Doesn't seem to have been my day. About a quarter to eleven this morning my Comcast link went out. I was busy at the time doing something local, and didn't notice it for about half an hour.

Well, what could it be? Power cycling the cable modem didn't help, so I decided to cultivate patience, and went out for a walk to get some lunch. After trying the nachos at the local Mexican restaurant (good, but not ultimately something I'll probably ever get again, simply because there are other things on the menu I like more) I came back, and it was still down.

So it's telephone time. After playing support-system-pinball for a while (If you're in Afghanistan, please press 7 por favor boop beep ding-ding-ding tilt) I reached a human, who confirmed that my modem wasn't online. Far as he could tell, I was the only one. No outages reported.

But, see, Comcast is a Jekyll-and-Hyde outfit. It's odd. There's one company who sells services to home users: telephone, television, internet. There's a different company who sells the same thing to companies and commercial users. They use the same wires, but not all the same equipment. I'm with the latter one, surprisingly enough. Why? Because I have a server, and home users aren't permitted to run servers. I'm not a company and I don't do anything commercial, but if I want to have a server and a permamently-assigned IP, I have to deal with the commercial side. (AND pay about twice as much per month.) Since I'm honest, I do that.

I got forwarded to the other company, and played pinball again for a while (Please key in your shoe size in centimeters) and reached another human, who told me it was a systemic outage and about 500 people were affected.

Why did the first guy not know that? Well... another reason we commercal users are different is that we're using a different carrier frequency than normal home users do. I don't compete for bandwidth with my neighbors. Everything beyond a certain point in the system is different hardware for us'n, and there was an outage of some kind on the commercial side.

Whatever it was, they were working on it but had not said when they thought it would be fixed. Good enough. So I cultivated patience again.

Actually, it was a relief to hear that. What I was afraid was that the bifurcated nature of the company had bitten me in the ass again. Twice now a tech support guy from the home-co has looked in the wiring box, seen that I was connected, looked at his list and not seen me listed as a customer, and decided I shouldn't be, and disconnected me. After which the only thing I could do was call commercial-co and get them to send out a tech to reconnect me again. I was afraid the same thing had happened again, in which case it probably would have been tomorrow before I would get back online. But since it was a systemic problem, and they were already working on it, it'd be much sooner.

And lo and behold, about another hour later, and the cable light stopped blinking and went solid (carrier back up!) and I started getting hits on my server again.

And I was instantly able to reach all of my favorite web sites except this one, or indeed any meenu or munu site. Oops.

Pixy says we had a drive failure on the server that hosts munu, and that machine does DNS for meenu so it took us down too. OK, that kind of thing happens. But to misquote that great Philosopher, Churchy LaFemme, "Friday the 13th happened on Tuesday this month."

AND on the 15th, to boot.

In the mean time, apropos nothing in particular, here's a picture of Akidra from UFO Princess Valkyrie 2.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 649 words, total size 4 kb.

NRO Corner linked to Ed Driscoll. Ed Driscoll linked to an old article of his, which included a link to Chizumatic.

So far I've gotten more than 20 refers from that old article. Amazing, isn't it?

Sometimes this happens to me, where an old article somewhere else will wake up and feed me a bunch of refers over a day or two, and I never figure out why. So it's nice that this time I know. I can only imagine how many refers the first Driscoll post must be getting...

UPDATE: Now it's more than 80 refers, and still rising.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:33 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 103 words, total size 1 kb.

I guess I've been putting this off way too long. The old rotation was 737 files. The new rotation is 753. Here's what got added:

Girls High: 56 pictures
Magical Play: 41
Magikano: 80
Ramen Fighter Miki: 66
Seven of Seven: 87
Tenchi Muyo GXP: 104
UFO Princess Valkyrie 3: 57
Yumeria: 46

...and 216 left over from before. So more than 70% of the images in the top rotation are new. The full cycle takes 31 days and 9 hours.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 84 words, total size 1 kb.

It's always a bit odd when I see something like this in my refers:

- -> /robots.txt 67.195.44.110 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 87.118.122.164 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /Chizumatic/top/top.jpg 134.67.6.11 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 65.214.44.29 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.142 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.140 0pct.
- -> /robots.txt 67.228.100.139 0pct.

