just a machine lurking
translator notes are one of my favourite parts of reading something foreign. it’s just a small trivia about something and allows me to understand the target culture just a bit more. this is way better than translators aggressively localizing some text to a comon american phase that will anyway make no sense to me.
tns get bad rep because lazy/elitist translators (i would vote the op is a bit more than being lazy) but they are a very important part and can be very valuable when done well
i was missing this thread. glad is finally here. this season i’m mostly watching sequels so i don’t have yet many things to write about. i also have been revisiting some old shows from my childhood to see how well they hold up (coincidentally, fmp is on the list for next revisits). this time i have a wall of text
Dragon Ball GT (1996)
After weeks of screaming “this plot idea was also on gt!!” while watching daima, i decided to go back and see how well had gt aged and if how much of my love for it was just nostalgia.
to my own surprise, i enjoyed most of it a lot. while the series had common problems found on 90s children anime, it actually did very interesting things. having a “20 years later” type of story was a very good idea since it lets you see a clear difference in the characters while keeping all of them familiar. new characters are interesting enough to keep the overal story entertaining. the big bad villain from the first half is simply great and probably one of my favourites from the whole db franchise. the last arc is great and thematically conected to the whole story, with the ending making me cry even if i already knew what was going to happen.
sadly, the show has quite some problems. many ideas were great but were not executed well. the second half screams production issues by how inconsistent it is and the ending, even if i loved it, was draged out and many events appear out of nowhere. it also has one of the worst sagas in the whole franchise (super 17) that is not only inconsecuential but it’s many recycled ideas without any proper plot. pan was a great character and it was on the spotlight for most of the show (excluding the big fights) but at the very end she was delegated to a background character and didn’t even had a last scene like other characters that barely appeared.
even with all of that, i still believe is a very strong db show and an amazing sequel to z. it tries to keep the core of the franchise while trying new things to keep it fresh. it’s full of callbacks and homages without making them pure nostalgia. i didn’t expect to hold up but it actually did
The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World (2025)
this one is actually a bad one. it’s very close to a generic comedy isekai. it falls in common tropes and characters are quite simplistic. but for a fan of tokusatsu, the jokes about its exagerated nature in a somehow serious world are incredibly funny. they are starting to get repetitive and the plot itself is almost non-existant but it has been enjoyable until now. i’m not sure if i will get through until the end.
ps2 had very good horror games, like the silent hill saga, fatal frame saga and some hidden gems like haunting ground and rule of rose. there is also the resident evil outbreak games with the online patch so it’s possible to play them in multyplayer mode.
there are also many good action games like the devil may cry saga or many jrpgs like the persona games or the disgaea games.
honestly, ps2 had so many games that it’s hard to list just a few. there was lots of slop but also lots of interesting ideas there. some games got re-releases later for more recent consoles so there are better versions but most of them still hold up
glad to see unc ensored art of ranma (new anime removed the star in the hat for all characters that used it)
privacy/security and convinience is almost always a linear scale where you need to choose to risk one to get the other. you should draw the line at the exact point you feel is correct. you have to decide how many hops are you comfortable jumping through to simply use something you want/need to.
no google is way better than microg that is better than play services, but every step requires you to stop using MANY things directly. is way worse when you need things like banks that require the full package and will keep breaking all the time if you ever find workarounds. this will in turn increase the time you spend making your device work instead of using it as a tool.
nice, i was starting to get worried when nvidia stock price started going up again
wiiu was a complete mess because nintendo didn’t really knew what to do with it. it tried to market it for 
(i remember there were conferences where the highlight was fifa or some “grown up” game) while trying to keep it’s usual family friendly userbase. it tried to move away from motion controlls (again, trying to appease gamers) while also having a very interactive gamepad without many games using its features. even the most popular games failed to sell the console so nintendo decided that they will try to slowly delete its existance from collective memory and re-released almost all the games for the switch.
