音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Finished another site-wise renovation, before winter comes.
I have been using Google blogger as my image host, and had no issue with hotlinking images until more recently, when the uploaded images began to have a different URL format. I have sort of noticed this back in March, then July, but never paid more attention. I simply changed my code regarding how the new URL shall be parsed, until about 10 days ago, I found the images are not getting displayed, even though I can directly access them by entering the URL.
I've then tried other google services, like drive, docs and site, but none of them provides a stable way of hotlinking like what I used to do. I believe google won't mind people hotlinking images in the aspect of bandwidth, but they probably disabled this feature for the sake of copyright. I hope that's the case, mentally.

Fine, nothing lasts forever. It's time for me to switch my image host.
So I did a quick image scan, and pulled over 1600 images of this or that I embedded in my site. The question was, where and how could I transfer them? I've thought of other image-hosting sites like imgur and photobucket, but honestly, I don't trust them. Then for better-famed cloud services like dropbox and finally I came to onedrive, for which I have a subscription and space is never a problem.
However, I didn't (and would never) want to share each image and record the link of it, without a batch solution. If I just started my site and there were fewer than 20 images, I won't mind that and could accept the way of gradual-manual-sharing in the future. But not to say 1600 images, I attempted the first 50 and I knew I'd never make it myself.

Why not just put them on the same host as the site itself? Of course I was aware of this easiest option but my concern was it may take too much space, or maybe I was just not used to this (too used to store images online). Since I had no other better options, I had to face it.
I also did some extra steps to shrink the image size, by "magick" limiting the dimension, quality and format. Until this moment I finally got to know more about webp format. Didn't like it before due to the worry of compatibility and the not-so-pretty-on-explorer-view chrome-ball icon.
But it does the job, wonderfully. ( ・∀・)ｲｲ!!

The remaining re-coding of my existing <img> tags was thus solved naturally. Along with this renovation, I also got a not-that-new idea, which I had a grasp of the vague plans but never pushed further. That is, to make a set of site themes in CSS -- colouring only as I'm satisfied with my current layout. Also because I've been playing around with fountain pens these days, I got to know more about Pilot's iroshizuku ink set. This would be a decent inspiration for the new theme series -- and potentially a new set of drawing roots! 24 of them, which is a manageable number and can be perfectly divided into different meanings.
By the way, it's not that I didn't draw this year. I'm just working on a large project that I've been thinking about for years.
Hopefully this time I can bring it to an end.

Another great discovery is, Chrome now has the feature to perform a hard reload (hope it comes to Opera soon!) so that I don't have to doubt which CSS version I'm actually seeing due to cache and such!

The real Winter General will come next week, temporarily.

This (normal) weekend will be filled with chilling autumn rain, and it's going to be subzero from today. But I like it.
Although there's not much sound from the rain drops, some songs in minor would fit perfectly to this, some Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Amano Tsuki, "Kinema Mosaic", Silent Hill...

And that came at a perfect time.

Silent Hill 2 is getting a remake! Though I don't like to see such realistic cockroaches, and... James looks like in his 40s. It's much much more exciting than the news of Biohazard 2, or even Demon's Souls remake. A great game worthy of a careful remake. Just hope the sound effect remains since I'm so used to that in the PS2 version. Rearrangement of the soundtrack doesn't always turn out well, like Demon's Souls, especially when the original version is already epic.
The bad part is that it won't be on PS4, but I'm positive that the current PS5 shortage won't last forever. Scalpers should be nuked by Russia.
Anyway, I have the feeling it will be another nightmare for me to reach 10/10 stars. If the remake doesn't feature auto-aiming it can be near impossible.

Weird enough that I don't write by hand so much, yet I love pens, especially fountain pens. After a long fight of getting used to a super heavy (48.8g) pen, I gave up as it makes my finger muscles exhausted. More severely, it skips badly on many types of paper I use daily (good/cheap notebooks and regular printing paper). That pen has a supposed-to-be-great German iridium nib, but I suspect the whole pen is made in Germany. Anyway, it doesn't gain my favourite, plus the whole pen is ugly shiny golden. I'm glad I decided to forget it (it's a little hard to do so as it may be on the expensive side) and move on.

