#i use it Sometimes. for One Thing. so its ok that its a little jank

[exculis]

nah i wanna use colors i rarely use on this skein. i wanna do reds and oranges and purple. i want it to be swag.

[fruit-salad-ship]

🍧🎵💐

🍧 SHAVED ICE - do they still have any objects from their childhood? what significance does it have to them? what would their reaction be if they lost it?

Plum: Loads of things, stuffed toys, books, photos, most of which are at home in Alola with her family. She has a couple of photos from her 10th birthday that seem to mean a lot to her, her family perhaps could have been more present while she was growing up, but they were both there with her on that day, a day she was gifted her first ever pokemon parter missy as a little dratini. She’s framed them, they currently hang in her Dotaku apartment. Should she lose them she’d probably cry a little but knows its just a thing, the memory remains.

Grey: Grey kept his dads jacket, and still uses it from time to time. Use to be so big on him but now he cant do the zip up. He doesn’t say it, but he likes to have it around still, and sometimes wears it to go visit his family. In all honesty it fits peach better now days, but thats ok, he just likes seeing it. If it were to finally be lost or broken, he’d try to repair it, or if that is impossible, he’d sulk for a few days. He may have to go home and steal another jacket, but nothing compares, that one had significance.

Peach: She’s got a family ring, not that she tells anyone thats what it is. On rare occasion is used to gain entry to underground locations. No one questions her if she’s got that. She use to never wear it, but as she’s aged, it’s crept into her collection, snuck on her hands with several other rings to make it less obvious, mixed and matched. It’s not easy to tell wether she likes or hates it, but if she was to lose it, she’d be very conflicted. Its not a good memory receiving it, but it also kind of was? Bitter sweet. One of the first and only moments her mother seemed not disappointed with her, sadly she was disappointed with herself…or proud for persevering? It’s a messy memory.

🎵 MUSIC NOTE - what is their playlist like? their favourite artists? do you associate a particular song with them?

Plum: All over the place. She loves a lot of up beat pop, RnB, but also thrives on anything with a brass section. The sort to have three playlists for moods, no more, no less. Sad, happy, running. (I associate Plum with: MEUTE - You & Me)

Grey: his family is large so he’s perfected the art of making a playlist to suit all ages. For this reason he’s wise to a lot of older songs and bands that perhaps got forgotten by the younger crowd. This doesn’t make his taste old school, he’s very adaptable. Knows what to play at any given moment to get a party going. His personal taste a wide and varied, appreciating almost all genres for one reason or another. A sucker for classic rock though. (I associate Grey with: Jank Setup - Prince Of Something)

Peach: anything with a filthy bass line, or that slaps hard. Never has sad songs on. Her lack of connection to music is apparent, having not had much music in her home as a child or teenager. She’s not very knowledgable on it as a topic, but over the years with Grey has learnt to enjoy it, and even found songs she actually enjoys, will never put a song on if asked. (I associate Peach with: YONAKA - Seize The Power)

💐 BOUQUET - create a bouqet for them! what do those flowers mean? are any of the flowers their particular favourite?

Plum: Classic romantic, red roses, gypsophila, maybe flamboyant white lilies. BUT! She’s from the tropics, and Peach will especially pick up on this, often favouring Bird of Paradise or Heliconia, palms and broad leaves, a bit more fancy than your average Johto garden can produce. However her favourite is Plumeria. Unrivalled in scent, she gets all nostalgic when she smells them.

Grey: Loves greens, whites and grasses. He’s the sort to revel in ferns, loves them. Fond of a Chrysanthemum, loves a wax flower. He’s big on textures, so the fancy seed heads from some species also get a lot of love from him.

Peach: impossible to pick a single fav, she’s forever asked this question and it keeps her up at night. In her heart of hearts she knows its Forget-Me-Nots, though why she can’t remember, ironically. Her choices are always humble. Wildflower, big blousy daisys that you see growing on the side of roads, knapweed, cornflower, ragwort, buttercups, all the stuff you see pop up through cracks in the concrete. Defiant. Sure fancy is nice, but it doesn’t beat a bunch picked by someone you love who thought of you while out on a walk. Nothing compares.

[kanralovesu]

ACCA is Looking Promising and That’s About All We Can Say Right Now [First Impressions]

Ok, anime about cute girls are great and all, but with like one million of those airing this season I’m really fucking glad this show is giving us something different. I definitely want to make this post just to make sure its on everyone’s radar but I’ve only got one weird thing about the show to talk about and that’s how I really wasn’t that impressed with the first half but loved the second half.

