AutoRename - keeping anime ordered.

OCD related.

I can get a little bit obsessive about keeping things ordered. I must have spent a fair bit of time making sure all my music is tagged correctly, for example, and I have fairly elaborate tagging and sorting systems for images that I save. Anime is no exception, and I feel the need to rename every file I download to something that looks a bit more ordered. Since that takes a fair bit of effort, especially when I download a whole series at a time, I made a small program to rename the files for me so I could spend less time being autistic and more time watching my chinese girl cartoons.

The topic of organising anime has come up a few times on /a/, and I get the impression that there are other people who might find this sort of thing useful. I'm a bit hesitant to post it though, since it was only really designed for personal use and has had no testing or anything like that. On top of that, I'm a complete amateur whose only instruction on programming has been from high school Visual Basic classes back in the day.

Nevertheless, I tidied it up a bit and uploaded it to Mediafire. It's called AutoRename (a program to auto rename anime that's called AutoRename, lol originality) and it requires Windows and the .NET Framework 3.5, which you'll already have if you run Windows 7. The idea is that you drag anime (or other video files) onto the window, it suggests new names for them, and then you hit the "Rename All" button if you're happy with the suggestions, or you can fiddle with the options to make the suggested name more suited to your taste. You can also add it to the Explorer right-click menu for mkv, avi and mp4 files if you want.

If you have any feedback please comment or email me, even if just to say that it crashes on opening.

Games everywhere

It can get boring when you're on holidays or otherwise haven't got a lot to do, but I've managed to bounce from distraction to distraction without much downtime in the middle. As I mentioned last post, I'm still working my way through Genius of Sappheiros although that's been put on the backburner this last week since Skyrim was released. I didn't care much for Oblivion, or at least my interest waned pretty quickly after closing the millionth Oblivion gate in a row, but I've been loving Skyrim so far. I've been rolling with the most generic character build ever (1h+shield warrior) but it's still been fun, although I feel way too overpowered. Seriously, dragons are a minor annoyance, and are more of a chore than a challenge. I'm considering bumping the difficulty up but from what I hear that only changes HP, which could just drag things out. Either way, if you're interested in playing, I'd suggest you try a mage or a rogue character to get the most out of it.

But my plans to keep questing in Skyrim have been thrown into jeopardy since I just received a Dota 2 invite. A guy I met on WC3 Dota and still keep in contact with got an invite with two extra keys, and was generous enough to throw one my way. It's still downloading, but it's about to finish and I can't wait to try it out.

I really can't see me doing anything much else for the next few days.

Rising up from the ashes

A few weeks ago I abruptly decided to forgo all non-productive internet usage so I could focus on my upcoming finals. I didn't manage to stick to this perfectly, but I did completely avoid blogs for that time.  Now, though, my uni year is finally over, and I can spend as much time as I want on internet stuff without feeling guilty about it. This happy state of affairs will continue until early January, so I've got quite a decent holiday ahead of me.

But it's not like I managed to do nothing but study for the last few weeks. I've been playing a bit of The Genius of Sappheiros, a Touhou doujin game released a couple of Comikets ago. It's recently gotten an English translation, and I just downloaded it and started playing a few days ago. It's pretty fun so far, though I'm still in the early stages.

The burning hells are populated mostly by giant feet.

The game's a dungeon crawler with turn-based combat when you run into an enemy group. You can also sneak by them but then you miss out on their delicious experience. The boss fights can be pretty tricky but dying isn't really a big deal. You lose any items you'd picked up from your current run of the dungeon, but you keep all the experience you gained.

The storyline has all the subtlety and complexity that you'd expect from a Touhou game: A strange mist is making Youkai sick and Reimu is going to find out who, by beating up everyone in Gensokyo until someone admits to it.

The sprite art is great, as is the music (as expected of a Touhou game). I'd recommend it if you've got some time that you need to get rid of.


Another time-waster that I've recently taken to is the live broadcasts on Nico Nico Douga. I can't even explain why I like these, but there's something cathartic about listening to Japanese girls doing stuff. In some ways it's the "cute girls doing cute things" idea taken further. A lot of them do imitations of anime characters (the K-On girls are especially common), some of them sing with varying degrees of skill, and some just talk about their day. It sounds all sorts of stupid just typing this out, but it can be great to have on in the background when trying to do other things.

Notably, I haven't been able to waste any time on Dota 2 because I still don't have a bloody beta key. It's a bit frustrating to see some people I know get keys just because they begged constantly until someone gave them one. I refuse to do that, but I'd still love to play, especially now that I'm on holidays. Valve claim they'll be sending out new waves pretty frequently now though, so with a bit of luck I'll be in before too long.

And now I'm going to go and catch up with anime from this season. There's a surprising number of shows that I'm really enjoying, and have me actively looking forward to the next episode, so it seems like a pretty good season so far.