The size is 600*375, which is 1.6:1. Most of the shows I'm taking grabs from are 1.77:1, so this is about 90% of the width. (The current top rotation pictures are 500*330, which is about 3:2.)
The main question is which of the highlight modes you think looks best for labels.
What I was doing before was to use a script in Paint Shop Pro to add the labels directly to the image files. I used a mode where the label pixels were the inverse of the background at that point, which worked fine for most stuff but failed miserably when the background was close to neutral gray. Unfortunately, there weren't any other easy ways to do it with PSP8, and manually inserting all the labels on 700+ images was unacceptable. (To me.)
With this new approach, I'm going to make the labels in flash at runtime. This opens up a lot of possibilities, flash being a lot smarter, and I tried a bunch of them in that example image. My own opinion is that the last one is the best looking, but I am posting it here to solicit opinions. (I just changed the setting on the first two, and now I'm leaning towards white-on-black background glow as the best looking.)
If you want a better view of them, you can right-click and choose "zoom in".
UPDATE: The editor is fixed, and now I can put that flash inline:
The problem with that one is that it is definitely legible, but I think it looks gawdawful.
Unfortunately, I can't do "rim" text, where the character is outline in one color and filled with another. I can sort-of simulate it by using what I guess would be called "quad offset", with a white foreground and four copies of it in black in the background, offset four directions. Let me give that a try... back in a moment.
5
Well, the third from the bottom (quad offset) is the easiest one for me to see and read.
Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at May 14, 2011 05:03 PM (Lbkvv)
6
I'd say either the first Quad Offset or the last Background Glow. To my eyes, both are equally as legible, but each has a distinct style. I probably prefer BG, but certainly wouldn't mind QO.
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 14, 2011 05:26 PM (n0k6M)
7
The triple offset looked too busy, but the quad wasn't bad. Or the last background glow. Double offset w/blur looked best, but I think that's the background being dark.
8
New editor deployed! Needs a little tweaking here and there, but it's in place and should work across all major browsers.
The one significant problem I'm seeing is that the buttons don't properly light up when selecting previously highlighted text in Firefox 4 and Opera 11. IE 9, Safari 5 and Chrome whatever all work fine.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 14, 2011 07:08 PM (PiXy!)
9
Ah, button lighting-upping works fine in my test script, just not on the live system. I should be able to fix that, then.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 14, 2011 07:12 PM (PiXy!)
10
I think the bottom background glow is the best. The white text with a dropshadow is also a good choice, it's not quite as readable as some but it's readable enough and it looks good.
Posted by: David at May 14, 2011 07:13 PM (Kn54v)
11
There's a problem with Flash if you use browser zoom - which I do, because I have high-resolution monitors and lousy eyesight. Browsers are pretty good now at scaling images, but lousy at scaling Flash - they just use nearest-neighbour scaling, so anything off the default looks bad.
I don't know how many people there are that both use zoom and notice that sort of thing though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 14, 2011 07:31 PM (PiXy!)
Sorry, Pixy, I don't really know what to do about that.
I can't please everyone. Using this new approach is also going to require a new layout, and part of that is going to be to make the page maybe 30 pixels wider, which means people with itty bitty screens won't be able to see the whole thing anymore. I doubt that many of my readers are visiting with netbooks, let along iPads (which can't run flash) but such few as there are will get a diminished experience.
It's too bad that "browser zoom" doesn't let Flash itself do its own scaling.
I'll vote for the bottommost background glow, also. (currently the 3rd glow & 12th line overall, in case more get added)
The offsets do some wacky things when you zoom in. Most evident on my monitor, anyway, at these zoom levels: doubles at 130% and 230%, triples at 130% and anything higher, top quad at 220%, and bottom quad at 250%.
Posted by: Mikeski at May 14, 2011 08:02 PM (GbSQF)
15
Another thing that might help is for me to use a larger font size, and maybe a different font. Right now that's 12-point Verdana, and there may be a better choice. Plus, 14 point would probably look a hell of a lot better. I'll do some experimenting.
So I'm trying to stay motivated and to keep working on the project to update the top rotation. But it's going to have to be an entirely different system, since I can't seem to access Regulus any longer via FTP or telnet.
So the new plan is to upload the top rotation pictures to mee.nu, and to use a flash to display them. There are several ways I could make that flash work, but what I'm probably going to do is make it pick a picture at random.
But I haven't really started working on that part yet. For now, I'm still in image collection mode. Here's what I've got:
34 Dog Days 15 Hayate no Gotoku 44 Infinite Stratos 42 Juuden-chan 35 Koihime Musou 157 Rio 65 Rosario to Vampire 77 Shukufuku no Campanella 53 Strike Witches 2 70 Zombie
592 total
If you figure about 20% rejects, that's about 470. I probably need a couple hundred more to really make this right. (Usually in the past I've tried to keep it between 700 and 750.)
