Well, that was peculiar. This was a comment I posted, but it got "flagged for moderation". Only I looked for it, and it wasn't there.

A while back I decided I didn't like that "flagged for moderation" feature, so I set the "moderation" threshold and the "spam" threshold to be the same. Which meant I got the "moderation" error message, but the "spam" response. Pixy? (I wonder if I should set the "moderation" threshold to be higher than the "spam" threshold? or set it to a ridiculously huge number?)

Anyway, this is what I posted:

UPDATE: I'm moving all that stuff below the fold, to unclutterize the front page, since few people will be interested in it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:29 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
Post contains 363 words, total size 9 kb.

1 It's correct for 38.112.2.94 to reject traceroute, but you should be able to ping it, and traceroute to the machine that routes to it, nicmonster.ooma.com (38.112.37.150). It's interesting that you got all the way to Cogent's San Jose routers before falling off the edge of the earth, though. Much the same way my packets almost reach your machine...

As for hop count, when I try from home, #12 is 68.87.216.30, and #14 is 70.90.130.45.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 10, 2007 11:11 PM (2XtN5)

2

70.90.130.45 is my server. That's my permanent IP, the one that "denbeste.nu" maps to. Hop 13 (which doesn't answer) is my modem.

This is very peculiar. Routing problems? That I almost reach you but don't, and you almost reach me but don't?

10 pings to 38.112.2.94 was 100% fail.
10 pings to 38.112.37.150 was 100% fail.

Which reminds me of a PIBKAC I did a couple of years ago. I was having trouble reaching Bob's store site on Yahoo. It turned out that the problem was that I had blocked Yahoo's IP range in my server firewall. (I don't remember why; probably because one of the IPs in that bank was a crawler and I used a big axe against it.)

So my pings to their server got answered, but their response was dropped by my firewall, and thus I never saw it. After I got rid of that firewall rule, it worked perfectly.

I bet that the problem here is that Ooma is blocking my IP.

I just took a look in my referer logs. There are no records today or yesterday for either 209.81.13.65 or 38.112.2.94.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 10, 2007 11:29 PM (+rSRq)

3 You'd lose the bet, since I run the firewall. I'm quite certain that nicmonster isn't blocking you, and as I said, some days it works. I actually suspect it's one of Cogent's routers doing the work; probably the same quality control that occasionally leads them to publicly route pieces of 10.0.0.0/8 from their own internal network.

wouldn't

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 11, 2007 09:10 AM (2XtN5)

4 Mrf; somehow my side comment ended up being interpreted as formatting commands, and got replaced with my name. You shouldn't see traffic from 209.81.13.65, since it's in a co-lo and I don't proxy through it. It was just a handy place to run a traceroute from.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at December 11, 2007 09:12 AM (2XtN5)

5

It may be a hiccup with one of the tags Pixy built into the system. If you put "you" between brackets, it does this.

you

"Me" between brackets does this.

Will

It lets you do stuff like,

"Will thinks you is a piker." The names in that statement will be different for everyone who reads it.

Posted by: Will at December 11, 2007 09:21 AM (WnBa/)

6 What does it do for someone who isn't logged in?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 11, 2007 10:08 AM (+rSRq)

7 I honestly have no idea. Guess I could log out and see.

Posted by: Will at December 11, 2007 10:12 AM (WnBa/)

8

Odd... It left everything intact as if I'd never logged out. I did a refresh of the page to clear the cache and it still had my name in all the right places.

That tags been around for a while. People were playing around with it in the comments to this post a long time ago. It seemed to work with anonymous users who had at least commented. Maybe Minx keeps a log linking user names to IP hashes?

Posted by: Will at December 11, 2007 10:22 AM (WnBa/)

9

Haha, reading the old bbcode tag messages reminds me of someone figuring out how to do that in Javascript and posting a "flame" on an EverQuest server board that would grab a person's ID out of their cookies file.  Board dramas were all the rage, and folks were always looking for a good one to help push along, but I think it was something like six pages of people fooled into ranting back at the original poster before someone figured it out.

Of course, then they all started sending IM's to their friends, "DuDe, u need 2 see THIS, sumone h8s ur gutz!"

About fifty pages later, the mod got sick of messages from irate players threatening libel actions for allowing the post, and deleted it.  Seriously, nobody but you could be that stupid enough to fall for that....

