Monthly Archives: September 2006

A Quiet Point

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So I was chilling over at the Megatokyo forums, when I noticed an odd looking .sig file. Usually, they’re quite colorful and have fantasy or anime themes. Sometimes they have bad-ass guys, sometimes they have semi-naked women. Heck, if you know what I mean when I say sig file, you’ve probably seen plenty of variants yourself. But this one was rather simple; just some line drawings.

Given that the forum was for an anime-style webcomic, the picture was entirely unexpected, and it took me a minute to get it.

sig file

Most game/comic/lesiure etc. non-political forums don’t like it when you start talking real-world politics. This guy figured out how to silently make his point, and I doubt most folks of the opposite persuasion (as in “Paliapologists”) even notice. Sneaky.

Hiatus Update

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Just keeping everyone posted on the state of affairs. I did not get as much done yet as I’d hoped, largely because of Magic the Gathering Addiction. This was the weekend of the Time Spiral Pre-release, so I spent Saturday and Sunday (after doing a few things around the house) shopping and playing. I only bought a few packs of cards because I’m pretty tight right now (more about that later). Most of the money went for entry fees into two tourneys. I was late both days and that’s all I could get into. I went 2-2-drop in the sixth flight (sealed deck) on the first day, and then eliminated in the first round of a booster draft on the second day. (For the uninitiated, the contest was to open packs of random cards and assemble winning decks from them.) This performanceis about what I expected–maybe better, since I’m just getting back in after being mostly out since just after Fallen Empires (about 6 years?).

Last weekend was “work on the car weekend� during which I took care of some deferred maintenance, so I haven’t made much progress in splitting the blogs yet. Originally, I planned to just put the anime blog in a subdomain named Omoikane, after the ship on Nadescio. Then, while debating blog names with Steven Den Beste (no, I didn’t take any of his oddball suggestions on Chizumatic!) and getting some help in Japanese, one name occurred to me that I was sure had to be taken. I checked just to be certain—thinking I’d discover a new anime blog, and maybe it would have some cheesecake.

Boy, was I wrong – to my surprise, no one had registered “bridgebunnies.com.â€? But….but! I know I saw it somewhere! What an oversight! Impossible! Sacré bleu! (Ugh, time to go wash my mouth out, I spoke French.) Anyway, I immediately fixed that terrible, terrible error. The internet must have bridge bunnies! While I was at it, I also grabbed “bridgebunnies.netâ€? and “bridgebunnies.info,â€? for good measure, so copycats are going to have to settle for something else; “.tv” would be appropriate. (I finally remembered where I saw it: “Bridge Bunnies on My Mindâ€? is one of the rotating titles on Jason Miao’s site.)

This left me in a quandary, because I kind of liked one of the titles I’d worked out with the invaluable assistance of Steven DenBeste and his friend HC. Before I go any further, I want to extend warm thanks to both of them for their help with the Japanese language and blog name suggestions. Thanks a bunch guys!

I was looking for something just a bit silly and over the top involving anime genres, but Magical Battle-Android Maid Girls just didn’t flow too well in English or Japanese: “Mahou Sentou you Andoroido Meido Shoujoâ€? is a bit long and unwieldy. Trying to tack Meganekko onto that somewhere was just overkill. So at Steven’s suggestion, what I settled on is Mahou Medio Meganekko (Magical Maid ‘Glasses-Girl’) which will be appearing soon at bridgebunnies.com, .net, and info. I think Omoikane will survive as a subdirectory for screencaps or something. It’s going to be a bit of a complicated setup, because I’m going to try to strip all the anime posts from Houblog and move them over there. Fixing the screencap URL’s is going to be stone cold beyotch. I don’t see any way to easily do it (writing a script is beyond my pitiful PHP skills), and anyway, the database structure will be different, as I plan to start the new blog with WP 2.0.4. Unfortunately, this will probably cause me to lose most of the comments as well, since they’ll be as difficult to move as the posts. Still, it will finally split the politics from the anime/gaming/etc. It’s always been a touch bizarre as match-ups go–sort of like Fred Astaire and Anna Nicole Smith. It boggles the mind.

You know, I wonder…. Since I’m a government employee, can I get bridgebunnies.gov? I could claim to be the Emperor in an alternate dimension—how’s ICANN going to disprove it?

It could work….

