Summary:
Next torrent version is in a state I'm not entirely content with, but I'm willing to just add some finishing touches, share it that way and apply fixes in the version after that. Unfortunately because of circumstances outside of my control I will have much MUCH more important things to do with my free time in the next several weeks (I wish). However, after that I expect to plan to resume working on it and make a release.
Long version:
I happen to live in a certain country whose senile mass-murderer at the top decided to attack and invade Ukraine.
I spent most of the last week in shock (call me weak if you want), primarily because there was nothing I thought I could realistically do about it (call me slow if you want).
Right now I'm looking for job offers in other countries, but because of a strong and quite literally one-in-a-million preference[*], there is only one country (US) which at the moment satisfies it and it's neither easy nor fast to get in there and two moves are as bad as two thirds of a fire... but I digress.
If there's any western company which can offer permanent relocation + status adjustment, which needs a C/C++/Go/etc software engineer with 5+ years of job experience who also accidentally got a PhD in theoretical physics when he was young and adventurous, please don't hesistate to contact me at xmpp-jabber address rwx@headcounter.org or offer other contact channels here in comments that are more convenient for you.
There is also a slim, but worryingly nonzero chance that the scum in the Ministry of Censorship will completely cut off internet connectivity (and then blame it on the Evil West). In that case, OOPS.
One last thing. I don't think this warning is needed here, but just to be sure: pro-kremlin commenters will be shot on sight.
[*] I'm not telling what it is, but you can have this cute picture instead.
Best of luck to you! I just moved to the US from Germany this year, and I also have a PhD in physics. Small world, huh?
ReplyDeleteI hope things get better soon; I'm both sad and mad, and I read the news several times a day.
>Best of luck to you!
DeleteThank you. Best of luck to the people in the warzone too, they need it more than me.
>I hope things get better soon
Emotionally I agree. Logically, if there's one thing soviet history has taught me, it's that things get worse before they get worse.
You know, the US has senile warmonger leaders too, right? :^)
ReplyDeleteBut yeah there's nowhere I'd rather be right now. Despite the many, many, many, numerous, very bad flaws... At least I know I'm free, and pretty much nothing short of an ICBM could touch me. Flyover pride cornfield wide.
shit dude, will you be alright?
ReplyDeleteI am in China. A considerable number of people thinks that Russia is unable to bear NATO's step-by-step pressure, is this not true?
ReplyDeleteIn China, any news relating to opposition to the war amongst the Russian public becomes immediately 和諧ed because it's not a politically convenient narrative, hence the one-sided reporting that's going on. Some in China might even think that the protests throughout Russia are instigated by "western agents", because the Chinese perspective is that detached from the real world, I've seen too many of these people in the past week or so.
DeleteIn reality, this so-called "brother war" isn't as popular in Russia as you may think. Vasilly from Saint Petersberg is being sent to kill his 4th cousin Sasha in Kharkiv for purely political reasons that he doesn't care about. Do you know how interconnected families across Russia and Ukraine are? Two months ago, these people would have probably been getting drunk at the same weddings, now they're scraping each others' corpses off the pavement.
Please look at the world outside a China-centric perspective. Not everything has to be about HATO expansion, only the political class care about that nonsense, most people just want to live their lives in happiness.
你認爲普通的老百姓操心NATO的事嗎？俄羅斯和烏克蘭這兩個斯拉夫民族那麽靠近，你認爲普通老百姓希望對方被轟炸嗎？
I think you are right. You know, China has the great Great Wall, so most people have a narrower channel to get information than others in the world. For too long, the Chinese have been getting the message that NATO or the West is doing evil things.
DeleteLife is more important than anything else. Take your time to settle up your situation.
ReplyDeleteTake care of yourself.
<3
Hugs
ReplyDeleteЧел, так ты тоже из Росии штоле? Вот это лол.
ReplyDeleteFking hell man, i hope you can get outta there asap.
ReplyDeleteI'm so mad right now, here in italy there is so much pro-putin propaganda that i'm so fking angry
are you still okay? you safe?
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteReached out to you via XMPP. Good luck and stay safe.
ReplyDeleteЭто прально что сьебуешь из рашки, но ты учитывай, что пиратов в цивилизованных странах "не любят", а ты так в открытую просишь помощи и свои контакты даешь. Лучше в постсовок мигрируй какойнить, глубоко в тылах (не белорашка и не казахстан конечно же).
ReplyDeleteПиратов нигде не любят. Просто в рашке за это не штрафуют в 99.9% случаев.
