Rubenerd

Paul Daley wrote a beautiful article for The Guardian yesterday on the feeling of lost time during Covid and lockdowns. The temptation is there to quote the whole thing, but I’ll restrain myself!

Something strange and discombobulating has happened to time during this latest lockdown. Like it’s become circular or somehow compressed. Years seem like months like weeks like days like hours like minutes.

Is it because our days are all the same now? Because the rigid routine of lockdown (wake, exercise, work, cook, read [..] sleep, wake, repeat) minimises the potential for surprise in all but our more vivid than ever inner lives? Which is, after all, the intended consequence of lockdown.

Lockdown days are the longest I’ve experienced, and the shortest in aggregate. Where have the weeks since June gone?

He then discusses feelings of nostalgia we’ve all being going down of late:

Is it any wonder the mind is taking these memorial trips into decades past when, we are all, having pared back so many extraneous “unnecessary” joys, in the words of Pink Floyd, “ticking away the moments that make up a dull day”?

Each post on retrocomputing here has been met with at least a dozen other meandering thoughts about childhood and my teenage years as well. They make me want to go home, eat at a kopitiam, and put on some Phua Chu Kang VCDs. Maybe we will, one day.

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27:47 – Why am I out here under a shelter while there’s a storm outside? Talking about the HoloCouncil, why am I out here, missing travel, it’s a bit windy out here, where I’d live if I had a spare billion dollars between the proverbial couch cushions, and why am I out here?

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released August 2021 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts; this one notwithstanding. Hosted graciously by the Internet Archive.

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Okay, back to these Hololive English Gen 2 debuts! I’m cheating a bit here, because I watched these last two with Clara earlier in the week. Next up was the HoloCouncil’s Warden of Time, Ouro Kronii.

There’s a bit of personal context I have to explain here; fortunately it’s the weekend now and I have all the time in the world. Can I already digress here and say that her gap moe and puns were the cherry on top of one of the best debut streams either of us had ever seen.

Clara and I were already Kroniis on account of her artist, as I’m sure many in the fandom were. WADARCO’s character designs for anime and games are the stuff of legend. I’ve written for years about my love for Umu!, and Bride Umu!, and all her other Fate art among much, much more. Few artists match the culture (cough!) and expressive detail with which she imbues her characters. It was such a treat seeing her art animated in live 2D in the hands of such a capable and brilliant new actor.

(Also, we’ve heard of mismatched stockings, but an asymmetrical skirt? With pinstripes!? Clara may have her work cut out for her when she updates Rubi this year).

The second bit of context concerns Kes, my favourite Star Trek Voyager character on account of… wait for it… her deep, calming voice. I used to joke that if I won the lottery, I’d hire her to read Lord of the Rings or War and Peace to me. It’s also one of the first things that first attracted me to Clara as well (naw).

In a similar vein, we had been told to anticipate Kronii’s voice acting skills, but I still don’t think any of us were prepared. She was a professional who set up this stoic, aloof demeanour only to let it crack and melt as she sparred with chat and discussed more of her background. That skill and talent paired with WADA’s art and her self-effacing helicopter humour lead her stream in directions none of us expected. I haven’t had stratospheric expectations exceeded that thoroughly since Clara and I first went to Japan.

I’m calling it, I think Kronii has the best stage presence of any vTuber I’ve ever watched, and this was on her debut! Her character claims to not be a happy person who aims to be one someday, but she’s already done that for her new fans. Mad respect.

(Here’s hoping one day she can do a Korean stream with Ina too, that’d be amazing. I’m already picturing them sharing a barbeque and talking about Korean culture in the West 🇰🇷).

Straighten up and fly right 🎺
Straighten up and stay right 🎺
Straighten up and fly right 🎺
Cool down, papa, don’t you blow your top.

Good point. What’s the use in divin’? What’s the use in jivin’?

🚀

Memory is a weird thing. Those of us who weren’t blessed with ECC DIMMs in our brains have to settle for scattered, incomplete, and poorly-recorded records of what happened in the past. These memories encompass the entire human experience, from what we ate for lunch yesterday to embarrassing moments in high school when you attempted to learn enough Korean to ask your crush out only to panic, inhale too much air, and hiccup instead.

It would come as no surprise that many of my formative memories revolve around gadgets, computers, and hi-fi gear. Some of these even involved using these devices as intended, and not warning tales that generally involved me pulling something apart Humpty Dumpty style (aka: couldn’t put it back together again). I’m floored that my parents were as accommodating as they were; I imagine it must have been a never-ending source of frustration to come home and find the cover for the VCR taken off, and the home computer hard drive formatted for the third time that month.

One such memory involved a Philips (or was it a Breville?) kettle my parents brought home when I was in primary school. In the late 1990s kettles were being introduced with circular heating docks that negated the need for an attached cable. The kettle would make electrical contact with a circular peg protruding from the dock (heavens) to boil water, then could be lifted off the pad and carried around wirelessly. Wireless in the sense that it physically had no wires; it’d be two decades before IoT schemes would exist to add insecure kitchen appliances to botnets.

This was an important development. Good electric kettles had featured detachable safety cables for decades, but they were still prone to being mishandled, resulting in scalding water being splashed onto undesirable surfaces. Kettles still terrify me despite my daily use of them, though at least I can take comfort from knowing I won’t be accidentally still tethered to a wall when I yank that handle (heavens).

The kettle came with a thick instruction book and pack of promotional material, both of which my parents stashed in various kitchen knick knack drawers for years. The cover said something along the lines of “the first device to use our new universal dock” and “we anticipate future devices to work with it”. Glossy photos depicted a kitchen counter with a kettle dock embedded in its surface.