The first half of this show decided it was going to deliver some of the laziest exposition I’ve seen this season so far. When your sentence starts with “As you already know”, you know its going to be bad. Sometimes this is a necessary evil to explain the setting, but I really think the writers could have easily written a better monologue for the chief. The thing is, the logic for him repeating the function of ACCA actually makes sense. They are getting shut down because they’ve become obsolete in peaceful times. The dialogue at the beginning of the episode did a great job at establishing the peace while seeming natural. I think a good improvement to the chief's dialogue would be: “We won’t forget the service ACCA provided in our years of hardship, but now even you Jean must understand that your services have become obsolete. We’ve got our budget to consider and frankly we can’t maintain an organization that looks for corruption among our ranks when there just isn’t any anymore.” See, that wasn’t so hard. 

The other time I thought they botched the exposition was in the car in the agriculture district. I’m not sure why they felt the need to tell us directly that it was an agriculture district. We had already seen the corn sign and we even got a shot of the fields themselves. Hell, the background of the shot where they delivered the exposition was enough of an explanation.  

Even though the way the told us about the world was a little jank, the world itself is amazing and there were lots of elements that were well explained without clunky exposition. By the end of the first episode its clear what role cigarettes play in society and not once did we get some fat guy in a chair saying “As you know, cigarettes are a luxury item now thanks to the price hike of 2078, blah blah blah.” I also liked how they use Skype. It does make me question, though, why they have powerful computers and yet are still keeping physical records of most things (hint: its because movie-makers need a character to actually hold something in frame; it just looks better).

So that’s my little bit on ACCA. Like I said, I loved the second half and considering all the exposition is out of the way I think we’ll have more good things to come. This is going to be one of those anime that has an overarching narrative that you just can’t judge until you’ve watched the entire thing. I look forward to seeing how it turns out. I would recommend this to everyone to watch, especially if you like Cowboy Bebop mixed with politics and detective stories because that’s what this feels like.

TLDR:

The first half of this show was filled with bad exposition, but the second half set up a potentially great overarching narrative. The chief explaining ACCA could have been better written to not seem so forced and the women explaining her area’s agricultural focus could have been left out entirely considering the images of fields we already saw. They did get a lot of world building right, especially in terms of cigarettes. This show is Cowboy Bebop meets political detective and it seems to be going in a great direction. There will be no way to full judge this show until we see the direction the story goes, so for now I just say hop on for the ride!

[hydrus]

Version 373 (Qt)

windows

zip

exe

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

The Qt update is ready for Windows and Linux!

This week's release is for all users, but please bear in mind it has some small layout and positioning bugs, such as subscription popups sizing a little strangely. If you would rather wait a week or two for these last issues to be cleared (and any others that pop up as more people play with this), that is totally fine.

Qt background

Since hydrus began as an application, it has used wxWidgets to draw all the windows and buttons on screen. wx has served us well, but hydrus has grown to be a complicated program with hundreds of different custom things going on, and it was starting to show. Lots of windows were flickery, modern tech like 4k screens were not excellently supported, and operating systems and window managers were unstable. If I could have moved to a more flexible and more frequently updated UI library by snapping my fingers, I would have, but the total UI code is almost three megabytes, far too much to reasonably convert as I kept at my normal weekly schedule.

A user contacted me I think about a year ago talking about Qt and possibly making some scripts to automatically convert hydrus's wx code to Qt. I said it sounded like a good idea, and he worked in the background trying to figure it out and add manual tweaks. He was very successful, ultimately getting an essentially functional build going a couple of months ago. He passed the code to me four weeks ago, and I have since crash-learned Qt and fixed the great majority of the bugs that slipped through the automatic conversion process.

I am extremely grateful for this user's work--this would not have happened otherwise--and I am very happy with the result. Qt is a nicer library than wx for our purposes, runs faster, has much less flicker and related jank, and provides many new options for future extensions and customisation. I also enjoy working with Qt--the library is good.

hydrus Qt

There are no critical differences between the wx and Qt builds. Every label and button is where it was before. Fonts and colours and sizes and margins are all slightly different, but nothing has been taken away. Also, there do not seem to be any dll-style conflicts with a previous installation, so you should just be able to install or extract as you would any other week without any problems.

One particularly nice thing is that Qt is overall faster. Video animations and thumbnail fading should be a little smoother. Another is that compatibility with different Linux distros is much better, so Linux users who have had crashes or drawing problems should now have an easier time.

Also, tag autocomplete dropdown result lists can now float for non-Windows. They can also float on dialogs like manage tags. Options on whether they should float or embed are now under options->gui.

Hydrus is a big program, however. I have done plenty of testing and fixed hundreds of things, and advanced users have tried out some early builds and helped me out more, but there are surely some odd layout and display bugs we have not found. There are also some that we found but I could not fix in time--for instance, sometimes the new page tab drag-and-drop does not do its new 'live' page navigation correctly, discord drag-and-drop file export is unreliable again, the duplicate filter's right-hand hover window sometimes positions incorrectly, and subscription popups will change size too often due to some unusual text handling as they work through their network jobs. If you encounter your own issues, I am interested in all feedback. For now, issues that affect usability are of higher priority than a couple of pixels out of place, but I am open to all reports.

