AernaLingus

joined 3 years ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This is the most seasonal anime I've been watching in ages.

There's No Freaking Way I'll be Your Lover! Unless... (a.k.a. WataNare) - oh hell yeah, you know I'm eating up that yuri goodness. It's not high art, but it's very fun and one of the shows that I look forward to the most each week.

Bad Girl - more girlfail yuri. Yes please.

The Summer Hikaru Died (Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu) - Compelling BL horror show set in the Japanese countryside. I won't say more, since I don't want to spoil anything, but if that sounds remotely interesting you should definitely check it out.

The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity (Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku) - Very cute romance which dispenses with a lot of the things I dislike about romance anime. Both of the lead characters are precious cinnamon rolls. What's not to love?

Ruri Rocks (Ruri no Houseki) - This one is the sleeper hit of the season for me. I hadn't heard any hype about it, but when I was scrolling through the anime schedule it caught my eye, and I'm glad that it did. The show features a mineralogy grad student introducing the main character to the world of geology and pulling her down the rabbit hole. It's gorgeously animated, and the author's love for the subject is really shines through (from what I've read, the author studied mineralogy in university and taught high school science). Watching the show will actually teach you some basic mineralogy, which I've found fascinating, and seeing Ruri's pure-hearted joy in learning about the world around her really makes me want to dive deeper into my own passions.^[I should mention that there is a fair bit of Anime Bullshit™ in terms of character designs and some lingering camera shots, which become apparent even in the first episode. It hasn't detracted from the show for me, especially since it really is just the camera and not any gratuitous scenarios, at least thus far, but it's enough that it would definitely raise some eyebrows in a general audience.]

See You Tomorrow at the Food Court (Food Court de, Mata Ashita.) - Not much to say about this one, tbh. Entirely dialogue-driven show with a nice dynamic between the two main characters, but I wouldn't say it's a standout. It's also only 6 episodes, though, so not a major commitment.

My Dress-Up Darling (Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru) Season 2 - My hetslop guilty pleasure show. Yes, there's a lot of fanservice, but the main characters are both really charming and I enjoy learning about the craft of cosplay. Plus, you can tell that there's so much love being poured into this production, and all those extra touches elevate this adaptation beyond the source material.

Turkey! - Is it a great show? No. But it's not terrible, and the premise is so silly that (so far) I'm still compelled to keep watching it.

I ended up dropping With You and the Rain (Ame to Kimi to). It's a cute show, but there's such little substance to it that I just didn't feel motivated to keep watching it after the first few episodes.

I'm also sort of paused on CITY THE ANIMATION. It's incredible for what it is (wacky non-sequitur comedy supported by gorgeous over-the-top KyoAni sakuga), but I think I tend to bounce off of pure comedy shows. There are exceptions (Asobi Asobase comes to mind), but a similar thing happened with Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan where I gradually fell off about halfway through even though I was enjoying it well enough. It's just hard to sustain my interest over an entire season without that emotional throughline.


As for non-seasonal shows:

Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater (Houkago Teibou Nisshi) - was put onto this one by our very own Erika and I'm quite enjoying it! I'm a sucker for CGDCT focused on a niche hobby, and it's nice to learn about fishing without any actual fishies being harmed.^[...yeah, I know the production team almost certainly went on some fishing trips for research purposes...]

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 2 - I watched the first season when it aired as well as a few eps of this season, but I dropped it back then for whatever reason. All of the recent excitement about the world release for the game piqued my interest, and I'm glad I returned to this because it's a lot of fun. What's not to like about hype horsegirl races and top-tier idol music?

K-On! - I've been participating in the watchalong on Blorptube and goddamn, I forgot how good this show was. Of course it's legendary, and I rated it 10/10 when I first watched it, but I'm sure everyone's had the experience of going back and watching an old favorite only to realize it didn't hold up. K-On! is the opposite of that for me—I appreciate it even more now since it's spawned so many copycats and yet still stands as one of the greatest works in its genre. Doesn't hurt that the music absolutely slaps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

How did you see the full text?

If you look at the source of the page (either F12 to bring up Developer tools or right-click -> "View page source"), you'll see that there's this script tag with the id __NEXT_DATA__ that has a big ol' hunk of JSON data in it, which (among other things) contains the entire article split up into discrete chunks with different types. I didn't bother to look at the page's actual JavaScript code, but I assume it's assembling the DOM dynamically from said JSON and when you're not authorized to view the full article it simply stops after some arbitrary point instead of finishing the job.

