An orange in an apple orchard
On one hand, it feels like it’s been a terribly unproductive day–the most that’s really gotten done this Sunday is grocery shopping and making coffee. On the other hand, that feeling of “Fuck, sometimes it’s nice to sprawl out on the couch,” does rather summarize the need for rest and relaxation.
Of course, that doesn’t counter the fact that eventually, I still have to get up for one reason or another \o/.
Watching the latest episode of The Too-Perfect Saint, the series continues to be the best anime of the season as far as I’m concerned. Episode 7’s meeting between Philia and King Parnacorta is especially pleasing, given the mask the character typically wears. No to mention Mia’s pursuit of the disposed crown prince; her speech at the end is both poignant and cathartic IMHO.
I’ve enjoyed the series enough at this point that reading the light novels is now on my backlog.
More precisely: what you get when you’re active in the morning, forget to make coffee, and then it’s after lunch by the time you end up getting to enjoy that hot brown morning potion.
In catching up on the season’s anime these past few weeks, I found my attention turning to The Too-Perfect Saint. Honestly, I found the series’ opening episode to be like a salve for an old wound. Not long into “The Saint Who Never Smiled” came that feeling, “Ahh, she’s like me…like I was.” That moment when you realize that Philia’s life makes it so the pains inside can’t be shown, because it will only bring her more suffering if they were to realize what’s underneath; it left me misty-eyed by the time she reached the national border. It’s so close to home.
I remember when I was young, feeling like “To die inside with a straight face” would be the most valuable life skill to master. It’s the memory of that place that makes Philia’s story feel so soothing. In many ways, I recognize the character as a kindred spirit, and more than a few artifacts of my younger self in how she adapts. Odds are, this will be one of the new series I end up finishing.
That it chooses to show not only how the protagonist was treated but her own thoughts behind the veneer, I applaud. It’s essential to the characterization, even more so given the contrast between the vile people who would sell Philia to further their own ends and the sweetness she encounters across the Girtonia-Parnacorta border.
For me, it’s the kind of story, where you root for the character. It tugs at old pains, long since gone but perhaps ones never to be truly forgotten. Looking back, I can’t help but hope that Philia’s story finds a happy ending. Because I know, when you’re in a place like that in life, it can be so hard to imagine what that looks like–and how beautiful it can be to reach the other side. I can’t help but wonder if that will manifest itself in the character’s development, or be simply buried under the tied of the plot, but I plan to find out.
Ya know, I have a feeling that double-rewards day is going to get taken advantage of this time. As a frequent reader of Light Novels, seeing translations of the first two volumes on Amazon, I think my reading queue can use a few additions.
While I’m almost sad to see the era of Baldur’s Gate 3 major patches end, given how they’ve supported and grown the game since early access, but I love the animated short they’ve created to commemorate the final patch.
Especially the ending, and the whole box trick, hehehehehe.
Away from its charger for 4 days of light to medium usage, Shion is only down to 45% charge–I think it’s fairly safe to say the M2 has good battery life.
Makes me recall my first laptop, whose Sempron would generally reach 2 hours and 30 to 50 minutes if one was lucky. At the time, that actually wasn’t bad for an x86 laptop, never mind the third cheapest at Best Buy. It was a machine best used with a charger except for short spurts of being on battery, regardless of system load.
For the most part, I pretty much forget that my MacBook Air even has a battery.
Reading What color is Your Function is perhaps one of the better explanations for why Continuation-passing Style or CPS is actually useful. Whether that’s intentional or merely a side effect, I’m not sure. But, I also can’t help but snicker at the quip, “No one ever for a second thought that a programmer would write actual code like that.”
Some with more of a study in computer science topics might be familiar enough with continuations, to be thinking of them as you reach the middle of the article. But I imagine that it’s a fairly niche topic by now, given Scheme and relatives aren’t that common in the wilds. I remember reading about continuations and CPS as a young programmer, and deciding that as cool as the trick was, it would be best not to write code like that without good reasons–because no average code monkey would understand it.
As Mr. Nystrome phrases it, it’s really bizarro way to represent code. But also one that is quite useful in situations that lend itself well to it.
I also find it a somewhat ironic dichotomy, that one of the things that really fascinated me as a programmer was the concept of Higher-order Functions. Along with Jason Dominus’ book Higher-Order Perl, it’s one of those few concepts that truly altered the way I think about code. Perl in general was a language that made me appreciate the usefulness of many modern notations. Yet at the same time, I will also admit that I find programs that masterbate with endless layers of anonymous functions rather grumble some to parse. Like any good thing, lambdas and closures included, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
One of the side effects of the RAID-mode oops incident has been having to re-rip and encode my Blu-rays and DVDs. At this point, most of the anime collection is basically done, but movies are in the “As needed” case because of the time/effort.
Recently, I was in the mood both, for watching Pacific Rim and taking a look at one of my original reference videos from back when I setup my previous AVC/x264 presets in HandBrake. I.e., Prometheus. In the years since then, I shifted over to an HEVC/x265 and slowly started to adopt it. Most discs since then have been anime or few and far in-between, so not as large a sample set.
So, naturally, this was the preset I chose when ripping Pacific Rim. However, I found myself disappointed in the video quality. Fortunately, I still enjoyed it greatly–as one of my favorite films and one that I haven’t seriously watched in a few years.
