably better.  I mean, my eyes are getting old along with the rest of me, but streaming purchased movies look pretty good, and iTunes even lets you download a local copy to play back and those look fine as well.

I mean, they knock the pants off Crunchyroll streams, especially with the way that service likes to mysteriously drop down to SD or sub-SD quality at times.  But comparing them to the quality of a stream from Microsoft Movies & TV or iTunes, not so much.

I recognize here that I am somewhat on the privileged side as I have near-gigabit connectivity and no data cap.

Also, I would have liked to purchase season 4 of DxD… but it was out of print in the US, meaning collector markups.

There are plenty of cheaper copies available on Amazon and eBay, but they’re region-locked and require a region B player.  By contrast, it was available on iTunes with subtitles and without overlays for like 20 bucks.

That isn’t to say that digital is immune to suddenly becoming unavailable.  I keep waiting for a sale on To Love-Ru on iTunes, and it was delisted before it hit my impulse buy point, as an example, and you can no longer buy the original “Love Live!” series even though Sunshine and later remain available.

Fortunately, anything ‘ve already bought – even if delisted – is still available to download and stream, which is one benefit of buying from a major company like Apple.  They really need you to keep buying their media consumption devices, so making sure that you can feel confident in the media you buy from them is in their best interest.

…of course, I would have said the same thing about Sony and they put a figurative bullet through the metaphorical head of THEIR movie service, so who knows.

That’s another plus for physical.  Out-of-print discs remain (generally) available, even if you do have to pay more for them.  Once a company delists a title digitally you have the options of, well, (a) not buying it or (b) not buying it and just finding a torrent.

In the end, I’ve just finished a kind of annoying process of putting all of these BDs through MakeMKV, and then through Handbrake, and they’re up on our NAS now so we can stream them to any TV in the house.  I just need to keep track of the files, and make sure they’re backed up, and the ripping and encoding took ages, and really I’ve added a little more complexity to my life.

It was an interesting experiment, but I probably won’t buy more discs.  Or if I do, it will be with the understanding that I’m only buying them as an intermediate step before making them into folders of m4v files.

I’ll keep the Switch games, though.  The spines are a pleasant bit of uniformity on the shelf, and knowing the Nintendo Faithful I will be able to unload them for (more than) a few bucks in the future.

 

Posted in anime, organization | Leave a comment

On Digital Graveyards

Posted on August 4, 2024 by baudattitude

Entirely self-indulgent post today, because I finally took like two hours to answer a really trivial question that has been bugging me for, at this point, literal years.

See, back in early 2008 I played through the campaign mode of Ubisoft’s “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas” which I will hereafter refer to as “R6V”.  I also eventually played the sequel.  I don’t think I played any Rainbow Six games after this point.  A brief perusal of Wikipedia suggests that Ubisoft more-or-less dropped the franchise until they released Rainbow Six: Siege, which is one of those all-multiplayer-all-the-time things that I shy away from.

Anyway.  R6V came out very early in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle, so I was surprised to see in-game ads for “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” plastered across bus stops in Las Vegas when I played it in 2008, since this was a currently-airing show and hadn’t existed at the time the game was originally released.  Coming from the PS2 generation, it was the first time I’d really seen games updated behind the scenes.

Anyway.  I finished it, eventually played the sequel, more-or-less left the world of tactical shooters behind, felt pretty good about having dipped my toes into the genre but without any real urge to go back to it.

At some point, though, I remembered those bus stop ads and wondered what they would be like if I played the game today.  Surely they wouldn’t still be advertising a TV show from 2008, but …surely Ubisoft isn’t still selling ad space in a video game released over a decade prior?  Not the most pressing question, but one that has occasionally gnawed at the back of my mind.

So today, when I launched Elden Ring for the first time in a couple of months and it told me that it needed to download a 20GB patch, I decided to answer the question for myself.

