Atelier Shiori

Much more than crafting Ice Cream.

A Week of Anti-Consumer Practices – Twitterrific Screws Over Paying Users

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As expected, it seems that this week is full of anti-consumer practices. Besides the Game Freak stating that not all Pokemon will be transferable in their new games, Twitterrific pulls an anti-consumer practice by forcing a major update and putting ads back in for users. Now, users who payed $7.99 to remove the ads are greeted with ads. To remove them, you have to pay a monthly or yearly subscription or pay $30, which is a 73% increase.

I understand that developers need to make money as development is not free. I’m an iOS and Mac developer for now. I rely on donations and App Store sales to cover development costs. However, there is no excuse to force an update and then put a ransom for users who paid to more money. This anti-consumer practice shows that you only care about money and you are willing to screw over paying customers. Even the excuses the owners said that they won’t be able to notify users to upgrade if they released the new version as a separate app as said in a tweet.

This is inexcusable. I have paid two different upgrades for Twitterrific for iOS during their heyday and now they want more. No, I will not accept this slimy business practice. If they don’t want this backlash, they should just release the new version as a separate app. Then put a dismissible one-time notification notifying users there is a new major upgrade. Then, you wouldn’t receive the backlash you are having now and you might have more people willing to pay. As a result of this, I switched my iOS Twitter client to Tweetbot.

Now they pulled this anti-consumer practice, I will be boycotting all applications developed by Iconfactory since they only care about money instead of making paying customers happy. I advise everyone to call them out of this practice as well and boycott their products as well.

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Book Scanner or Manga on EBooks? – Fujitsu Scansnap SV600 First Impressions

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For awhile, I have accumulated a bunch of physical manga when I started getting interested in reading them. I didn’t buy digital since I didn’t have a good tablet computer. Also Surface Pro 2 is cumbersome to use as a tablet due to it being heavy. When I finally obtained an iPad Pro 9.7 first generation, digital manga is now viable. It’s a lot more convenient to read on the iPad as I don’t have to carry the books around and risk them getting damaged. I find out that most of the Manga Time Kirara titles are available through CDJapan through their e-book service. Still, I managed to also set up EBook Japan as well so I can also obtain titles that is not on the CDJapan service.

With that, what do I do with the physical copies? In the past, scanning them through a flatbed scanner is just too inconvenient and slow. While automatic feed scanners give better quality scans, most don’t want to cut up his or her manga collection. This is where overhead scanner comes in. While they are expensive in the past, they have gone down in price. The Fujitsu Scansnap SV600 is probably the best, although there are cheaper ones such as Czur ET16, but malware concerns (software requires malware protection to be disabled and run in administrator mode, which is very bad), communication to Chinese servers and other issues is why I didn’t consider it. Also, having the finger removal and deskewing done automatically isn’t good. I would rather have some control if the software didn’t get it right.
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The Intel X99 Hackintosh Experience, Two Years Later

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Back in early 2017, I decided to build a Hackintosh for some reason since I want something more powerful. I decide to take the x99 route. I considered building something around the Intel x99 platform back in 2016 since there is more cores and memory expandability.

Of course, installing it have become easier since the early days when you have to mess around with kexts and custom kernels while hoping a system update doesn’t break the whole system. Nowadays, it’s trivial and you only need to create a normal macOS installer to a flash drive on an actual Mac and then plop the Clover bootloader. Afterwards, you will have a working system, that is if you use a consumer Intel platform.

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Gacha Results – Kirara Fantasia – Kirima Sharo Banner

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I’m at it again as Kirara Fantasia finally adds the remaining girls from the main cast of Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka.Aside from adding Chiya, there is also her childhood friend, Sharo which has a crush on Rize. She is my favorite character from the series. With that in mind, I wanted to summon her.

These are the official Gacha rates in the game. Note that there is no pity meter in this game. As always, a single roll is completely useless and you will only get results from 10 rolls, which requires 400 star stones (300 for the first roll on the banner). With a 10 roll, you are guaranteed to have at least one summon that is four stars or above.

  • ????? – 2%
  • ???? – 12%
  • ???- 86%

Luckily, I got her on the 5th 10 roll. The results are as follows.

Rarity Count Percentage
????? 1 2.0%
???? 5 10.0%
??? 44 88.0%
Total 50

Note: Your milage may vary and it may take more or less rolls to get her.

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Gacha Results – Kirara Fantasia – Archive/Sugar Banner

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In most instances, Gacha mobage games can become brutal with very low rates when it comes to the rarest cards. Sure, you may get lucky and pull a super rare card on the first try or be very unlucky and not get anything, requiring several rolls. I have to admit that I was aiming for Sugar in this limited time banner. I guess either one is fine since I don’t want to spend more time grinding and maxing out the girls’ relationship level, which will net you 120 star stones.

The official rates for this game shows as follows:

  • ????? – 2%
  • ???? – 12%
  • ???- 86%

There is no pity meter in this game. As a result, one rolls are completely useless as you will mostly get common 3 star cards, which are pretty much useless, besides the beginning of the game. You want 4 or 5 stars since you can evolve them. 4 star cards can go up to level 90 after limit breaking and evolving. 4 star character cards are easier to get since they are given out for free in limited time events. For every 10 roll on a banner, you will at least get at least 1 4 star or 5 star card. The first 10 roll costs 300 star stones and 400 afterwards.