All of the above shows are widescreen format, and I've given some thought to changing the aspect ratio. Originally they were 440*330, but one time I changed it to 500*330. I'm thinking of making it even larger, and increasing the aspect ratio again.
Here's a sample flash I did just to see how it would look:
UPDATE: They don't all have to be new images, and I've got some of the raws from the last update. So I might be able to add 200 or 300 images which are already familiar, for instance from Asobi ni Iku Yo (59) and Ichiban Ushiro no Daimao (60). And Kampfer (84).
1
That RnV sampler looks fantastic. I may need to whitelist Chizumatic in flashblock. I'll think about it.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 12, 2011 11:04 PM (9KseV)
2
Minx has tags to display random entries from a list or rotate them at specified intervals.
They're called [quote:random] and [quote:cycle] because I originally put them in to display random quotes, but they'll work for any HTML as long as each line is standalone.
Basically, you create a new template, drop the list of items into it, one per line, and then add [quote:random template.name] (whatever type.name you used for the new template) or [quote:cycle template.name 900] (where 900 is the cycle time; defaults to 3600).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 12, 2011 11:38 PM (PiXy!)
No, it doesn't have, in the sense you're thinking of.
There's a display: it's a two line B/W LCD. There's a keyboard: it's six buttons on the console. You use those to set up the firmware, including setting up the ethernet. Then you do everything else with a remote computer.
5
Pixy, I don't think that would be practical here. It would mean that the header would include 700+ lines, one for each picture in the top rotation. That would make the page load rather slowly. And it would be a pain to enter and to maintain.
For a couple of years now, the most popular single post on this site has been the one about Pedobear. It often represented 20% of the site traffic, pretty much all as a result of search engine refers.
Now that's mostly stopped. It's typically down below 5% these days. I'm glad for that, understand. Indeed, several times I've considered going back and deleting that post. I didn't want to have the distinction of being the go-to guy for info about Pedobear. (Ye gods; is that to be my fifteen minutes of fame?)
But I wonder what happened?
It occurs to me that Google has retuned their search ranking again (something they do a lot), and my relevance just dropped considerably. Or maybe there was something topical that made a lot of people curious about Pedobear, and now it isn't topical anymore and it isn't being searched for any longer.
There's supposed to be a page somewhere on Google where you can plug in a URL and get told what Google thinks its rank is, but I'll be damned if I know where it is.
(Funny, that first monster Haruna kills in "Kore wa zombie desu ka?" sure looked like Pedobear, which was pretty straight on considering the type of monster he was supposed to be).
Posted by: Mauser at April 14, 2011 12:39 PM (cZPoz)
2
There's enough tongue-in-cheek about that series so that it was probably a deliberate reference. That's what I thought when I first saw it, anyway.
3
Sorry if somebody already emailed you, but it probably isn't
coincidental that Encyclopedia Dramatica, the wiki that tried to
archive all 4-chan related phenomena, and was equally offensive due to
its relative permanence, was taken down and repurposed on 14 April in
an attempt to monetize the webspace. Probably a failed attempt, as
she's wayyyy behind TVtropes when it comes to sanitized memearchivery.
Posted by: Gunther at May 10, 2011 02:52 PM (pDd43)
4
That's a shame. Encyclopedia Dramatica was pretty awful, but in a cheerfully unabashed way that made it... Cheerfully and unabashedly awful, I guess.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 10, 2011 10:46 PM (PiXy!)
5
"There's supposed to be a page somewhere on Google where you can plug in a
URL and get told what Google thinks its rank is, but I'll be damned if I
know where it is."
Try googling it?
Posted by: Mauser at May 12, 2011 12:44 AM (cZPoz)
Well, last year it was more subtle. This year, not much of a secret. You get 24 hours of Hinako. (Or probably more like 36.)
There are 8 different animations in a flash file, and when it starts running it picks one at random. If you click it, it will sequence to the next one.
The flash file is something like 5 megabytes, so the first time it'll take a while to load. But after that you'll get it out of your browser cache.
For archival purposes, I'm also embedding it below the fold.
UPDATE: Be careful out there. Leopard Raws posted something they claimed was the last episode of Madoka. It was actually hentai, something entirely unrelated.
1
I was completely fooled by "that guy"'s joke. Also Chihiro has a not-Madoka Ep11 as well, though it's not hentai (how do you know, Wonderduck? Shaddap.).
Posted by: Wonderduck at March 31, 2011 06:38 PM (W8Men)
2
Do we know when they're going to start broadcasting Madoka again?
It's been since last August that I've made any changes to the top rotation, and that one wasn't very big. It's getting to be about that time.
Tonight I went through the first two episodes of Strike Witches II and got some good ones. I'm going to continue working through the series, and there is a pretty long list of others I may visit. In the mean time, how about this one?
