Rileks yang Malah Jadi Nggak Rileks -- tl;dr

OK for this time I'll post in Indonesian. It's only something about my campus' local internet forum, and most likely won't be of your interest.

Buat yang pernah ikut forum internet macam Kaskus, Indowebster atau AOIndonesia tentu tau soal 'pangkat' dan 'jabatan' anggota forum. Ada yang bersifat fungsional seperti 'moderator' atau 'admin', ada yang berdasarkan reputasi, seperti 'newbie', 'addict', 'veteran' dan nama-nama semacamnya, biasanya ditentukan dari jumlah post atau kontribusi lain, misalnya donasi.

Kelas-kelas user di forum itu jelas, seperti yang kita ketahui, punya tujuan mulia: memancing anggota untuk meramaikan forum. Dan kita ketahui juga bahwa di dunia ini ada orang-orang yang haus kedudukan, haus akan reputasi sehingga mereka menghalalkan segala cara untuk meraih yang mereka inginkan.

Dan dari semua kekonyolan, ada orang yang hatinya terbakar hanya karena mengejar reputasi di forum internet, lokal pula. Orang itu adalah saya sendiri, yang menulis blog ini.

Fighting over Leprechaun's Gold.

Di kampus saya, ada sebuah forum internet bernama Rileks, yang hanya bisa diakses dari LAN kampus atau dari luar kampus lewat VPN (yang lemotnya minta ampun). Forum ini adalah ajang diskusi (sebagian kecil) mahasiswa tentang berbagai hal, mulai dari politik, olahraga, game sampai hiburan. Tetapi tak dapat dipungkiri, fungsi utama (dan daya tarik utama) forum ini adalah sebagai tempat pengumuman lokasi server (dan direktori) FTP dari sebuah file multimedia - dengan kata lain ini adalah versi lokal Indowebster di kampus saya. That's why I said something about Leprechaun's Gold before.

Seperti di forum lainnya, ada berbagai atribut member, beberapa yang istimewa adalah, Admin, Moderator, Veteran (member dengan post 1000 atau lebih), Sesepuh (Veteran yang sudah alumni) dan Tukang Upload. Saya akan fokus ke Tukang Upload, member yang berkontribusi meng-upload berbagai konten dari luar (jaringan kampus) ke beberapa server FTP yang ada di kampus. Sebetulnya ini bukan kewenangan mutlak, karena member biasa pun (yang punya akses upload ke paling tidak sebuah server) bisa meng-upload konten. Tetapi dengan peraturan yang berlaku sekarang ini, hanya Tukang Upload yang boleh membuat thread rilis film atau anime (thread rilis musik dapat dibuat oleh semua member). Jika ada member biasa yang ingin merilis film, pertama dia harus membuat thread di subforum 'Request', dan Tukang Upload yang akan memindahkannya ke subforum 'Release'.

Nah, apa keuntungannya kalau kita membuat thread rilis? Boleh dibilang, tidak ada. Yah, paling-paling kita dapat 'thanks' dari member lain. Lebih ke soal reputasi, ada kemungkinan kalau aktif bikin thread rilis akan direkomendasikan jadi Tukang Upload, dengan begitu jadi lebih mudah untuk membuat thread rilis (tanpa harus di-approve Tukang Upload) dan kesempatan mendapatkan 'thanks' lebih besar. Lain itu, tidak ada. Cuma soal reputasi kosong.

Itulah posisi yang saya kejar.

Karena itu, mulai winter 2011, dan spring 2011 ini, saya rajin membuat thread rilis di forum anime, melalui jalur 'rakyat jelata': upload ke server anime, buat thread rilis di forum anime, Tukang Upload memindahkan thread saya ke subforum Release, tunggu thanks dari member lain. Karena ini anime yang kebanyakan berseri, sebagai thread starter saya punya kewajiban moral untuk terus meng-upload seri tersebut. Yang terakhir ini menjadi awal sebuah masalah bagi saya.

