Sitemeter seems to have fixed that problem with the weird javascript, so I've put it back on the page.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One nice thing about exercise sequences is that they save a lot of animation cost by repeating frames. Another nice thing is that they make for nice top anims. These are from the second episode of Sekai de Ichiban.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:36 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Added 39 images from Hagure Yuusha. Total number is now 2691.

I actually watched it, all the way through, last night. It was better than I remembered. Akatsuki is still an arrogant perverted jerk, but not as annoying as I had remembered him being. And the plots swirling around him made somewhat more sense than I remembered.

But he's the star and he's on camera a large percentage of the time, and generally I don't use images including guys (though there have been rare exceptions). Plus, a large percentage of the scenes with girls and not with him or the other guys in the show featured levels of nudity that I generally don't use. So it was only 39 images, and about ten of those came from the OVAs.

UPDATE: His special technique where he removes a girl's underwear while fighting originally struck me as being completely gratuitous fan service.

Well, it still is. But it actually makes some sense. He isn't just doing it because it's sexy. It's also a way to end a fight with a girl without him having to beat her black-and-blue.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Back when I switched to using a flash for the top image, one request was that I allow people to store the image they were looking at. I can't do that directly out of the flash file because the flash security sandbox doesn't permit it. You either can manipulate local files, or you can manipulate files on the web, but you can't do both.

I never understood why anyone wanted this. But apparently some people did. And it just now occurred to me that I can give you something nearly as good, and I just implemented it. In the upper right corner now is another magic invisible button. If you click it, a new browser window or tab (depending on how your browser is set to treat target "_blank") opens with the current image in it, and from there you can drag-and-drop or right-click to your heart's content.

The lower right corner is a magic button which causes the flash file to choose a new image to display, on every click (for IE) or every other click (for Firefox). I still don't know why that doesn't work correctly for Firefox (and certain other browsers) and I still don't have the slightest idea how to fix it. I still believe it's a bug in Flash, and it won't change until Adobe does something about it. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

The lower left corner is a button that causes your browser to load the main page. The upper left corner acts like the lower right corner except that a mouse hover brings up a panel displaying a bunch of internal information about the flash.

UPDATE: If you're looking at an animation, the upper right button will open that in a new window/tab, too. But the animations are flash files themselves, so you can't drag-and-drop or right-click them to save them. Sorry; nothing I can do about that.

If you really need your own local copy, for some reason, then in Firefox you can open a new tab to "about:cache" and then dig it out of the file cache. There's no equivalent in IE; Microsoft thinks we're too stupid to be allowed into the cache and does its best to prevent us from getting into it.

UPDATE: And having written the above, I just now realized what I was doing wrong that was screwing up Firefox (and Chrome etc.) and fixed it. (Yes, it was my fault.) The lower right button should work every time now. At least it does in Firefox for me.

So the current version of Chooser is 37.

UPDATE: By the way, it's better now than before. Used to be, the top image was always named "top.jpg". But now it will have a unique name, so you don't have to rename it.

Of course, sometimes the name is something like "GuP.zip:0101.jpg" so you better hope that having a colon in the name doesn't screw up the operating system of your choice. (Windows doesn't mind, but I have no idea how MacOS handles that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:35 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Added 109 images from Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Total number of images is now 2652.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Added 72 images from Vividred Operation. Total image count is now 2543.

The usual caveats apply: if it's in your browser cache you won't get the new version.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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After 6 episodes I've got 61 candidates. Not too surprisingly, about half of them came from episode 6, the swimsuit episode.

UPDATE: The later episodes didn't lend themselves well to this. Final count is 72. And it just occurred to me that I might be able to find at least a few decent images in Mondaiji-tachi.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I'm tired of pressing the "cancel" button on IE's popup every time I load a page here. So I've removed the sitemeter bug from the sidebar.

It's very strange: once IE pops up that alert at the bottom of the page, it doesn't go away even if you change pages. You must respond; no choice about it. That's poor design.

UPDATE: OK, now it's really gone. (I hope.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:33 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Sitemeter rolled out something new this morning without warning, and every time I load this site, or any other that has a sitemeter bug on it, I get asked about some sort of analytics javascript. I have no idea what it is, and I didn't do it. I imagine Sitemeter is already being flooded with complaints, so I imagine whatever they did will get undone, or fixed, fairly soon.

Anyway, it's not my fault, but I apologize. If it keeps going on for a long time, I'll remove the sitemeter bug.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 01:08 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Jack Elam is/was probably my favorite character actor. I liked his performance in Rio Lobo, and he was particularly good in Support your local sheriff.

He is credited with this pithy explanation of the career of a character actor:

1. Who's Jack Elam?
2. Get me Jack Elam.
3. Get me a Jack Elam type.
4. Get me a young Jack Elam.
5. Who's Jack Elam?

And when you reach stage 5, you're a has-been.

Seems like I just achieved it, my own self. Share me a shoulder to cry on, please. Time was, my serious posts got a lot of attention. But I've been consciously trying to shed that reputation (because it became a pain) and seems like I have succeeded too well; now I get ignored even when I don't want to be. Recently I've occasionally written something serious and sent it to Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spade HQ who posted it. But this last time, two days later I received an email from him saying he was on the road, and that he had forwarded it to something called "open blogger".

Whoever was the recipient (if indeed there was one) doesn't seem to have thought it was even worth acknowledging, and that's also the last I heard from Gabriel. He has since posted at least one article on Ace's, but didn't post mine.

I guess I'm a has-been. (sob. Pass me those hankies...)

The people at Ace of Spade HQ don't owe me anything, of course. It's their blog and they can post whatever the hell they want there, and omit whatever they think isn't up to their standards. But I would have at least hoped for an email telling me it was rejected, and I don't seem to even have rated that much consideration. I remember a song from when I was a kid:

Nobody likes me,
Everybody hates me,
I think I'll go eat worms.

OK, end of self pity now.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:36 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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