I had, somehow, forgotten how awful the first level of R6V is and how poorly-spaced the checkpoints are.  It’s brown and ugly and just keeps GOING, with a couple of moments where you are certain it must have ended and then it throws a new objective at you.  There were a couple of deaths where, any other day, I would have thrown put the controller gently down in frustration and played something else.

But not today.  Today I needed to get to Las Vegas proper to answer my question for myself, and that meant grinding through the godawful Mexico level before being released on to the glittering streets of Sin City.

Fortunately, the bus stops I was curious about are right there as soon as you get to Vegas, so I didn’t need to play too much more of the game to satisfy myself.

So here we go:

These two ads look like placeholders.  A fake movie poster and an in-universe ad for the casino I’m about to shoot my way through.  If I’d played the game off a physical disc without an internet connection, I’m willing to bet all the ads would look like this.

However, there are still a few ads for real things.  For example, there IS a company called Sha Clothing.  I’m pretty sure they have no connection to the company that was at “sha-clothing.com”.  But there was a Sha Clothing there, once upon a time.

To be clear, there’s nothing at that URL now.  Looking through the internet wayback machine, the last time there WAS anything at that URL was 2017 and it was just a domain squatter offering the site for sale.  It looks like it hasn’t been an active business since 2008.

For the record, the domain appears completely up for grabs.  If you wanted to take it over and host a site to confuse anyone playing an 18 year old Xbox 360 game, knock yourself out.

Finally, Axe.  I’m pretty sure this stuff is still for sale, but I was completely unable to find any record of the “Change Your Odds” tagline used in their advertising.   It may have been exclusive to this game since it’s set in Vegas and they were trying for a sort of gambling motif?  I couldn’t find any images of this specific package design either, so I’ll assume it’s quite old as well.

My guess from this little dive into history is that there’s a forgotten server somewhere hosting the last ads from the last advertisers that paid Ubisoft to show up in R6V, and that the game dutifully checks that server for ads when started and pulls down the latest ones on offer.  There may not be a Sha Clothing anymore, Axe may have long moved on from the campaign and their marketing department almost certainly has no idea that they are getting one heck of a return on whatever check they last cut to Ubisoft, but R6V does not know these things.  It knows only that there are ads, and it must serve them to whatever audience exists.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

I played another Call of Duty. It was pretty good!

Posted on April 23, 2024 by baudattitude

Recently, I sat down with a couple games that weren’t soulless mobile gacha cash grabs, and I even finished two of them.  One was Stray, which was a game I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed but did make me think, and the other was Call of Duty: Vanguard, hereafter CODV, which I am certain I enjoyed but did not involve any great deal of thinking.

I’m not sure what this says about me.

I did start off with something of a bad impression of CODV because the first two missions are night missions, with the first one quite literally railroading (you are on a train) you through something of a tutorial and the second starting off with a forced stealth bit.  You really could not try harder to make your game less interesting from the get go.

And yes, the post-tutorial mission is One More Perspective On D-Day which I guess is mandatory for any shooter based in WW2 but at the same time urgh.

Moreover, while the first level sets up the premise that you are part of a team of extremely skilled people with all sorts of exciting specialties, it really doesn’t tell me why this team of people are together.  It made me really wish for a Mission: Impossible-style scene where you have a couple of guys at a table and they have dossiers on people and are tossing them down on a desk with “and here’s your explosives expert, and here’s your disguise expert, and here’s your driver” and so on.

You know the sort of scene I am talking about, I am certain.

Fortunately, AFTER suffering through the first couple of levels, I realized that I was getting my dossier scene, just sort of after-the fact.  Every character from the team gets their own spotlight mission or two, where you get to learn their particular gameplay quirk, and then the last mission is a team event where you are swapping between characters as you go.

It works.  It took a little while to get to the point where it started working, but it works.

The best Calls of Duty, in my opinion, are the ones where you are constantly being given new things to do and where the game diverges from a level design where you are just trying to cross invisible lines on the map to stop infinite waves of enemies spawning.  This is one of those.

There IS a little bit of the “just need to make it to the next checkpoint” in the ground levels, but it’s well-disguised.