;-)

Posted by: ubu at December 11, 2007 11:35 AM (dhRpo)

10 If you think I'm going to say something...

Posted by: Wonderduck at December 11, 2007 12:23 PM (dGuAN)

11 I can see how something like that could be seriously abused in open comments.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 11, 2007 12:40 PM (+rSRq)

12 When I am not logged in, it says 'you' instead of PatBuckman.

There are a few problems with this:

'You are the legitimate world dictator.'
'Steven Den Beste is the legitimate world dictator.'

'You have conquered.'
'Steven Den Beste has conquered.'

Posted by: PatBuckman at December 11, 2007 01:11 PM (EOUd+)

13

Posted by: PatBuckman at December 11, 2007 01:12 PM (EOUd+)

14 oops

Posted by: PatBuckman at December 11, 2007 01:13 PM (EOUd+)

15 I think I'll have to tweak the BBCode interpreter a little to help it distinguish between malformatted tags and plain old text in square brackets.  The more forgiving I make it with tags the more likely it is to trip you up the other way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 11, 2007 01:44 PM (PiXy!)

16 I've already had one n00b write to me and ask, "Why is everyone talking about me in this thread?"

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 11, 2007 09:47 PM (+rSRq)

17 You know, maybe blog authors should have the option of deactivating individual tags in their comments without turning off all html and bbcode tags.

Posted by: Will at December 12, 2007 05:48 AM (E3UGR)

18 Will, that's a good idea and a bad idea.  Good - gives the blog owner more control.  Bad - commenters find that some tags suddenly don't work on some blogs.  I'll probably do it, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 12, 2007 05:54 AM (PiXy!)

19 That particular one seems as if there's no good use for it, but plenty of opportunity for mischief. I think it should be outright deleted unconditionally.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 12, 2007 08:54 AM (+rSRq)

20 Hey....  how did my ID get into this mess?  I didn't do it, I SWEAR!!!

Posted by: dkallen99 at December 12, 2007 09:48 AM (1PFDl)

21

That's what I thought, but I decided to be clever about making my arguement, since I don't have an active Mee.Nu blog.  A university study¹ indicates that clever people are 6.42 times as annoying when they make their points -- which means the victim of their cleverness remembers it.

¹"Annoying Russian Agents for Fun and Profit," by Dr. Bullwinkle, published in Flying Squirell Quarterly, Whattsimatta U. Press, Jan, 1978.

Posted by: ubu at December 12, 2007 09:54 AM (dhRpo)

22 This reminds me of the good old mainframe days.  Console and inter-system messages were tagged with the ID of the sender... but the system operator could always over-ride this.  We used to log in remotely as system ops, and send console messages to the current actual sys-op, tagged with some other poor soul's ID.

Of course, us being college students, it tended to get out of hand, with the director of the CS department appearing to heap abuse on the poor (other) student operators at the time.  Good fun, though.

Posted by: dkallen99 at December 12, 2007 10:41 AM (1PFDl)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

This is kind of scary.

The bottom line is that someone found that their web page was hacked to include an obscure piece of Javascript which redirected hits on the page to malware sites only if the hit was a refer from a major search engine. If you accessed the site directly, you saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 03:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

I think I'm going to start using Firefox to do my posting. There are mystical, magical, mouse-actions and control-mistypes that cause IE to do "return to previous history entry", and if you do that while you're composing an article, then advance forward again, your post is gone to the great bit bucket in the sky. I just lost a post that way.

I tried an experiment, and Firefox didn't have that problem. On the other hand, I'm noticing that when I hit "enter" in IE, the frame editor creates a new "p" tag. In Firefox, the "enter" key creates a break -- which is what happens on shift-enter with IE.

And as I'm composing this, I see that I can't use control-I to open italics. It opens the Firefox shortcut bar instead.

Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Probably the best answer is for me to get in the habit of composing my posts using Frontpage.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:12 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.

Back in the day, I was a pretty high profile political blogger. I was in the Technorati Top 100 for quite a long time, for example. I used to get linked to by other high profile political blogs. I got a lot of attention. A lot of people liked the stuff I wrote. A lot of people despised it.

And some people came to feel ownership over me and my blog. This is peculiar, wouldn't you think? But I guess the idea was that I had come to have a high profile by expressing a certain political point of view, and that meant I came to have a responsibility to represent the other people who held that political point of view, to use my tall soap box to speak on their behalf -- even if what they wanted me to say was different than what I myself felt like saying.

