Category: Uncategorized

Ranking the Ronin Warriors / Samurai Troopers

Ronin Warriors was this anime that was on in Japan in the late 80’s / early 90’s and in the late 90’s here in the states. I loved it’s aggressively 80’s anime style. And so now, let’s rank the Ronin Warriors!

5. Sage

It's Sage from the Ronin Warriors. He's got a big bunch of blond hair, some of which is covering one eye. This shot is tight on his face, but we can see a bit of the green from his armor around his neck.
Sage from the Ronin Warriors

I don’t know what to say about Sage. I don’t particularly like his armor and I really don’t know much about him as a character. Also he looks a bit like an ex.

4. Cye

It's Cye from the Ronin Warriors! He's in casual wear right now ... which for him is a nice button down shirt with a jacket that looks a bit like something a professor would wear.
Cye from Ronin Warriors

I like Cye’s Armor of the Torrent with the water theme and trident weapon, but I don’t quite like Cye as a character. There’s one part in Gaiden where he’s criticizing Kento on his clothing, but dude is wearing plaid pants! What an ass.

Cye and Kento from Ronin Warriors both in casual gear. Kento is wearing overalls with a white shirt, and Cye is wearing a jacket that looks like something a college professor would wear with plaid pants.
You’re really going to make fun of Kento while you’re wearing plaid pants?

I’m watching Legend of the Inferno Armor right now, and Cye is being whiny right now. I’m sure he’ll be alright past episode 3, but still.

3. Rowen

Rowen from the Ronin Warriors. We're tight on his face. He's got blue hair and a white/orange/grey cap that he's wearing backwards.
Aggressively 80’s

Honestly: in the earlier series I used to get Rowen and Cye mixed up. But I think as the series progressed, Rowen really became a character on his own. Armor-wise, I love the Strata armor with it’s cool bow. Rowen as a character seems to have a pretty good style … sometimes a bit aggressively 80’s anime.

2. Ryo

Ryo from the Ronin Warriors. He's wearing a white tee with a random logo on it over a purple long-sleeve shirt.
Nice shirt. It’d be unfortunate if something happened to it.

On the one hand, Ryo is kinda your typical anime hero from the 80’s – rides the motorcycle and all. But I think looking back on the series now, that kinda makes him cooler. Like: it’s this snapshot of the anime style at that time.

I don’t think we get as much of a backstory with Ryo as we do with Kento. I do like that Ryo is quick to temper like Kento and that both Ryo and Kento are both usually butting heads.

1. Kento

It's Kento from the Ronin Warriors! He's in casual gear, with green - probably plastic - sun shades and a smile.
Sup’ Dude!

I love Kento! There is a bigness to him – both physically and emotionally. I love his unpredictability and his just raw emotion. Such a goof. I feel like through the series Kento probably grew the most of the warriors. Maybe that’s just me projecting? Kento is probably the strongest of the warriors outside of Ryo in the Inferno Armor. I love that his armor has an asymmetricalness to it, with one horn bigger than the other. Also: this guy loves to eat!

Honorable Mention: Anubis

I always likes Anubis’ style after he started working for the Ancient One. He had the cool staff with the rings. Still managed to be a jackass, but was like a cool jackass.

Honorable Mention: OG Mia

The very first episode of the American Dub of Ronin Warriors, the voice actress played Mia just a little more gruff than she wound up being. Like: this lady isn’t going to take any of your shit. I kinda understand softening it … Ronin Warriors got targeted as a kids show. But I miss gruff Mia and I wonder how gruff Mia is in the original Japanese.

And some more random photos …

Kento and Cye surfing! Kento is in a pink and blue muscle shirt thing with green trunks and Cye is in a full wet suite.
Hang Ten Dude!
In the background are ladies lounging at the beach. In the foreground is a can of beer that looks like a Budweiser, but is labeled Dudweiser.
What a dud.
Kento in his full armor suite. The suit is the a burnt orange color.
Kento in his armor.
The camera is pointed to towards the sun as Kento flies over on his surfboard. There's enough lensflare that this might be J.J. Abrams doing.
DUUUUUUUUDE!
Closeup on Kento as he winks.
Wink.
Ryo sits in an airplane seat with his arms behind his head. Kento his hanging over the chair next to him from behind with his shades hanging on his nose.
What a drag.
Kento, Ryo, and Cye walk down a New York street.
A night on the town!
Rowen with his blue hair looking towards camera. He's got something slung over his shoulder.
You got to have at least one person with blue hair for it to be an anime, right?
Ully, Rowen, and Mia standing at a reporters desk.
It’s a good thing you just summarized what that guy said off-camera so we didn’t have to hire another voice actor to say it.
Ully and Rowen walking down what looks like a country road.
Is this a Ully?
Closeup on Ryo
Looking determined.

Giving Up

I’ve really been struggling with my Fedora/NVIDIA setup. Not to long ago, I swapped over to the KDE Plasma spin of Fedora, and everything has been fine EXCEPT Cities: Skylines absolutely refuses to run on the NVIDIA card. Other games seem to do fine: the Intel UHD GPU will hand off more complex stuff off to the NVIDIA card. But for some reason, it just won’t hand off anything to the NVIDIA GPU. I tried a number of things … among them trying to launch Cities with switcherooctl and using the -adapter flag when launching Cities.