UPDATE: Addon-domains don’t work like I thought they did. I thought it would appear to anyone from outside the site as a completely separate site; it would just use the same hosting account and resources as Houblog. Instead, it takes anyone typing in www.bridgebunnies.com and points them to the subdirectory and subdomain “bridgebunnies”; thus the viewer would see bridgebunnies.houblog.com. So I deleted it while I try to decide whether I’m going to spring for another account or not. Originally, that was my plan when I was going to go with omoikane.houblog.com, and I don’t suppose there’s any difference between that and bridgebunnies.houblog.com. And it would be much simpler if I didn’t have to move all the pictures from one site to another. But the reason I went with the domain name (outside of the fact that such a cool one was still available) was that Houblog and anime really don’t go together, and I wanted to separate the names, not just the blogs.

Sigh. Time to go look at hosting plans. Dammit, this hobby is starting to cost money. Correction: this hobby is also starting to cost money.

UPDATE 2:Ok, I am now totally confused. I purchased a new hosting plan to set up a second site, but when I log into the cpanel on it, the URL says bridgebunnies, but the cpanel says I’m in Houblog! All the databases, disk usage, stats, etc are from it. Jeez, that’s almost what I wanted in the first place…


UPDATE 3:Whatever the problem was, it’s fixed now. They’re seperated. Might have been an issue with my browser, or it might have been that they didn’t finish the setup until the invoice payment cleared. Weird. Edit: only now the placekeeper page has disappeared, and Fantastico won’t run; cpanel claims it can’t find it. And the move to a PHP 5+ server is still pending, but I can live with that; I don’t expect it to happen until tomorrow or later. I did want to get WP set up tonight though….


UPDATE 4: And they’ve got all three issues fixed by 11 am, when I only notified them of the last two just before 9 am. Hosting Matters just has great service, what can I say?

Is Someone Trying To Be Funny?

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Spotted on the City of Houston’s Planning and Development Department intranet:

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then–we elected them.
— Lily Tomlin

Of all the places for that to appear, about the only funnier one could have been the website for the Housing and Community Development Department. I’d say the Mayor Pro Tem’s, but there isn’t one.

HOPE for Pizza?

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HOPE, the combined organization formed by the SEIU and AFSCME Now unions has had so little luck getting people to sign up (I’ve mentioned in comments over at bH that the rep got no respect here) that they came by this week to offer pizza just to listen to their pitch. Employees were encouraged to sign statements supporting the union’s attempt to bargain collectively for employees–without joining up. Methinks they’re not getting much support; perhaps petition fatigue has set in?

Still on hiatus (but this was fun)!

Don’t Chase, Don’t Catch

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Chief Hurtt’s no-chase policy just keeps looking worse and worse… A new user registered over at bH to bring us the following tidbits:

From the Chronicle, about Rusty Hardin’s holdup:

Shortly after the incident, Bellaire police attempted to pull over three men in a green vehicle with a license plate light that wasn’t working, but the men sped away.

West University police spotted the same car later, and six Bellaire and West University police officers stopped it.

The men were ordered out of the car one by one. Hardin’s property and a gun were found inside the vehicle. All three men were arrested; it was a little over an hour after the robbery, police said.

From KTRK, Channel 13:

Prosecutors told a judge they performed ballistic tests on bullets in a gun taken from Jeffrey Mitchell after he was charged with robbing Rusty Hardin. Police say the bullets match those that killed 15-year-old Andrea Mayberry in June. Investigators believe Mitchell shot and killed Mayberry after the teen challenged him to a fight in west Houston.

A simple traffic stop, and an armed robbery plus a killing are solved. There’s a simple principle at work here: someone who is so dismissive of the law as to commit felonies, to rob and kill people, is hardly going to show more respect to even less imporant laws, like those governing traffic and their vehicle. Thus, the routine traffic stop is a valid and useful criminal-catching tactic. And if someone runs from a simple traffic stop, the odds are they have a bigger reason than not wanting a simple ticket.

In the end, there is a very small chance in every chase that something bad may happen. There is a very large certainty that letting criminals run away from the law will allow many more bad things to happen.

Get the picture, Hurtt? If you don’t, go back to Phoenix.

(And I’m still on hiatus, dammit!)

Ok, Now I’m Worried

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Stealing an electronic election just moved one step closer to reality with this proof of concept from Princeton. Aziz says “my blog has better security!”

I had quite the argument with Satyr over whether paper tickets were a good idea on bH, but now I think he may have been right. Of course, what’s to say that the program couldn’t fiddle with the printouts too?

h/t to Instapundit.

(Still on hiatus, but this was important.)

On Hiatus for a Month?