i don’t doubt the name problem was real, but i also read of things like this on the ps1/ps2 transition so i doubt it was as bad as many make it sound.
i tried that for a couple of seasons some years ago and the biggest problem was the amount of repetitive slop (isekai is the biggest problem but not the only one). i tried to watch at least one episode to avoid skipping something good but there were shows that barely lasted after the opening. i learned to watch only shows i’m heavilly interested in and to not waste time in anything that could be “potentially interesting”. if i miss something good i can always go back an try it
funnily enough, the only non-sequel anime i’m watching this season is an isekai (red ranger goes adverturing or something)
kubernetes is the way to go for home cluster computing
i will challenge this idea every time I see it. The benefits that you get with it are good but usually quite overkill for the needs of a home cluster. Services that balances across nodes, no downtime, software defined storage; all of those stuff is nice and fun but most of the home clusters don’t really need them.
kubernetes is quite complex and it’s very hard to handle when you don’t have all the necesary knowledge and experience to do so. it’s very easy to misconfigure things and errors are often very hard to find when you don’t know where to look. there are other projects that try to have a simpler version of the “cluster orchestration” (nomad, swarm, portainer and others. haven’t tried all of them so I might be wrong) but they are also complex on it’s own way and have their own share of problems.
my recomendation is that, unles you are planning to work on it and want to get more experience, you should start with smaller things (podman + systemd, regular docker, maybe start managing systems with ansible) and slowly build new things over what you already have. this has the benefit of letting you learn the basics slowly so that if you ever jump to the kubernetes bandwagon you will have more knowledge that will help the experience to be better
that one is atrocious but another thing i also find nasty is the amount of disk space new games need. sure, buying more disks is way cheaper than getting more graphical power but downloading +100Gb for a game I might just play once feels like an incredible waste
games should have a lo-fi version where they use lower textures and less graphical features for the people that cannot actually see the difference in graphics after the ps2 era
pretty much every pressident since 1992 has made statements about supporting indigenous people in one way or another just to backstab them with worse reactions. AMLO was specially bad since he did use them as political platform and then continue the common opression every other pressident had done.
Claudia has said many things that sound good in theory but my trust in politicians has complately run dry. this reminds me of the san andres accords, which looked really good but the government decided to betray them bad
will stop seeing posts even if they follow them
wow, is this real? like, what type of social media is it that you can block your own follows without even telling you explicitly. I get the idea of wanting to get automatic block of specific stuff (even if I don’t agree) but having blocklists take precedence over something you actively opted in for makes no sense at all
been watching very few new anime these months so there in not much to write about but i have been reaching a bit into donghuas (chinese animation) and it’s honestly quite interesting. will probably try more if i can find something that is not wuxia
Shiguang Dailiren (Link Click) (2020): just an amazing first season. it combines supernatural elements with mystery in daily life events and makes it incredibly interesting. animation is very well done and all the different stories told are very relatable and enjoyable. second season (still hafway through) it’s going lots for the “supernatural police mystery” instead, which reduces the relatability of it but it’s still quite interesting. have high hopes for this one (there is a 3rd season comming up a some point in the near future)
other animes I’m watching and I’m not sure if I wrote about them on the previous threads:
Ranma 1/2 (2024): everyone is loving the remake except me, by the looks of it. I have a strong connection with this story and I have seen the previous anime and read the manga multiple times so I am heavilly biased. the pacing is my biggest problem with it. i have barely any time to react to any scene since it feels like they adapted the manga panels and just continue with the next one without breathing room. also, the lack of musicalization is very anoying. there is barely music at all so it feels like there is something missing on many scenes. i could probably write a pages-long rant about this but i rather not do it right now
Dandadan (2024): everyone is talking about this one so I feel pressured to say my opinion. i just don’t understand why it has soooo much attention (both possitive and negative). it feels very average in many fronts. and while it has good and bad parts, many other anime does it better and worse respectively. maybe I’m burned out of the shounen troupes so I’m missing some readings here and there. musicalization is really good and animation is also good but that is not enough to capture me. i’m slowly watching it so I’m some weeks behind
Dragon Ball Daima (2024): GT2 is fun but reminds me too much of GT (less the latest episodes, but point stands) and I preferred GT over it. I don’t really enjoy the new dragon ball but I will continue watching it anyway.
