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.