Jaringan kampus saya dibatasi firewall yang hanya dibuka di beberapa port, dan proxy membatasi akses internet. Walaupun sebagian besar situs terbuka, adanya firewall dan proxy membuat mahasiswa tidak dapat men-download via torrent atau melalui situs-situs filesharing. Dengan kondisi koneksi internet di negeri kita yang masih nyampah, sharing konten melalui server lokal menjadi sesuatu yang sangat menolong, dan inilah salah satu faktor yang membuat komunitas Rileks berkembang, walaupun ini bukan satu-satunya faktor. Tetapi, beberapa orang (termasuk saya) bisa mencari celah blokiran proxy dan firewall untuk mengunduh konten multimedia dari luar, dengan kecepatan di atas rata-rata kecepatan koneksi internet di Indonesia. Ada yang memang punya 'posisi' - para admin jaringan kampus, tentu saja pemblokiran firewall tidak berlaku bagi mereka. Ada yang bergerilya dengan gigih, mencari situs-situs Rapidleech yang belum diblokir proxy - tokoh kita, 'T' menggunakan cara ini, selain tampaknya dia punya koneksi broadband juga. Ada yang menggunakan tools tertentu secara tidak etis untuk mengelabuhi proxy - saya termasuk golongan terakhir ini.

Kembali ke masalah Tukang Upload. Selama beberapa lama, rutinitas saya - membuat thread rilis serial anime baru, meng-upload kelanjutan serial yang sudah saya mulai thread-nya - berjalan lancar. Tetapi saya mulai merasa terganggu sejak 'T' mulai meng-upload kelanjutan serial yang thread-nya saya mulai. Dia selalu berhasil mendahului saya karena dia bisa men-download lebih cepat. Bagi saya, ini sangat menyebalkan karena (paling tidak menurut pendapat saya) merusak reputasi saya sebagai thread starter, dan menunjukkan saya belum cukup mampu menjadi Tukang Upload. Pada puncak kemarahan saya, sebuah thread di JP (subforum untuk diskusi nyampah) saya tulis, meminta agar 'T' menghentikan aktivitasnya meng-upload kelanjutan serial anime yang thread-nya saya mulai.

Saya belum pernah ketemu dengan 'T' waktu itu... dan pertama kali saya samperin orangnya setelah thread unlimited rants work itu, orangnya terlihat menyenangkan dan kalau saya kenal lebih awal, tampaknya bisa jadi teman akrab saya. Tentunya dengan masalah ini hubungan saya dengan dia sudah nggak enak.

Terakhir, saya membuat thread rilis anime Denpa Onna, seperti biasa di subforum Request. Saya tidak memberitahu 'T' karena saya pikir tentu 'T' akan memindahkannya ke Release, lagipula 'T' pernah bilang dia tidak suka dapat PM.

Dan waktu saya cek Rileks, kaget saya melihat 'T' membuat thread rilis anime yang sama di subforum Release, sementara thread yang saya buat masih tidak tersentuh di subforum Request. Waktu saya coba login, akun saya kena suspend. Saya jadi paranoid, jangan-jangan ini memang disengaja agar saya tidak bisa bikin thread rilis lagi...

Dengan akun lain saya bikin thread keluhan (sampai saat ini belum saya cek bagaimana responnya), dan lapor ke seorang teman yang sudah Veteran di Facebook. Keluhan saya di Facebook bikin 'T' mencak-mencak, sementara kawan Facebook saya itu mencoba menenangkan, katanya hal ini sudah biasa terjadi pada dia dan dia nggak pernah mempermasalahkan itu. Pada akhirnya dengan jengkel luar biasa 'T' memindahkan thread yang saya mulai ke Release, dan balasan yang ada di thread buatannya digabungkan dengan thread saya.

Masalah selesai, dan memang tidak pernah ada rencana menyingkirkan saya.