Why are they accessing it over and over? Do they think it's going to change just because they ask again?

Anyway, I need to get into the firewall controls; looks like there needs to be another entry in the ban list.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 194 words, total size 1 kb.

If you noticed odd things happening with mee.nu blogs this morning, it's because there was a foul-up at the hosting company. "mee.nu" was making it to the right server, but the sub-domain interpretation (e.g. finding "chizumatic" inside mee.nu) wasn't working.

Pixy noticed it before I did; he was right on the case, and got it all straightened out in about an hour -- which, considering the hosting company is in Texas and Pixy is in Australia, is pretty damned good.

Thank you for your hard work, Pixy.

UPDATE: Correction: the "mee.nu" domain record itself was corrupt, and got propagated around the internet. The correct one has now been propagated, but it may take a few hours to reach every name server.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:51 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 124 words, total size 1 kb.

It's been quite a while since I updated the top rotation. I've been accumulating images from various series. Right now I've got 81 from Magikano, 104 from Tenchi Muyo: GXP, 57 from UFO Princess Valkyrie 3, 46 from Yumeria. I've also got Girl's High, Ramen Fighter Miki, and Seven of Seven that I could go through and get grabs from, though I'm not really sure how many good ones I could get from those. Girl's High is mostly too ecchi, and Ramen Fighter Miki is mostly too strange, and Seven of Seven has kind of lousy image quality. But you never know.

And if I can bring myself to do it, I could rip some of Godannar and scan through it looking for decent images. (Oh, the pain...)

So it's time for me to get serious and work hard on this, and see if I can't finish it in the next few days.

UPDATE: Yeah, I think I can find some frames in Ramen Fighter Miki...

UPDATE: Of all the weird things that happen in that series, this is easily the weirdest:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:09 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 185 words, total size 1 kb.

Yesterday I was looking at my refers, and noticed that someone was reading a lot of my reviews. That happens sometimes; a person discovers the site and looks at a bunch of them. The pattern is different than a crawler; crawlers hit every entry in order; people like this don't usually read them all and almost never read them in alphabetic order.

Anyway, I was curious to see where this reader was located. The IP began with 71, something you don't see a lot. So I looked it up, and it turned out that my fan was in Saudi Arabia.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 01:36 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 104 words, total size 1 kb.

I just added two entries to the glossary:

Eroge -- is the Japanese abbreviation of erochikku geemu or "erotic game", essentially a seduction sim. Also known as "hentai games" or "H games". The genre is very popular in Japan and the goal is to meet girls and get them into bed and please them there. Many eroge's have been turned into anime series, sometimes staying quite true to the original and sometimes rewriting the story completely. Popotan is based on an eroge but the only thing they kept from the game was the graphics designs of the girls. Everything else in the TV series is entirely new, including the plot line. (They even left out the player avatar.) This is distinct from a "dating sim", where the goal is to get one of the girls to confess her love to you. Dating sims do not include explicit sex as a reward for winning. There are also otome games where the avatar is female and the targets are male.

Nice Boat - Comes from the series School Days. Nominally a high school romance story about one guy and two girls (based on an eroge), it had a rather shocking ending. Both girls got pregnant. One of them killed the boy with a knife. The second one took the knife from the first and killed her. Then she cut the guy's head off and took it away. The final scene shows her laying in bed, cuddling his head.That was apparently too much for some of the TV stations in Japan, especially considering that a couple of weeks before a teenage girl in Japan had killed her father with an axe. Instead of showing the final episode of School Days, they showed a half hour documentary about a cruise liner. So a "Nice Boat" ending is the ultimate "bad end".

I couldn't really remember for sure: Was the School Days ending the worst of the possible outcomes in the eroge, or was it a new ending that was even worse than the worst game ending?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:14 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 298 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Heh.  I saw a "nice boat" reference recently and had no idea what it meant.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 12, 2008 07:22 PM (PiXy!)