They felt like I owed it to them to toe their party line. They didn't have a tall soap box, so I owed it to them to use mine to say what they told me to say. This manifested often as emails where they offered me advice on what I should have said in a particular post, things I left out, and mistakes I made.

Part of what's peculiar about this is that they expected me to be grateful for the help. They never understood why I resented it. Hey, guys, it's my blog. It's there for me to say what I want. I don't represent anyone except myself. If you disagree with me, get your own damned blog. No, that wouldn't do -- such a person knew that even if they did start blogging, they'd never had the audience I did. It was vital to change my message, to take advantage of my high profile.

That is one of the biggest things that eventually made me get fed up with it all and to stop blogging on USS Clueless. Having people constantly write to tell me how they would have written my posts better than I had actually done -- more in sorrow than in anger, of course, and ever friendly and helpful -- was infuriating. Beginning of August 2004, I simply had had enough.

After a couple of months of cooling off, with some of the bruises healing, I thought that I wanted to start blogging again. But I didn't want to go back into that same lion's den again, and face all that horseshit. The solution?

Blog about something totally inconsequential, something so trivial and unimportant that the self-important people who Had A Mission would never pay attention to me. Write about something fun, something I enjoyed, and something that made no difference at all. In so doing, I would attract people with similar interests, I hoped, but chase away all those who suffered from excessive earnestness.

Anime! The perfect choice!

And it's mostly worked. But not completely. There are still otaku around, with "otaku" used in the pejorative way that the Japanese use the word, for whom nothing is too trivial to let pass. They, too, are on a mission -- to preach the True Faith of the utter brilliance of "Full Metal Alchemist" and how every living, breathing person should watch it because it would change their life. I'm really glad that girl stopped writing to me.

I've learned a lesson: there is no subject so trivial that you cannot find someone who takes it too seriously.

Folks, this is an anime blog. It exists because, and only because, I have fun writing for it. I write what I want to write. Sometimes I say things that are unfair. Sometimes I post things that are wrong. I do it because it's fun. Sometimes I do it in jest. But ultimately, I do it because I want to. That's what my blog is for. It's what any given person's blog is for. It's the voice of a single person -- or a group, if it's a group blog. But this is not a group blog. It's mine. Mine! Mine! Mine! It's my opinions, and it's what I think -- and it doesn't matter. Anime doesn't matter. It's just a diversion.

I'm not trying to be accurate. I'm not trying to be fair. I'm sure as hell not trying to be comprehensive.

Don't take this stuff seriously, OK? And for God's sake, don't tell me what I should have written. You write what you want on your blog, and I'll write what I want on my blog, the one you're reading right now.

Let's have fun!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:51 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 771 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I have to admit, I was getting a little crabby about everyone telling me that Clannad was the bestest thing out there.  I mean, I'll admit to having questionable judgment, given Shana II's nosedive and my probably-eternal fascination with Mayu (who is getting stupider by the episode).  But c'mon, Potemayo was too much for my tender psyche, how am I supposed to watch sad girls without some snow?

Snow makes everything better!  (Except the yellow snow. Avoid that stuff.)

Posted by: ubu at October 29, 2007 03:34 PM (08nnO)

2 I'm glad you post a message like this every so often.  It reminds me to abide by the rules, and hopefully does the same for others.  I've caught myself several times starting to post a comment here or at a few other sites, and then said "wait, I may want to say this, but does this site owner want me saying it?  Do they or the readers here care?  Will I just annoy them?"  Not only are the comments at those sites probably better for taking a minute to edit a post or not make it all, but the comments I have made are much improved for it.

Posted by: David at October 29, 2007 04:53 PM (K0q+2)

3 The compulsion to send someone a "you should write about my favrite topic, X" post can be very strong at times. More so when you're looking to have your opinion validated by someone whose opinion you respect. I know I've felt that urge at times, but I've got the added reminder of seeing this topic materialize at least twice on USS Clueless, and I'm sure a couple times since the birth of Chizumatic.

Posted by: Will at October 29, 2007 04:58 PM (E3UGR)

4

I actually just left a comment in that other thread, apologizing if you thought I was telling you what/how to write.  As I said there, I didn't intend for that to be the way it came across.

Anime doesn't matter. It's just a diversion.

Anime blogging: serious bidnez.