Hanya karena soal forum internet yang bahkan cuma sebatas lingkup kampus.

Jelas saya sudah menjadi terlalu ambisius sampai ke tahap paranoia, berburuk sangka pada orang lain, marah-marah untuk hal yang tidak penting. Saya lupa tujuan awal masuk Rileks, untuk sharing secara enjoy dan rileks.

Tampaknya, saya akan mengurangi laju membuat thread rilis, paling banyak mungkin satu atau dua seri anime lagi untuk spring 2011 ini. After all, saya tidak suka dimonopoli, dan saya harus memberi kesempatan member lain untuk eksis juga, seperti halnya saya ingin eksis di Rileks.

OK, saya akui kesalahan saya yang tidak kontak ke Moderator/Tukang Upload untuk menginformasikan thread yang saya mulai, dan bikin rants nggak jelas di forum dan Facebook. Mudah-mudahan ini nggak terjadi lagi, supaya saya dan semua member Rileks bisa dengan enjoy menikmati forum kampus tercinta itu.

Dan saya harus mengalihkan tujuan saya untuk hal yang lebih bermanfaat, ketimbang sekedar mengejar reputasi di sebuah forum lokal yang nggak akan menambah nilai plus untuk mencari pekerjaan.

Commando Girl Homura Magika

Best show for this week.

This tenth episode from Puella Magi series recounts Homura's struggle to save Madoka, and it reveals much of the unexplained parts from the canon.

OK, here's the spoiler in short:

Before she became a puella magi, Homura was a sickly girl. It happened one day, shortly after her discharge from the hospital and her transfer to Madoka's school, she was rescued by Madoka from a witch's attack. Homura was very grateful, and she adored Madoka, being a strong fighter who protects the world from evil beings. Sadly, Homura witnessed Madoka's death after battling a witch (maybe in Walpurgisnacht event). Wanting to save Madoka, she wished that she could go back in time, to fight alongside Madoka, to save her from her death. She leap back through time, over and over again, never succeeded in saving Madoka. Even she learned the bitter truth of being a puella magi (guess you should know what it is already, if not, better not reading this post). She resolved to prevent Madoka from being a puella magi (which explains, why, in this story Madoka hadn't became puella magi so far).

Certainly Magica Quartet did a good job for the flashback. It was an excellent breakdown, explaining some unanswered questions in a breathtaking way. It also washed away the horrible 'Archer Hypothesis' (this is a bizzare speculah that says, Homura is a future version of Madoka, much like Archer and Emiya Shirou).

The most memorable part is Homura's evolution here. She was not a strong puella magi to begin with, outperformed by Mami and Madoka in every occasions. But she had a strong will, and seemed that she was a geek too. She began to learn to make improvised explosive devices, which she would insert into her time-frozen targets, or firing assault guns. This is something that makes her unique, while other puella magi relies on their magical attack, she uses standard military armaments (although on her character design, she is depicted as an archer with a black bow).

As she went over the time loops, we see the weak, clumsy girl transformed into an elite commando with plus time manipulation ability. The emotional pain she went through forged her into a steel-cold girl, almost never showing her emotions, although deep inside, she truly cares about everyone around her.

Just can't wait the next episode.

Plans... Plans... It Will Remain Plans....

As long as I'm alive, there will always be desires, infinite number of them; but the time and chance I have will always be finite.

My life will always be limited by constrains...

翼がなくても

この呪文がある

僕たちならば昨日よりも

高く飛べる

Here's a random rant about many things I wanna do in this so-called ten thousand dimensional net.

Well, reading on anime blogs, and seeing how the writers become popular and 'looks intellectual' makes me tempted into writing them too. So far, I've managed to write few entries on an anime episode, J-music and otaku subculture. The latter had been the most successful so far, calling out rain of flames and insults from those mentioned in that post. I didn't care about them anymore, there's a very slim chance for a single writer to stand against the whole community (yea, it's my stupidity after all) insisting that they're the good guys and the writer is just an illiterate, ignorant fool who didn't comprehend their social codes; and unfortunately, I'm not that smart to write a brilliant argument that could knock them out of their shoes. -- Enough with the rants on that community.