I have a Pilot Metropolitan for many years, but it has a fine nib. It works perfectly but sometimes I miss the feeling of writing with unsharpened pencils, because of the thick strokes. Therefore, I got my second Pilot Kaküno last week, of a medium nib. It suits me better, as my hand tends to write smaller with a fine nib even my brain doesn't want that.
Of the usual superb made-in-Japan quality, it writes perfectly, with no skipping on all types of paper I tested, and the stroke thickness is pleasant.
Plus, it's light -- 13 g only for Kaküno -- no effort needed to hold it at all! While Metropolitan is 26.3 g, I personally like Metropolitan in this aspect. Kaküno may be too light to adjust the balance unless I put the cap to the end.

However, here comes one question. I bought some Con-40 converts at the same time. On the packing, it states the maximal ink capacity is in the middle of the cylinder. Fine, but I also wonder why is that? What if I fill the cylinder full? Of course, it's totally possible and not hard to do at all. With just some extra 0.4 ml of ink it won't physically damage the converter, would it?
Some googling didn't bring me a solid answer. All I found was about how to fill it fully -- and how many people who too lazy/stupid to figure it out themselves.
So google doesn't know the answer either, the only solution would be to ask the Pilot designer. I stopped there, I'm not bothered to not fill it full, as I enjoy the process of sucking ink into it.

Another recent purchase I'd like to note down here. A set of gel highlighters, aka bible highlighters, as described by many different brands.
Some spin-off thought was that there're actually people reading the bible! I'm indeed surprised.

Of course, I didn't buy them for the bible.

I just hope they add some fresh look to this antique German book. (so I can finish it!)

September used to be a boring month, but this year we got 3x long weekends, followed by that in October. It does actually feel fun -- though it's going to return to normal from tomorrow.

I'm so glad I got the chance to play Stray, a cute little game that I almost neglected. From the very beginning, it gave me the ambience of Nier Automata and till the end, I strongly believe one can just swap the music of them and it will be a natural blend. -- As the robots contact the real world, their AI also grows and... doesn't it sound like a reasonable introduction to the latter?

But I care more about the cat! To find where the little orange guy returned to his own world, I tried to search in chapter one but didn't find much, other than that their home is fairly close to the control room, and probably located on the same side. There is an opinion that the last scene is very close to his tome, and I believe it. As for the super hacker B12, whom I've begun to think he's 9S' ancestor will probably just talk to them again -- there is a door with some small screened-terminals in chapter 1 with a note "human staff only", which would be a perfect place for them to reunite. B12 might also find some super old recipe in the cyberworld about how to make Churu and the robots treat cats as the god, and made the best Churu factory... -- I'm getting too far. xD;
A happy end so that is. However, I'm not 100% good with the real game ending. I'm not generally fond of this kind of open-end and I like to make things clear. The one that immediately appeared in my mind was Shadow Hearts 2, where there were many static images for each character during the ending credits and thus nothing was left unstated. Some people like that though, so it can't be helped, all I can do is hope for a good end!

Humans can be wiped out, but cats won't!

Also I wish there are more to read regarding the world and why the date stops on Oct 11 (tomorrow)! Quite many questions I have already about that world. A note in Momo's home says the town is 450m in diameter, but this is obviously too small. Maybe he meant the slum. Regardless, the whole walled world doesn't seem to be large at all, since the slum is clearly seen from the midtown and even from the control room, which is good, so it's not a huge journey. My gameplay time is about 14 hours including finding all memories and badges, so our little orange guy probably won't take any longer so he can survive even without proper food (a big relief!).

Then I look at my own cats, can they be that agile to jump around and deliver this or that? No, they can't, I know that...
all they can do is sleep like that (which I don't mind at all)↓

One last little thing,
Windows finally brought folder thumbnails back! Have been looking forward to this since this February when that was first introduced in an insider build.
Only two weird things remain now, one is the shortcut "desktop" can't be taken out from the quick access list (as usual), and the other is the system removed the old version of Windows, which occupied about 12 GB, but my remaining space didn't seem to increase at all. Maybe it now doesn't count temporary data toward the total disk space? Whatever, I shall not be worried until I run out of space -- hopefully it never happens.