In particular, the opening sequence and numerous cases of darker scenes exhibited artifacts. Now, my original AVC preset wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t that bad either. Taking the first chapter, I decided to do a bunch of experiments, focused on the parts most prone to artifacts. The logo’s background fire effect, the star field, and the breach, followed by the more general video quality of the next 5~6 minutes of the opening.
| Encoder | Quality | Size (MB) | Bitrate (Mbit/s) | Time | Comments |
| Blu-ray | N/A | 38,320 | 22.8 | N/A | Reference Blu-ray ripped with MKV. |
| x264 | RF 20 | 1,010 | 14.8 | 06:05 | Reference AVC. Limited artifacts |
| x265 | RF 18 | 949.1 | 13.8 | 13:11 | Like reference AVC |
| RF 20 | 794 | 11.5 | 11:39 | Close to AVC reference. Not as good as RF 18. | |
| RF 22 | 688.1 | 9.8 | 06:56 | Reference HEVC Too many artifacts. | |
| Video Toolbox | CQ 80 | 1,780 | 25.7 | 01:08 | Close to AVC reference. (not as good) |
| CQ 70 | 1,080 | 15.7 | 01:08 | Close to AVC reference. (not as good) | |
| CQ 22 | 448.9 | 6.5 | 01:07 | Like a mid 2000s video game (only better) | |
| CQ 18 | 453.2 | 6.3 | 01:07 | Like a mid 2000s video game (really) | |
| CQ 10 | 424 | 6.1 | 01:07 | Like a mid 2000s video game (too close for comfort) |
The AVC and HEVC reference referred to above, are my presets. For x264, high profile level 4.1 was used with the “medium” preset. For x265 auto was used for both profile/level, with the “fast” preset. The only adjustment for the experiments were the Constant Quality, which for those encoders is a logarithmic scale where higher numbers are worse quality.
For Video Toolbox, I couldn’t find any documentation about the scale but the tests obviously show higher numbers are higher quality. In each case, the “medium” preset was used.
Based on what I found, I’m kind of disappointed with the x265 cases. Perhaps it’s time to experiment with kicking it to the medium preset or enabling a deblocking filter to compensate. For the most part though, the quality is there sufficiently if comparable bitrates are thrown at it. The downside of course is that basically doubles the encoding time from x264.
The Video Toolbox case is more impressive, but also not so useful. I believe the M2’s encoder is a lot better than the ‘Bridge and early ‘Lake era Intel encoders. But in much the same way, they just don’t serve my purposes. To make my M2 achieve good enough quality for streaming, the file sizes balloon to near the original Blu-ray–so may as well not bother transcoding in that case. But still, we’re talking about a speed of 190~200 fps encoding versus about 30-40 fps encoding. I think it’s better suited for video editing than streaming video from my server to my TV.
The difference though is considerable. At the uber quality levels, it’s still subpar for Netflix/YouTube quality at this point, versus a Blu-ray reference.
Partly though, I’m tempted to revert back to using x264 and partly tempted to just leave it at Blu-ray. I didn’t really change from AVC to HEVC to save on disk space, so much as I did it because the more modern codec was now widely available on most of my hardware. The kind of perspective that AVC is still fine, but I assume devices will hold onto HEVC support longer once AVC becomes to new MPEG-2 :D.
There’s also the option to just stick with MakeMKVs output. My entire Blu-ray collection probably represents about 4 TB to 5 TB of data at this point, and ahem, it’s an 8 TB storage array with 6 TB free. My storage concerns were pretty much solved two sets of hard drives ago, back when my server’s storage was made up of 3 TB drives rather than 8s. The playback concerns, well, much like HEVC capable devices becoming the norm, most of my devices have less concern with Blu-ray quality bitrates at this point.
Upside of testing surround sound with Godzilla Minus One: it’s got everything from dialogue to roars and explosions.
Downside: “I must not turn an entire wall into a projector screen just to enjoy TV…”
😂
The amusing nature of memory consumption and the modern web. Going by Activity Monitor’s memory page as a measure, wikipedia is pretty darn memory efficient at a couple hundred megs–for a website that’s about 95% content aside from the CMS, I’d call that’s pretty good. For sake of a value, one of the random pages loaded were around 180 – 200 MB.
By contrast my own website (also mostly content aside from the CMS) and Google’s home page, burn around 400-500 MB. Which to me, feels excessive, but to be fair, part of why I started to believe in whole-lotta-memory designs was in the 2010s when I realized 2 GB was not enough to surf the web anymore, unless you loved trashing hard drives. Most content-heavy rather than ad heavy websites, fit that description as well.
Now for comparison? A few common news sites that you’ll see just about any compute nerd visit: around 1.5 – 2 GB for basically any article and easily reaching 3 – 4 GB in activity monitor. Largely depending on the amount of ads, and whether or not it’s a website that endeavors to load the content first. So basically, the modern websites consume so much RAM that we should be charging websites for the resources their advertising consumes rather than supporting them by not running ad blockers 😜
Ya know, if you just throw enough videos modern web advertising may be to computer memory usage what the pop up ad was to the 1990s web browsing experience. Seriously, web ads were Really A Lot Worse Back Then ™ when actual pop up windows were allowed.
At this point, I think the only thing that consumes more RAM than the modern web is working with high resolution graphics and artificial intelligence with loads of parameters, lol.