Animethemes has it: Odoru Akachan Ningen

I think back when I first watched Welcome to the NHK that song may be what made me realize that the Japanese had also adopted a planet/weekday naming convention e.g. 火星/火曜日 == Mars / Tuesday (Tiw/Tyr’s day == Mars’s day; more obvious in e.g. French “Mardi”, etc.); 土星/土曜日 = Saturn / Saturday; etc.

• Sora wa Takaku Kaze wa Utau from Fate/Zero (2nd cour) – it’s a powerful song, and I think I listened to this one all the way through in every episode. Definitely one of my all time favorites.
• Taiyou - Denpa-Teki na Kanojo. (This OVA is pretty obscure, I think.) Another powerful song. No visuals for most of the ending (just text credits scrolling) – although 神戸守 (Mamoru Kanbe) listed as the director (監督) jumped out at me! No Klimt this time, but funny that I’m talking about something he worked on again already. Maybe I should go track down his other works more systematically…
• Kesenai Tsumi - FMA 2003 – I have a lot of nostalgia for this song and listened to it way too much as a teenager after my friends started introducing me to anime. The version on animethemes is a bit different from what I remember visually but the song is the same.
• Wareta Ringo - Shin Sekai Yori – I was actually thinking about posting an animepic clipped from this the other day since it popped back into my mind…
• Hibari - Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note (the Fate/Zero spin-off series) – I like both the song and the visuals (with the seasons changing)
• My Pace – Bleach ED6; I didn’t much care for the filler seasons of Bleach, but the synth from this ED and the dancing characters got stuck in my head for a while.
• X Jigen e Youkoso - Space Dandy. This one is memorable to me both for the “Hey, Everett…”/「ねぇ、エヴェレット」bit specifically and the general subject of the song.
• Zzz - Nichijou – both the art and song are great. There’s a couple versions, but I like this first one the best.

Edit: corrected the link to the Space Dandy ED

Sorry if addressed in the link (I’m not willing to visit Twitter) – but, like, actually McDonald’s themed? Or are they just sponsoring a show (like P&G, etc. have done for ages)?

If the former, I guess there’s some precedence with the KFC visual novel and Isekai Izakaya and such, but that still sounds pretty weird…

Edit: I went back and checked and it looks like McDonald’s was also a sponsor on the show I remember P&G from (i.e. season 1 of Bleach), so there’s precedence for them sponsoring Studio Pierrot’s shows too – I just don’t usually pay that much attention to it, I guess.

Huh. So… it finally occurred to me to check this. Elfen Lied and Sora no Woto share the same director – Mamoru Kanbe / 神戸守. I probably should’ve figured that out sooner given that Sora no Woto’s OP also references Klimt’s paintings heavily, but I had no idea.

I mentioned in a past comment a while back that I made a catalog of my anime. One of the observations I found while making it is that everything except for one movie had an entry on the English language Wikipedia already. That movie is Gundress from 1999. According to my personal journal, I watched this once back in 2014, apparently, but I remembered nothing about it, so I loaded it up recently and rewatched it.

The movie has that “sort of hard to follow if you don’t already know the source material” kind of feel – although I think this is the original work? I checked the Japanese Wikipedia entry about it after watching it. Sticking the article through a translator, there’s a description of a seriously screwed up initial showing and mismanagement of production with the film being finished after it aired in theaters initially. The version I have is finished, of course; if half the movie wasn’t colored in I’d definitely have remembered that!

The DVD menu prominently credits it as “Masamune Shirow’s Gundress”, but I’m not sure what his role in the production actually was. He’s listed in the opening credits for 設定協力 which got translated to English as “Characters Designed by” – but different people are credited with character and mech design in the end credits. A literal translation is something like “setting cooperation”.

There’s definitely a number of familiar elements with some buildings reminiscent of Dominion Tank Police, mech suits that reminded me of designs in GitS:SAC, as well as thermoptic camouflage, cable-based cyborg communication (jacked into the neck), cyberdiving, etc. coming up during the story.

Unusually, this anime features a Little Arabia enclave within the Japanese “Bayside City” the story is set in and one of the main characters is Muslim. I think this may be the only time I’ve seen Arabic script in anime – although I don’t know what it says.

I clipped some screenshots and stacked them up so you can see what it looks like, if you’re curious: https://files.catbox.moe/qtsa0d.png (~8MB)

Yep. It’s Garden of Words. I just skimmed through my copy and this image is from about 18 minutes in.

What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

I had somewhat limited time this past week, but wanted to keep working through my backlog of unfinished shows, so I pulled up the short (6 episode) series Looking Up At The Half-Moon and watched that. I think I dropped this after episode 2 the first time I tried it, but finished it this time.

The show is a hospital drama + romance, which seems unusual for anime. I don’t think I’ve watched any other anime set almost entirely in a hospital before – scenes, yes, but not the whole show. I’m not generally into medical drama so I haven’t really gone looking though; this is one I went into blind originally.

