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The Demon Prince of Momochi House (Ep 1) from crunchyroll.com
Himari’s 16th birthday will be one she never forgets. Unexpectedly, she receives a will detailing her inheritance of a mysterious estate: the Momochi House. She arrives only to discover that the home was built on the cusp between the human world and the spiritual realm. There, she encounters Yukari, Ise, and a peculiar boy named Aoi, who seems to be concealing a shadowy secret.
⭐⭐⭐

This was the first completely new (as in not subsequent season) anime I am trying in the Winter 2024 season. These days, not involving “another world” or “reincarnation” is a good place to start. We have a girl, Himari Momochi, who is an orphan. When she turns 16, she learns her late parents left her an inheritance: The family house. However, the family house she finds is old, in the middle of nowhere, and occupied by three very pretty boys (le shock!). The studmuffins warn her that she should leave for her own safety, but everyone unsurprisingly works things out by the end of the episode after all the cards are laid on the table (you’ll be shocked to learn that the dreamboats may not be normal guys). It was equal parts inoffensive and unimpressive. I do not always (or often) agree with Anime News Network review takes, but I think their four first impression reviews were on point. I would have given it 2 stars out of 5 on my unofficial rating scale but for one thing…

A basket of sealed ayakishi, including several talking vegetables, from episode 1 of The Demon Prince of Momochi House.
Look at that turnip…

The talking turnip in the basket is too perfect for our imperfect world. I like animate turnips. 5 stars for the turnip, 2 stars for everything else. I will keep watching but I expect to see more of the turnip.

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Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki 2nd STAGE (Ep 1) by Project No.9 from Crunchyroll
As the second term begins, Tomozaki's first task (courtesy of Hinano) is getting popular girl Erika Konno motivated for the school sports tournament.
⭐⭐⭐⭐

I re-watched the first season of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki (after having watched it as a simulcast in 2021) for two reasons. Firstly so I could write a review and secondly so that I could refresh my memory for the second season. I watched the first episode of season 2, titled The best games make reconnaissance fun, a few hours after it went live on Crunchyroll. Five quick thoughts below.

  • The overall aesthetic is the same but the production values were better than most of the first season. For example, I noted that the character models were very consistent. It did reuse a few cuts, however.
  • The episode did a good job of depicting Tomozaki’s new-found confidence in his coaching sessions with Hinami.
  • A good part of the episode was spent effectively re-introducing the characters. This is understandable since I assume many viewers did not re-watch the first season in the last week of December like I did.
  • It introduced one new character in Tomozaki’s lethargic co-worker (another girl, of course). She seems to be set up for a advice role but time will tell.
  • Speaking of advice, I complained that Tomozaki’s friend/pushed love interest, Kikuchi, was used too much as an oracle in season 1. In this episode she gives advice that reasonably followed from things she and the audience observed happening in Tomozaki’s class.
  • Speaking of advice, I do not find Tomozaki’s initial challenge, to get the unpleasant Erika Konno motivated for the sports festival, to be particularly interesting. However, his approach to completing the task, relying on others, does highlight his character growth (namely that he can rely on others) and give the first episode a way to help all the characters shine.
  • Speaking of shining, I like what this episode did with Yuzu Izumi. I mentioned in my review of the first season that I thought she was a good character but somewhat underused. Her late-episode resolution was well-done and I hope she continues to play a meaningful role in the second season.
  • In my review, I opined that the series would ultimately depend on its exploration of Hinami’s characters and motivations. Perhaps the most encouraging point of the episode was an early monologue wherein Tomozaki considers the difference between him (trying to enjoy each step of his self-improvement journey) and Hinami (looking beyond the moment at something distant). I will count it as a good early sign that this is something Tomozaki is thinking about.
  • Finally, in my season 1 review, I complained about the camera’s tendency to fixate on Hinami’s and Mimimi’s legs. Positive sign: Only one weird Hinami leg shot in episode 1. Progress!

I expect to see this first arc wrapped up in episode 2 next Wednesday. All in all, the first episode was a solid start to the second season and I am interested to see how it develops after we finish the first arc.

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I opened Steam because I am purchasing at least one visual novel while it is on sale. Steam prompted me to ask whether I wanted to participate in the Steam hardware survey. I said yes. I did my part to represent EndeavourOS. But what about my specs?

  • OS: EndeavourOS
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core processor (3.60 GH)
  • RAM: 32 GB
  • Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER
  • VRAM: 4 GB

I built my computer in 2020 and decided to go for a budget video card, but I have not had any issues since I have not done anything to tax it. My computer originally had 16 GB of RAM but I upgraded to 32 in 2021.

