Me in a leather jacket, wearing a sheer top with snakes
running up it and matching snake earrings.
can't express enough gratitude to
normal for girls
for hosting masked shows with big ol'
cr boxes. had an incredible time. my legs feel like pudding now.
dancing in heels is hard work
I appreciate when manga translations include both
transliterations and translations of onomatopoeias.
yeah actually I am interested that "gata" is the onomatopoeia
for "clatter" that's really cool
The classic box fan CR-Box was invented during the
COVID-19 pandemic and is THE most cost effective
method to clean the air. They have
been shown
to be remarkably effective and outperforming most
commercial HEPA filters on the market. It can also be
scaled up as there have been many CR box builds where
entire schools came together to provide one per
classroom.
This article is legitimately helpful, but I'm mostly posting
it because I find it extremely amusing that (at least as of a
year ago) the best-in-class air filter by cost and among the
best overall is literally just taping a bunch of filters to a
box fan yourself. Hilarious and easy on your wallet!
But what's even funnier is Joey's #1 recommendation:
The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a
method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with
very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of
in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option
to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the
market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of
clean air at 35 dBA.
Nothing comes close.
The only thing better than than taping a bunch of filters to a
box fan? Taping them to a bunch of PC fans instead! Granted
the ones linked here are a little more sophisticated
than that, but elsewhere on his site Joey presents one that
absolutely is just fans and tape:
spoilers for
She Loves to Cook, & She Loves to Eat
Yuki: 😭 I can't believe you're moving
further away than literally the same apartment complex! This
is the worst thing that's ever happened to me! Totoko: 😐💭 I wonder if she likes me. I
wonder if she even likes women. No way to know. Yuki: I just... I like you so much!!! Totoko: 💭 Just no way to know.
A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I
get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex
and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear
scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion
of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first
place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual
textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to
capture the nuance and context that's never going to be
visible in a star rating.
At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of
comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in
the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd
journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing
cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video
games, and novels were all in competition with one another.
It's not particularly fair as a way of determining
quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway.
What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to
successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each
medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star
ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about
how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to
articulate why.
By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is
just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious
is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems
"irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out
that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it
at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my
conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to
remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and
star ratings are a major way I do that.
To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of
what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I
do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of
course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that
I've been giving out
★★★½ and to a
lesser extent
★★★★ ratings
too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything,
here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only;
I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or
well-made relative to its tier.
★ :
Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal.
Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise
miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or
simply irredeemably noxious.
★★ :
Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did
not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but
nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively,
there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things
I disliked.
★★★ :
Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal.
Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner,…
On July 18th, I documented my Low% route, including a
discovery I'd made. It is possible to
snipe Hedges 2
while standing on the top of the mountain. The
description of the trick included the following
picture and caption:
The panel is completely invisible because it is
blocked by the castle wall -- however, the wall
has no collision so the panel is still solvable.
This statement is false.
It was an understandable assumption to make. There's
no reason why that wall needed to have collision coded
into it, since it wouldn't be occluding anything in
normal gameplay. It's common for game developers to
cut corners in places that don't really matter. But it
remains an incorrect assumption.
I don't do speedrunning myself, but I find the act fascinating
and delightful to watch and especially to learn about. There's
an intrinsic human drive, distributed across the entire
species, to fractally explore every aspect of the world we
live in. It's what drives us to do science, it's what drives
us to understand mathematical structures, and it's at least a
part of why art speaks to us as strongly as it does. I find
speedrunning to be a particularly pure expression of this
drive, the progression from enjoying something to wanting to
enjoy it to its fullest to diving so deep into it that it
expands into a world of its own.
Hatkirby's writeup of the process of discovery and the fallout
of one particular trick in The Witness is fascinating
and at times hilarious. I recommend giving it a look if only
to discover why specifically it's called the "No-Wizzies
Snipe". I bet you won't be able to guess.
i've come around 360 to thinking that silent hill 2 is
underrated actually but only because i haven't seen
enough people talk about the parallelism between sh2's
crowleyan psychologizing of sh1's necromantic horror on
one hand and the homologous relationship between
contemporary occultism and its demonological
predecessors on the other