By taking consideration of statistics, for 100 rolls, you should at least receive 2 five star cards.

Here is the actual rates from recording each 10 roll. This excludes single rolls from summon tickets. I done 8 ten rolls.

The actual data is below.

Rarity Count Percentage
????? 1 1.3%
???? 14 17.5%
??? 65 81.3%

While Sugar didn’t come home, at least I got the other. I want to save the other potential earned stones for the next event if I had this bad of luck next time.

Of course, you can become really lucky, as I did with the Sansha Sanyou banner and getting a 5 star Nishikawa Youko on the first 10 roll.

Rarity Count Percentage
????? 1 10.0%
???? 2 20.0%
??? 7 70.0%
Total 10
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Jumping Ship or Why I am Ditching the Surface Pro After Five Years

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After 5 years of using the Surface Pro, I’m going back to the iPad.

Back in 2010, I bought the first iPad when it first released. While it can’t really replace a laptop computer,  it was good for web browsing, writing short documents, reading eBooks and PDFs, and gaming. Also, these new tablets last longer since they used ARM processors opposed to Intel or AMD processors found in laptops. Furthermore, they were optimized for touch compared to desktop operating systems. This gives a better experience compared to trying to touch traditional user interface elements found on Windows or Mac OS X.
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Goodbye Nvidia, Hello AMD Radeon

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It’s official. I have went over to the red team for video cards. It doesn’t come at a surprise given Nvidia’s anti-competitive behavior with the whole Geforce Partner Program fiasco, which they ended up killing after massive opposition. Aside from dealing with terrible Nvidia Web Drivers on macOS High Sierra and overall glitches with my eGPU with a Geforce GTX 980 Ti, it was the last straw. I eventually sold my EVGA Geforce GTX 1070 Hybrid  and got back 86% (excluding shipping costs) I originally paid for it back in early June.

Given that Apple have a strong bias for AMD Radeon graphics cards since they don’t seem to like Nvidia either, I had to go to the Red team. However, it’s going to be expensive because of those stupid Cryptominers buying up all the AMD Radeon GPUs to mine fake digital currency that probably doesn’t worth anything. Thankfully, I managed to get these two cards pictured above close or below MSRP thanks to Crypto crashing. They are:

  • MSI Amor Radeon RX 580 8GB – Bought this in mid April 2018 for $280, which this particular model originally retailed for $240. It’s an impulse buy since I didn’t want to deal with the Nvidia Web Driver issues anymore. It was apparently used for mining for Ethereum for at least 3 months, before the person realized they will never make the money back. It’s his loss. I simply re-flashed the original BIOS and it worked nicely on macOS and plays all the games I usually play well. There is one problem. Trying to use any application that uses Apple H264 encoder like Final Cut Pro X would lock up the machine since it relies on the iGPU, which the Intel X99 platform doesn’t have. Since the hardware encoder on the RX 580 isn’t compatible, it just causes issues for those programs. So, it’s back to the drawing board.
  • PowerColor AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 – It’s a known fact that Vega cards are a laughing-stock of the gaming community due to its disappointing performance to watt compared to Nvidia’s offerings. The RX Vega 56 almost takes as much energy as a Nvidia Maxwell Geforce card only producing slightly above GTX 1070 performance. However, those darn miners bought up all the cards, making them insanely expensive (over $700) when it supposed to retail for $399 (currently, it goes for $500). Thankfully, I got mine for $385 and it was only used for mining for only a few weeks apparently. Given how clean the card is and that the BIOS is not modified, it’s believable.

So how is it like to go to the Red Team? The Vega 56 works flawlessly on my computer as H264 hardware accelerated encoding and decoding works flawlessly. Video exports a lot quicker on the Vega 56 opposed to the RX 580. As for gaming performance, it pretty much matches the GTX 1070 or slightly better. I haven’t fully benchmarked the card in 3DMark, but it’s definitely fast. However, I notice the card’s fans runs a bit louder, thanks to the reference cooler.

As for the RX 580, I only needed to upgrade to the latest macOS and run the script to make it work with Thunderbolt 1. For the most part, it works better than the 980 Ti as the computer no longer freezes up after several hours along with other glitches. This should be enough to keep my non-retina MacBook Pro 2012 15 inch running a bit longer until I can afford a new MacBook Pro.

In short, is it worth it to ditch Nvidia? Definitely given how nasty Nvidia’s business practices have been lately. Hopefully AMD will build a more competitive card with Navi that can actually compete so Nvidia can’t abuse their large market share.

Plans to Create a Mascot Character

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Back in January 2017, I planned on creating a Mascot character which will serve as my blog’s (Chikorita157’s Anime Blog) main identity and replace all those header images. Of course, the idea didn’t go anywhere since I do not have the funding for it. A year later and some crypto mining on the side later, I think I have some funds saved up to make this happen.