DeleteStay safe, my dude. Try not worrying too much about what's not in your control.
ReplyDeleteI worry about.
ReplyDeletePutin just did a little Троллинг on Ukraine doe
ReplyDeleteI hope you are alright
ReplyDeleteIs it possible, to include a lossy version of .opus in the torrent, after all a lot of people love it but don't have hard drive space...
ReplyDeleteIncluding a lossy version _in the torrent_ would be pointless and wasteful, but a separate opus torrent might be made by whoever did it the last time.
DeleteIncluding a lossy version in the torrent will not only help many people with insufficient hard drives, but more importantly, fight censorship!
DeleteAs we all know, the best touhou music sharers on youtube faded away many years ago. Democracy in our world is not as good as it used to be. We may be censored and cracked down in the future.
This torrent data is very huge, and it will be even bigger in the future. Adding the official lossy version will allow more people to enjoy it, and more people will upload and seed it, making it more difficult to censor touhou, effectively dispersing the risk of being attacked. In addition, multiple third-party lossy versions will only spread the number of uploaders, which is not conducive to torrent survival.
So I want lossy and lossless in one torrent at the same time, not split into two torrents. People who don't want to download lossy can choose not to download the lossy part. The opus of v.19 is only 230GB.
In addition, I also hope that bloggers can encourage those who are able to actively upload lossless parts, because lossy formats such as opus are no longer supported by many software after decades, but lossless formats can be losslessly converted to another Lossless format.
The worst is not that there is no lossless, but that there is nothing, and this resource is too important, touhou is a miracle of democratization.
I don't think adding the lossy versions would be a promising idea.
DeleteWhile it would inflate the seeder numbers the vast majority would only download one version anyways so there wouldn't be a viable increase in seeders per file.
I haven't really seen any attempts of censorship on 2hu so far. With there not being many copyright issues there also is no monetary incentive for censorship. So aside from places like China -which is a whole other can of worms- I don't see 2hu music being cracked down upon soon.
Even if that scenario happened, I don't believe putting everything into one singular torrent would be a solution anyway. Why put all your eggs into one basket? Also, the decentralized nature of torrents is already advantageous for robustness.
If you do see merit in your idea, you could set up a combined torrent for it. You can have multiple torrents seeding the same data. So you could seed the lossy, the lossless and a combined version at the same time. I think there are other ways to achieve that as well e.g. with some tracker wizardry or such.
I don't see any demerits in that over your idea.
Even people with insufficient hard drives will keep lossless versions of a few excellent works, and people with lossy downloads can upload lossless.
DeleteI believe that there are very few people who have 2TB free hard disk space. The lossy version will instantly increase the number of torrent seeders, increase the torrent activity, and spread the risk of censorship. It is meaningless to simply attack a few lossless uploaders and audition sites, requires action on the hard drives of countless people...
Everyone should feel the censorship, so I don't need to say too much. Maybe everyone has nukes on their hard drives, something that authoritarian thinking censors are very afraid of :-)
Touhou is like the accelerant of the philosophical lamp that illuminates the night road. This resource is too important. Everyone, we are already at the forefront of fighting the censorship of touhou!
Ты там жив, цел, орёл?
ReplyDeleteИ жив, и цел, и орёл.
DeleteI'm setting a "final cutoff" deadline at 01 Jan 2023. If I'm still not done by that time I'll admit defeat in managing a 10k+ album collection, share everything in whatever form it is by then and ask someone else to step up.
ReplyDeleteI don't expect that to happen, but as hard drives teach us it's better to fail earlier than keep trying forever.
What would you think about distributing the workload between multiple people?
DeleteSome idea I had in mind would be a system where every submitted album/file/whatever goes into a list or queue that people could access.
Those inputs would be vetted and checked for dupes. If they qualify they could then be entered into the collection with the torrent updating in reasonable intervals.
Depending on the amount of trust to internet strangers this could either be completely open, accessible only to vetted people or some hybrid tiered system in-between.
Of course there is the possibility that the initial setup of such a system or the concurrent maintenance is even more work in the long run but I think something like that might be worth thinking about.
We already have a system for submissions from multiple people, it works at doujinstyle. You post an album and it appears in the list immediately.
DeleteHuh, neat, didn't know that. In that case would you just need to get more people onboard for the management or is there another issue you're getting snagged on?
DeleteNope, coordination costs would make it not worth it.
DeleteHow is it going?