I wrote a crappy little scraper that parses the JSON to pull out the text and link chunks for the article, stick 'em together, and spits out some Markdown ready to paste into Lemmy. It doesn't handle all of the possible chunk types (e.g. embeds (which I should do) and ads (lol)), and sometimes it'll throw errors (which I usually ignore), but it gets the job done okay most of the time.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That would be a good thing in the sense that they'd be pissing off companies with billions in revenue at stake (well, Take Two, at least) and therefore both the incentive and the resources to fight back, no? Of course, that could easily mean said companies getting carve-outs established for themselves rather than actually changing the underlying policy, but y'know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Me: I should try to code up the project in this book section before I read it so that I can learn how to organize my code better! What a great opportunity to get feedback!

Also me: (comparing the two) god my code is so dogshit I should just give up why do I even try?

(I'll get used to it...)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Mega mega THREAD THREAD meow-coffee

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Konyanyachiwa~!

I should really start another rewatch of Cardcaptor Sakura again...God I love that show. Immediately started hearing Sakura no Theme II in my head

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I know this has already been answered, but here's an exhaustive discussion of Team Rocket's ages (TL;DR: they're 25)

https://musashi.tumblr.com/post/615801089998061568/how-old-are-jessie-and-james

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's usually more like, "Yeah, Hexbear probably won't fuck with that aaaaaaaand post" but you've got the spirit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Thank you—fixed! Not sure how that happened, but I'll look into it.

edit: the error was in the original article. I'm absolved!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

To anyone who wants a nostalgic Pokémon TCG fix on a budget (read: for free), check out the two Game Boy games^[make sure to grab the English patch for the Japan-exclusive sequel]. Tons of fun, banger soundtrack, and incredible renditions of the card art considering they're on a frickin' 8-bit handheld (see this great video to understand the technical and artistic mastery required to make it work, and check out the rest of that channel's videos if you're into Pokémon TCG).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Full textBeneath our feet, in sunless depths once thought barren, a vast and vibrant ecosystem thrives.

A groundbreaking study by Chinese and Canadian scientists has revealed the surprising “energy engine” powering this hidden biosphere: the very breaking and grinding of Earth’s crust during earthquakes and tectonic shifts.

Forget 19th century French novelist Jules Verne’s fantastical depictions of mastodons and giant dragonflies dwelling in mushroom forests nine to 12 metres (30 to 40 feet) tall in an illuminated subterranean world. Traditional science held that kilometres below the surface, cut off from sunlight and surface organics, life could not exist.

Yet, recent discoveries have unveiled a massive, active deep biosphere, harbouring an estimated 95 per cent of Earth’s prokaryotes and constituting roughly one-fifth of Earth’s total biomass.

But how do these microbes survive in the deepest, most isolated zones?

A study led by Zhu Jianxi and He Hongping, professors at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (GIG) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Kurt Konhauser, professor at the University of Alberta, provides an answer.

Their findings were published in Science Advances on July 19.

They discovered that seismic activity and crustal fracturing act like a natural “generator”, constantly producing energy for deep life.

“In the silent darkness, chemical reactions between rock and water generate energy. This process functions like a battery, creating positive and negative poles that drive electron flow – the currency of life’s metabolism,” Zhu said in a GIG news release on July 19.

The team simulated Earth’s most common silicate mineral, quartz, in the lab to recreate two fundamental types of rock fracture: extension, where rocks suddenly crack open, exposing fresh surfaces instantly to water; and shear fracture, where faults grind continuously, crushing rocks in water.

Both fracture types split water molecules, producing hydrogen gas and reactive oxygen species. Extensions were particularly efficient at accumulating hydrogen peroxide.

The hydrogen peroxide paired with the generated hydrogen to form a natural “redox couple” – a pair of chemicals that drive reduction-oxidation reactions. This reaction produced electrical energy of up to 0.82 volts, easily sufficient to power most life-sustaining reactions.

Iron, one of Earth’s most abundant elements, acts as a crucial energy shuttle. Tiny amounts of hydrogen peroxide oxidise dissolved ferrous iron into ferric iron. Simultaneously, abundant reactive hydrogen atoms, produced during rock fracturing, reduce ferric iron minerals back to ferrous iron.

This continuous electron flow creates an “underground power grid”, energising microbial life and driving the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur.

As highlighted in the GIG report, the team discovered in 2023 that minerals under stress can produce oxygen at their surfaces, potentially exceeding production rates from atmospheric photochemistry.