There are many excellent anime bloggers out there, and with my slightly below average intelligence, inadequate English, not to mention blogger.com's failing WYSIWIG editor that keeps complaining on it's self-generated HTML codes (yeah, I always write straight on the web editor, I never use any word processors except that legendary LaTeX), I was discouraged. It doesn't mean that I'm giving up, I'm gonna post my thoughts on recently watched anime episodes or on my beloved waifu singer, I just haven't got the mood. Perhaps I'll write them out just for my personal archive; aiming to be an anime blog celebrity is thousand years too early for me.

Mmm... have you ever see a rainmeter with cute anime character (usually moe-blob anime girl) display? I always want them to sweeten my almost-barren desktop. Too bad, AFAIK those cute little sisters only available for Madobe Nanami and her sisters. Rainmeter's *NIX counterpart, conky, offers only texts and bars by default. Maybe with few lines of Lua scripting and animated moe-girl artworks forked from rainmeter, I could transform conky into a cute little sister I've been dreaming about. I would host my project on code.google.com or sourceforge instead of those crappy filehosting services that constantly extort you into paying for their service. Alas, I've always been too lazy to read the long, almost incomprehensible manpages or their API documentations. Well, I might work on that project in the near future, if something motivates me.

I also have a non-English fansub project (sorry I won't give the link here). Currently I have a total of three staffs (including me) and the group had released three episodes, two first episodes of AIR (by myself, single fighter) and the first episode of Kore wa Zombie Desu ka. My motivation was disappointment I felt seeing so many groups releasing fansubbed anime in my language simply translate their script from English fansubs (doesn't mean that I'm good at Japanese, I could barely understand a dialog in Japanese without repeating them at least one hundred times and consulting to my software dictionary). Thanks to my laziness, the group is now at hiatus once again. I feel sorry for the two staffs that has just joined in eagerly. For now I'll just concentrating on improving my Japanese language skills and maybe, I'm gonna do small projects such as translating various anime OP/ED clips.

Yes, even without wings, there exist a spell that can make me fly higher than yesterday, higher than everyone.

But,

ただしかし、しかしである、

小さな星の、小さな秘め事

誰も知らない秘密のキーワード

To me, it still remains a mystery, at least for now.

Counter Strike on Archlinux

Well, got a few shots of Vodka, and now I'm very sleepy, so forgive my sloppy writing. FYI, I'm not a regular drinker, and drinking spirits is prohibited in my religion.

The old good Counter Strike, it's outdated but it's awesome since it could run on cheaper, outdated graphic cards, including the built-in Intel graphics card on my Acer Aspire 2920 laptop without any problems. Haven't tried Point Blank or newer FPS...

So it happened that my friends in the student association played CS, and I was invited to join too. I downloaded an illegal copy from a local server, then tried to install it on wine.

The installation went fine, but then, when I run the binary, what I got is Half-Life instead of Counter Strike. A little bit of googling gave me the command flag '-game cstrike' as the argument needed to run Counter Strike from hl.exe.

It works fine, I'll explain it later.

There are several problems, however.

First, if you tried to join a multiplayer in the middle of a round, the app seemed to freeze, but that was not the case. Just call the in-game menu, and exit from it, then it'll be fine.

Second, you can't invoke 'wine start $Path_to_executable/hl.exe -game cstrike'. Unless you're in the installation directory, the app will crash before it load, returning some error messages. You must call 'wine hl.exe -game cstrike' from the installation directory.

Third, Counter Strike (or Half-Life) runs in SDTV 4:3 aspect ratio, instead of widescreen in a normal Windows environment. I guess it's just a matter of application settings.

