Data drive on the computer crashed this afternoon. Completely failed. The drive will spin up but will not initialize. I didn't lose too much all things considered; all major downloads since September and a set of documents that were updated in October. I lost almost all of my video archive; but that was mostly accrued by thinking of something I wanted to watch and going out and finding it.

So, my computer is going to be down quite a bit for a week or two. Apologies.

UPDATE: Two Silverstone air intake fans on the bottom of the case were out. It doesn't surprise me; I've never had good luck with Silverstone. However, they came pre-installed. I replaced them with a single, smaller Antec.

It appears that the SATA bus I was using burned out or something. Thankfully, my system drive still works plugged into another SATA bus. I replaced the 3TB Seagate drive I used for storage with a new external 3TB drive. It'll be slower, but for most things it won't make a difference.

Even without my video archive, the restoration process will take several hours. Plus, because one of the things I tried was doing a Windows Repair/Recovery, Windows 8 now says I'm using a different computer. So I have to re-activate.

UPDATE 2: I'm back to, not 100%, as I lost quite a bit of mostly meaningless stuff that I had decided over a year ago to stop backing up; but back running with the configuration that I'll be rolling forward with. This should allow me to do work unhindered; which is good because I still have one W2 to prepare.

This is a problem I have with a lot of anime...
(note: not completely safe for work, but not horrible. specified start and stop times.)

So the long-awaited Kantai Collection anime has made it through three episodes now, and opinion is...mixed (LINK CONTAINS SPOILERS). Of course, KanColle is such a huge property, and expectations were so high, that I expected some level of disappointment when the series debuted. For the record, I have been...underwhelmed...and in ways I did not expect. I've been talking with friend Wonderduck about the series, as he seems to be enjoying the show so far. However, I think he went into the series with more realistic expectations; and, considering his vast knowledge of World War II naval and air battles in the Pacific he appears to get a lot more out of the fanservice details than I think a lot of other people probably are. In the interest of sharing my thoughts on what the series has done, I'm going to post some of our conversation. I'll add context where necessary, and Wonderduck will have a shot at reviewing and editing this as well, to make sure we're getting our points across clearly (that's mainly for me). Wonderduck has a short write-up, with screenshots of Episode One, Two and Three.

It is important to note a couple of good things. The art design and execution are both spectacular.

Fubuki

Fubuki is the main character, but thanks to the source property being a card battle game, the viewer actually splits their point of view between Fubuki and an anonymous, 1st-person "Admiral". However, 99.9% of the show is depicted from Fubuki's viewpoint, so; honestly, I kind of wish they had just left "The Admiral" out. It's a pointless fan-service prop that accomplishes nothing.

However, another pointless fan-service prop is the amount of detail put into the transformation sequence in the first episode. Granted, we probably won't see this process again in the series, unless they just reuse the same footage.

Fubuki starting the transformation sequence, wherein hardware based on the actual ships the fleet girls are named after is strapped on via backpacks, pads, gloves and garters.

Continued Within...

UPDATE: Redid formatting because it was ugly.

I started playing World of Warcraft right after Cataclysm came out. Literally, Cataclysm was released in December, 2010 and I started playing in January 2011. So, four years later, I just got my first character to Level 85, which was the level cap introduced with Cataclysm. The day I started playing that January, a month after Cata had come out, I saw Level 85 characters in game world. For the record, I have a character that reached level 70 (or maybe 75) much earlier (I don't remember when), but as that was my first high-level character and I had no idea what I was doing, I wound up transferring that character to a new server and account, shifting all gold and possessions to a different character, and then deleting and recreating the character as a different class.

On one hand, I know Blizzard has simplified the game quite a bit, and a lot of it is not only explicitly easier than it used to be, but overall easier because leveling is so much faster. However, I have, on occasion, been able to revisit a starting area (as previously documented, I've been through the starting areas every which way possible) and watched new players. Some, of course, are obviously someone rolling an alt (they move constantly, always collect every quest in an area and don't read anything) but a few are legitimate, new players...and I see them struggling to kill these level one monsters. It seems ridiculous to me, but thankfully I remember how frustrating the game was at first. Plus, I'm trying for the fourth time to level a fire mage, and the game is still like that; for me, playing a mage. I can't figure it out.

Post by Ben Menix.

Seven years after StrikerS ended, the Nanoha sequel Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid is finally getting its own anime adaptation. ViVid, centered around Nanoha's (and Fate's?) adopted ancient god wizard little girl Vivio, began as a manga in 2009 and is still running. I haven't kept up with the manga, as I have always been one of the weird ones who thought Nanoha and Nanoha A's built up to StrikerS; which, despite its flaws, was the best of the bunch. ViVid wasn't a "return to type", either: the series went in mostly different directions from StrikerS and the earlier shows. Plus, the series has never, as far as I know, been officially adapted to English, and the early scanlations weren't very good. I'm sure that part has been fixed, at least. Another problem with the manga was that the art style, which was taken directly from the anime, relies heavily on color differentiation to easily spot different characters. In a black and white manga, that doesn't work very well.

Anyway, and still: following KanColle, which is my one show of the season (no one ever guessed which show I followed last year. No, I didn't ask. I don't think I ever dropped hints either. So I guess that's a silly thing to say.) I'll be looking forward to ViVid.

Our house is completely without power, and thus without water, due to the recent ice storm. We're not expected to have power back until later in the week, so my internet access will be irregular as we move between hotel and relatives and trying to keep the homestead ready for recovery. So, apologies if I'm not around much for a few days.

UPDATE: Yesterday we got power back, and this evening we got water back on. Still have some electrical repairs to get done next week, and the house is filthy. But, we're back home.

I've had a number of minor things go wrong with the blog lately, so I'm working on doing a reinstall of the Serendipity blogging software. This may actually lead to further problems, as my site host insists that some configuration files contain viruses in the default install. Or at least they did for about a week. If the blog goes away for a while, that's why.

Hibike! Euphonium is apparently a tribute to under-appreciated musical instruments. As a euphoniumist from Junior High until I dropped out of music entirely in college, this is a must-watch for me.