I wanted to do a writeup on the mangas I’ve been reading. Since I’ve been spending most of my time in the Mojave desert (what I call the shit-ass desert), I’ve had spare time to read these. As much as I’ve been willing to carry in my backpack anyway, but I’ve got good at traveling light.

I’ve been reading No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! (私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い! ‘Watamote’) since the English release started in 2013 and it’s been as entertaining as ever. Whether you consider that a good or bad thing, but it’s consistent. Funny but tough to read at times since the authors are so good at getting that cringy feeling. My only hope is that they come to a satisfying conclusion, better than petering out or choosing some cop-out ending.

I’ve been keeping up with Please Tell Me! Galko-chan (おしえて! ギャル子ちゃん ‘Oshiete! Galko-chan’) and it’s great. Genuine, funny and entertaining, my only concern is that the covers are way too sexual so someone looking at it might get the wrong idea (look at this).

I picked up Nichijou (日常） for reasons I can’t remember. It took me a bit to get into its absurdist sense of humor but it’s pretty funny once you get past the expectation that it’s supposed to make sense. It’s something fun to read at the airport.

I made it through 3 volumes of Haganai: I don’t have many friends (僕は友達が少ない ‘Haganai’). It was OK but I couldn’t really get into it. Maybe once I’m done reading what I am now I’ll pick up the next volume.

Kokoro Connect (ココロコネクト) I read the first volume of but couldn’t get into it either.

I picked up the first volume of Your Name (君の名は ‘Kimi no Na wa’) but I haven’t read it yet since I think I should watch the movie first. I’ve heard it’s really good so I’m looking forward to it. I’ve really liked Shinkai Makoto’s previous films. ‘Looking forward to it’ but the only reason I haven’t seen it is due to my laziness lol.

I read the manga version of 5 Centimeters Per Second (秒速5センチメートル ‘Byousoku 5 Centimeter’) . It’s quite a bit longer than the anime and expands the story a couple of chapters. Maybe it’s because I’m in a different place in my life now, or maybe because the manga expanded a lot on the anime, but it hit me a lot harder emotionally. I’d really recommend it. Watch the anime first for the beautiful visuals, but read the manga for the story. The final chapter really made it, a much more positive ending, or at least more ambiguous and not as negative.

On the recommendation of PaperChazz I’ve been reading Mysterious Girlfriend X (謎の彼女Ｘ ‘Nazo no Kanojo X’). I’d agree with him that it’s a really great romance manga. If you just read the synopsis of the story it might seem like this weird drool-centric story, but it’s really great. I’m on volume 4 right now. If it seems interesting to you go check it out.

That’s all I can think of for now.

I have a new domain name: chihaya.moe. Something coming there soon.

I’ve been down in the Mojave desert most of the time.

This sucks.

Follow my twitter for more frequent updates @crazyfarmsexy.

I have moved my server over to a Linux box (running Debian). The most important thing is that this means NO MORE CRASHERINO. Server 2003 is getting a little old anyway.

This site hit one hundred thousand hits a while ago, so that’s cool. It’s almost 10 years old too. Thanks to everyone who has visited my site, I think there might actually be one or two human beings.

I’ve been meaning to write a news post on what’s going on over the last half a year, but I haven’t found the time or motivation to do so. I’ve been trying to keep myself as busy as possible so I don’t have time to think or work on this site. There’s a lot of things I’d like to write.

I upgraded my computer, GeForce 1080 FTW and a new monitor, I should do the CPU soon.

I bought and beat The Witness, it was a pretty decent puzzle game. It also head beautiful visuals.

I watched Amagami SS (アマガミSS) and SS+, it was good. I also watched Oshiete! Galko-chan (おしえて! ギャル子ちゃん) and I’m reading the translated manga.

Work has been busy and it sucks anyway, I hate waking up so early in the morning. At least I’ve got all this money, and nothing to spend it on.

If you’re more interested in frequent updates (you’re not) you can check out my Twitter and Twitch, links are on the left.

So for the last year or two I’ve been reading a manga called Inside Mari (ぼくは麻理のなか ‘Boku wa Mari no Naka’). It was really good and I’d recommend it, but the ending wasn’t so good. It ended just a few weeks ago and I feel kind of disappointed. It’s a gender bender but also some sort of drama/mystery, and it kept pulling the cocktease chapter after chapter and after so long of wondering what the mystery is it just pulls a ‘it was all in ure head :^)’. So I dunno, it could have a better ending I guess. Too bad they didn’t make a physical English version, I’d totally buy it.

Also I made a small update to the reverse image searcher to fix a small issue with ExHentai.

If you watch my stream, I recently played though the campaigns of Halo and Halo 2, on the original Xbox. This started because my computer was doing it’s CS:GO crashing issue (which I solved with a 50% GPU underclock), but once I started I felt like I should keep going. Playing them now, over a decade after they came out, and casually, feels like it gave me a more objective look at how good they are, without any nostalgia effects.