Anything else just works out of the box, you could play it seamlessly, without any lagging or other problems, even in multiplayer mode (there are network connection errors sometimes that crashed the app, but it's very rare).

FYI, I'm not a good CS player, out of 5 times being killed, I only manage to kill once... :p

There are other Windows games I've tried with wine, too...

Ragnarok Online, works fine, only if there were not-so-many other human players around. If you happened to be on a party, be prepared for a horrible lag, almost making it unplayable (my processor is 1.8GB core2duo, and an onboard weak Intel graphics card, I dunno if it worked well on better hardware).

Some japanese visual novels. At least Symphonic Rain worked out of the box, including its VOS-like mini game session. Alas, another VN (I forgot the title) crashed when playing in-game character dialog (I think it also holds true for most VNs). Fate/Stay Night failed as it couldn't recognize the mounted image as a real original CD needed to run it (or maybe I just couldn't make it work).

Hmm... I doubt that Wine would make it for high-end games, such as Unreal Tournament.

Flac to Ogg Converter (Bash Shell Script)

My recently gathered collections of anime and Japanese musics are mostly FLACs. If you haven't heard of it, it's a free and open source encoding for storing the exact data from a WAV audio file (this is the one you get directly from ripping an audio CD - CMIIW, the data dump from an audio CD) at half of its original size. This means, you can get the equal quality of an audio CD track with only half of the original space.

Of course, if you have FLAC files, it doesn't mean you could enjoy a crispy bright playback of an audio CD. There are several more factors, they are, your sound card, your amplifiers and speakers. As for me, with only on board sound card and a Sony Ericsson standard Walkman phone headset, it's meaningless to play FLAC tracks on my laptop. It just a waste of precious harddisk space. But nonetheless, I still spare them for keepsake, in case someday I could afford a better audio system.

So, the solution for a time being is to burn my FLAC collections onto DVDs, then ripping them into OGG format. This tutorial on Archlinux Wiki provides the basic script, I made some slight modification to it so that the final result would be OGG instead of MP3. This script will work on any UNIX system with bash shell on it (including Cygwin).

First, you need to provide all the dependencies. You will need these binaries (refer to your distro guide on how to install them).

flac oggenc

Then, copy the following script to your text editor, save it as anything you feel like (the convention is not to give any extension to the filename, as this is an executable , and normally executables don't have any extension). In this example, I save it as flac2ogg.

#!/bin/bash

for a in *.flac

do

OUTF=`echo "$a" | sed s/\.flac$/.ogg/g`

ARTIST=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`

TITLE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`

ALBUM=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=ALBUM | sed s/.*=//g`

GENRE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=GENRE | sed s/.*=//g`

TRACKNUMBER=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`

DATE=`metaflac "$a" --show-tag=DATE | sed s/.*=//g`

echo "$a"

flac -c -d "$a" | oggenc -q 8 -a "$ARTIST" -G "$GENRE" -t "$TITLE" -d "$DATE" -n "$TRACKNUMBER" -l "$ALBUM" - -o "$OUTF"

done

The next step, as a superuser, make it executable.

$ sudo chmod 0775 flac2ogg

Still as a superuser, copy it to the local binary directory, /usr/local/bin.

$ sudo cp flac2ogg /usr/local/bin

The final step, as a normal user, add /usr/local/bin into PATH environment variable. To make it handy, we will need to modify the .bashrc file so that/usr/local/bin is always in PATH every time you log in. Now you can call the script from anywhere.

$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Add the same line above to your .bashrc.

To use it, navigate to a directory (in a terminal, of course) where you place your FLAC files you want to convert. Simply type the script name, the terminal will show the encoding progress. The final OGG files will have the name and tags from the original FLAC files.

Now you can manually remove the unused FLAC files.

rm -v *.flac

Adding this line will get your script to automatically remove the original FLAC right after it has been encoded to OGG. Put it before the very last line (before done).