On the other hand, there are two levels that fall prey to the problem of being set outdoors, in forest/jungle settings, and needing to keep the player in set corridors despite there not being, you know, walls.  It’s always a little obnoxious when you’re prevented from walking between trees just because you’re not supposed to go outside of the corridor.

In a bit of a meta moment, I got a kick out of realizing that, for the character whose gameplay quirk is that she can climb walls and duck through narrow spaces, every place she can climb is indicated with a bright yellow tarp at the summit, so if you’re ever not quite sure where to go you can look for the splash of yellow.

And in my final critique, I didn’t find myself wanting to stop and take odd little photos of set dressing to make fun of calendars with extra days or electrical sockets.  It didn’t have the same sort of obsessive attention to detail that I’ve enjoyed in other CoD campaigns.

With all of that said, though, it was seven solid levels – out of nine – involving vigorous debate between your on-screen avatar and various members of the Axis Powers, on the topic of which of you would be allowed to continue breathing, in a sort of words-are-violence-but-violence-is-also-violence way, and generally the debate goes to your favor so that’s good then.

I’m not sure of my comma placement in that last massive run-on sentence, and I’m not going to put much thought into making sure they’re all placed correctly.  I apologize to anyone with a strong sense of grammatical rules.

Finally, it wraps up with a sequel hook that made me desperately want to spend more time with these characters and I am reasonably certain that absolutely nothing will come of it and that was very annoying.  I think that’s the sign of a good game.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

Ranking Apples

Posted on April 19, 2024 by baudattitude

OK, this won’t be a post debating the merits of different varieties of fruit.  It’s a spin-off from a work conversation where I was complaining that it was annoying to bring a separate charger for your Apple Watch but at the same time it wasn’t horrible if I accidentally wound up with a dead Watch battery as it really wasn’t THAT critical of tech to me.

And then I was like, I have a ton of Apple-branded nonsense around my house.  If I was asked to give them up, which would be the easiest and which the hardest to part with?

Hence, this post.

From easiest to give up to “from my cold, dead hands”:

Starting with Apple mice and keyboards.  Honestly I use Logitech devices almost everywhere.  I have a Magic Mouse on my work laptop, and I’d miss TouchID on the one Mac I use an Apple keyboard with.

Apple Studio Display.  It’s gorgeous but I have used plenty of non-Apple monitors in the past and it wouldn’t be a huge adjustment to go back.

HomePods.  I never use them as “smart” speakers because Siri is hopelessly outclassed by a $30 Nest Mini.  They sound good and I’d regret needing to go back to a clunky receiver but eh.

AirPods.  Convenient, yes, cool, yes, absolutely replaceable by almost any pair of earbuds on the market also yes.

AppleTV.  My living room TV has apps for MOST things and/or I could use the media apps on a connected game console.  Huge step down in ease of use but I could make it work.

Apple Watch.  I’d miss the turn by turn directions when driving and all of the notifications but really I mostly use it as a fitness tracker.

Below here gets rough because this is all stuff I use daily.  While the #1 “indispensable” spot is fixed in stone, #2 and #3 made me think and I could honestly go either way.

Mac.  I’m cheating here and assuming I get to use a Windows or Linux PC even if I was forced to get rid of all of the Macs in my house.  Apple’s service integration with Windows is OK and Windows 11 is not a terrible OS.  This would sting though.

iPad.  This is my go-to portable games console, manga reader and YouTube binge-enabler.  It’s also not half bad for productivity stuff, and there are days when the only reason I go to a desktop/laptop at all is because there’s no World of Warcraft client for the iPad.  Honestly if I could just manage my iTunes library and use Smart Folders in Photos it would be just about the perfect device.  There are tablet alternatives, sure.  I own a Surface Pro.  It’s nowhere near as good as a device with a dedicated tablet OS.