Guess which novel shows up again! Yup, it’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. I feel like I’m seeing this book everywhere now, and this show quotes from it directly; one of the characters has pretty much memorized it. Something I noticed from the quotes is that one of the characters (in the novel) is named Campanella – which should ring bells for anyone who’s played the Trails series… No idea if there’s actually a connection there, but I thought it was interesting.

The show strained my suspension of disbelief with how a number of characters acted, but did some things I found interesting as well. The doctor’s characterization did not go in quite the direction I expected, and there were a number of other surprises throughout. Episode 5 in particularly really went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I kind of feel like I should write more about that… but it would all be spoilers.

Between kbin’s issues around the holidays and some of my own issues this month I haven’t been very active lately, but I’m still here.

I finally managed to finish watching Penguindrum! That show was weird. I really don’t have the words to properly express just how weird it was. Did you know that Penguindrum and Utena share a director? I didn’t realize that going into it, but after finishing Penguindrum I felt like giving Utena another try – and realized that fact after looking up some details about it. It was very much an “ohhhh…” kind of moment. I’m not deeply familiar with the details of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, Night on the Galactic Railroad, etc. that were sources of inspiration for the show; so, a lot of it probably went over my head. I still have a few screenshots left that I never got around to posting – here’s a suitably weird one.

Since the last time I commented on here, I’ve also gone back and cataloged all the anime I have. I looked up the starting air date for every show and movie, and then sorted them oldest to newest. That was a bit more involved than I expected it to be and I wasn’t sure how I should handle some entries (e.g. Index/Railgun, Fate/<whatever>, FMA, …) where there’s multiple works that are related in a complex fashion. For movies there were often multiple dates associated with a work so I went with public release dates (in Japan) even if they were shown a few months earlier at a film festival or whatever.

The oldest anime movie I’ve watched is The Castle of Cagliostro from 1979 (which is older than I thought it was), and the oldest series I’ve watched through (if you count it) is The Mysterious Cities of Gold from 1982. (The oldest series I have is the first season of Lupin III from 1971, but I’ve only watched a few episodes and the pilot.) It turns out that the year with the most entries I’ve got in my collection is 2013 with 2012 as a close second; I did a lot of DVD collecting around 2015-ish when I had terrible internet at home, so I suppose that makes sense.

I also realized recently after seeing a post about a nihonga featuring a tiger and a dragon and wondering if it was referenced in ToraDora (didn’t see it in the first episode) that Taiga’s English voice actor (Cassandra Lee Morris) is the same person who voiced Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, Morgana in Persona 5, Ritsu in K-On, etc. That was a bit trippy.

This does not work on kbin.social, unfortunately.

I’ve used Wireshark when I want to inspect the traffic going through my computer. I’ve found it particularly handy for debugging my own networking code. I’ve also used netstat to see active connections and programs listening for traffic when I don’t care about the packet contents specifically.

With that said, can I possibly only allow traffic to and fro from the proxy through my firewall?

Yes. That is what I suggested. If you configure the firewall to only allow traffic to/from the specific IP and port combination of your proxy, other traffic will be blocked.

I should be able to (in theory) inspect traffic too, although I don’t know how far that will take me.

You can do content filtering via a proxy like that, yes. A similar sort of configuration is used on school computers to do things like block adult content, with varying degrees of success. Some ad-blocking techniques work on similar principles.

If I understood your question correctly, you’d run the proxy application (which might be Squid or Apache or some other program) either on the host computer outside the VM or elsewhere on your network. (I’m not well versed on all the ins and outs of setting Firefox up to communicate through a proxy; I just know it can be done.) The proxy would listen for incoming traffic on a specific port you configure. You then tell Firefox (in its network settings) to communicate with the specific IP and port of the proxy instead of talking to web servers directly.

To prevent other programs from communicating, you’d firewall off the VM with iptables (or maybe ufw or something else depending on what you use on your system). You’d set it to drop all traffic going to/from the VM’s network except packets going to or coming from the specific IP/port combinations you want to allow.

This isn’t a bulletproof way to block other apps from talking to the internet – anything that knows about the proxy (or which can hijack/manipulate a program like Firefox that you’ve told about the proxy) could communicate with web servers via the proxy, but depending on your specific concerns it may be good enough.

You could try configuring Firefox to access the internet through a proxy and then block the VM off from everything except the proxy and your network mount with a firewall (outside the VM).

I ran my own email server about 10-ish years ago for a while on a Linode using Postfix and Dovecot similar to what others have mentioned. Took some effort to prevent GMail from just flagging everything I sent as spam, but I was eventually able to do it. I remember having to configure something particular with DNS records. (An SPF TXT record, probably?)

I didn’t end up using it very much and shut it down after a couple years, but it was a good exercise and I learned a lot from doing it.