Posted by: Wonderduck at October 29, 2007 05:02 PM (CJ5+Y)

5 Wonderduck, it wasn't you who inspired this rant.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 29, 2007 05:44 PM (+rSRq)

6

Call it 'just in case,' Steven.

Posted by: Wonderduck at October 29, 2007 05:48 PM (CJ5+Y)

7 Clearly, we need more alternative energy posts.

I'd say something about the Internet being serious business, but that's a parody of a cliche by now.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be.  At least not everywhere.

Bring out the catgirls with glasses!

Posted by: BigD at October 29, 2007 06:06 PM (JJ4vV)

8 Honestly, I don't understand why my comment annoyed you so much, Steven.  All I did was point out how silly it is to offer an opinion on a show without having watched a single episode, all the while comparing it to ANOTHER show you've never watched a single episode of.

Yes, it's your blog, and you can write whatever you want, but as long as you have comments enabled, you should be prepared for people to speak up when you say something stupid.

I understand your desire not to get beat up by your readers (I don't enjoy it getting beat up, either), but if you honestly expect them to just roll their eyes and think, "Oh, that's just Steven," every time you write something that's "unfair" or "wrong", you're delusional.  If you go out your way to make a fool of yourself or piss people off, what do you expect?

Of course, you and I have been through this once in the past, so I don't know if you'll give me the time of day here, but I'll say this:  before blaming your readers for not responding the way you'd like, take a good, hard look at what you're writing.  It's not like I make a habit of going around leaving nasty comments on other people's blogs.

Posted by: Jeff Lawson at October 29, 2007 06:22 PM (VgF1Y)

9 Long term reader here. I think I started closer to 2001 then 2004. I have greatly enjoyed your work. When it agreed with me, it boosted my ego, because I respect your thinking. (I do not and didn't need the ego boost.) When you disagreed, it helped my thinking, even if I rarely changed my mind. Either way, I found valuble details, arguments, and mental approachs. Your use of engineers' thinking helped me to appreciate it, and was a major influence in my decision to try to become an engineer.

Will: I agree about the benficial effects of these posts on myself.

BigD: Please no alternate energy posts. Hearing people recomend perpetual motion machines of the first and second kinds makes baby engineers emo and angtsy. Please think of the baby engineers. I do not want to have to get a MySpace account and write poetry about suicide and cutting. Except for Kipling, I hate poets and poetry, and I have no self-destructive tendencies aside from laziness.

Posted by: PatBuckman at October 29, 2007 06:41 PM (DZ471)

10

Jeff, if there's any reason at all for you to read my blog, it's because you want to hear my editorial voice. I am what I am. I think what I think. I write what I write. And the point of this blog is to be opinionated. It's a review  blog. It's here for me to express my opinions.

Remember this?

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: the anime bloggers I enjoy reading most are those who write with a distinct personal voice. When an anime blogger can effectively convey their passion for anime in words, I pay attention. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that way. If you collected the authors of the most popular anime blogs in a room, I think you’d find yourself amongst a pretty opinionated group.

But apparently you aren't happy if those opinions disagree with yours.

I don't need to read what I wrote; I knew what it was when I wrote it, and I still know what it was. Yes, I do expect people to roll their eyes and say, "That's just Steve". Because if it wasn't "Steve" it wouldn't be my blog, my distinct personal voice. If you don't like that, go away and don't come back.

(I'm closing this thread now.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 29, 2007 06:52 PM (+rSRq)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Where I went to college, Computer Science was (at the time) a part of the College of Science rather than being in Engineering. That was mostly for historical reasons. Originally the computer programming classes had been taught by professors in the Math department, so when they finally decided to create a formal Computer Science department they forked the Math department inside the College of Science.

That meant that we Computer Science majors had to satisfy course requirements for a Science degree instead of an Engineering degree. So where my buddies who were studying EE had to take Statics and Dynamics (basically, Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering) I was instead required to take one physical science and one biological science. I took Physics and Zoology.

I was told that these requirements were so that I would have a broad education. We had to take a lot of humanities, too, and I took a lot of Philosophy and Psychology courses in order to fill those credits.

And you know what? A lot of that stuff not only improved me as a human, but it even turned out to be useful professionally. One of the things I ended up doing was to design human interfaces. Psychology and the physiology part of Zoology ended up helping me a lot.

Here's an example of what not to do. There are several things wrong with this pair of color choices.