i have not tried it myself but have you taken a look into zig? it looks alot like go but is lower level. i have heard good things about it and it looks nice. of course the ecosystem is quite limited since it’s a quite new language
decided to try supertuxkart again after dismissing it as a bad game years ago. surprisingly, it’s quite entertaining. it still have very rough edges but it’s actually fun to play for a bit
been using a kensington one for a couple of years and I don’t think i will be able to use a mouse ever again. While this model is not great and it could use some improvements. The whole idea of a trackball is really comfortable
that said, I lost the original ball and it has been incredibly hard to find a proper replacement. we have tried many different ones and they all have downsides that make the experience not great but still better than a mouse
i have been saying this for a while but het people (mostly men) tend to be so far from het that i don’t really understand what they stand for anymore
I had to stop reading manga because my tablet died so I have been unable to continue most of my reads. I have been trying chinese mangha (is the name correct?) and I have been enjoying it more since I’m kind of tired of manga tropes. Regarding anime, with the end of the season and the start of the new one, there is not much to talk about yet. I also got a bit burned out from anime in general so I have not watched as much as I usually do. Some highlights from the old season are:
Dead Demons Dededede Destruction - Amazing show. Engaging in every moment from the beginning to almost the end. Great characters and subtle societal comentary about migration and liberalism. Didn’t really like the ending tho. I understand why it went that way but it felt more like a cop out than a proper resolution. I haven’t read the manga yet so it might be a presentation problem (why does ep 0 even exist???).
Oshi no Ko 2 - Adaptation of my least liked (debatible) arc from the manga and I enjoyed even then. The anime art decisions were really good and make it more engaging than I can remember feeling when reading the manga. Story is still a mess and I can complain about it a lot but at least it was fun. Also, I was getting very tired of this last manga arc so I’m not really missing it but I have heard good opinions of the last episodes so I might try to start reading again soon
Senpai wa Otokonoko - I really liked the start but I slowly started disliking most things about it. I am aware that expecting good queer representation in anime is hard but even then I got disapointed. Worst part is that I read the manga a couple of years ago and was disapointed even then. I really need to start handling my expectations better.
Old anime I’m watching:
Rockman.EXE - It’s a kids anime but it has something that is hard to replicate. The vision of the internet in that era was really fun and interesting. It reminds me a lot about Digimon. I’m enjoying this alot but thinking that it has 5 seasons of ~50 episodes is making me wonder where am I going to stop.
ODDTAXI - Rewatched it recently to watch the live action spinnoff and it’s amazing how good it is. Characters are great and their whole interaction is wacky and weird but very enjoyable. Spinoff is simply bad so no comments.
Movies:
Blue Giant - Simple story but amazing concert animations and incredible music. It was probably one of the best animated experiences I have ever had and I loved every single second of it. For whoever enjoys jazz, this is something I would completely recommend
i just learned not so long ago the concept of “man cave” where they have rules like “no women allowed here” which in my opinion, sounds everything but het. but for some reason, it is considered very manly and very het
i’m happy to see The Summer You Were There mentioned in possitive light. i did enjoy it and while i don’t think it’s amazing i have read quite a lot of negative comments about it which i think are ungranted.
about manga recs, have you read The Moon on a Rainy Night? it’s probably my favourite teenage romance manga so i heavilly recommend it.
for LNs, “Adachi and Shimamura” is really good altough a bit slow teenage romance. there is manga and anime adaptation of it if you prefer the medium but both are behind by far