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Well, if you’ve been asking yourself, “What’s with all the animé? Where did the politics go on Houblog?” you seriously need to stop asking yourself questions that should have been addressed to me. I had started a long drawn-out explanation-by-way-of-apology, but frankly, who wants to read all that crap?

Here’s the short version: I’m stressing out due to real-life issues. Work, home, illness, etc. Serious posting takes a serious mindset, and the more stressed I have gotten, the more I’ve run away from being serious. Animé has been my big escape, to the point that it’s started dominating Houblog, which was never my intent. And in the last week or two, the stress has doubled and then some; to the point that I’ve been nearly incapacitated.

The only thing I can do is scale back my optional committments, and pretty much, that means blogging. I’ve already let the crew over at blogHOUSTON know that I’m taking some time off from posting there, and now I’m filling in my readers (both of those remaining!) that I’m doing the same here. About a month, which is what I think should be necessary for the non-optional things to settle down. I hope, anyway.

I’m not abandoning Houblog, or blogging in general. While I won’t be posting, I’m still going to be commenting over at bH, and on a few animé sites as well. I’m also going to be working behind the scenes here to do something I’ve been mulling over for some time: I’m going to split Houblog in two. Animé and politics just don’t mix that well, and I’m going to move the first to a new site, which I plan to be a subdomain of Houblog, just for the sake of simplicity (and cost, since I’ve yet to make a dime off any blegging here.) That way, when I take off on a run of posts about either local politics (and there’s so much going on there!) or animé, the other audience needn’t groan and wonder why they clicked on my link today.

So, although I might get bored and post a comment here, in all likelihood, you won’t see regular posting from me until sometime in October. Everyone take care, and keep the fires burning ’til I get back!

New Animé Terms and Concepts?

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Steven DenBeste discusses the arms race. The animé arms race that is, as he writes on the concept of simple plot or setting devices taken to their extreme. In honor of Gillette and Shick, he christens it “the five-bladed razor,” and then goes on to list what he feels are the “winners” (or perhaps, “worst offenders” would be a better term) in each of several catagories: Panty Shots, Harem, Maid, Combat Android Girls, catgirls, Girls With Guns, and so on. However he missed a category, for which he’s hardly at fault; I never realized it existed–and it may not have, prior to the series in which I found it.

I don’t watch a lot of robot shows, (Dual being only the 2nd one I’ve ever purchased, unless you count Nadesico), but the establisher and therefore hands-down winner in the category of Robot Fanservice has got to be Godannar. I mean, really, where else would you see something like this?

“Live, tonight, from Tokyo Bay, Robot Mud Wrestling!”

“Your diodes turn me on, baby!”

A “camel toe” on a giant robot? (These things are about 25 meters tall.) You know, after some thought, maybe it should be a five-bladed razor just for “Most Extreme and Ridiculous Fanservice.” It doesn’t even need a new category…

Edit 9/8: Well, I’m watching Dual, and the robots in it are also female in form and have high heels. However, none of them have obvious panties or tube tops. And they aren’t as…. uh, well-endowed.

I Was Right

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Excel Saga is MUCH funnier when you’re drunk in a state of legal intoxication. And in English. ADV had a little fun with the translation. Nah, they had a lot of fun. My chest hurts from laughing.

“I mean I’m not bitter, but GOD DAMN!”

Update: “I’m drinker than y0u thunk I am.”

“If you keep punching holes in the definition of death…”

Just A Few Short Notes

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Firstly, I rode the DART today for a few hours and will be posting articles comparing it to Houston’s MetroRail next week. Houston loses.

Secondly, I brought plenty of anime with me, and Dr.Heinous and I stayed up to watch Divergence Eve last night. It was supposed to be “just one disk” before we sacked out, but of course he got hooked by it, and “just one” became “just one more” which became “ok, let’s finish it tonight, I’ve got to know the answers….” (The heinous doctor pronounced it a damn good show, but the breasts were really distracting and unnecessary.)

Finally, watching Divergence Eve until 3:30 a.m. is the only way I know to make eating lunch at Hooters the next morning a disappointment.
(Edit: that’s definately a drawback to watching DE!)

Good thing I didn’t hold my breath

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Ok, now this is faintly ridiculous. (Actually, I don’t think the ridiculousness is faint at all.)

HOUSTON, TX, US
— 09/01/2006 12:13 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
— 09/01/2006 6:06 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

And they’re still talking about delivery on TUESDAY. That’s part or all of four days it will spend in Houston. I know it’s a holiday, but this still feels stupid. It wouldn’t get the box into my hands any faster, as I’m in Dallas. But still…..