Finally, iPhone.  Frankly I have offloaded so much of the stuff my human meat brain used to handle to the phone that I don’t want to think about what it would be like if I had to go back to functioning as a non-connected person.  Technically I could go with another smartphone – I have a Pixel 8 for work and it’s a really nice device – but boy I do not want to think about how much pain would be involved in detangling myself from all of the Apple services I rely on.

Posted in iOS, mac, random | Leave a comment

Ermagahd I’m actually caught up.

Posted on April 2, 2024 by baudattitude

With all of the posts about various mobile games of late, you would be forgiven for assuming that I had gone completely astray and succumbed to Live Service Game Madness.  Mostly because it’s kinda true?

However – and this is a pretty huge however – I’m finally caught up with every game I’ve been playing lately.  Well, mostly.  NIKKE is its own special case.

That is to say, I’ve finished all of the Archon quests and all of the main World Quest chains in Genshin, caught up with the post-Final Chapter antics of RABBIT Squad in Blue Archive, and slapped around Nihilister for a second time in NIKKE.

You might say, if you were for some reason intimately familiar with the game, that just means I’ve finished chapter 22 of NIKKE and currently there are 28 chapters.  And this is also true!  However, because of the way the power requirements are structured in that game there’s no point in even starting chapter 23 until I have ground out a bunch more levels, and grinding those levels just means launching the client every 24 hours or so and tapping a button to collect materials, and there’s really no point to start 23 unless my party is strong enough to go through both chapters 23 and 24 in a single stretch.

Also power requirements are assumed to be lowered for the 1.5 anniversary in a few weeks.  So I’m putting aside story progression and just treating it as an idle grinder.

Anyway, with all of that said, am I still having fun with all of these games?

Well, yes.

Genshin remains the ultimate pretty world to log in to and run around hunting for chests and puzzles and little sparkly things on the ground to pick up and shove in your inventory.  Blue Archive continues to deliver Peak Weirdness in every story chapter, and NIKKE – despite a thoroughly uninspired Re:ZERO crossover event – lets me fill bars and make numbers go up in a way that my dumb ape brain finds deeply compelling.

It also had the BEST April Fool’s event.

And uninspired or not I did blow all of my pity coupons to pull Rem.

I really do think that the Big World Quest chains can be Genshin’s weakest point at times.  The Inazuma ones were great but had way too many time gates, the Fontaine quests were depressing as all get out at times, and the Sumeru quests made my eyes glaze over trying to keep track of all of the Deep Lore and weird names.

But, once the NPCs – and Paimon – stopped talking there were usually things to beat up, puzzles to solve, and chests to open so eh.  Good with the bad.

Oh, and while it’s technically not a mobile game, I did luck into the Legendary axe from the current season of World of Warcraft.

Because of the way WoW does a complete gear reset every few months, getting this axe late in the season wasn’t quite as impactful as if it had come into my virtual life earlier, but at least we’re apparently getting to upgrade it in the upcoming season, and that will keep it viable until the next expansion.

Anyway, WoW aside I think I’ve managed to turn three major time sinks into “waiting for the next content drop” games and that’s a good feeling.

 

Posted in videogames | Leave a comment

Displaying the Undisplayable

Posted on March 22, 2024 by baudattitude

OK, “undisplayable” may be a little harsh.  But I don’t think it’s an entirely unfounded statement that your average fanboy is going to wind up with a ton of cool THINGS that they want to have on display but that are a little annoying to actually display.  Stuff like keychains, can badges, strap hangers, that kind of thing.

Like this stuff

There are always options, of course.  I’ve definitely had my share of small hanging things thumbtacked to the wall, and mounting a bunch of can badges to a square of felt and then sticking that up somewhere would work as well.

But either of those options has always struck me as a little tacky.

Pun not actually intended but I caught in on like my third proofreading pass of this and I was too proud of it to take it out.

One thing I found in Japan that I thought was going to be at least a partial answer were these little acrylic stands:

They were cheap, came in a couple of different shapes and you got like half a dozen per package.  They seemed perfect!

Well, no.

