Booth.pm corrupts your downloads.

If you ever bought direct downloads from them make sure to check that your files are error-free, especially if your downloads were slow.

Today I noticed that half of the files in four free albums by "クロネコラウンジ" did not decode properly. I redownloaded them all and one of the new files was still broken, but another attempt got me a good version. It was the only file that took about two minutes to get (today's first attempt), compared to several seconds for the rest, which suggests that under heavy load the file-serving part of their webmonkey code hiccups and starts sending you wrong file parts. Looking at the broken files in hexeditor you would notice content starts repeating in some random place (the starting position of the first part that gets repeated is aligned at 1 MiB boundary).

Princess Connect

Important notice 1: TLMC pre-release post soon(tm), the torrent several weeks after that post. Don't ask when, it's being worked on.
Important notice 2: Princess Connect Re:Dive [global] is available both in "32-bit" (ARMv7) and "64-bit" (ARM64) versions, don't listen to anyone claiming otherwise. Just visit some direct-from-google downloader like this, and pick SG Grand Prime (for 32) or SG Note 9 (for 64).
Important notice 3: Leapdroid won't run PCRD (some OpenGL surface issues). Bluestacks emulator, which I saw being recommended by many, contains a metric shitton of malware out of the box, be advised.

Just a short observation - if you feel like peeking at exact values the game uses internally, you should view its db (which is located in "files/manifest" app settings subdirectory; the one with the sqlite header). If, for any reason, you just want to refer to some data there without exporting it yourself, you may use this dump. I'm not sure I'll be sticking with the game for a long time, so I can't promise regular updates yet.

Based on the current db the game will be officially released on 19 Jan 2021 and clan battles will start on 10 Feb 2021.
First "focused gacha"' will be rateup for Djeeta.

20 Feb 2021 edit: Stopped updating the db dump on github.
The game turned out to be pay-to-win trash, wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Proper GF battery chart

Yet another thing that was slightly bothering me about GF for a long time was wrong information about the effect dorms and their comfort have on collected batteries that is repeated everywhere. It was bothering me only slightly because I never had enough gems to go past 3 dorms. However, some time ago I got rich fast (in gems, not real life), so I decided to fix the issue.

Bookmark a backup

Yesterday I got an email that looks like a fishing attempt. Bla-bla, validate your identity or else we'll suspend your domain, bla-bla. Just in case it is not a scam I recommend you to save a backup name that leads to this blog: http://nameless--fairy.blogspot.com (note the double dash).

Significantly reduced GFDB precision

Starting from 03 Nov 2019 the frequency of the log data updates returned by the game server changed once again: now refresh interval is more than once per hour (~20 updates in 24 hours). If this is a permanent change then it's rather bad news for anyone expecting meaningful statistics from EN GFDB in the future.

UPDATE: On 06 Nov everything got back to normal.

On modern software

Today I noticed that gfdb updates were broken again. It was the third time it happened, so I knew this deserved a post.

I caught first update breakage purely by accident. One day I looked at the process list and noticed a chain of git commands sitting there doing nothing. Apparently at some point git decided it was time to do garbage collection, so it ran "git gc --auto", which, for reasons yet unknown to me, could not complete in 50 minutes on a fairly small and completely linear repository. This step should have happened before the push took place, but since it just hung there (with no cpu/disk activity, by the way) it was killed by task scheduler every hour to start new task, which repeated everything. This was going on for 5 days before I noticed. I run "git gc" manually and it finished in about a minute, cleared the clog and all was good (for a while).

First Girls' Frontline guestopocalypse

Today during the maintenance I noticed an error in craft scraper log that I've never seen before: all login tokens were being explicitly rejected. This slightly scared the hell out of me, it could mean that my account, which I kept as a guest, was also in danger. After the mainenance concluded the error message didn't change, my own account was also locked out.
Well, shit.