Recently, I created the concept character design in Custom Maid 3D2 since the expansive character customization can at least give me the an idea for an initial character design. The final character design will look similar as in the face, hair and figure, but her outfit will differ in the final design. I plan to use some reference material for the outfit. It can be outfits worn by other characters as a reference for the final design.

Aside from that, I have to vectorize the initial 2D Anime-style design before sharing them, so there aren’t any pictures yet. However, I spent the time to write the initial character profile, which I will share.

If you have any ideas, feel free to share them in the comments or on Twitter.

Name: Hanamori Rie  (花守 理恵)

Birthday: May 14

Age: 18

Background:

Hanamori Rie is a cat girl who comes from the Kansai region. She is born from a middle-class family. Both of her parents work in technology and have degrees in Computer Science. Rie is currently a freshman college student majoring in Information Technology. She doesn’t have many friends since she is shy, except a few, mostly with other girls around her age. She loves using her MacBook Pro. On her free time, she plays video games on Playstation 4 and the Nintendo Switch.

Rie spends most of her time on her computer writing on her blog, messing around with computers, playing musical instruments and gardening. She is usually seen wearing cute clothing with a lot of frills, including Gothic Lolita fashion.

Hair Color: Dark Blue

Eye Color: Blue

Weight: 46 kg (101 lbs)

Height: 149 cm (4 ft, 11in)

Three Sizes: 87 cm, 59cm, 80cm

Personality

Hobbies:

  • Gardening
  • Playing Musical Instruments
  • Computers and Programming
  • Video games
  • Watching anime and reading manga, especially magical girl and yuri genre

Skills:

  • Ability to speak and understand Japanese and some English
  • Coding in several programing languages
  • Playing Piano and the Clarinet

Favorite Food: Onigiri

Favorite Things:

  • Japanese Pop Music, including idol music
  • Apple computers and iPhones
  • Yuri in general

Dislikes:

OMake: Märchen Mädchen Production Woes

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Kyouko walked into Rie’s bedroom. She saw Rie crying in front of the computer. It appears that she watched episode 9 of Märchen Mädchen on Crunchyroll. She is a big fan of this show since she likes the characters and magical girl shows in general.

Kyouko: What is the matter Rie?

Rie: The animation in the ninth episode of Märchen Mädchen looks so terrible that it made me cry. Poor Hazuki-chan.

Kyouko: Let me see. It can’t be that bad.

Several minutes later…

Kyouko: What is wrong with Hazuki’s eyes?

Rie: I don’t know!

Few minutes later…

Rie: That is like the worst animated scene I have ever seen in anime since I last saw Ore, Twintails ni Narimasu.

Kyouko: Oh my! That looks terrible.

Rie: I know! It’s sad because I really enjoy this show.

I hope you enjoy this screen cap story. I always do an April Fools prank, but I can’t seem to think of one this year. After messing around with the photo mode of a game involving maids, and of course allows people to create female characters from anime.

If you haven’t read my editorial regarding the production issues with Märchen Mädchen, it’s on my main blog. I have to admit that I enjoy the story, but it’s sad to see the animation fall apart. Hazuki does not deserve this mistreatment.

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The Continuing Comment Woes

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Since 2016, I have been struggling in getting more comments on my main blog at chikorita157.com. My main blog focuses primarily on Anime. Sure, I overreacted in April 2013 when I complained about the lack of comments. I basically cried wolf since 2013 is a very good year for comments with 637 made in total. The problem didn’t become worse until 2016 . Last year, only 299 comments were made, which made me become very frustrated. After all, discussion is what makes a blog a blog. Not only that, allows me to potentially come up with new ideas for posts. This is probably one of the reasons I didn’t write many editorials last year.

After 2015, things took a turn for the worse. It’s understandable that anime blogging is not what it used to be as many of the blogs. Looking through my blog roll, most of the blogs are in fact inactive or no longer exist. Given that this month have been a terrible month with only 11 comments, one of the lowest amount of comments per month aside from June 2017, which only have 8, it upsets me. Seeing the lack of comments in my stats is very demoralizing, especially when I compare myself with other blogs who receive more comments per post. This also doesn’t help with my real life issues that I am still dealing with aside from the lack of social interaction over the past year and a half.  This gives me a sense of feeling that nobody is really reading my content and that I am wasting my time. Believe me, I enjoy sharing my thoughts about anime, but not when there is no comments or discussion.

Something needs to be done to prevent myself from experiencing burnout eventually if this trend doesn’t change. I want to discourage likes and encourage more commenting. Of course, that won’t work since you can’t disable likes on the WordPress.com reader. Subscribers can still leave likes even if likes are disabled in Jetpack. Even commenting on other posts on other blogs, nowadays, not many leave comments back as they used to. I am left with just being lucky just to receive a few comments per months. This is not helpful with my well-being since it gets somewhat lonely besides talking with my family.

You can help resolve my frustrations at least commenting on some of my posts that you find interesting. The current goal is to have at least 25-30 comments per month (including replies I will make on the blog). If you have a blog, I may comment back, if I can leave a constructive one and not for the sake of doing it.

In short, I do not enjoy complaining about this issue. I hope things will get better from here.

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