DeleteSlower than I'd like, but hopefully faster than the new album release rate.
DeleteAs mentioned above, I am currently correcting the fork
DeleteBut I believe that the content of the current homework has a considerable part that is repeated with you
I know Reverse has shared with you, the OD link before the new album enters our server
So I wonder if it's possible to collaborate in some way
Not to require communication and coordination, but to be able to know what each of us has fixed to reduce duplication of work (such as correction lists)
As a continuation of discussion at http://www.tlmc.eu/2021/06/tlmc-v20-pre-release-post.html?showComment=1632969353452#c5713052197283865349
DeleteOne straightforward way I can see helping you is a list of all directories and/or files that I plan to add that is autogenerated daily and autouploaded somewhere.
You would need to provide that 'somewhere', though. Sftp, http form or anything else that can be trivially scripted.
Do you have other suggestions?
@rwx Is there any help you need getting the work done? I'd love to support as best as I could.
DeleteTheoretically I'd welcome help with finding the best cover versions (highest resolution up to original with fewest compression artifacts) for albums.
DeleteIn practice, however, I strongly expect the gains from parallelization to be minimal at best.
maybe use our updated OD?
DeleteIf you have a list of covers, which are still missing, I can do my best to find high quality digital files or scans
Delete@Edward.K
DeleteIf that is directed at me and OD is Onedrive/Sharepoint, then is that the "TLMC更新文件夹3" one? I'm already regularly using it, then. Or is it something else? What do you suggest exactly?
@Anonymous
For most albums the covers aren't missing, they are just worse than what could be found in 3 minutes. In some cases even the best digital versions are so bad that dropping them and going with purely scanned images is the way.
I'll take you up on that offer, but you'd have to set up some sort of download option which would allow me to grab all of your found covers in one go (please ask if it'll work for me before committing effort).
Can also upload my images, but that would easily be 50+ GB (didn't check, handwavy estimate). Will post a list in <36 hours.
@rwx
DeleteOnce I have a list, I'll do my best to find high quality covers. I don't mind a 50 GB download, I have 200 Mb/s download speed. As for my upload, I could host it on my own server temporarily until you have it. But let's talk about this more when I actually have something to show for.
https://litter.catbox.moe/96qku0.txt
DeleteThis is, uh, not the latest list of albums that need their covers checked and potentially replaced: there are still some albums in queue, some albums listed are on the other hand somehow problematic, but you can start with it.
If you have the last TLMC torrent then you can add its albums too. As a general rule if there are scans then adding an extra digital version of the front cover isn't particularly necessary, unless there is some superb single source that covers the entire discography.
Sorry for using litterbox (you have 3 days until file expires), but the catbox looks full at the moment (500 error from backend).
@rwx Thank you a bunch for the list. As it's over 3400 entries and I can do about 15-25 a day, it's going to take me a while. I'll do my best to keep you updated as I get along.
DeleteFor now, I've found some incredible high res digital covers (upwards of 1600x1600) directly from the artists for some of them. For others, 570x570 only, but at least no JPEG artifacts or aliasing. I'm afraid for some of the older covers, or for those of artists who didn't particularly care, this is really as good as it gets unless the illustrator themselves steps up.
As for how to get it to you, I'm planning on making the directory structure like in TLMC and then put it all into a 7z archive and temporarily host it on my own server. As it's ~1MB per album, it'll be about 3 GB to download. Is that alright for you?
@rwx sorry for the late reply
Deletei think should additionally create new folder in OD to handle
do you have any other private contact methods?
i will share the new folder link with you
Sorry for the late replies too.
Delete@Anonymous
Downloading a single file is ok.
I think I should've made a test out of several albums' covers. What are your best picks for these (just leave the urls)?
[凋叶棕]/2019.05.05 [RDWL-0029] 奏 [例大祭16]
[LUCIOLE＊CAFE]/2014.05.11 [LCCD-0003] Le Rêve [例大祭11]
[石鹸屋]/2018.12.30 [SKYT-0016] ってゐ! ～因幡総動員～ [C95]
@Edward.K
Private contact method other than the jabber? Well, you could use an email, for example: imhereforthefiles@cock.li (doesn't always work, but it does now).
You can also encrypt your message to my public key and post it in base64 below, but that's probably more complicated (if that's what you prefer just say so).
