random stuff

The natural flow of things on /w/ has slowed down, so I suspect I'll get to work sifting through what I've saved to see what needs editing, detexting, decrediting, resizing to standard resolutions, and so forth. I know there's a bunch of editing to be done this time, so it might take a while. Anime you can expect to see: Gurren-Lagann, K-On!, Azumanga Daioh, Haruhi, and Full Metal Panic.

That's right, I now have two entire Full Metal Panic wallpapers that I like. All the wallpapers I get to choose from for FMP usually fit one of these 3 criteria: Low resolution, official (and therefore plastered with logos, credits, and websites), or just plain weird art style. Also, barely any of them feature Kyoko. I know she's a side character of barely any relevance to the plot, but... dammit she's the meganekko.

Completely unrelated, has anyone else who's subscribed to a few people on YouTube noticed the annoying glitch on the New Videos section of your subscriptions? It just randomly re-adds videos I've already watched. If you're going to call the section "New Videos", then don't fucking re-add shit that isn't new.

I've found a workaround for my problems with Guild Wars (and any other DirectX game) that seems to work: Running the game windowed. I formed this hypothesis directly after playing Polynomial for quite a long time windowed with no crashes, bricks being shat, or spontaneous reboots. It's interesting that running the game windowed lets me play without the weird things happening that happened when I ran it fullscreen. All on a computer that used to be able to run the game fullscreen no problem whose only hardware change has been a different network card, which was unrelated to the issue in the first place as it started happening long before my onboard lan died.

Speaking of Polynomial, I started it up after typing all of this post except for this paragraph and made it an entire hour on the lowest enemy-populated difficulty before voluntarily stopping so I'd die. I guess my points about powerup durations are rather moot now, seeing as how when there's shittons of enemies in the level and the game is running at a blazing fast 5 frames per second, you can usually fly through another powerup before the first one's worn off just because there's so many of them out there. There were so many enemies they were killing each other while trying to shoot me. So I present the following screenshots. The first is just before I let myself die, and the other is the error I got upon exiting the program.

I spent most of Saturday catching the hell up on the Negima! manga. I've fallen behind getting the official American release, so I figured until I get around to getting them I might as well see what happens. Without spoiling anything, all I can really say is there's lots of great action, great humor, plenty of stuff gets explained, and there's a fair amount of stuff I just didn't expect to happen at all and was like "holy shit" when it happened. If you thought the Budokai arc was awesome, wait 'till you read the Magic World arc ;) It's not quite over yet but it's definitely closing in on the end of the arc.

The scanlations are generally good (there's a couple chapters that were total ass, but that's because I was reading it on onemanga.com and they don't seem to select the same scanlation group every time), but the scanlators never seem to explain the latin (i.e. all of the spell casting), which the official American release explains in great detail. Or maybe onemanga just didn't figure people wanted to read pages of translator notes, I dunno.