It turned out that they had very strict limits on what you could put in them, and because the notches were so small they were really limited.

Serval-chan fits!

I managed to make them work for a couple of things, and they were cute enough, but I think most of these are going to go forever unused.

So that didn’t go well.

On the other hand, I was watching a YouTube video where a devoted Genshin fan was showing off their desk,  and these things jumped out at me:

No, not the Barbara can badges and acrylic stands, though I would very much like those as well.  THE FRAMES.

Even better, the YouTuber in question carefully went over all of the stuff on her desk and explained that these frames were from a company called Ouxee.  Maybe OUXEE?  I’m not sure how it should be stylized.  Let’s go with Ouxee for now.

A quick google search later revealed that Ouxee has a catalog made up of all kinds of shelves and storage solutions for very weird spaces.  Stuff like an under-sink shelving unit that you fit in around the drainpipe:

Super handy, no?

And also and more importantly, a lot of assorted stands and tiny shelves for displaying nerd goods.

The ones I had fallen immediately in love with were these things:

Amazon listing

Naturally, they do not sell their products outside of Japan because we’re not worthy, or something, BUT they were happy to charge a small* fee for international shipping and it did not take long before I had 10 of these rectangular frame things and 4 larger square ones.

It turned out that they work very well!  They’re basically a plastic frame with two sheets of slightly stretchy, slightly sticky clear plastic that you can open up, stick things in, and close – and whatever you put in stays put, at least so far.

Keychains

Can Badges

Straps and a small acrylic stand

I have no idea how good these things will be long-term.  Plastic always has a tendency to yellow, after all.  Also, I’m not sure how reusable they are since the act of putting anything into them and closing them will stretch the plastic slightly.  My wife found an example online of using a hair dryer on low heat to “reset” them, so it’s possible they’re made out of a thermoplastic similar to heat shrink tubing?

But, for now they’re pretty cool.  My terrible photography skills aside, they do a great job of “floating” your small items in a way that lets you show them off and they come in either black or white to match your space’s vibe.

And, yes, I need to remove the “Remove Tag” tag from my lamp.  The problem is that once you do that the lamp can never be moved again as the bottom of it is covered in a very strong adhesive.

 

 

* The international shipping fee wasn’t actually that small.

10-days-later update:  While I was searching for something else entirely on Amazon, I found that these things ARE available in the US.  They seem to be mostly sold as displays for coin collectors, which makes sense.  Here’s one listing.

 

Posted in anime, organization | Leave a comment

Three years later, I’ve finished Blue Archive

Posted on March 19, 2024 by baudattitude

So I should start with a flashback to March of 2021, when everyone in my home state was still dealing with pandemic lockdowns.  We had some of the more severe restrictions in the nation, and everyone was pretty much dealing with it in their own ways.

My method of choice was watching a whole lot of videos of people walking around Japan on YouTube, since going to Japan is one of my favorite things to do and it was completely impossible at the time.

Anyway.  In one of these videos, I saw a video billboard advertising a mobile game that promised a combination of cute girls + kemomomimi + guns, and I quite naturally went immediately to google to look it up.  This was, if timestamps can be believed, on March 28th.

Sadly, I immediately found out that it was a Japan-only game.  Well, it was written by a Korean team so I’m certain it was also available in Korea, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Eventually it got an English release, on November 8th of the same year.  I downloaded it day one, eager to find out whether it was as cool as the brief glimpse of a trailer playing on an Akihabara billboard had made it seem.

And, I’ll be quite honest, I did not like it.  There were, yes, cute girls with guns and some sort of weird thing going on where they all attended different schools in a city made up entirely of schools and administered by a student council government and who also regularly engage in shooting each other a lot because they all have possibly-mystical halos that prevented them sustaining any real injury.  You’re assigned to this city as sort of a combination teacher/troubleshooter thing.

Your character is not a cute girl with a gun (it’s unclear what your sex is, and your strongest weapon is a tablet computer) and does not have one of these possibly-mystical halo things so you are infinitely more delicate and vulnerable than any of the students you are teaching, but that wasn’t really a turn off.  I mean, it’s not exactly rare to see someone’s highly specific fetish turned into a video game.