@rwx
Delete[RDWL-0029] 奏 is a tough one. I found two images, which I would consider "usable":
- http://www.rd-sounds.com/img/kanadess.jpg
- https://p1.music.126.net/gmSBu0xcXIOVbhjzyMr9Dw==/109951166032230719.jpg
The first one is directly from the blog of the artist and likely the "original" image. The second one is much higher resolution, but also has considerable JPEG compression artifacts. I believe for most people, these two files would be sufficient.
[LCCD-0003] Le Rêve is a real headache. I eventually found the Pixiv account of the artist, where she uploaded the cover: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/43321509
Unfortunately, 600x600 is as high-resolution as it gets. I know, this is disappointing, but I don't think tracking down a physical copy of a CD and scanning it with a 600 DPI scanner would give "better" results, because the original wasn't high-quality to begin with.
For [SKYT-0016] ってゐ! ～因幡総動員～, I was able to track down the site of the artist and the album cover was available there: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f27c2b_1a36570d197540d7917e0834fd00c22b~mv2.png
I found other sources for this album, but they just seemed like upscaled versions of this one or had JPEG compression artifacts.
In general, quality is way more important than resolution. A 800x800 image in perfect quality is much preferable to a 1200x1200 image, that was upscaled, had JPEG artifacts or similar. I hope those results are sufficient for you
>In general, quality is way more important than resolution.
DeleteI'd drop the "way" in "way more", because true higher resolutions can compensate for artifacts to various degrees. Upscales are right out, that's a given.
My answers are behind the link-type spoiler; follow the link once you think you can't do better.
https://www.klgrth.io/paste/eajne
WTF, google?! Retroactively marking comments as spam and removing their visibility? REALLY?
DeleteI'm still hoping for a christmas miracle.
DeleteI have not given up on the full package, but the timeout version will be only new albums and non-uniform codec (mostly flac).
DeleteI'm preparing the partial torrent, it should be ready in less than a week.
DeleteSounds good. What's the plan going to be after that?
DeleteAt least one complete clean torrent, hopefully this year.
DeleteThank you for all the effort you keep putting into these, I'll be eagerly waiting for the definitive edition release :)
DeleteOne thirteen-day workweek later...
DeleteIt's hashing.
<3
DeleteUh, how do I say it? Torrent content viewer, explorer directory total and "dir" on a mounted share show three different counts of files in the batch (less than 10 files difference, but still). What's even more weird, a quick-check (only filenames, not content) by my windows qb says everything is ok. Another day of delay while I figure it out.
DeleteAs expected, one of the files had a weird control character (U+202B) in its name, which confused qb and could trip some other clients.
DeleteAnd the problem with varying file counts was YET AGAIN caused by windows explorer being dumb retarded piece of shit. Linux FS's are case-sensitive, Samba is case-sensitive, NTFS, because it was made in better times by people with actual brains, is case-sensitive, Qb/libtorrent is well aware of all that and is case-sensitive/aware too, but no, explorer had to be different and therefore, when there are two directories which only differ by their case, can't count for shit. I don't even want to think about why "dir" is even more off, probably some other legacy windows idiocy like failing on characters outside of basic multilingual plane or something.
DeleteBy the way, control character failure is a deliberate design decision by libtorrent. Not sure I agree with that, but whatever.
If anyone saw the post on the main page (that I took down for now)... I need more sleep. Forgot to actually rename the file. Three more hours.
@rwx
DeleteAfter more than half a year of inactivity, I think it’s time to come back and discuss the issue of version forking and unification.
I'll try jabber later to see if I can get more timely contact.
Also want to confirm if imhereforthefiles@cock.li can still contact you?
Oops, sorry, only now have I noticed this message.
DeleteI don't check cock.li often because it's blocked here and my censorship circumvention measures for some reason don't work for the TLS session by a standalone client, only for the web version, which no one of sane mind would use on a daily basis.
I saw you add me on jabber and authorized you, but got no further messages, did you send anything there? I suggest pursuing that route, it's much faster and more convenient than posts here for 1-1 conversations.
Holy shit dude. Didn't expect you to be from the same shithole that I am.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I flied Istanbul days after the war started and finally settled in Thailand. Living here for two months. Comparatively no visa issues, cheap even for a Russian, love the food and the culture, possible to travel around neighboring countries. Nice place if you can work remotely. But tbh doesn't seem like anything really permanent.
Stay safe and you will find a way out. Fuck the war.
Hope you are doing well friend, keep safe
ReplyDeletejust saw the news about the russian mobilization, I hope you already fled russia.
ReplyDeleteI hope you’re staying safe and keeping your head down. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help with your escape from Russia.
ReplyDelete