Hetare King

Most countries don’t do the absurd funding the local public school using the district’s property taxes thing, but they still have property taxes.

I think there’s a 50% chance we went to the same theater, because I also went to see The Colors Within yesterday. I agree, great film. It’s interesting to me how Japanese entertainment tends to do a better job at telling a story where Christianity plays a role without being utterly obnoxious about it. Or maybe I’m just less suspicious about a Japanese creator’s intentions when it comes to this. Anyway, I did notice a slight plot hole, maybe?

But well, it’s not that big of an issue.

I already went to see Chainsaw Man a couple of weeks ago, which was great fun. I did like the first season quite a lot, but I enjoyed this different approach as well. Still a weird experience to go to the mainstream cinema and see an anime film in a packed house, though. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

I do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between something being attributed to a real person and a fictional character being loosely based on real people, though. Like, I think we can be pretty confident that the events in the Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t really happen (at least not literally), but if Gilgamesh was, like is generally accepted, a real person, the Gilgamesh in the Epic is most likely supposed to be that guy. Whereas Robin Hood was probably never meant to be any particular person.

That said, do we actually know whether all the stories in the Bible about Jesus were originally about the same individual? The new testament was written decades and centuries after the death of historical Jesus, by people who didn’t even live in the region, right? So all the stories the authors heard would have come from traders and missionaries of Christian cults with vocal traditions. That alone is very long game of telephone, but I imagine every town at the time would have at least one person claiming to be messiah, and if one of them became a big enough deal that rumours around him spread beyond town, there would also be bunch of copycats. So a lot of room for mix-ups.

“I am Jesus, your king!” “I heard Jesus was buried like three days ago!” “I uh- I have come back from the dead!” And then he skipped town ASAP.

I think I’ve solved the main conundrum of this show. Hinako wants Shiori to eat her, but Shiori first wants Hinako to want to live, so that she’s more delicious. But if that happens, Hinako won’t want to be eaten anymore. Also, she’s worried about leaving Miko behind without a friend. Then the solution is simple: all Hinako has to do once she wants to live again is eat Shiori so that she becomes immortal (because of eating mermaid flesh). After that, she’s pretty much a youkai herself, so Miko probably won’t want to eat her anymore (at least not in that way).

MikoHina lives on forever, Shiori has become a beautiful martyr for the cause, it all works out!

If you go to the official Japanese website of a show and look up where you can watch it, almost every time you’re presented with a list of close to two dozen streaming services. The exception is when one particular service (always an American one like Netflix or Amazon Prime) has exclusivity rights to it, but they’re the minority.

Exclusivity deals aside, this seems to me like a much better setup, at least from a consumer perspective. Shows are for the most part not dotted across different services, but there’s no market consolidation. And even if something isn’t on the service you’re subscribed to, it will probably be available on a service where you can just rent an individual show or episode instead of having yet another subscription. And I imagine that if they’re not competing on hostage-taking, that would mean they’re competing more on price and quality of service instead.

Studios don’t have that power, they don’t usually own the distribution rights of the shows they animated.

Most animation studios do contract work; they get hired by a production company to do a job, and get paid for it irrespective of whether the product does well on the market. The problems here are more structural, which are actually explained in the article.

The standard type aliases like uint64_t weren’t in the C standard library until C99 and in C++ until C++11, so there are plenty of older code bases that would have had to define their own.

The use of #define to make type aliases never made sense to me. The earliest versions of C didn’t have typedef, I guess, but that’s like, the 1970s. Anyway, you wouldn’t do it that way in modern C/C++.

If you’re directly interacting with any sort of binary protocol, i.e. file formats, network protocols etc., you definitely want your variable types to be unambiguous. For future-proofing, yes, but also because because I don’t want to go confirm whether I remember correctly that long is the same size as int.

There’s also clarity of meaning; unsigned long long is a noisy monstrosity, uint64_t conveys what it is much more cleanly. char is great if it’s representing text characters, but if you have a byte array of binary data, using a type alias helps convey that.

And then there are type aliases that are useful because they have different sizes on different platforms like size_t.

I’d say that generally speaking, if it’s not an int or a char, that probably means the exact size of the type is important, in which case it makes sense to convey that using a type alias. It conveys your intentions more clearly and tersely (in a good way), it makes your code more robust when compiled for different platforms, and it’s not actually more work; that extra #include <cstdint> you may need to add pays for itself pretty quickly.

I’m not an expert on making browser extensions, but I doubt they’d get direct access to the audio buffer just before it gets sent to the the OS. It should be possible to do this on the OS-level though, like with (on Linux) a PulseAudio module or something.

Interesting how they used the lighthearted side-story to prevent complete tonal whiplash with the practically denpa song ED.
Also, Fairouz Ai can really draw, wow.

I’m reminded of laundry detergent for some reason.

In Japanese: 春夏冬
It means spring (haru), summer (natsu), winter (fuyu). What’s missing? Autumn. In other words, autumn (aki) is nonexistent (nai), so this is pronounced akinai, which means “not getting tired/bored of something”.

I imagine it’s also because the werewolves in this version of the game appear to be demons (which actually makes a lot of sense), so it also depicts the two sides in the game.

Steins;Gate gets quite dark and serious, but it starts out pretty goofy, so if you’re trying to avoid comedy it would leave a pretty bad first impression. I don’t think I would recommend pushing yourself through the earlier parts to get to the later parts either, because you do need a certain attachment to the characters to appreciate the latter.

Vinland Saga, from what you’ve written, seems more up your alley. In a similar vein (bloody serious historical fiction) I also recommend Orb.

Other than that, Pluto and Monster, both thrillers based on manga by Urasawa Naoki, are very straight-laced.

It’s weird, it feels kind of like watching a Japanese dub of an English-language show, which I haven’t felt even with other adaptations of works originally in English. I guess it’s because it also uses the visual language of the comic? Pretty luxurious cast, though.

Anyway, the writing isn’t very good. A bunch of things just don’t seem to make any sense; the dumb incident at the office it sends half the episode or so on, the whole deal with the rating of the protagonist’s game by the streamer. Still not sure what the show is about, either, but I don’t think I have the motivation to find out.

I will hate the game and the player, thank you very much. Even under this system, other choices could have been made that are neither illegal or financially nonviable, so Monsanto is very much responsible for the choices they did make. They’re not victims of the systems, they’re gleefully pursuing everything the system lets them get away with.

Of course, if you want things to change, it is indeed changes to law and government incentives that need to be pursued. But in order for that to happen, you need enough people to get upset about the current state of things, and for that you need concrete examples. And it doesn’t get more concrete than this.