No? You guys are such spoilsports.
Seriously, there are a lot of images in SWII I can't possibly use, and I'm going to try to be reasonable about it. But there sure are a lot of nice pictures, too, and I'm not going to avoid things simply because they include panties. Everything in this series includes panties. For instance, this one I will use:
I don't consider that one particularly scandalous. In the mean time, here's a list of candidate series which might get included. It certainly won't be all of them.
Fight Ippatsu Magipoka G-On Riders Kemeko Kenkoo Zenrakei Suieibu Umisho Moetan Sora Kake Girl 11Eyes Inukami Sacred Blacksmith Nogizaka Himitsu Strike Witches 2 Akikan Sora no Otoshimono To Love Ru Rio Hayate the Combat butler MM! Shukufuku no Campanella Angel Beats The World only God Knows. Infinite Stratos High School of the Dead Kore wa zombie desu ka Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls Today, in Class 5-2 Railgun OVA Occult Academy
Some of these will be painful for me, since they're shows I really don't want to watch. So I'll be going through them without sound and with the subtitles turned off. And in some cases I may quit before going all the way through. I imagine that High School of the Dead and Occult Academy will be good for about two episodes each.
7
Campanella is a good call, due to a) breast size not in Sekirei area, b) pleasing costumes. I would also consider Mitsudomoe, for the worthy parential component.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 05, 2011 08:35 AM (9KseV)
8
Aria in the Sacred Blacksmith wouldn't be a bad choice, but I personally don't think I could sit through another episode featuring Cecily in that most literal of "breast" plate to get to any scenes with her.
I'm not surprised at your exclusion of Freezing. I doubt if there's even 10 seconds in the last 9 episodes or so where panties are not flashed nor dresses punched off.
Posted by: wahsatchmo at March 05, 2011 10:48 AM (r4uXE)
9
In regards to the first screenshot: Is it me, or does her tail attach several inches above her tailbone?
Posted by: Boviate at March 05, 2011 04:41 PM (C8t4z)
10
SW tails are magical indicators, side effects, or waste products. They and the ears appear when the strike witch magic activates, and disappear when it ends. So, the tails are not anatomically correct, and the ears are not linked to human hearing that witches retain.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 05, 2011 05:47 PM (9KseV)
In the original OVA, each witch had an animal familiar, when when they wanted to use their power they merged with the familiar, and the ears and tail were a side effect of the merger.
When they did the first regular series, they decided that having 11 animals running around would be too complicated (and, likely, too expensive to draw):
Wilcke: gray wolf Sakamoto: Doberman Barkhorn: Wirehaired Pointer Yeager: Jackrabbit Perrine: Chartreux (a kind of house cat) Bishop: Scottish Fold (another kind of house cat) Hartmann: Dachshund Lucchini: Panther Eila: black Fox Sanya: a black cat of some kind Miyafuji: Shiba (a Japanese breed of dog)
So now the way it works is that whenever they activate their power, the ears and tail of their animal avatar appear on them. And they vanish again when they power down. There's also a peculiar musical sound that happens, and while they're powered up they are often surrounded by an aura.
It doesn't quite work the same way with Eila. She has essentially perfect precognition about ten seconds into the future, declining in accuracy as she looks further out, but when she's doing divination her ears and tail don't appear. And she's doing the short term thing pretty much all the time. When she's in combat she never uses a shield, because she knows where and when the Neuroi will fire, and isn't there when it happens.
I saw a news post somewhere that talked about the fact that th quantity of email spam going around right now is waaaay down from its peak of a few years ago. They speculated that part of the reason was that some of the worst botnets used by spammers had been taken down.
I think the reason is that the spammers have switched to doing referer spam. Last couple of weeks I've been getting a hell of a lot of it on my server. Ordinarily when I get referer spam I add the IP (or its entire licensed block, if it's Ukraine or Russia) to my firewall block list.
But the recent ones use IPs from all over the world, and they never seem to use the same IP twice. I can only conclude that it's a botnet, likely one that just changed its business from email spam to SEO. Grumble.
"SEO" is the most godforsaken and contemptible TLA in the Internet language, if you ask me.
1
What's referer spam, if you don't mind me asking?
Posted by: Jaked at January 13, 2011 04:08 PM (zVv/5)
2
I've noticed that message board spam has gone up quite a bit - and that block lists indended for email filtering tend to protect message boards fairly well. So I suspect that the spammers are branching out to many different kinds of evil.
Posted by: renpytom at January 13, 2011 04:16 PM (SKrs1)
When a browser makes a request to an HTTP server for a page or file, it sends a string saying where it came from, which is called the "referer". Sometimes the string is empty, but when it isn't what it's supposed to say is what page the person was looking at when they clicked a link to do the HTTP "get".