...

rm -v "$a"

done

PS:

The blogger editor fails so hard, either in HTML or WYSIWYG mode. Srsly, they need to fix it up. It always complains errors when I add images, and it also messing up the 'quote' command. I wonder why they always said blogger is better than wordpress.

Edit:

PHAIL. It cannot change the font into fixed-width font (Courier). blogger.com sucks.

Random: Some Japanese Bands

Well, I've got no idea on what should I post, lately. So, maybe I'll just recount my encounters with J-Music, and the Japanese bands.

FYI, most of my playlist entry are Japanese songs, some of them are anime OSTs. Sometimes, I enjoyed Western metal bands too, but they're only getting less than 1% of my listening time.

L'Arc en Ciel (Laruku)

Like most Indonesians, my first encounter with J-rocks was via this band (Indonesians even had a clone, a band named J-Rocks, thank God they're now more than just a bunch of Laruku wannabees). They have mostly easy listening music (sometimes they went cheesy), and Tetsu's unique bass lines tempted me to learn bass (later I found out that they were just simple patterns between root and fifth note of the chord). I adored them, collected all their albums prior to Daybreak's Bell. Too bad, they had gone too cheesy and too electronic recently, and I don't listen to them anymore.

X-Japan

Strong metal, hard noise of distorted guitar riffs. They have some nice ballads with beautiful piano. But most of their songs were monotonous (especially the drums, the drummer was an excellent pianist but he certainly lacked creativity needed to compose the drum parts for his band), hard to tell a song from another because they were too similar. Hard rock with staple rhythm, staple melodic line, then a cooling down with a little bit piano, then back to hard rock again... it goes all the way like that for most songs.

Glay

They had better skills than Laruku, but I didn't like the harsh guitar sound and the vocalist's unstable pitch.

Dir en Grey (Diru)

Too loud for me to enjoy.... Except a ballad piano arrangement for one of their songs, alas I forgot the title.

Tokyo Jihen

Well, they're way too intellectual. Their harmony was too ear-clashing for me. Their piano and keyboard lines were challenging, tho...

Kurahashi Yoeko

Unique vocal character that sounds much like a singer from 80's era, and naughty melodic lines. I've just listened a few, but I like her. Wish there were more of her songs in the internet.

Depapepe

Monotonous, they repeated that melody and that pattern over and over again.

Sound Horizon

Hmm.... good balance between musical showmanship and nice, easy listening and beautiful romantic rock/metal. Revo is certainly a prodigy, for he composed and arranged the songs all by himself. Still, my acceptance rate for his songs is much less than Kajiura's.

Kalafina

A trio of three young, beautiful vocalists.... I fell in love with them the instance I heard 'Natsu no Ringo'. Kajiura did the composition and arrangement well, she keeps teasing my ear with her unique blend of European Classical and anime atmosphere, as well as her superb brew of musical arrangement and tight vocal harmonization.

Kajiura makes the most of her slaves vocalists, each vocalists are assigned to a specific part of a song (or even the whole song), and sometimes the key changes as the singer switches from one girl to another.

While certainly Kajiura also has her own weakness (read it here and here), I always listen to her music everyday, humming them as I walk. It's been several months since I first listening to Kalafina, but my honeymoon with them (wew... great isn't it? a harem of three beautiful girls) hasn't been over yet.

Wandering Son Ep 04

Epic win!!

This show is pretty slow-paced, and it's not in my top waiting-list-of-the-week. But it seems to get into the right direction, things are getting exciting when it's about to turn into a boring show.

Here's a screenshot.

The couple looked so well-matched, except that, the boy was the girl, and the girl was the boy.

Somehow, I could understand what Nitori-kun felt to some extent. I've always been dreaming about a relationship (heterosexual one... don't get me wrong) where I, the feminine boy, was the girl and my masculine girlfriend was the boy.

Yeah, I want a female boyfriend.

And if one day she raped me, I wouldn't mind at all.... No, I'd die happily....