Rants

Hey, have you heard? Music is getting worse! They sent a bunch of musicologists out and had them count chord complexity in songs and, yep, it's gone down a whole bunch!

So, I joined the Fediverse.

Over the past year or so, the European Union's tangled web of triply-indirect democratic processes have been churning out a copyright directive. This has been vaguely reported on with semi-sensationalized names like the "link tax" and "censorship machines". In response to these names, creative industry lobbyists have alleged a vast net-wing conspiracy to mislead the public into believing that the upcoming EUCD will kill the Internet.

Last night I wrote a rather long rant about the effect bad translations had on my enjoyment of an adult male targeted comic book series called "Rozen Maiden". In the 20-odd hours since then, I found scanlations of that series and completed it. The translation quality was terrible, and I even spent some time shocking some of the Telefang translators as to what the fanbase does with clearly translatable vocal tics.

So, I need to confess something - I've been putting off work on the Telefang patches. I originally planned to release patches on a monthly basis, but after rolling out v111, I moved onto another Smilesoft game in need of hacking. I assumed other adjustments would come from other members of the project to justify v112 in July, but it didn't happen. Bugsite is it's own can of worms, but yet another thing has interrupted that project for something else.

A year ago (modulo some months) I made a particularly flippant comment about how, given it's slavish devotion to a specific brand of quirky humor and subversiveness; UNDERTALE could just have easily been passed off as a fan-made sequel to the MOTHER series it so heavily cribs from. In video games, we use the term "spiritual successor" to indicate this sort of thing. Part of my reasoning is based on the fact that the MOTHER series itself doesn't have a particular shared thread of character or setting.

I've decided to make an upgrade to Drupal 8. This gave me the opportunity to rebuild the site theme again; I think it's an improvement. You can check out the old version on Archive.org if you're curious. It's not 100% complete yet, but this is a personal site nobody ever visits, so I have no reservations with making changes to a production site like this.

YouTube's new copyright policies are better than nothing, but quite simply put, they aren't enough. It's gotten to the point where YouTube creators are starting to cannabalize smaller channels in the name of "protecting" their "intellectual property". Quite frankly, it's an insult when copyright owners use the excuse of "author's rights" to force other authors to only create on their terms.