Fanfiction review “On the Wings of Freedom”

Another Fate/Stay Night and Sekirei crossover. Ever since gabriel_blessing started writing “In Flight” these stories seem to be popping up like bad fungi. Heck, even I wrote a few snippets some months ago! Without further adieu here’s the link to the story (WARNING: Spoilers ahead!),

On the Wings of Freedom by Shadows of Vanity

The summary is well written. I wondered what Shirou was doing in France, but the author answers the question with the next few words. Seems that he went there on a holiday. It’s a bit odd why someone would be called in for an interview in the middle of a vacation, but that’s just nitpicking for the sake of it. What really spoils things are the last 4/5 words,

powerful!Shirou, Shirou/large harem.

Is there any real need to mention this? The summary has already told us that he’ll be getting a harem. Why repeat information we already know? And what am I to make of the phrase ‘powerful!Shirou’ ? Barring a few crack-fics, most stories have him as a competent fighter anyway. Or are you trying to tell me that he’s going to be God-like in this story? If so, you should have also included a tag for the Emiya Clan. Sounds like a perfect fit to me.

I find your choice of pairing “Shirō E. & No. 08/Yume” puzzling for a harem story, but I think we’ve spent enough time talking about the summary. <starts reading the chapter>

a missed job opportunity

About a week ago, one of the companies I applied to got back to me. They wanted to know if I was willing to take a test as part of their hiring process and that the test would be conducted in either Hyderabad or Bangalore. Assuming that was where Flower (company name changed) had their Indian offices, I replied ‘Bangalore’. The test date was scheduled a couple of days later. It would be my first visit to Bangalore and thanks to the wonders of technology, I was able to reserve transport and hotel accommodations before I departed.

a surprising lack of comedy fanfiction for Love Hina & Ranma

Some days back the following Love Hina fanfic idea was thrown out on TFF,

During the 4th volume (manga) when Motoko challenges Keitaro, he somehow ‘defeats’ her by catching her blade with his bare hands. Suppose that didn’t happen – the fight ends with Motoko defeating him. As per the agreement, she sends him off to her sister with instructions “to make a man out of him I can respect”

As a Keitaro+Motoko shipper, I couldn’t let the idea slide by. I volunteered to pick it up and as part of background checking, went back to re-read the manga. To my horror, I discovered that my characterization of the cast was off. Badly.

That aside, I realized something else as well – what I found most enjoyable about Love Hina. It’s without a doubt the humor. Checking back on fanfiction.net I confirmed that no-one had written a notable humor story lately. Some more digging and the same conclusion can be reached for the Ranma section as well (not talking about crossovers).

I’ve decided to tackle this shortcoming by writing a humor story. At the moment, all I have are a few random ides that (hopefully) will diverge to the snippet above, but … the lack of humor fanfiction for a source that is nothing but slapstick comedy is a bit disheartening. Even worse – it took me this long to realize it!

Fanfiction review “The Weaponless Meinster”

I’m a huge fan of Fate/Stay Night and enjoy the Soul Eater anime as well. But when I heard that there was a crossover written between the two, an eyebrow went up. Here’s a link to the story on fanfiction.net,

The Weaponless Meinster by L33t Horo

Canonically, I don’t believe that the two magic systems can co-exist. The former sees magic (or “prana/od”) as a limited resource in the world. The latter talks about using a person’s “soul wavelength” to accomplish impossible deeds. And then there is the title of the story – ‘weaponless meinster’ ? In Soul Eater canon there are weapons who can act without Meinsters (and these are usually the very high-level ones), but a meinster without a weapon? What is the meinster expected to do; fight and reap souls with their fists? Needless to say, I was very skeptical when I started reading the story. (WARNING: Spoilers ahead!)

lack of audio standard for HTML

On the desktop there are 2 audio formats that I listen to – MP3 and OGG. Not that I prefer one over the other, but rather I just leave my files in whatever format I first got them in. After all, why should I bother wasting my precious time reformatting everything to some ‘standard’ when my favorite player plays both file types? Recently, I’ve been exploring the idea of running a game inside the web-browser. This brings about the complication that I have no control over which browser my users will use. And here comes my audio dilemma.

Lack of free artwork for amateur Visual Novels?

The idea to make a Visual Novel got stuck in my head recently. Searching around led me to Ren’Py – a free (and open source!) game engine designed for such purposes. Documentation is … not what I expected it to be, but it’s passable. My current problem is artwork. For now, I just need some decent placeholder art to use while I learn Ren’Py, but I can’t find anything!

Computers and Algebra

I just finished attending a 3 day workshop on Computers and Algebra held in my University. Here is the website.

When a professor asked me a few months ago if I would be interested in attending, I told him yes. My motivation back then was curiosity. We hear a lot about how a mathematics background is important for a computer science student and it seemed like a good platform to learn something.

Some nitpicking first. It didn’t seem like a workshop to me. At least, when I hear the word “workshop”, I expect to be doing something. What actually happened was a series of lectures with Q&A sessions sprinkled in-between. But in spite of that, it was an interesting experience.

The word “Algebra” makes me think of polynomials and related matter – high school stuff. I went into the workshop expecting to be able to follow the technical jargon. To my utter dismay (and horror), I could not properly follow ANY of the mathematics lectures! The speakers all assured me that it was basic stuff which they spoke about; which means that my math isn’t good right now.

One of the speakers talked about prime numbers. That got me thinking about making a program to check for a prime number. It isn’t a difficult task; something most computer science students are taught as a textbook exercise after they learn about loops. What specifically caught my attention was how to optimize the answer.

A simple way to check if a random number “N” is prime is to divide all the numbers between 1 and N with N. If none of them are perfectly divisible, then we caught a prime! Its a very wasteful tactic and the first level of optimization students are taught is to limit the check to all numbers between 1 and N/2. This range can be further reduced to all numbers between 1 and square-root(N).

I began to wonder if something more could be done. My search led me to this paper titled Primes is in P. Its a PDF link to a 9-page paper. What surprised me was that one of the conference speakers mentioned this very paper. … And I couldn’t understand a word of it!

In the end, I came away from the conference humbled and inspired. I’m going to add “algebra” on my TO-DO list.