2 It certainly is obscure, and fairly recent, and I've been seeing it a lot especially in comments elsewhere, so I felt it was worth a glossary entry even though I myself haven't used it. (Yet.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 12, 2008 07:23 PM (+rSRq)

3 You got the basic gore down, but your spoiler isn't really anywhere near accurate. If you don't mind spoiling this one (I doubt you'd ever want to watch it anyway) I reviewed it here:

http://anime.theastronomicon.com/?page_id=27

Clicking the spoiler tags will let you know how it went down, including the 'Nice boat' meme.

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 09:07 PM (RXNsB)

4 Also, to answer your question,

Any ending where Mokoto dies was a good ending. The game was famous for it's brutal endings, but it had some happy ones as well. However, the anime made him so hated that only his death could satisfy the fans. Early on, the director had promised one of the 'good endings'. As bloody as it was, he actually delivered on his promise. Damn, Kotonoha got screwed over, though...

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 09:20 PM (RXNsB)

5 Steven, I've not seen all the various endings from the game, but the ending in the show is just one of many 'bad ends', and it's not even the worst of the bunch, depending on your point-of-view.  Certainly it's not even close to being the bloodiest...

Posted by: Wonderduck at January 12, 2008 09:33 PM (fEnUg)

6 Alright alright. I changed it on the glossary page. Sheesh.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 12, 2008 10:36 PM (+rSRq)

7 I wasn't scolding you, if that caused the 'Sheesh'. You are still misunderstanding it, though.

Kotonoha wasn't pregnant, nor was Sekai, as we found out through a gruesome autopsy. Sekai was just nuts.

The 'Nice boat' episode that played in place of the finale was just a series of nature scenes, one of which included a boat sailing through a bay. A 4-channer made the comment 'Nice boat', and it got picked up by Futaba and then spawned countless macros.

The ironic thing was that it actually ended on a 'Nice boat'. The final image in 'School Days' is Kotonoha sailing away into the sunset on a yacht, cradling Makoto's head.

Legend has it that this episode was reworked because of the meme, while the TV stations were deciding whether or not to air the final episode. She'd actually mentioned this boat before, though, and even her sister envied her sailing trip with Makoto. So it was likely just a happy coincidence.

Still, for almost a month this series was known as 'Nice boat' before the finale aired. The fact that it ended on the boat just cemented it in otaku lore.


Hope that helps.

Posted by: astro at January 12, 2008 11:21 PM (RXNsB)

8 Hm... I'm not sure I would draw the line between Dating Sims and Eroge where you would. At least in the west, there are plenty of games marketed as Dating Sims that have explicitly adult content. See http://www.peachprincess.com/ for a bunch of (massively NSFW) examples.

Posted by: renpytom at January 13, 2008 11:46 AM (vkkAp)

9

I'm defining those terms the way I use them. That glossary is for this site, not for the universe.

Do I have to start posting the "no pedantic nitpicking" graphic again? Please tell me I won't have to.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 13, 2008 12:15 PM (+rSRq)

10 I was under the impression the anime ending for School Days combined a couple of the Bad Ends of the game ( but not all of them, for reasons unknown to me ).

Posted by: metaphysician at January 13, 2008 08:31 PM (KVPNK)

11 Well, <em>somebody</em> had to survive...

Posted by: mparker762 at January 13, 2008 08:39 PM (4qjka)

12 Why? 

Posted by: metaphysician at January 15, 2008 09:52 AM (KVPNK)

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Earlier I had a strange experience entering a comment. Something strange happened, and I was back at an empty entry box. I hadn't finished typing it, so I started over and posted it again.

Seems what happened is that somehow the first incomplete comment got posted. So I ended up going into the comment entry frame, and tagged that incomplete comment and deleted it.

Just now I noticed it was still there. So now I deleted it for real. But what that probably means is that I deleted someone else's comment the first time by mistake. If so, I'm sorry, and it wasn't deliberate, and please enter it again if you feel like it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

Stripey sez:

Believe it or not, Hontou ni taihen desu is entering its 5th year of anime blogging and yet to crack its 500th post.

I took a look at my statistics, and this will be post #650 since I started using mee.nu last May 20. So is he slacking or am I obsessive? (Maybe both?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:59 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 61 words, total size 1 kb.