I think that Halo probably edged out Halo 2, which was the opposite of my previous opinion. They were both good, and suffered from the same flaws, but I think the first one was a little better. It’s hard to place my finger on it, but it had a better ‘feel’ to it, like it wasn’t quite so serious, and focused more on good game play and experiences than a good story. One think I noticed in both of them (but maybe more in Halo) was that the level design was very repetitive. so many levels were repeats of earlier ones, or ‘do the level then go backwards through the whole thing’. It wasn’t too bad, but it feels like they did it just to stretch the game out longer. Even on a smaller scale, especially in Halo, the same encounter in the same type of room, over and over again.

Still, there were a few levels that hit it out of the park. ‘Sacred Icon’, in Halo 2, really had amazing level design. So many of the other levels felt bland and empty (probably due to hardware limitations), but this level looked amazing. Maybe it was just because the lack of open areas meant they could pack a lot of detail into the level geometry, but it really came close to the level of the concept art and the design and feel of the level really tickled my pickle.

‘Truth and Reconciliation’ was another great level (from Halo). But, this might be my bias speaking since this was the first level I ever played. The first time I played Halo, or any Xbox game for that matter, I played on this level, at a friend’s house maybe 2003-ish. I remember being blown away by the graphics, especially the flashlights. It also didn’t suffer from the repetitiveness that I mentioned. I might also be biased because I’ve read the books (and know the backstory), and because Halo was ‘the original’.

Apart from that, I’ve been streaming some other games (mostly CS:GO). 4th of July celebrations went well, similar to last year. Work has also been keeping me busy (unfortunately). I’ve got money now from that but I can’t bring myself to spend it on anything.

Apart from those, I ain’t been doing nothing interesting.

I wanted to write a little blog post but I haven’t because there’s not much to write about, but I should try anyway. Work has been keeping me busy I guess. It’s not particularly fun or interesting, but not the worst job either, so whatever. And it’s a temp job, so only for a few more months anyway. I’ve also been streaming a bunch, mostly CS:GO, the link to my Twitch channel is on the left. I also tweet occasionally, so check that out too.

I’ve been slowly working on recoding the site, but it’s been slow going. There wouldn’t be much of a difference anyway (to you), and the old code still works fine.

It was my birthday last weekend. I didn’t do anything to celebrate, played some games and streamed I think. The only gift I got was a third copy of Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015 (because I had 2 copies in my inventory already so I must like it) and Nekopara Vol. 1 (because it was in my wishlist) from my brother.

I have a challenge out there, to anyone who reads this. I’m trying to stream audio from my network, over the internet to somewhere else (behind a NAT) using ffmpeg. What I’d like to do is have ffmpeg act like a listen server, wait for the incoming connection from the remote host, then push the stream to it. I’ve messed around with all the -listen options but none of them seem to work like I want (doesn’t wait and errors immediately, requires the remote host address beforehand, etc). I could use ffserver but I was under the impression it’s not really under development or supported anymore, and in any case I don’t know how to use it. VLC is capable of doing what I want, even really old versions, but it doesn’t have the flexibility ffmpeg does. The only way I’ve found to pull this off is to use ffmpeg to push to my RTMP server (which was set up for a different reason), and have the remote host connect to that. The problem is that the delay is huge, and I can’t use Opus like I want (only MP3/AAC). If you know a solution to this problem, I’ll give you a hella cool CS:GO skin.

I still want to do a post on all the anime I’ve watched and the chinese cartoon books I’ve been reading that I talked about many moons ago, I just haven’t got around to it yet. I could probably also write about some of the games I’ve played, too, except most of the ones I’ve been playing are just pure multiplayer.

I also still need to upgrade my server using my old computer parts (the Q6600). For the most part all the old parts are just sitting there, except half the RAM I put in my Dad’s computer (which might have been faulty and broke it). When I do I’ll upgrade the OS too. I’m getting a lot of experience with Debian at my job, and I would totally move to a Linux server if certain things like the Skype Bot didn’t require Windows. I don’t want to mess with VMs either, too much hassle if it’s possible to just use one OS.

Oh I also applied for a passport, after much hassle. I’m the only person I know that has one. I don’t have plans for any travel, but once this temp job is done it’d be nice to take a while off.

I got a job, thought I should mention that. It’s here in Seattle but I’m not looking forward to the commute times. So at least Google indexbots will read this. Don’t forget to check out my Twitter and Twitch (links on the left).

I thought about redoing the backend of the site (again), I’ve got some ideas but it’ll take some work. I ran into some weird Apache issues but I think I figured them out, conflicts between mod_dir and mod_rewrite. For some reason mod_rewrite rules override mod_dir rules (the DirectorySlash directive) but only in httpd.conf, not in .htaccess. I fixed it by disabling DirectorySlash and wiring a mod_rewrite rule that did the same thing. It’s just pounding out some PHP at this point, I think I can work though it piecemeal.

2 of my friends were so nice as to get me computer upgrades as a present because they felt Q6600 was ‘quo2quouo’. I got an Intel Core i5 6500 CPU, ASUS B150M-C motherboard, 8gb of DDR4 2133 RAM, and an Intel 535 120GB SSD. It’s super fast and cool but I’ll still need to buy a new capture card or sound card since it’s only got one PCI slot. And despite his guarantees that I have the fastest CPU of all of us now I still have the slowest.

I’m the first guy I know to have DDR4 though, completely skipped DDR3.

I finally got around to making a version of my reverse image search program that will work for everyone. You can check it out on the projects page.