“This long-overlooked radical chemistry could simultaneously explain the origins of Earth’s initial oxygen and hydrogen,” Zhu explained. “It might be the intrinsic mechanism driving the early co-evolution of minerals and life.”

“Furthermore, the deep subsurface provides a sanctuary, shielded from catastrophic events like intense ultraviolet radiation and asteroid impacts, offering a previously unrecognised crucial environment for the origin and evolution of life,” he added.

The study quantifies the power: a single moderate earthquake can generate hydrogen fluxes 100,000 times greater than production via radiolysis, which involves splitting water molecules through ionising radiation, or serpentinisation – a chemical reaction between water and ultramafic rocks at high temperatures and pressures.

Such intense energy flow can readily sustain populations of deep chemosynthetic microbes and may even lead to localised accumulations of dihydrogen gas.

According to He, “This process of converting mechanical energy into chemical energy isn’t unique to Earth.

“It applies to other planetary bodies like Mars ... and Enceladus (a moon of the planet Saturn). Detecting signals related to redox couples – such as hydrogen, methane, oxygen, or redox fluctuations of iron – within Martian fault zones could indicate active subsurface life.”

So the next time you feel an earthquake’s tremor, remember: deep beneath the surface, in unfathomable darkness, shattering rocks might just be igniting sparks of life. The hidden worlds within Earth – and perhaps even Mars – could be far more alive than we ever imagined.

Incredibly cool research.

 

Great video which systematically investigates the factors which cause electric guitars to sound different from each other (hint: it's not "tonewood") and manages to do so in an engaging and entertaining way. I think one of the best things about it is that the dude doesn't have terminal redditor brain--rather than wasting time putting down people that believe or perpetuate the myths or gloating about his superb intellect, he just does the experiments and lets the results do the talking.

Jim Lill put out a great video today (Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Microphone?) which I would definitely check out if you enjoy the video I submitted, but it's a little more subtle/niche which is why I chose to lead with the guitar one. My next favorite after the guitar tone video is probably the one on guitar amps--equally good, and perhaps even more surprising.

 

I'm an impossibly out-of-touch boomer and was honestly only vaguely aware of Laufey having seen a few videos of hers on a music transcription YouTube channel I'm subbed to, so I felt pretty stupid for not realizing just how popular she was. Adam Neely does good work, and this is no exception; he does a great job breaking down the components and influences of her music and comparing them with the essential elements of "traditional" jazz. It's a well-organized and carefully thought-out video from an actual jazz musician--not just some hot take artist--and it's also not gatekeeping or denigrating Laufey's music.

Even if you have no interest in either jazz or Laufey, there was one really historical tidbit in there I think Hexbears will appreciate (@7:23-8:09):

Between 1942 and 1944, there were no new instrumental recordings due to a general strike organized by the musicians' union trying to get musicians paid fairly. Imagine that happening today right? No new recordings for the next couple of years until Spotify pays musicians fairly...wow, a boy can dream.

Vocalists were not part of the Union, though, and so could still record; this led to musical innovations. They started singing acapella arrangements and developing an acapella style mimicking the popular big band jazz arrangements of the day: popular jazz big band arrangements which use stuff like these mechanical voicings. Singers mimicked the big band saxophone solis popular at the era and backed up popular up-and-coming stars like Frank Sinatra.

Pretty wild that the distinct style of dense vocal harmonies heard in American WWII-era music was born out of desperation due to a prolonged strike! And impressive that the union had the strength to maintain a two year strike.

Also definitely check out Live from Emmet's Place--can't go wrong with "After You've Gone" featuring Patrick Bartley on alto sax and Bruce Harris on trumpet as a starting place.

 

This is one of my favorite videos of all time, perhaps even surpassing Watch for Rolling Rocks in 0.5x A Presses (although obviously not as iconic). It just perfectly scratches that itch of someone using a combination of technical skill and lateral thinking to complete an absurd video game challenge, all presented by an even-keeled narrator with clear visualizations and a bit of humor sprinkled in. I think I've watched it half a dozen times at this point--it's my "comfort food" for when I'm having trouble sleeping.

Kind of amazing that the very first video the creator has put out is such a banger, not just in terms of content but in terms of production value. He did say that he'd be making another video, so I'll be looking forward to that--tough act to follow, though, not unlike Watch for Rolling Rocks.

Can anyone recommend any channels/videos along the same lines? I've devoured the following:

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