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I checked by 404 logs over at The New Leaf Journal. I found an interesting user agent among the myriad web crawlers:

PoorlyConfiguredWebCrawler

I appreciate that the crawler advertises that it is not well configured. You get the feeling that whoever released the poor thing on the internet is asking us to not be too hard on it. I did a bit of digging and learned it comes from a Swedish server, but information is otherwise scarce. According to my logs, it was only trying to crawl real articles (its only 404s were old links with no redirect) and did not seem to be misbehaving. Because it appears to be a well-behaved (albeit “poorly configured”) bot, I declined to stand athwart its crawling journey. I look forward to trying the Poorly Configured Search Engine it is clearly working toward.

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My privacy-friendly local page-counting solution for WordPress, Koko Analytics, picked up a referral from snapchat.com over at The New Leaf Journal. Snapchat? Really. I thought this was for sending photos. No no, don’t correct me. I am happy living in ignorance. I will just go on living under my assumption that Snapchat is not the best.

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Santa Owl by Michal Rzeszutek (Openclipart - boican's album)
A cartoon owl in a Santa hat bearing two wrapped presents. The image is on Open Clip Art and in the public domain.

I enjoy some of the fun public domain images on Openclipart. For Christmas 2022, I shared a “cat Christmas tree” over at The New Leaf Journal. This year, I will use my new social posting site (it seems more conducive for the purpose) to share a fun Openclipart Christmas owl posted by Openclipart artist Michal Rzeszutek.

Public domain Openclipart image of a round cartoon owl in a Santa hat holding a blue and green wrapped present in each of its wings. The owl is looking straight at the reader as if it wants to share its presents. Image by Michal Rzeszutek.
Public domain image from Openclipart by Michal Rzeszutek.

Merry Christmas!

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Victor V. Gurbo's "Christmas & You" by Victor V. Gurbo (The New Leaf Journal)
I started writing Christmas & You in college when a friend of mine prompted me to write a Christmas song that would have no prospect of commercial success. His idea was not that the song should be anti-commercial, but instead that it should be hilariously off-brand next to upbeat popular Christmas songs such as Jingle Bell Rock and Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer.

My good friend Victor V. Gurbo noted over on The New Leaf Journal that his college friend gave him the prompt for a melancholy Christmas song that would have no prospect of commercial success. I addend his post to note that the unnamed friend was a very versatile character. The person Victor refers to is the same person who I described as having changed my opinion for the better of one of the many twisted story lines in the infamous “nice boat” School Days anime (I did not, however, grant his positive opinion of the series as a whole). We can complete the circle by noting that my decision to subject myself to re-watching much of School Days for a review was prompted by Victor, who never watched the series.

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I send a weekly newsletter attached to The New Leaf Journal called The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Unsurprisingly, I focus on sharing links to my latest articles (including some from here) and news and notes about my projects. However, in the spirit of generosity and sharing external links, I pack each newsletter full of links from around the web (21 per issue, as of late). I had a markdown file with links and comments ready to use in future newsletters. This file was over 9,200 words. I managed to lose the file while reorganizing my documents, notwithstanding the fact that my preferred markdown editor, Ghostwriter, creates automatic backups (single-version automatic backups hit a snag when you accidentally write over markdown your file but keep the same name). Maybe I would have been safe the markdown document was not in one of the few working folders that I was not syncing with my favorite app, Syncthing). But the past is the past. I guess that we will be starting fresh as we prepare to turn the calendar to 2024. Fortunately, I have more than enough new links to keep things rolling (so do subscribe via email or RSS).

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The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist (TV) from Anime News Network
Sajou Wataru is madly in love with his classmate, Natsukawa Aika, to the point where he daydreams about them being together and constantly pesters her...

I am working on cleaning up a few anime series that I missed throughout the year in preparation for my year in review. As part of the project, I quickly went through The Dreaming Boy is a Realist (light novel titles…) on HiDive (I had neglected HiDive for a bit because there’s no unofficial Kodi app). Was it good? No, not particularly. A series about a high school boy (first year in this case, somewhat unusual for anime) pulling back from his overbearing obsession with a girl he likes but who appears to not like him back would have required a much more deft, focused, and sophisticated hand than what crafted this series. But I will note that notwithstanding the series’ sub-par animation production values, both the OP and ED songs were well done.  That may be one of the over-arching themes of my year-in-review. There were no great series that finished in 2023 like the third season of Oregairu in 2020, SSSS.Dynazenon in 2021, or the third season of Takagi-san in 2022 (jury is still out on one continuing into 2024), but it was a banner year for OP and ED productions.

