Rubénerd!

I haven't blogged an anime series as it's aired since Bakemonogatari in 2009, but I'm getting back into it again with the delightful Tamako Market.

For those who don't know me, I have a Kyoto Animation Doctrine. This states that if Kyoani releases something, I have to watch it. Not "I should watch it", as in I have to watch it. The plot, the origins of the story, the number of clichés or blobs, these are all irrelevant. Or possibly, the reason. This used to be the Kyoani SHAFT Doctrine, but with limited time I had to get a bit more selective :)

As Clara and I huddled in front of the computer screen to watch Kyoani's latest endeavour, we couldn't tell if we were being trolled or not. Or if we were, whether you can be trolled in a good way. The story makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Firstly, a regal talking bird who's name happens to be a disparaging review of the foodstuffs his hosts produce? A bird who gains so much weight without simply exploding? The fact people so readily accept the fact he talks after the initial shock subsides? The fact he turns into a projector?

For a shameless person like me who watches anime for the art as well as the production studio, the colours, sky and market itself were rather vibrant, more than I was expecting. Clara is an actual artist and seemed impressed by these too, so I knew it wasn't just me being impressed by something simply because I have no hope replicating anything close to it.

The characters. Well, lets just say they look like K-On, talk like K-On, have the K-On eyes and hand gestures. It may as well be K-On, in a market, with a talking bird. I'll admit, I was excited to see the K-On character design being adopted for... guys. I unashamedly loved K-On, so I'm perfectly okay with this, almost nostalgic. There were a few elements of Hyouka too, especially of Tamako during the ED.

Haters gonna hate. I don't care. I'm going to watch the heck out of this series. The only catch, watching all this food being prepared made Clara and I eat more pizza than we realised, which gave us tummy aches afterwards. This is a concern.

Also, for what it's worth, the florist is already giving me ideas for a cosplay. I couldn't hope to match our club's Lexi, but I could try. Also, Tamako drinks coffee which is far too awesome for words. Sudohbucks, anyone?

My first 2013 post, my first K-On! post of 2013, the first post from my adorable new 11" MacBook Air, and the first 2013 K-On! post from my adorable new 11" MacBook Air!

The image on the left is by おまる@3日目西“け”23b on Pixiv, the image on the left is the video I took of the Sydney fireworks from my iTelephone 4 in the company of some wonderful friends, and especially Clara ^_^.

Peace, health, sillyness and happiness for the new year to you all.

From the illustrious Vadim this morning, here we have a #Double-You-Vectors contest entry by ~asdf12324qwerty on DeviantArt. Mugi-chan from K-on!

Vadim likes using vectors for folder icons, but my current thing is using them with scenery pr0n to create desktop backgrounds.

I'd abstained from using the GUID partition tables (get it... tables?) on my ThinkPads after reading warnings on the Fedora mailing lists. Inadvertently I installed FreeBSD with GPT on my ThinkPad X40 this afternoon though, and it worked just fine!

The K-On! girls eating sushi © Kyoto Animation.

Fedora

From Pádraig Brady on the mailing lists in February:

In Fedora 16 we changed to using GPT as the default disklabel for new installs. In a few cases, mostly limited to Lenovo hardware, we found that some BIOS's would not boot from GPT. We blacklisted Lenovo, falling back to msdos labels in order to solve this.

Thanks to Matthew Garrett we found that switching on the boot flag of the GPT's protective MBR these BIOS's would then boot from GPT. Matthew wrote a patch for parted to allow controlling this flag using the disk_set pmbr_boot command in parted. This is in parted-3.0-7

I can't find them right now (of course) but I also recall the release notes or installation guide for Fedora 16 and 17 detailing the use of nogpt and how Lenovo machines were blacklisted for using GPT.

So I avoided it, and used extended partitions to overcome the 4 partition limitations of MBR that we all remember.

FreeBSD

With the release of the 9.0 series, FreeBSD defaults to GPT instead of MBR. While installing, I explicitely created an MBR table instead of using GPT in the initial disk step of bsdinstall. Curiously, doing this resulted in a string of those notorious "g_vfs_done() error=5" errors when I first booted. The same results occurred when I used gpart manually from the shell.

Just to see what would happen, I let bsdinstall create GPT partitions instead, and FreeBSD has since booted flawlessly. No joke!

Granted, this is with FreeBSD i386 on a 32bit Pentium M ThinkPad X40. My next experiment will be to use GPT with FreeBSD amd64 on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad X61s.

From AmiAmi.com, we have this Mitsumetronics K-On! Photo Frame Coin Bank! You can have any of the girls from HTT, but naturally you'd want to get this one ^^.

