Month: April 2015

Line on Linux

April 26, 2015
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Naver’s LINE is basically the mobile communication platform in Japan at this point. Teens aren’t sharing email addresses anymore, it’s their LINE usernames. Just a while ago, we had new recruits coming to the studio for training, and they’d all write down their names, phone numbers and LINE names.

Obviously I use it too. Thing is, it’s not so obvious how to use it on a computer. There is an official client for Windows that works, but there’s none for Linux. I hate writing long messages on my phone, so the effort of having to compile a Pidgin plugin for the LINE protocol is worth the effort.

It was quite an effort too, since I purged my system a while back, and I had no dev packages, or even git installed. Needless to say, it took almost an hour to get everything up and running. Most time taken by the Apache Thrift install, that would keep failing with C++ when using the 0.9.1 tarball, no matter what I did.

Luckily the git latest worked fine, and the plugin seems to work okay too at this point.

Using people

April 25, 2015
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I might’ve just read too many crime novels, or maybe it’s just that it was stated loud and clear in Hyouka, but when someone tells me that they are counting on me, or that they trust me, I can’t not feel that they’re (just) trying to manipulate me.

I can’t really put my finger on what feels so off about it. Especially since it’s usually people I know and have worked with for a long time telling me so, it could as well be a totally innocent, honest expression of their trust. Yet, it feels so wrong.

Why?

Movies

April 23, 2015
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Today at work the topic of flashbombs came up. Now the only thing I know about flashbombs is that Inara uses one in Serenity when Mal fights the Alliance agent at the training house. I suggested that I’ll bring the movie to use as a reference, so when I got home I ended up rewatching it. Again.

There aren’t many movies that I saw more than one time. There are plenty that were memorable (like Cloverfield for example), but I can only think of two from “recent years” that I watched more than once: Serenity and the 2009 Star Trek movie.

Of course there is a good bunch of movies that I grew up on, watching them over and over again, such as Mary Poppins, Home Alone 3, Beauty and the Beast, Die Hard or Little Nemo (the Slumberland one, not the fish)… However, I watched these before I’d consciously start to look for and watch movies.

Tank

April 6, 2015
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What it means to play a tank is quite apparently not all so self-evident to certain players. (Obviously I’m talking about the wonderful bronzies I’m stuck with for the time being.) A tank is not defined by its item set. You can have all the armor in the world, but if you don’t act like a tank you’ll be just an useless XP hog on your team.

It’s actually quite similar to the job of the support. You must make sure that the enemy team doesn’t kill your carries. Roughly put, the support’s job is that the enemy team can’t kill the carries, while the tank’s job is that they won’t.

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