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Reclaiming the Web with a Personal Reader by Facundo Olano (olano.dev)
I realized that I had been using Twitter, and now Mastodon, as an information hub rather than a social network. I was following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites; I was following bots to get content from link aggregators. Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for that job.

I came across an interesting passage by blogger Facundo Olano in his blog post about creating a personal feed reader to follow good and meaningful writing from around the web (see the source code for his interesting feed reader project). He assessed his prior usage of Twitter (now “X”) and Mastodon and realized that he was “following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites,” in effect “following bots to get content from link aggregators.” He concluded that “Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for the job.” I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Olano’s assessment as well as his preference for using personal feed readers to stay abreast of updates from interesting authors instead of social media platforms such as Facebook, X (or Twitter), and even Mastodon. Feeds are the best way for following individual websites and authors (combined with newsletters in some cases). Social media and networking serve different purposes, but I will grant that they can play a limited role in discovering new authors and articles (preferably combined with a read-it-later tool).

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My Tablet - My Computer by Roger Carter
Rather than replace your old, slow computer with a new one, why not buy a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for your Android tablet instead? This book explains how to set up your tablet to replace your computer, what apps to install, and how to configure your new system. It will not only handle all your home office tasks, it will be much faster and in many respects more capable than your old computer.

I came across a free ebook by Roger Carter on Smashwords about using an Android tablet as a computer (see My Tablet – My Computer). The book is short, running just over 5,000 words. While I do not personally need to use an Android (LineageOS in my case) tablet as a computer (not to mention my 2013 Google Nexus 7 might struggle in some areas), I was curious to see Mr. Carter’s set-up and recommendations. It provides a nice tutorial to setting up an Android tablet to behave like a computer (I was not aware of some of the settings he toggled) and is worth reading if you have a use case for this set-up. Regarding apps, I would personally opt for a different set-up from the perspective of preferring LineageOS (or other similar ROMs) and open source apps to the stock Android suite. For example, because I do most of my writing drafts in markdown, I would rely heavily on Markor as my text editor. But if I needed word processing, my first inclination would be to try the open source Collabora Office. For keeping everything in sync between my devices, I prefer to rely on Syncthing instead of a third-party cloud.

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I read many video game magazines when I was a kid. Back in my day, E3, which typically took place in May or June, was the major video game expo and a major event in the magazines. I used to look forward to E3 coverage. Over the years, I stopped reading video game magazines and, by extension, consuming much video game news (I am mostly content to see how games look when they are released). I lost track of E3 but was aware that it was struggling in our new, digital age. E3 had not been held in person since 2019 or in any form since 2021. It was cancelled in 2022 and 2023. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the organizers of E3 announced that E3 is no more. So closes a lengthy chapter in video game history.

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Yukinu's 5am Udon Recipe by Yukinu (Yukinu's Blog)
Here’s my go-to recipe for early morning Udon noodles. The recipe is in MealMaster format (see Jan Wedekind’s site for more info on the format, it’s a very old format from a DOS application named Meal-Master), and you can read and manage MealMaster recipes using the Free Software application AnyMeal.

Yukinu over at Yukinu blog posted a simple and tasty looking 5am udon recipe. I approve with the qualification that I would opt for unsalted chicken broth (if I am adding soy sauce) and that I am not sure if I am ready for udon at 5 AM (I usually prefer hot cereal for breakfast). But what most caught my attention in the post was the format Yukinu wrote the recipe in, the MealMaster format. It looks like simple markup and another blogger/developer maintains a full resource on it. Bookmarked, and added to my Zotero, for future reference.

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An article in Ars Technica reported that Systemd Linux distributions (which describes most distributions these days) will receive a much-desired updated from Windows: The Blue Screen of Death. From the article:

Today, version 255 of the Linux systemd project honors that original intent by adding a systemd-bsod component that generates a full-screen display of some error messages when a Linux system crashes.

All Blue Screen of Death jokes aside, this seems like a good change to me. While my Linux proficiency has come a long way since I first switched over from Windows in August 2020, I have fortunately not had too many reasons to master finding and parsing error logs. My few crashes have usually had to do with Nvidia graphics drivers after an update (and those cases have been rare). Having a friendly Blue Screen of Death to describe an error in the event my computer crashes would be welcome.

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Exploring the Personal Web by foreverliketh.is (foreverliketh.is)
Into the Wild Green Yonder

Blogger foreverketh.is put together a very good list of webrings and similar collections of personal websites and blogs. I recall having come across it before, but I had previously missed that I am cited as a contributor for my New Leaf Journal article on the idea of a “social” media consisting of independent personal websites. Whether you are a webmaster or a curious reader, I recommend perusing the list of webrings and blogrolls (and submitting to one or more if your project fits the criteria).