Instead of trying to spend more time figuring out what’s wrong, I decided to just set the primary GPU to the NVIDIA card using the directions here: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/how-to-set-nvidia-as-primary-gpu-on-optimus-based-laptops/

And it worked! Cities: Skylines is now running on the NVIDIA GPU … because it has too! Still not as beautiful as is looked under Windows, but a lot better than runing on the Intel GPU.

It kinda sucks, because having the NVIDIA card set to the primary GPU drains the battery and heats up the laptop, but since I rarely use my laptop off the AC Adapter, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Since it looks like this only works in an X11, I guess if I need to save power, I can login to a Wayland session. Or maybe manually set the NVIDIA card to a lower state.

I’m not expecting to grow flowers in a desert …

I’ve been having good luck with my Bird of Paradise plant and decided to try planting some other bulb plants. I know: strictly speaking a Bird of Paradise plant is not a bulb plant, but close enough. I planted a number of ornamental bulbs, but I also planted some onions and garlic, and out of all of them, they are coming up great!
An onion bloom
I’ve never actually seen an onion bloom. It’s kinda cool. And it’s already attracting visitors …
An onion bloom with a butterfly on it
And one more picture … a little stink bug on a new Bird of Paradise shoot.
A stink bug on a leaf

Movember 2022


One of the guys on my rugby team does Movember – where grow a mustache during the month of November to raise money for various men’s health issues. Movember started in support of prostate cancer awareness, but has grown to cover other men’s health issues like suicide prevention. It’s pretty cool, so I do it too.

If you have a few scarves lying around, how about throwing a few on the pile for men’s health? You can do that here: https://movember.com/m/14637302?mc=1

Sea-O-Sphere 2

I got a chance to go to Galveston today and so I collected some water for Sea-O-Sphere 2. I got some of the water from this one from a tidal pool and the rest straight from the ocean near East Beach.

I am still living with your ghost; lonely and dreaming of the Gulf Coast

In the photo, straight ahead is the Houston Ship Channel. To the left and right is the tidal pool I got some water and sand from.

The tide was out, and the sand from the ocean side … well it’s a lot coarser and filled with little bits of shell and whatnot. I found a little bit of seaweed that I’m pretty was dead already, but I threw in. And I took a little piece of grass that was growing near the tidal pool. I don’t thing it will survive, but we’ll see.

So there it is with the other Sea-O-Sphere on the window sill. Looking at it, I thought I saw something swimming around in it. I tried to get a picture, but it came off looking a bit like one of those photos of Big Foot.

Sea-O-Sphere

So I went to Corpus Christi for 7’s by the Sea. I got half way there when I realized that I had left the glass jar I had intended to put everything in at home. Ooops. Fortunately I had a couple of empty water bottles I could used.

Beach in Corpus Christi
I am still living with your ghost; lonely and dreaming of the Gulf Coast

After the tourney while we were packing up, I took a moment to go out and get two bottles of ocean water, some salt, a little mussel, and some seaweed.

When I got home I dumped the seaweed and sand out in a bowl. It smelled kinda bad. Hope that’s not a bad sign.

So then I started putting everything in the jar. I’m using an old kombucha jar from HEB for all of this.

So I shoveled in the sand and stuck the seaweed in there. And the mussel as well. I think it might be dead, but I put it in there anyway.

And here’s the finished product on the shelf!

I think I might head to Galveston this weekend. If I do, I’ll make another Sea-O-Sphere from water/seaweed from there. I’d be interesting to see if anything different happens between the two.

Life in (a Prego) Jar

I’ve been watching a lot of Life in Jars on YouTube lately. I’ve always been fascinated by little self-contained ecosystem. When I was a kid, I did a very bad terrarium for a science project (I don’t think I got a good grade on it). I had the aquarium for a long time after and used it to keep critters and crawdads in until a friend knocked it over.

When I lived in Austin, I made a little terrarium from an old candy jar. The bottom had some polished rocks. I’m not sure why I put those in there. It had a little fern plant, some moss, and a snail that I had found out on the Barton Creek Trail. Also, a rock from the parking lot of my apartment. The snail didn’t last long … just not big enough a space for it. The moss did well, but the fern would wax and wane. Unfortunately, during the last move the jar took a bit of a tumble and the rock inside broke the glass.

So I had an empty jar that was previously home to some Prego Alfredo sauce – yeah, I know, I could make it myself, but I’m lazy – so inspired by Life in Jars, I decided to stick some stuff in it and see what happens.

I started with some charcoal. I think this is supposed to help filter water? I just took a briquette and crunched is up using two large rocks.

Next I added some rocks and pine straw. I don’t think the pine straw is too good – I think it tends to make soil acidic. But meh … we’ll see what happens.

Next some dirt and a little clover plant that I dug up in my back yard.

I threw in some of these grass seeds, some berries, and a few pieces of wood with lichen and whatnot on it.

I was looking for some pill bugs but I couldn’t find any. I did find a worm and dropped him in. But then I thought: this little ecosphere is too small to support it, but he had already started squirming away before I could get him out.

There’s the finished jar, lid and dated, and into the window seal. We’ll see how it does.

I’m going to Corpus this weekend for a Rugby 7’s tourney. I’m taking a little jar that I’m going to use to get some sand, salt water, and maybe some seaweed, and see what happens to it.