The reason I remember this was due to my bewilderment at such a proposal. The dock was circular to match the shape of the kettle, and presumably so it didn’t have to feature a fixed orientation. What other kitchen devices could feasibly be operated from this? All I could think of were spice or coffee grinders, the latter of which you’d likely be using while you were boiling the kettle.

I can see the appeal of having a dock of some sort for lesser-used appliances like waffle irons, sandwich presses, and jaffle makers that usually reside in a cupboard and require you to unravel their cords and plug them in like a schmuck. But the shape of the dock didn’t seem ideal for these, and you’d still be limited to using one device at a time. I could also see the protruding dock connector getting gunked up with spilled pancake batter; an especially-tragic outcome for those with the aforementioned devices embedded into counters. It’d be a fun exercise to learn about the electrical conductivity of various breakfast foodstuffs though; I have been told I need to eat more iron.

But the biggest issue would be one we’re currently facing with phones and electric cars: you’d be stuck buying devices from one manufacturer, unless a universal standard were adopted. And what if the standard changed, and you were stuck with a deprecated device embedded in your counter, silently judging you while you boiled your water elsewhere? Like a schmuck.

It’s interesting that companies didn’t take this concept and run with it (that I know of). These docks still exist today, but are still only powering kettles. We’ve got induction and wireless charging now, maybe there are a family of kitchen appliances waiting to make my life easier with these. Hard pass if they want to join my home network though.

I saw this news fly by from the Wall Street Journal:

With offices closed for nearly two years, will anyone want to come back? Companies have repeatedly postponed their return-to-office dates, and some bosses fear it will get harder to draw workers back to their desks.

The Delta variant changed companies’ return-to-office timelines. It’s also making bosses worry that the longer people stay at home, the more challenging it will be to bring them back.

Bosses who worry about flexibility will lose their staff.

The cat is out of the bag; a large part of the population has worked remote just as effectively before; some even moreso. That was a lot of semicolons. Two of them.

👋

Clara and I are slowly catching up with latest generation of Hololive English debuts, which we’re watching entirely out of order. I say both of us, though of course she has seen them all already. Last night was for the HoloCouncil’s Speaker of Space, Tsukumo Sana.

Did you know that when you trip into a black hole you turn into spaghetti? EVERYTHING WAS A MISTAKE!

I’d been spoiled a bit by being on social media for a few days before watching this stream, but seeing that meat pie floating above the celestial sky to the sound of her broad Australian accent, punctuated by that triumphant m8 was nothing short of glorious! Not to be one of those people, but I could even hazard a guess to her background and where specifically in Australia she’s from, based on having spent so much of my time living back here in that community… but let’s leave it at that. Shifty eyes.

It’s hard to explain to non-Aussies and Kiwis, but her deadpan joke delivery, timing, and her expectant expressions were absolutely spot on. I was worried that someone from our part of the world would feel compelled by Cover or her audience to conform to how other streamers speak, but I’m so happy she was able to be herself.

Multi-diciplined creative people are among the worst human beings in the universe, but as the literal embodiment of the aforementioned time and space plane her graphics, production values, and introductiory video were such a joy. Her NASA SANA logo was my favourite touch.

Having had some time to digest (the meat pie) afterwards, I think I’ve finally figured out who and what her art reminds me of. Her eyes, facial expressions, and all the space-themed graphics harken back a bit to those late 1990s to early 2000s sci-fi series (think Diebuster). The other girls in the HoloCouncil are thorughly modern, but Sana has this retro vibe going that I love.

Sana was bubbly, entertaining, and just the right amount of silly we need during These Times.

🐒

Clara and I are slowly catching up with latest generation of Hololive English debuts, which we’re watching entirely out of order. I say both of us, though of course she has seen them all already. Last night was for the HoloCouncil’s Guardian of Civilisation, Nanashi Mumei.

Let me be clear, I do not take the responsibility of imparting this reaction lightly. FGSDFGJWERFFVS FVASDJ GFKGRT REHS ADFAFHNNGGG! Her self-deprecating humour, tone of voice, and mannerisms pushed all our buttons and then some. Not that I’m predictable about my favourite characters or anything.

Her voice actor was clearly nervous at the start, but by the end of the stream she’d hit her stride and managed to impart some of those subtle digs against her Hololive senpais. The setup and her inquisitive voice made it that much funnier. I’d give more examples if either of us had a better memory (where am I, have I mentioned memory yet)?

I haven’t watched the rest of the other debuts yet, but I can already tell Mumei has our favourite character design as well. My site mascot Rubi appreciated the callout and respect for mismatched stockings, but I’d say her cape is my favourite feature. It has hieroglyphics!

At the risk of reading too much into her lore here, I appreciated a more optimistic view of humanity as well, especially at a time like this. I maintain that the timing of Hololive during Covid was almost too good. They’re all been such an uplifting and positive force in a world needing both right now, and I can already tell Mumei will be a great addition.

I’m not at all a Hololive completionist on account of not playing many games, so I’m also keen to see some of the history streams she’s planning. Minecraft aside, most of my favourite streams have been ones where the characters discuss ideas, learn a new skill, and make music. Plenty of game streams are entertaining and fun, but there’s still so much untapped potential in this format.

And finally, I could also see her mascot Friend chilling with Ina’s Tako. I think the world would succumb to a comfiness vortex if they did a collaboration stream in the future. But Inaff of that.