At meanwhile, notepad++'s newest update got some block markings, at least for web-based file types, html, xml... Doesn't seem to be very useful to me though, since it doesn't work well in Perl and probably more formats that I haven't checked. just noticed it's actually editing markings, still doesn't seem to be useful to me at all, but can still treat it as some kind of fun colour decoration.

Two months from the last post, it's all the weather's fault. Over 30°C for July and August burnt all my motivation of doing anything.

But after the long period of emptiness again, I'm expressing nothing more than complaints about the book "German For Dummies" that I bought many years ago. Haven't touched German at all in the past few years so this book -- which I never finished -- could be a good point to restart. I started reading it at the beginning of this month, but after just a few chapters, I began to lose patience, and I rushed to finish it this weekend. Feeling relieved, now I can just return to my antique 1950s book that uses the beautiful yet hard-to-read gothic font!

So, about the problems. Just like other For Dummies books, the authors are too "talkative". Too much nonsense, I mean. But I get that they want to give a casual feeling so I will just accept this as a minor problem to me.

Then, some more serious issues other than typos -- have found at least five so far -- since they didn't affect me I'll just neglect them. First, the whole book lacks organisation. (Too) Many examples use grammar/words that are never explained clearly in the same section. For the "Fun Games", which are supposed to serve as exercises, they often require words NEVER appear in the same chapter also. Besides, they're often repeating the exact same sentences as in the chapter. What's the point? Good exercises should be giving similar things so one can apply and derive from what they learned. To me, I'd just repeat the sentence that's important when I read it in the main text.

Next, the book doesn't cover what I, and probably most German learners, want to find. It does cover some basic grammar but that's all. The (literally) whole book, is about the present tense, absolutely unnecessary. The book claims that the present tense is the most common, but it doesn't mean that not touching other tenses at all is acceptable. It covers a bit in the past/future tense, but the information is too little and I don't get even a vague idea of how they look like. In contrast, the book does a good job teaching you how to make "Ich möchte" sentences, such examples are everywhere and really made me bored. It doesn't mention enough about many important things either, such as the second possessive case, and how to change adjectives according to the case/gender.

Finally, it gives you false hope. It says the book is for you if you don't want to memorise lots of words. False. How one can learn a language, even the most basic, without memorising words?? I didn't pick up this book because of this, but just hearing irritates me.
I'm okay with the bad illustrations (not the sectional cartoons, which are meaningless anyway).

This book is the worst so far among all paid books I've read (if including free books the worst would be a Python book that I deleted after reading 3 pages).
At least, I can now enjoy the intriguing German Gothics!
I have one more For Dummies, hope that can be better, but when I'll read it would remain unknown...

Was going to resume at least weekly writing habit, but couldn't mostly due to the extreme over-30°C heat that burnt many of my brain cells.
It will take some time to fully go back to normal, I know it.

Déraciné. I have to say it's the worst From game because you're forced to get a VR. Since I'm not interested in first-person ones and never want a VR, I chose to cloud-play it and indeed enjoyed it this January. During that special and a little hard period, it brought me so much peace, and I also can't forget its ending music, not the common version of the Scarborough Fair I know, maybe a different version or not, I love that more. Therefore, today on the very special day, that melody came across my mind again and I finally added this little gem to my collection.

Hopefully I can someday transcribe it -- Not very confident at the moment though. But if I could finish the majority of it, how nice the ensemble would be!
-- I really need a cello. No, this isn't the point...

Then, the reality.
Have been coding for the past weeks, mostly in R -- that I never knew I'd do so much R even in the last year -- then some Perl and Bash. It's fun actually, and I love what I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I've got many thoughts. Maybe I've said them before, but here, I'll make them clear, again.
-- Code never betrays you. It's always the coder's fault when it goes malfunctioning.
-- Never trust Reddit and Quora regarding coding questions, and I never understand why people ask such tech stuff there.

It's getting much cooler this weekend and following, so I can finally turn on my PS4 and get irritated by the Elden Pest! (°ω°”)

At last...
↓

Only at such times do I wish my phone had a better camera or I brought my semi-pro Sony...
Still haven't organised its memory card for nearly 1.5 years! -- Too lazy...

I was (sort of) expecting this, but at least it's something today.
For too long I haven't written much and it's all of a weird feeling right now.

