Tasunke's Random Ramblings

As some of you may already be aware, Konami released a new DS dating sim game this fall known as “Love Plus.” Konami is, of course, famous in this market for their Tokimeki Memorial series. The difference with this game, however, is that it continues after the player has successfully wooed the girl. (This is likely the source of the use of “plus” in the title.) From what I understand, the bulk of the game is interacting with the girl with her being the player’s girlfriend.

The website “boingboing” recently posted an article entitled, “Advisor: My husband has a virtual girlfriend,” in which a Japanese couple living in San Francisco was interviewed about the game and if/how it has affected their relationship.
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Xerox has announced that they have developed a procedure to print with “low-temperature” silver ink using ink-jet technology on a variety of surfaces. What makes this new technique so different and promising is that existing techniques required high temperatures, which would melt materials such as plastics, and/or a so-called “clean room” environment. This new development requires neither.

This is the sort of breakthrough that the RFID industry has been waiting for. With this, it becomes practical to print RFID tags on everything, as costs have been dramatically lowered. According to PC Mag, Xerox claims that this could bring costs for RFID tags down from where they are at about a dollar (US) or so, down to roughly a penny each. In the research I’ve done on RFID in the past, this sort of drop has been seen as critical in the development of item-level tagging.

If this really takes off (and I do believe it will), this could cause alot of changes in retail. Everything from better inventory management due to “smart shelves” that can tell how much/how many of an item still remains on them, to effortless checkout, where you just push your cart through a reader and it rings up all your items at once. Videos after the jump.
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Wow, what a poignant video! Truly a great work of art, and I felt I just had to share it. Found this by way of Kurofune through Google Reader.

The video has been reposted quite a few times on Youtube under the title “Romancing Your Soul”, but I believe I’ve found the original post, which calls it “Lost Generation,” and that is the one I have embedded here. It was an entry for AARP’s U@50 video contest, and placed second in that contest.
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Apparently the manufacturer of Time-Warner cable’s default modem/router combo, SMC, is run by a pack of incompetent morons. Yes, I am using such strong words because they are needed to express the depth of the stupidity in how this router is setup.

First off, the default setup for these routers (model SMC8014WG-SI) is WEP encryption. Anyone who knows anything about wireless networks will tell you that WEP is pretty much useless. They can be cracked within minutes. However, it gets even better. There’s a normal user account that can only access certain options, supposedly. However, the administrative functions are apparently only restricted from non-admin users by HIDING THEM WITH JAVASCRIPT! Hence the double facepalm above. Words fail me at this point, so let me just quote the guy who found this, Dave, from his blog.
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Sorry I didn’t get to this post until now, but midterms have been killer. ^^; I went to Halko Momoi‘s Osaka concert on her “No Answer, No Live!” concert tour last Saturday. It was quite fun, though tiring, as it was standing room only at the venue, so I was on my feet for several hours.
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A notice was posted on the ai sp@ce website on the 16th with regards to the (apparently) widespread client crash issue.

Essentially, they acknowleged, as of 6:05 PM that day, that there was a bug that was causing clients to crash after logging in and selecting their avatar. They also stated that they are currently investigating the cause of the crashes and would announce when they have tracked down the cause of the bug. As far as I can tell at this time, they haven’t put out that announcement yet, so it’s likely they’re still working on it.

This is likely related to the watergun shooting game, which appears to be quite popular and is putting a huge strain on the ai sp@ce servers (as I reported on earlier).

Full text and translation of the announcement after the jump.
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Update: It seems that the shooting game has been temporarily taken offline. After the server came back up from maintenance, the woman you have to speak to in order to warp to the shooting game lobby is gone.

So, I logged on to ai sp@ce today after the weekely maintenance and managed to get a round of the new watergun shooting game in. I didn’t manage to get any screenshots, but it was fun. ^^ A review with screenshots will be forthcoming, but not until after they fix the server issues they’re having.

After my one round, my client started acting funny, and eventually dropped me back to the login screen. When I logged back in, my charadoll was there for a few seconds, then disappeared, and I had to go out of the lobby (into the UDX building main lobby) to get her to re-appear. However, she disappeared again when I tried to re-enter the shooting game lobby.

A couple more disconnects later, I managed to get back to the shooting game lobby with my charadoll, but again, she disappeared. Then came across a message from management about 10:30 PM local time.
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So I went to the bookstore today and picked up a few magazines. I was scanning over the magazines, not really knowing what to look for when I noticed that this one was including a free figure with it. This one happened to be Dengeki Bunko Magazine (電撃文庫MAGAZINE). Having a significant lack of figures here, and curious about this magazine, I decided to pick up a copy.

This figure appears to be an exclusive to Dengeki Bunko, and this is affirmed by the figure holding a copy of Dengeki Bunko in her hands. More pictures after the jump.
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ai sp@ce has announced plans for a 「公開テスト」, or “test open to the public,” for the anticipated watergun shooting game. I translated that as “open beta” for the title of this post. ;) If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I would suggest checking out my other ai sp@ce posts for more details.

In short, what’s been revealed so far about the mechanics of the game includes the fact that it’s a game where you control your charadoll to shoot at enemies with a watergun. In addition, if the enemies shots hit your charadoll, they knock off parts of her clothing. Also, your charadoll can gain various powerups by cosplaying. Different costumes give different effects, and require sets of in-game items to be equipped as clothing on the charadoll to give the powerups.

The announcement post about the test was on September 29th, and is after the jump.
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Well, seems I didn’t manage to get to this one before the next one was posted, but almost. ^^; Anyway, this time, the post is about 「属性コスプレ」, literally, “attribute cosplay,” but I believe it’s short for “moe attribute cosplay.” In this case, it’s cosplay of moe stereotypes. These stereotypes are witch, maid, female teacher, miko, catgirl, doggirl, and gothic lolita (goth-loli). These different cosplay sets give your charadoll various powerups, each set providing a different powerup. Translation of the post starts after the jump.
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