It took about a minute for my comment from reddthat to show up here, but it looks like it made it through ok, so inbound comments are working. (Note: replying to myself from my kbin account)

Unless I’m missing something it looks like it doesn’t use Denuvo? (Steam lists a custom EULA but I don’t see Denuvo listed.)

Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven’t kept up with most of mbin’s specifics.

Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information…

Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.

You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text – but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the “@ user @ instance” syntax – e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties – e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called “kbinMeta” and this magazine as search results – but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you’re copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance’s local version of a thread and that isn’t the original source it probably won’t find it. (I’ve had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)

@piotrsikora @ernest – FYI searching for this thread by the exact title “Multiple questions regarding Kbin” does not find it currently but searching text like “as a new Kbin/Mbin user” will find it. Is that a bug?

@piotrsikora @ernest – Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.

Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).

You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.

To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.

Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I’m not sure how to post them intentionally since I don’t use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.

Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?

It’s fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/fedia@fedia.io maybe? Sorry if that doesn’t link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )

On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?

DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.

You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user’s profile and clicking “Send Message” on the right side.

Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn’t work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error – is this a bug?)

Hope that helps!

@piotrsikora @ernest – this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn’t see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io’s side or on kbin.social’s side)?

@piotrsikora – FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.

Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind – with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.

I’m assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side – 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you’re unfamiliar) – but it’d be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what’s going on rather than guessing.

In particular, it’d be helpful to know:

• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
• Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies – or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
• Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all – knowing if there’s federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between “no one saw this”, “no one liked this”, and “people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn’t made it to kbin yet”)
• Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
• Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?

Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?

Thank you!

This is from ~54 mins into Tokyo Godfathers. (I just skimmed my copy to double check even though I recognized the character; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it!)

That’s an issue in older versions of Lemmy that was fixed in the 0.19.x releases, I think. lemmy.world still seems to be on 0.18.5

Discussion on Github from last year: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3965

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

Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

Hmm, so federated downvotes from Lemmy are public now on mbin, not just local downvotes and federated upvotes. Interesting. Does mbin-mbin downvote federation work? kbin doesn’t federate downvotes to you. (I checked – for science! – but switched back to an upvote afterwards.)

artificial gestation

The word “matrix” literally means “womb” in its older sense.

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.

It’s not a GUI library, but Jupyter was pretty much made for the kind of mathematical/scientific exploratory programming you’re interested in doing. It’s not the right tool for making finished products, but is intended for creating lab notebooks that contain executable code snippets, formatted text, and visual output together. Given your background experience and the libraries you like, it seems like it’d be right up your alley.

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)

Gundress (1999)

I was just thinking about the image resizing thing again when I saw your message notice pop up. Another option for preview is a web browser. A minimal HTML page with some JS to refresh the image would avoid the image resize on reload problem, and gives you some other interesting capabilities. Python ships with a kind of meh (slow and quirky), but probably sufficient HTTP server (python3 -m http.server) if you’d prefer to load the preview on a different computer on your LAN entirely (e.g. cellphone / tablet / … ) for example.

A simple HTML file for this would be something like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      html, body {
        background-color: #000000;
      }
    </style>
    <script>
      function reload()
      {
          let img = document.getElementById("preview");
          let url = new URL(img.src);
          url.searchParams.set("t", Date.now());    // cache breaker; force reload
          img.src = url.href;
      }

      function start()
      {
          setInterval(reload, 500);
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body onload="start()">
    <img id="preview" src="output.png">
  </body>
</html>

Regarding input from a gamepad – I’ve had some similar ideas before but haven’t really had much success using a gamepad artistically outside some limited things where I either wrote the entire program or was able to feed data into programs that accepted input over the network (e.g. via HTTP and which I wrote a custom adapter for). It’s been a long time since I’ve tried anything in that space though, and it might be possible to do something interesting by trying to make the system see the combination of a gamepad stick as relative mouse motion and trigger as pen pressure. I’m not quite sure how to go about doing that, but I’ll let you know if I find a way to do it.

The Wikipedia article for hqx points out that an implementation exists as a filter in ffmepg.

You can run a command line conversion of e.g. a PNG -> PNG using hqx upscaling like: ffmpeg -i input.png -filter_complex hqx=4 output.png

The =4 is for 4x upscaling. The implementation in my version of ffmpeg supports 2x, 3x, and 4x upscaling.

As a quick and dirty way to get semi-live preview, you can do the conversion with make and use watch make to try to rebuild the conversion periodically. (You can use the -n flag to increase the retry rate if the default is too long to wait.) make will exit quickly if the file hasn’t changed. Save the image in your editor and keep an image viewer that supports auto-reload on change open to see “live” preview of the output. (e.g. eog can do it, although it won’t preserve size of the image – at least not in the copy I have, anyway; mine’s a bit old though.)

Sample Makefile:

output.png : input.png Makefile
	ffmpeg -y -i input.png -filter_complex hqx=4 output.png

Note the -y option to tell ffmpeg to overwrite the file; otherwise it will stop to ask you if you want to overwrite the file every time you save, and in case you’re not familiar with Makefiles, you need a real tab (not spaces) on the line with the command to run.

ffmpeg also appears to support xbr (with =n option as well) and super2xsai if you want to experiment with those too.

I’m not sure if this will actually do what you want artistically, but the existing implementations in ffmpeg makes it easy to experiment with.

What upside down thing with a banana??

There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I’ve seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I’m guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily – it’s easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the “bottom” myself.)

What back bit?

There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

Also…veins?

I’m not sure what they mean either.

I don’t know if there are any existing implementations that work well enough yet for it to actually be relaxing, but it might be possible to set up a hands-free IF experience by hooking up speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools to the game.