All's well with the Genki Shadowcast... even on Windows

Been seeing a lot of criticism for the Genki Shadowcast, even after the update. All I can say now is, it works great.

The very first time I used it, it seemed to take up all my resources and lag and frame drops were common. Just the other day I tried it and it would crash shortly after launch. All I had to do was navigate to it through the Start Menu > G > Genki Arcade 1.5, right-click, More > App settings, enable all app permissions, scroll down, and click Reset.

Now everything's working as it's supposed to; no lag, no frame drops, and my laptop doesn't slow to a crawl! Honestly, I had no idea Shadowcast had its own capture program (I just backed it on a whim on Kickstarter), but since it captures a respectable 60.xx FPS at 720p, I don't think I'm in the market for a capture card anymore.

Just gotta make sure the source is Full RGB, not limited or automatic. Fine by me as my TESmart prefers Full RGB as well.

Downsides: there certainly is lag (just enough to make rhythm games unplayable if going by visuals alone), and the lag is, of course, worse when actually recording. And the codec doesn't seem to play nice with AviSynth even if the captures do scrub and seek fine in VirtualDub, so I always have to encode in highest XviD settings. Probably for the better; it looks like the frame rate is variable until the re-encode that locks it at a constant 60 FPS.

Endgame Vita & PSTV gaming

My interest in the newest game consoles is still zero, so I'm revisiting the Vita and PSTV. Storage is cheap and plentiful with SD2Vita adapters, but the dream of simply taking your memory card out of your Vita and continuing on the PSTV will have to remain a dream; the bubble trick of keeping similarly placed bubbles across the 10 pages using system icons to preserve icon placement across memory card swaps just never worked for me. That's fine; I didn't want to be greeted with the "rebuilding database" message with every power-on anyhow. 

So I'm just going to get a separate 512 GB SD card for my PSTV and mirror exactly what I have on my Vita. The one fly in the ointment is transferring save data (and I don't plan on keeping PlayStation Plus forever), so thanks to these threads I should be able to copy the save data (located in ux0:/user/00/savedata) directly to/from my hard drive:

• What folder is game save data in in vitashell?
• How to back up your saves with Vitashell (may be deprecated but the comment section should be worth a look)
• Where can i find a comprehensive titleID = name list for the vita?
• BombBloke's Google Spreadsheet of game IDs

A not inexpensive lesson in buying anime

(TLDR: Skip the Honey and Clover DVDs, but do get the Blu-rays.)

Got nostalgic for the last two fansubs I ever downloaded:

• Welcome to the NHK
• Honey and Clover

The budget DVD rerelease of Welcome to the NHK was cheap enough on Amazon, with the whole package coming in at six episodes per DVD and four DVDs. I have to wonder if the original releases were of better quality, but I'm not gonna do anything more about it.

The DVDs of Honey and Clover, however, were far too expensive on Amazon, so I hopped on eBay to check prices there. I saw the entire set for $30 so I had to get it. Then I felt bad because there were actually Blu-rays available, but naturally more expensive; the first half of the series alone was $40. So I thought I could at least be happy that I got the whole series for less than even that.

The DVDs arrived in great condition, and the "book" style packaging was quite attractive. Video quality was as good as you can expect from pre-HD sources. But the truly awful subtitles crushed any enjoyment I could have gotten from it. As this review and this forum post mention, if you hear can clearly hear the surname, you damn well better have that name in the subtitles instead of the given name! Not only is it confusing hearing one name and reading another, but relationships can change, and if and when characters become closer, they'll drop the surnames and call each other by their given names instead. So what what happens when given names were used all along? As a translator, you're boned. As a viewer, you're more confused than you have to be.

Not unrelated: I was almost going to blow a stupid amount of money for the rare, out-of-print physical English manga of Welcome to the NHK, but it's available digitally at both Comixology and Viz. Of course, had I known that it was on Viz from the beginning, I probably wouldn't have gotten it at Comixology first. While the reading experience is equally good on tablets, you want Viz for browser-based vertical monitor for single-page viewing; Comixology can't seem to do single-page viewing on manga other than the cover page. But if you want to view both pages at the same time on a TV, again with a browser, you do want Comixology because Viz enforces this stupid border at the top and bottom of the screen that you can't get rid of. Viz has the border in browser-based vertical monitor viewing, but that almost perfectly centers the image, making it even better than if you had hit the full screen button.

Welp, more money to splurge on the physical complete Japanese-language manga!