The gameplay, however, did not exactly excite me.  While you set up teams of six characters to clear missions, you don’t really have any sort of direct control over any of your team members.  Gameplay boils down to watching them run from left to right through some admittedly very charming levels, automatically shooting and taking cover as they go.  You do get to control when they use special attacks, which adds some strategy to it, and I understand that high level Blue Archive play involves a LOT of micromanagement of this, but it did not hook me.

Screenshot

It is cute though.

At the end of every level, you get a victory screen featuring your chosen characters, though this again was kind of disappointing because I’m not a huge fan of super-deformed characters and there is a world of difference between the gorgeous cel art used in the story and the character models used in gameplay.

So I kinda mostly dropped it after the prologue.  I left it on my phone and tablet, and occasionally I would log into it and run through a couple of the game’s missions, but I never started the story campaign so I was very limited in the things I could do.  It was fun enough just to watch bars fill up, but not fun enough for me to go beyond that.

Then the pandemic ended, and Japan eventually opened up to tourism, and my wife and I spent a week touring cultural sites and a week binge shopping in anime shops.

And, yeah, there was a fair bit of Blue Archive merch even though I didn’t recognize most of the characters on display.  I did buy a mouse pad with a fox girl on it.

The mouse pad / desk mat in question.

So that could have been the end of it.  However.  Around about the time I came home from our trip, I was reading news about the impending December 2023 Comic Market and how it was organized by content, and I was moderately stunned to find that it had two entire display halls devoted exclusively to Blue Archive doujin merch.

Like, obviously this game was A Thing and I probably should be taking a second look at it.

So, early November I booted it back up and started trying to figure out how to get further into it.

One of the first things I discovered when looking up resources was that there was an infamous wall, roughly halfway through the main story, where people tended to get hard stuck for days or weeks at a time while they leveled up characters so they could get past the mission.

This didn’t sound fun, and I definitely didn’t want to be getting into a story and then hit something like this, so I looked up the level requirements for the mission.  It’s a mission with a recommended level of 57, and people report that you can get past it as low as level 40 if you have the right characters and the right strategy, but I am a somewhat brute-force type of guy and decided I would just level up to 60 before even starting the story.  This is possible because going through the tutorial missions when you first start the game opens up a few ways to spend energy, and spending energy converts directly to experience points.

So I did that for three months, and finally started the main story, at level 61, on February 17th.

As a side note, one interesting thing that Blue Archive does is that it gives up a way to sort of save up for characters by running hard mode missions.  So, even if the gacha system is being stingy with your waifu of choice you can eventually just buy her outright.

It took me until February 3rd, but I eventually added the same wolf girl who had gotten me to fall down this particular rabbit hole back in 2021 to my roster.

Anyway.  I found some guides on reddit saying, without a hint of guile, that you could easily finish the entire story at level 50 so I figured that being level 60 meant I could just coast through the whole thing and skip the grind.  Thankfully I did not actually stop grinding.  More on that in a bit.

Tonight – March 19th, so that’s a month after starting – I finished the main story.

I’m not sure I can possibly describe the proper insanity I’ve been put through in the last month, but I am certain that it was worth it.  Yes, even though for like three months I was loading a game for 5-10 minutes every day only to burn energy and turn it into XP without really ever playing it.  It was Just That Good.

In the fine tradition of JRPGs, you start off doing menial tasks for your grandfather’s farm and then eventually kill God, though in this case the “menial tasks” involve trying to help the last students of a bankrupt academy avoid eviction or helping a school club avoid being disbanded and the “killing God” is, well, actually it’s not entirely far off from that.

Like 95% of this involves reading and staring at mostly static images with a very minimal bit of animation to them.  Occasionally you actually do some of the run left-to-right sort of combat missions but the vast majority of the game is a literacy check.