There are ways in which that string can be spoofed. It isn't all that hard. Some people use those ways to make it so that the string is always empty, for a number of reasons I won't go into. Some tools make it so that the referer string is the same as the "get" string, again I won't talk about why.
And sometimes spammers put in the URL they're trying to pimp. That's because some sites have their referer logs publicly available, raw or processed, in one of several ways, and they hope that the Googlebot will pick it up from there. That's called "referer spam", and it's really obnoxious. (Well, all spam is obnoxious.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 13, 2011 04:25 PM (+rSRq)
4
I started getting a lot of referrer spam about a month ago, so I installed one of the plugins for wordpress that lets you ban IP addresses and subnets. Any comment spam that when I go through the list with the same IP more than once I'll add to the ban list. Since then, I've gotten over 4500 hits from banned IP addresses. So it's definitely bot spam, since it just keeps trying.
Posted by: ChadAmberg at January 14, 2011 08:19 AM (xcgZX)
5
I started getting massive amounts of referrer spam about two months ago, but it was really strange. It was some sort of search engine that was sending all the spam... and it seems to have cleared up in the past few weeks without any real action on my part. Comment spam, on the other hand, has been driving me nuts lately (which is silly, since most blogging software uses the 'nofollow' attribute by default, meaning that spammers get no gain from comment spam - though I guess it doesn't cost anything for them either).
Posted by: Mark at January 14, 2011 08:51 AM (aUPJJ)
Well, maybe. The main cooling fan on the Qube is beginning to make awful sounds, and it may be near to dying. If I go offline for an extended period, and you don't see top rotation pictures, it probably means the Qube has gone to computer heaven.
In that case it will be useless for you to send me email about it. I get my email through the exact same wire that you get the top rotation pictures through. If it doesn't work one way, it won't work the other either.
(By the way, please note that I am not asking for suggestions or advice.)
UPDATE: It's still doing it intermittently, and I don't want to leave it running while I'm asleep. So I'm going to turn it off now and go to bed. Tomorrow morning I'll open it up and blow out all the dust, in hopes that'll fix the problem.
Until that's happened, you won't be able to see the top rotation pictures, and I won't have any access to the internet, including receiving email.
UPDATE: Next morning. I just opened it up and blew lots of compressed air into it, paying particular attention to the CPU cooling fan. Now it's running again and I don't hear any awful noises, so maybe we're in luck.
I've been getting a lot of refers this evening from The New Republic.
I have a mirror of an article from years ago by Walter Russell Mead about Jacksonianism. The guy at TNR linked to my mirror of that article, because it isn't available any longer on the original site.
Actuall, Mead himself did the same last year. He found my copy and linked to it, so I gather he doesn't mind my having it.
Anyway, so far the amount of traffic isn't too heavy. But it's Friday night, so there's no telling what will happen later. If you have trouble getting the top rotation picture or reaching my reviews over the next couple of days, that's probably the reason why.
I usually get between 1500 and 2000 page loads a day. Today it's over 14,000 and still rising, because Glenn Reynolds linked to a post of mine from 2 years ago, just after that election.
I guess that's no huge load, but I hope it doesn't cause Pixy's servers any problem. So far, my server here is handing all the loads of the top rotation pictures without any pain, as far as I can tell.
I confess that it amuses me a bit to know that all those people are coming here to see politics, and are getting pictures of anime girls in swimsuits. (And similar topics.)
UPDATE: And we finally have something that knocks my Pedobear post out of first place in terms of traffic, at least for a day or so.
Naah. The people who are visiting from Instapundit are mostly just reading that one page and then leaving again. few of them are coming to the front page.
Besides which, if they do it, it serves them right.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2010 05:28 PM (+rSRq)
I suppose it's a good sign (?) that Glenn was (is still) reading you.
Posted by: Mauser at November 12, 2010 05:40 PM (cZPoz)
4
IIRC, I mailed him that link, back then. I seriously doubt he reads this blog. (In his copious spare time. When does he have time to sleep, anyway?)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2010 05:54 PM (+rSRq)
5
You can see down the bottom of each page a little line that says something like "11kb generated in 0.0078 seconds; 19 queries returned 16 records." So yeah, we're Instalanche-proof.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 12, 2010 07:20 PM (PiXy!)
6
I figured it probably wasn't a problem. Ace and the Jawas do 25 times as much traffic pretty much all the time.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 12, 2010 07:23 PM (+rSRq)
Well, I dropped in from Insty, and then went to your home page.Â
Wasn't a bit shocked. But, then, I drop in here periodically anyway...
Posted by: katkin at November 13, 2010 04:15 PM (JqX3r)
8
P.S. I agree, and doubt he reads you much (if any) anymore. But he does obviously remember the old USS Clueless. One of the most mis-named blogs of its time, IMO.Â
Posted by: Kathy Kinsley at November 13, 2010 04:18 PM (JqX3r)
