音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

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！

Finally, another post after months. My hunch is such big intervals will still last for quite a long while.
Today's post remarks a successful attempt (finally) to get a music player with external cue support on my legacy Xperia Arc with android version 4.0.4.
I should have learned it many years ago since I upgraded the android version from 2.x to 4.x, but since back to that time my main purpose was to upgrade the OS, I didn't pay attention to anything else.

More recently, when I re-charged my over-10-year-old music player, I noticed its earphone socket became buggy and I could only hear both channels when the cable ~50% inserted. Though it still works now, it probably will be undone soon.
A quick search on Amazon showed a review-based okay player (with SD card support) won't cost more than 50, but I'm not in the need of getting a new device. At first I was thinking I could use my 1-year Samsung A31 to play music, but quickly dropped this idea considering the battery consumption. Then I remembered my legacy Arc, which lied in a drawer since the beginning of WFH.
Apparently an old phone with bluetooth, etc. (though I don't need them really) would be better than a budget player, but I also feel tired already before converting a chunk of 64 GB of music as single tracks. I'm too used to one image file + cue index file.

With the thinking on using A31, I discovered AIMP being a nice one for android that meets my requirement, but on google store, its minimal version is higher than 4. Another big problem, it seems Arc can't connect to the store properly at all, very likely due to the old version.
I do know you can install apk on android like running an exe file on Windows and have done so before. it's fairly easy to discover a couple of apk files, but Arc doesn't have a built-in file manager and I was stuck again.
So I tried a few attempts again trying to installing a newer OS to Arc, hoping to get back the connection to the store to find something useful, but all failed due to the inability to unlock its bootloader. I did find some programs that claim to do the trick, but being afraid they're potential viruses, I didn't try them on Jupiter (my surface laptop 3). Instead I tried to use my VAIO as the laboratory mouse, which has been literally hibernating since a year ago, it soon turned that the VAIO's long-lasting hard-drive issue has worsened and I couldn't start even a window explorer.
Maybe it could perform a bit better if I stop ignoring it's asking for a disk check. So I did the check, but ended up with it shuts down and never starts up again. Did the disk check kill its power connection? I don't know but that's the end of it, very likely.

Finally, right in this afternoon, I learned about ADB -- should have known about it years ago! -- and all issues were solved. Could easily install any apk matching the current version. Tested v2.9 of AIMP and it works great. Before AIMP, I have tried winamp and another neutron player, but neither allows you to select music from a specific folder -- like what I do on the computer -- both require to first scan your given library folder and you get nearly no flexibility.
Many people on the AIMP page complain its "old school" style, but it's actually easier to manage. My music folder and its subfolders are well organised and don't require further of the so-called "modern" ways of library management.

I'll see how long Arc's remaining battery can last!

Was too distracted by a variety of things in the last year, but it's probably the same for most people. Hopefully this year is totally different, in a positive sense. Staying at the same pace won't bring significate changes, and time to call for a refresh, triggered by the purifying spirit Amabie. (wish I could make an art but this won't happen in the near future.)

Since many months ago, my bluetooth speaker began to randomly skip, but eventually returned to normal after a few restarts/reconnects. It didn't become a big issue until today, and it sounded like playing a badly scratched disk on a nearly-dying CD player. Unbearable.
After trying all simple and quick reset-related ways without improving the condition, I finally began to check on the possibility regarding wifi interference. -- When wifi being turned off, the skipping disappeared. So that must be the problem. Actually, it wasn't a hard fix either, and I also renamed my wifi to "Old Moonlight" at the same time (as another kind of refresh!). Though I wanted to change the pass as well, I currently had no good phrase to use aside of those I'm using for other sites.

This wifi fix indeed triggered me writing something today, but I'm not the type to state all my year-change ambitions loud, so I'll keep the very first post as normal as my most others and stop here.

(Interestingly, my first post in the last year was also on this day but this won't mean anything. I disagree with Ichihara Yuuko.)

↓ This could be done much earlier, but unfortunately I was playing too much Nioh2..
But also thanks to Nioh2, that further inspired this remake, sort of.
Nine tails, so cute that I fell in love immediately. But never really got a chance to equip since Nioh1. Before I needed the running speed up and stamina recovery speed up from the golden bird, and soon I was bound to use Nekomata and Hakutaku, the lovely and knowledgeable elders.

At least, I decided to have two accompanying nine-tails in this remake.

客人まれびと綺想曲 / Marebito Capriccio
originated from Yorlga's KitsuneTsuki by Mitose Noriko + Hirota Yoshitaka
I doubt there's a word equivalent to Marebito so maybe it's better to use as what it is.

The initial version was done 10+ years ago, hard to believe but true.
The idea of remaking it also came out suddenly, when I played that album again after quite a long while. One reason was the initial version barely has a proper background, plus I was in a blank period without new inspirations (I do have one but not in the right mood to start), thus this (huge) remake was triggered.

However, during the draft stage I never thought about how the background would be like, and accepted whatever turned out after reading the lyrics many times.
One key concept could be the "異界の門口", entrance to the other world. So I blended elements of three seasons, combined with Torii gates that usually served as a connection. The lanterns are merely decorations -- originally I drafted stone lanterns, but then I was attracted by the wooden ones I saw in Nioh2's DLC1 (in the mount Kurama mission) and changed my idea -- thanks Nioh2 again!
But it's still a shame I had no chance to blend some winter.
Finally, I did struggle a bit for its title, but not for too long. Because I just recently noticed it's in an irregular time, combined with 3/4 and 4/4 and probably 2/4 (that's why I usually messed up myself in terms of tempo while listening to this song), Capriccio would be a good fit. (Seems it's becoming a habit that I try to give titles of a musical form for works that were inspired by a song.) Although I still don't think the first half suits the best, I have no more motivation to find a better one. (Trying to make the title writes in a [not really] Nioh-ish font is fun -- Thanks Nioh2 the third time!)

**final raw file size: 460MB?!

-- Hopefully there's Yorlga III sometime.
and I'm going to clear Shura difficult this week!

Next plan: Möbius Mechanisms II (°ω°彡)