If you use IME text input, let me know how it works for you now!

I regret that I was unable to get a release-ready macOS build out for today. macOS has some important UI differences to Windows and Linux, and there are still some significant things--like maximise/borderless fullscreen support for the media viewer--that were causing stability issues. I will keep at it next week.

Users who run from source will need qtpy and either PySide2 (default) or PyQt5. Check https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/running_from_source.html for more information.

misc

I also did some normal work, mostly quality-of-life ui stuff:

The 'archive/delete' menu option now shows up when you have nothing selected, and will do everything.

Some of the system predicate edit panels now show quick-select buttons--for instance, if you hit 'system:duration', you'll now have two extra buttons for 'has duration' and 'no duration'.

I fixed an important CPU inefficiency in the new files maintenance manager that was affecting some users with large file maintenance queues and large gui sessions. It was causing juddery UI, which should be completely fixed now.

Clients with large sessions that include 'collected' media thumbnails with hundreds or thousands of files should experience less UI judder as they browse the files within those collections.

full list

qt:

hydrus now uses Qt for its client's user interface, migrating from wx. this is thanks to a huge effort by a user, who delivered converted code for hydrus dev to finish off

a number of hacks and patches remain to compensate for old systems, which hydrus dev will slowly clean up in normal work. ui bug and layout issue reports would be greatly appreciated

shortcut storage had to be converted from fixed wx enums to an independant system. there is a small chance that one of your shortcuts, particularly if it is on the numpad, may have been converted wrong (unusual Enter/Return buttons may be hit here). if one is not working, please check what hydrus thinks it is and try re-entering it

added tentative support for 'Mode_switch' keyboard modifier, for X11 users (and perhaps some users' AltGr?)

autocomplete results can now float in a popup window in dialogs like manage tags! they'll still embed by default, but there are now separate float/embed options for 'main gui' and 'other frame' a/cs

autocomplete results can now float in linux and macOS ok!

page drag and drop now navigates as you drag, so dropping into a page of pages works by you hovering over it and then dropping in the tabbar below, inserting exactly where you want the page to be

a couple of text inputs in the program--the watcher and gallery search pages' text inputs, particularly--now use nicer 'placeholder' text, which isn't real and only shows as grey text when the input is empty

for now, moved to icons for thumbnail 'has audio/duration' indicators, rather than the custom labels

to run the hydrus client from source, qtpy is now needed. either pyside2 (default) or qtpy5 is needed. QtCharts is optional. wx and matplotlib are no longer needed

.

misc:

'archive/delete filter' now appears even when no file is focused. it also appears when no files are selected--and will apply to everything

the system predicate edit panels now support static buttons for easy one-click select for common predicates. duration, has audio, limit, and num tags now have these

system:duration and system:num tags now render a special label if they are >0 or =0

system:untagged is now removed from the normal list

fixed a critical cpu inefficiency in the file maintenance manager's new always-on maintenance, which was lagging several users' browsing sessions while it was working

fixed ctrl+mousewheel tag autocomplete results navigation to skip over multirow parent results

fixed an issue where resetting to default bandwidth rules for a network context would not update the ui properly

fixed a bug when adding a parent/sibling from autocomplete results list

the serialised png export folder now catches when a manually inputted export path's directory does not exist

reduced metadata update lag of pages with very large media collection groups

the inaccurate 'add tags based on filename' button is now called 'import with tags'

fixed a database UNIQUE issue when two duplicate gui session save calls happen within one second

the server's lock_off command now works with the Hydrus-Key header auth (rather than hanging indefinitely wew)

the server now caches hashed access keys in the session manager, in memory, to avoid a db hit on access-key based reauthentication, and in instances where this authentication requires a db hit, now cleanly provides an appropriate 'serverbusy' error

improved some media object memory management and speedy cleanup

improved boot fail graceful exit

removed a bunch of defunct flash (swf) hacks from media viewer code

bunch of misc non-qt cleanup as I went through the code

fixed a bug with rendering network credentials for human display

cleared out the ancient tag archive sync advanced help and added a stub for the new tag migration window

various help updates around wx->Qt

next week

This took a lot of work, more than I thought. I am really pleased, but also exhausted. I am going to take an easy week of fixing little layout issues and try to add system tray minimisation and css theming (which will eventually lead to 'proper' nightmode or any other theme users can work out). I'll also see if I can get the macOS release working better.

Once the Qt-issues rush has eased, I will return to the big tag work and Mr. Bones' normal schedule. I'll also test out adding an mpv video player into the media viewer, so we finally have proper video (and audio!) support.

In the longer term, I have probably a hundred Qt-cleanup jobs to catch up on. There are many behind-the-scenes hacks to get wx-specific code to talk to Qt, so I need to clean up that old bad code into something neater. I will spread this work out into my normal schedule.