They are, however, very PRETTY static images.  Like, both the art and music in this are way too good for the price of admission.

You get your crazy assassin maids.

You get your tiny girls casually carrying ship-mounted railguns

You get your cute girls driving very fast away from explosions

…and your poster child for I Can Fix Her.  No. No, you can’t. She’s Best Girl tho.

And this screenshot which I am including for reasons that I hope are obvious.

Basically you spent like 40 or 50 hours getting to know a huge cast of characters at different schools, and then the Final Story is another 10-hour long story where everyone you’ve met comes together to solve an earth-shattering crisis and, well, kill God.

OK technically you do not kill God.  You’ll just have to play it to find out.  And I profoundly recommend playing this game, even if you don’t basically grind for three months before you even start.  I would in fact really recommend NOT grinding for three months before you even start because that would be insane.

HOWEVER.

Let’s talk about walls and why they are so obnoxious in this game.

I quickly discovered that the reason for the infamous midpoint wall is that it’s the first time that the story mode of the game asks you to use your own characters, rather than giving you a set of pre-assigned characters who are tuned to perfectly clear the mission and move on.

Through the first four main story volumes, you have to do this twice, and there’s a bit of a repeated fourth-wall-breaking gag where the Bad Guy asks you how you’re going to defeat him and you do this:

OK about that.  While I did eventually throw some money at the gacha system, I didn’t wind up using the character from it in any of the story missions.  So I will state, very firmly, that you are 100% able to clear the game’s main story without dropping a penny on it.  This is not typical for gacha games, but this one is exceptional in that regard.

If you’re curious, it’s because I wanted the fox girl from the mousepad I bought in Japan and she was on a limited time banner.  I spent less than what a regular game release would have cost in the process so I consider it a donation to the publisher for making a very enjoyable story.

So if we’re talking about only the first four volumes of the story, there are only a couple of walls and they aren’t too high.

And then there’s the fifth volume, or the “Final Story” volume.  I suspect most of the guides I was seeing on Reddit, promising that I could coast through the game at level 50, were written before this volume was released, because there is a single story chapter in this that is basically wall after wall after wall.

I was level 68 when I hit this, with a lot of leveled characters, and was humming happily along until I started hitting levels that knocked the hum right off my face.

One of the drawbacks of my approach to grinding is that I had gotten tons of levels… but very little actual gear for my characters, since I’d just been replaying intro missions over and over again and not playing higher level missions that dropped better equipment.  So I had highly-leveled very flimsy characters.

Fortunately, the game has a system that lets you borrow characters from other players, and that’s the thing that got me through the chapter.

Screenshot

Level 87 kitted-out and fully-skilled 5-star character for 40,000 credits, when I have 40 million on hand?  YES PLEASE.

I have a couple other minor quibbles with the last chapter, like the part where you have to fight five bosses in a row… and them fight them AGAIN for story reasons, but there were too many absolutely glorious moments for me to have more than minor quibbles.

Like, you know the bit in every good action movie featuring a team of heroes where the Good Guys are on the ropes and the Bad Guys are leering in anticipation of victory and then someone off-camera says something sarcastic or super understated and it’s like ohhhhh buddy we are ON NOW?  The last volume in particular is just that, over and over again, with all the minor characters you last saw ages ago and have lost track of.

It’s a simple and horribly overused trope and I am right here for it every time.

So to sum up.

Tiny girls with railguns:  1

Combat maids: 5

Homeless tactical bunny girls: 4

Writing: 10/10

Gameplay: 3/10

Art: 10/10

Music: 10/10

F2P friendliness: 10/10

OVERALL RATING: 12/10 just download it already.  There’s sadly no PC client or console version, but there are Android/iOS/iPadOS versions.  I’d recommend hooking up an external monitor or mirroring your phone to your TV, because the art deserves to be seen on a big display.

And, finally, thank God I am not in Japan and I do not have ready access to merch or I would be considerably poorer at this precise point in my life.

Posted in iOS, videogames | Leave a comment