Though the plan to resume was kind of settled back to this March, the truth was I got more hooked with git than working on the content itself! Still I get an issue with how to properly tag stuff, or maybe I should just stick with the long version strings.. it's not how I'm supposed to write right now.

Anyway, earlier this week, I finally got another push. I was working on a website earlier this week, which was not built with source code but a WYSIWYG tool that stupidly doesn't support much of css/custom codes, which brought my expectations to a dead end. However, on my own end, I was rather motivated, as I finally come back to look at the main page again.
For a while I've been using the official twitter widget -- regardless that I'm not a social media person -- and I'm never happy with how it looks nor how it arranges stuff. Previously I was using a 2 or 3-column layout for it that was retired as I revised my whole site content. While my experience told me multi-column won't be my type, I was also too lazy to redo the barely-used twitter stuff, until this time.
Probably because of the multi-column design I had to extract all tweet content into an individual file before arranging them (there has to be a better way but I don't remember why I couldn't make one, again, laziness it seems). This time with the much simpler one-column layout, there were no more issues and I was able to do it without any problem. Meanwhile, also noticed that in inspector mode you can create a temporary CSS file instead of inserting each rule individually.

So that was it, hopefully I can now move on to the beta stage -- some visual works that I've been planning since this February but had totally no progress!
And Elden Ring is all blame should point to...

I'm not planning at all to talk about my thoughts toward Elden Ring, but in short I like it, mostly.
The point is, after this 90% blind run, I can finally listen to its soundtracks without worrying about spoilers. I do hope they will have a more formal release of it, as it's a shame there's no lossless format available at the moment. Besides, all field battle BGM, that should cross-fade well with normal field BGM, are missing -- I don't really care about most of them but I just like the drums in Caelid.

Then talk about the main dishes, the boss music. There are quite many that caught my love from the first time, especially...

Godskin Apostles
Top 1 love. It was engraved on my mind since the very first fight. The boss fight is okay, excluding the stressful duo -- Thanks to this BGM I didn't throw curses at it.
Also there's a trace of Akiko-taste from it, which is a nice experience.

Omen Illusion/Mohg, Lord of Blood
I prefer the illusion version more, probably because I enjoy vocal-less versions in general. Unlike the above, I like the first phase part more (and it's NOT because of him throwing blood-flame everywhere). The timpani are superb!

Godrick the Grafted
Even I myself don't believe it's on the list (though I can't explain why). But honestly, it's here only because of the first part.

Godfrey, First Elden Lord
A classical boss fight piece. This piece can be replaced naturally by Gascoigne's BGM.

extra: Starscourge Radahn
This one is a special assignment, as I love the piece each time I play it but can't recall the melody at all.

Still, others are great too, of course independent of how good/bad the fight itself isElden Pest, I mean you!.

Another shame is the ending music, if there were a song like those in DS1,2,3...
A rearranged medley isn't bad, but they didn't include all boss fights, which made this ending piece as a whole incomplete.

One more small thing, I wish I knew Windows Terminal much earlier. It's so nice to use, and more importantly, it's so visually appealing!

Time to bring things back to my weekly routines.

もう何年ぶりだったか、なにか書くのも懐かしく感じる。でも、もう決めたんだから、これからは、「最初」のように戻るように。
戻ればいいだけどな。
せめて、今の私は絶好調なので、これを新しい始まりとして、元通りじゃなくても、少しずつ自分なりの「普通」に戻る、
と信じる。

時々考えるんだ、もしそうではなかったら、私どうなるの？
知らなくて、知りたくもない。ただ「今」とこれにくっつける「明日」を大切にしないと。

え、なんで今は絶好調なのか？これに関しては内緒。

とにかく、前一年に積んだものを全部ここで書き流すのは無理なんだが、まずは忘れかけの一枚を。

完成したらずっとほっといてごめんね。前の自分はどんな気分でこれを描いたのか全然思い出せないぐらいに。
でもやっと正式にデータベースに登録したんだよ、良かったね。

あとは、Windows11はようやくフォルダのプレビューを再びサポートするようになると聞いた。早くリリースしたらいいな。満遍なく黄色いフォルダアイコンたちはもううんざりだよ。

今日は肩慣らしとして、来週からは本気になるぞ！
それでは！