With her watching me save, I could imagine doing it more often! I could have phrased that better.

It's my anime waifu Mugi-chan's birthday! Yes I'm aware she's only into Yuri stuff, shaddup!

Bikinis aren't really my thing (this one by comparison made me HNNNNNNGGGG), but when I saw the rather fabulous Ikari Manatsu's illustration of Mugi doing the famous Star Trek Vulcan salute, I couldn't pass it up! Live long and prosper Mugi! It's the logical thing to do! :D

(Update: Michael P. emailed me saying the Zerochan links only work if you're logged in. Thanks for the tip!)

So last night we were Twittering my attempts to eat pizza with chopsticks. I also unabashedly invented the title of UTS Anime Club Moeblob Liaison Officer for myself. Somehow, these two conversations folded into one, and we decided if I were to have a badge it should be of Mugi-chan... eating with chopsticks.

Needless to say, our art director wasted no time sketching up a concept, after I'd already gone to sleep! That she could do that at an ungodly hour of the night and have it look like the character so much it's uncanny only confirms the fact the Anime club voted for the right person for art director. I'm just saying :)

Celebrating Empire Day in style here in the Schade family household, by posting a veritable litany of randomness, eating crumpets and drinking tea. At least half my genes are pleased with this arrangement, the others aren't so sure. Oh, I say, rah-ther.

Britanime

We start our cavalcade of British Empire blogging whatnot (a spot of tea?) with an image from Detective Conan, and from the K-On! movie where the girls found themselves eating cake in London. I can only imagine the latter, having never seen it.

First image submitted by 穂積 on Pixiv, the second by the fabulously smashing folks at Kyoto Animation who managed to distill moe and dispense it in lethal doses!

Cathay Pacific Sherlock

We continue by flying to Hong Kong, one of their former colonial possessions. Given I only just posted a story about aviation, it seemed fitting. Wait a minute, Singapore was a colonial posession too. Those Brits have been everywhere; and they weren't exactly original with their subordinate's flag designs either.

Anyway, we're getting distracted chaps. On the Australian Business Traveler site, what did the reviewer use to test the new inflight entertainment system of select Cathay Pacific aircraft? That's right, Sherlock!

Naturally, I rewatched an episode of the show again this evening. The first of season two, because it was rather cheeky. I still haven't got over the anger that CBS will be creating an American version, what an abject travesty against decency and good taste!

To help calm down from this, here's a photo of our favourite duo:

Little did they know when meeting for the first time... :'). Oh dear, I'm using emoticons and writing vague sentences with regards to this show just like fangirls. They're so dreamy... ^^

The Brittas Empire

Speaking of British television, one of my favourites from years past is The Brittas Empire. Along with Fawlty Towers, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Keeping Up Appearances, Red Dwarf, Monty Python and too many others to count, this was one of the British television shows growing up that I simply could not get enough of.

I forget which station I used to tune in with The Family™ to watch this each week in Singapore, but it was absolutely hilarious. The gist was an uptight manager of a recreation centre in suburban England that had to contend with incompetent and/or silly staff, government regulations and... customers! With comedic results ;).

On this Empire Day, I found myself learning something new about the show, from the @BrittasEmpire Twitter account:

You bastard! You'll never get away with this! (Brittas swears for first & only time) S1 Ep4.

It also took me this long to realise that I'm discussing the Brittas Empire on Empire Day. Who'd have thought.

Britanime part two, fine folks

I was going to round off this post with a mention of Hetalia, the anime series featuring moe anthropomorphisms of nation states with ridiculous results, but I figure this page unfairly slants towards depicting British gentleman.

So here is a picture of Lynette Bishop, the moe anthropomorphism of the British Spitfire from the 501st Joint Figher Wing of Strike Witches. You'd better believe it.

Don't worry, I didn't understand it either. A jolly Empire Day to you!

So my sister wants the latest Punk Goes Pop CD. I'm thinking of printing this picture on A3 and giving it to her for Christmas. Flawless plan.

In other news, too cute. I disagree with the naysayers that the K-On girls couldn't pull off punk, I think they did it pretty well ^_^.

On Twitter this afternoon I said I couldn't justify posting a moe picture here for Moe Day 2011 given I'd only just posted this picture of Mugi-Chan recently. @Sebasu_tan and @hanezawakirika would have none of that however, and told me to post another one anyway. Then I was sent the adorable picture you see above, and was encouraged to blog about it!

This could very well be the first entirely crowdsourced blog post in Rubénerd.com's 4054 post history. I need more of these ^_^.