Physiology tells us that humans are far more sensitive to changes in light intensity than we are to changes in color. When the foreground and background vary a lot in hue and saturation but not very much in lightness, it's much less comfortable. In this case the foreground color has a lightness of 50% and the background color has a lightness of 75%. Here's the lightness plane without any color information:

The contrast ratio is terrible, irrespective of the hues that were chosen. But the choice of red and blue as the specific hues is the worst there is.

Physics teaches us that all lenses are prisms. Feed white light through a concave lens, and the different color components will focus at different distances from the lens. Blue, being the shortest wavelength of visible light, refracts the most and will focus nearest to the lens. Red, being the longest wavelength, refracts the least and focuses furthest from the lens.

Green is in the middle. It's also the color we're most sensitive to. So when you go to the optometrist, it turns out that he selects your correction so that green focuses perfectly, as the best compromise.

But when you're presented with sharp edges (anti-aliased or not) between red and blue zones, it is impossible for you to focus on both of them. The result will always be a bit blurry. And it will be uncomfortable to look at, because your natural focusing system will try to correct constantly, and won't be able to do so.

That's why blue and red, alternating in space or alternating in time, is the most obnoxious and repellent color combination there is. It's what you use if you want to drive people away. (That's why I used that color combination in my "stop deep linking my pictures" animated GIF.)

As I worked on human interfaces I ended up using a lot of things I had studied in fields outside of my specialty. Turns out the University was right: studying broadly is better than narrow concentration.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:30 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 577 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Unless you have red-green deficient color blindness, like I do.  A lot of web sites are a real pain for me.

Posted by: Toren at October 26, 2007 10:16 PM (6CGiQ)

2

That was another thing I learned about. My dad was RG color blind. Since it's an X-linked recessive, and since my mom doesn't carry the gene so far as we know, my brother and I have normal vision and my sister is a carrier.

Turns out that RG color blindness afflicts something like 12 percent of adult males in the US. (As with most X-linked negative genes, the rate for women is much lower.) So that's another thing that has to be taken into account.

When the US military creates maps, they color code. They use red and blue, and by convention red is enemy and blue is friendly. The reason they use those two colors is that even when a man has RG color blindness, he can differentiate them.

But they don't print them on top of one another, so chromatic distortion isn't a factor.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 26, 2007 10:30 PM (+rSRq)

3 They might have changed that after a not-to-amusing incident back in the 80's, that I read about on Baen's Bar.  Ft.Benning, IIRC.  Seems John Ringo and Tom Kratman might both have been in the area for this one, anyway it was one of them that told the tale, and the other chimed in with some details.

The story goes that a platoon was given orders for a night march across the base.  The newbie Lt. leading them got about a mile along,  reached a crossroads,  halted and called his senior NCO's into a huddle.  Pulling out the map, he carefully shined his night light on it (under cover so as not to give away their position--good technique) and noted that their march route had them going along three sides of a square, and it would be much better training to cut straight across the wilds in between them and their destination.  At least one senior Sgt noted the swampy terrain and tried to talk him out of it, but, "Good training!" was the response and "Follow your squad leaders!" was the order of the night.

At this point, I should note several things:
The temperature was about 40 F.
Their unit had just been posted to the base for advanced training, and none of them were familiar with it.
To avoid being seen at a distance, Army night lights are red.
So are most warnings printed on Army maps -- such as the one marked on the swampy area that said, in effect, "This area used for target practice by artillery -- unexploded ordinance everywhere!"

The topper to it all?  An artillery battery was using it for target practice that same night. Fortunately, it was only a "dry fire" exercise, with no actual ordnance expended, so the net result was only a few cases of hypothermia and one very severely dressed-down Lieutenant.

I'm told he was serving in Afghanistan as a Colonel. last year, so I guess he didn't manage any more such fubars... .

Posted by: ubu at October 27, 2007 02:54 PM (LrQ7M)

4 No, the red/blue convention goes back much further than that. I have a pair of books in folio size, the West Point Atlas of American Wars, printed in 1959 where every right-side page is a map. Red and blue ink are used to print the positions of hostile and friendly units in it -- and they didn't invent that convention for that book.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 27, 2007 03:13 PM (+rSRq)

5

The common habit of using red type for links on web pages is a real problem for me.  I often have to highlight an entire page to spot the damn things.  When my friends are redesigning their sites, the very first thing I ask for are blue links.

