Rupee Shards

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anime, encoding, fansubbing, images, internet, manga, music, video games, youtube

Created By Desbreko

2k-tan Gets Some Well Deserved Rest

It's taken six months but I've finally been able to put together a new computer. A week ago my two oldest brothers actually remembered to bring the graphics card and power supply which were supposed to have been Christmas presents when they came for a visit, which meant I could order the rest of the parts I needed. I now have:

GIGABYTE Intel P35 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU
1 GB Kingston DDR2-800 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT Graphics Card
250 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
Lite-On DVD+R DL Burner

Everything but the DVD drive is new and I also installed Windows XP on the system, rather than Windows 2000 which I had been using before. I figured it was about time to upgrade since more and more software is no longer supporting 2000 and XP is as stable as it's going to get. I've been happy with the change so far since XP is very similar to 2000 but has some handy new features. And, like, I didn't have to reboot three times just to enable DualView when installing the graphics drivers! I was shocked and amazed when it just did it without needing to reboot at all. 2000 has served me well but I think I'm going to like all of XP's little improvements.

おやすみ

The system itself has been great as well. HD 720p anime plays silky smooth on this baby even during fast action scenes and I was getting around 100 fps in Guild Wars with all the graphics settings on max—while in windowed mode with other stuff running in the background. This makes me wonder if I could watch 720p anime on one monitor while playing Guild Wars on the other. I think it would be a toss-up between my computer or my multi-tasking abilities choking first.

Overnight Fame

As I posted over on the Watercooler a few days ago, I threw together a new comment design for myOtaku since it seemed no one else had taken up Adam's offer. I never use myO anymore since creating my World here so I did it pretty much on a whim, because I could and I felt like doing some HTML coding. It was fun and I've ended up spending about five, maybe six hours on it total.

Adam implemented it last night and then we made some more tweaks to add improvements, like the user name links opening in the parent window. Since then I've gotten lots of thanks in his post's comments and a couple guestbook entries. It's really cool to make something and know that a bunch of people will be using and enjoying it so I'm glad it's gotten such a good reception.

It makes me wonder, though. If I can do something like this in only five or six hours, what could everyone else do if they put all their time spent nagging Adam about stuff into something constructive instead? He told me while we were talking over AIM that the number of things people nag him about is infinite. So I'm thinking that, if people really did divert their time and energy into useful things, we might just be able to solve an infinite number of the world's problems. Who's with me?

Turning Japanese? I Don't Really Think So

Since becoming an anime fan and starting to browse more anime discussions I discovered something that really bugs me. I don't see it too often but it annoys the crap out of me when I do. That is, people randomly using Japanese words for no good reason. And, even more so, people who then feel the need to follow up that word with its English counterpart. You know, the kind of sentences which read like, "The tori (bird) flapped its tsubasa (wings) through the sora (sky) happily until it was time for its bento (lunch)." Seriously, what the hell is up with that?

First off, it's not fooling anyone; it's painfully obvious that people who do this don't actually speak the language. Second, following up with the English word renders the Japanese word completely pointless and redundant. Third, I'll nad kick anyone who does this in the comments.

Linkage, Sweet Linkage

As you might know, I'm one of the administrators over on OtakuBoards, theOtaku's sister forums site. And, if you were around on OB the past few weeks, you probably noticed the site was pretty inactive. Not a lot of people joining, not a lot posting, not much happening at all.

For a lot of the site's life (that I can remember accurately), theOtaku had a link to OtakuBoards somewhere fairly prominent. I myself found OB through a forums link on theO, way back in 2001. So, being a forum that features anime discussion as one of its main topics, we naturally got a lot of members from theO visitors.

But that changed with theOtaku's last layout revision before Version Vibrant here. The link to OtakuBoards was taken down and activity slowly dropped off. Up until a few days ago OB was at the lowest slump in activity that I had ever seen, and I've been there for over six years and also have access to all the activity statistics in the admin cp. At one point I even commented on Adam's myOtaku page saying that the feature I wanted most for Version Vibrant was another link to OB on theO's front page.

With Version Vibrant live now, I've gotten my wish and OB is once again linked to from theO. Not only that, but OB was the first of the three sites to come back up during the server move, which gets much love from me.

So, how has this affected activity levels on OB? I could tell you but I think this chart from the admin cp stats pages shows it best. (Everyone loves charts.) It shows the number of new members who have registered each day over the past month:

March 3-4 is when the sites went down and OB was the first to come back up. Now, some of this is due to the other two sites not being available for those two days and a link to OB being provided on the holding page. But still, I think it's obvious how much difference that connection with theOtaku makes.

UPDATE:
I updated the chart to include the first two days that Version Vibrant has been live. As I figured, we didn't maintain 100 new members per day but 35 and 34 is still way better than the single digits we were getting before.