My maternal grandfather was a true monochromat.  I fail all Ishihara tests except two.  I'm supposed to have anomalous trichromacy (protanomaly) with a tendency to dichromatic protanopia.  As you might imagine, my wife does not allow me to dress myself.    What's interesting is how much I still enjoy color animation (although it's likely my early switch in interest to manga was prompted by it being much more relaxing to look at).  Some colors are weak to me that are strong to others.  For example, red is a dullish brown to me, most of the time.  But I suppose it catches people's attention the way an electric blue grabs mine.  A further oddity is that, on rare occasions, a color will not resove itself to my eye.  Meaning, it has a "non-color." Sometimes it will flicker back and forth between options rapidly (nauseating).  However, in many cases, if I can get someone to tell me what the color is supposed to me, it "snaps" into resolution.

It can be annoying, but I've gotten used to it.  But then again, sometimes I wish I could see the world as most others see it.

Posted by: Toren at October 27, 2007 04:24 PM (6CGiQ)

6

To avoid being seen at a distance, Army night lights are red.

Umm, no. They were red to minimize the effect on your night vision.

Around 20 years ago, they switched the red lens to blue. That screws with your night vision a little more but it isn't as visible to passive light amplifiers ("starlight scopes").

It used to be fun to watch a tank at night with a starlight scope when they hadn't turned off the call light on the radio and got a call. The flash out all the optics and windows in the cupola (M60) looked like a grenade went off in the turret.

Even so, it's really hard to hide from thermal sights.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at October 27, 2007 07:28 PM (Ef+b7)

7 Mark: doh. you're right.  I confused two things, one of which I don't recall the details clearly on.  Whichever one of them was telling that part of the story (Kratman, I think?) described something they were doing to avoid letting the light shine out.  Don't remember if it was the huddle or covering up with the sleeping bags from their gear. 

Posted by: ubu at October 27, 2007 10:55 PM (LrQ7M)

8 Well, the blue light tended to wash out the water features on the map (such as swamps, streams, and rivers) until they printed new ones that used a slightly different shade of blue.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at October 28, 2007 01:53 AM (Ef+b7)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

When I did the update to the top rotation recently, I was afraid that maybe I'd included too many pictures of Rushuna from Grenadier. But now I wish I'd used even more of them. As I'm posting this the top picture is of her, and damn but she does look good.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm working on a pretty significant update to the top rotation. Right now it's 736 images.

I've got 71 new images from the Ah! My Goddess! TV series, 35 from Najica Blitz Tactics, 81 from Petite Princess Yucie, 74 from Shingu, and 48 from Grenadier. So with great pain and suffering I trimmed the previous collection down to 441 files, so that the combined total will only be a bit larger than it is now. That means almost half of the images will be new.

That also means nearly all Sugar and Bottle Fairy images are gone. I cut way back on Happy Lesson and Stratos 4. The badly-created Vandread 2 images are all gone. I trimmed back a few Hand Maid May images, and did some selective deletion of images from all kinds of things that I didn't think were very high quality. I also cut back on the UFO Princess Valkyrie images.

I've got maybe 2 more hours of work before it's done, but it's late and I'm going to bed. I'll finish it tomorrow.

UPDATE: Done. 737 total images of which 308 (42%) are new. It takes 30 days and 17 hours to cycle. (I trimmed back a few more.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:20 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 206 words, total size 1 kb.

Irrespective of its other merits, or lack thereof, Grenadier is wonderful source material for top rotation frame grabs. I just went through it and ended up with 50 candidates. But I won't be able to use them all, much though I'd like to. Below the fold, NSFW, are two I just cannot bring myself to use. more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:21 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

I won't tolerate having commenters hassling other commenters and trying to put words into their mouths. It's OK to kid around, but not OK to seriously abuse other people.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.

I saw a post by someone celebrating "100,000 visitors". It got me curious. So I took a look at the stats page. I don't think we get told "visitors" (if I even knew how to evaluate that) but we do get told page loads. Since I switched over here May 20, it's 219,753 pages. For 102 days, more or less, that's about 2100 per day.

Which ain't shabby. We thank you for your support. (Not just me; I suspect Pixy is glad, too. We -- you and me -- have also been helping him hammer out some of the last remaining bugs in his system.)

Of course, that 219 thousand is only a bit more than the amount of traffic Glenn Reynolds does in one day.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.