iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 30/09/2026

couldn't find where I'd posted this before so here's a new render of my prestige TV-style fly-through of part of Chauvet Cave, now with improved texture and lighting

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 25/09/2026

I feel complicated about the issue but I do think think this doodle from years ago would make a good laptop sticker

A drawing of a DEC vt220 terminal with the stylized lettering “computers were better when they were worse”

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 22/09/2026

oh I'm a shoo-in for this one

A job ad that for a position as "JavaScript Developer (Mid)"

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 05/09/2026

A flyover of the Gaussian splat I made of the drip castle I made today

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 05/09/2026

The drip sand castle I made today

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 05/09/2026

Drip sand castles I made this week

A drip sand castle connected to the pit its sand was dredged from

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 24/08/2026

Anyway I finally took a crack at a dual-path Surrender Flare. It's very far from what's actually possible but I don't think it's too embarrassing. Definitely the fastest solution I've ever composed for this particular puzzle.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 19/08/2026

This is what my manga translation workbench software looks like at the moment.

a screenshot of a manga translation app. The app's left panel displays a photo of a page of manga, with bounding boxes drawn around the panels and lines of dialogue. On the right side is the corresponding script. There's a right-hand sidebar that lists Character names, styles, and a find/replace tool.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 07/07/2026

Happy anniversary Molly Anne

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 01/07/2026

Me welcoming Fable back like

The “WELCOME HOME” text from the end of Gunbuster

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 25/06/2026

just taking in the afternoon like he owns the concept of summer

A shorthaired brown tabby cat lounges on a concrete wall behind wrought iron bars

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 12/06/2026

Good god but I married well.

A social media post reading “If you can't listen to spitz and feel gently wistful with the big dogs get out of the bakery where I control the aux”

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 12/06/2026

Day 19 of posting "I need a job" every day until I get a job. Yesterday I trained a computer vision model to find text and panels on manga pages and it's roughly as accurate as the current state of the art on those tasks while being much faster. Eh, probably nothing.

a comparison of my RT-DETR finetune (left) vs. MagiV2 (right).

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 11/06/2026

day 18. hmm what's this, eh probably nothing

a photo of a page of me & roboco with bounding boxes around pages and panels and reading order correctly graphed

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 05/06/2026

Day 14. Would an unemployed person do THIS?

an analysis of potentially palindromic equivalency in sheena ringo/spitz songs titles

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 30/05/2026

Knew it was going to work and it worked almost exactly how I knew it would

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 23/05/2026

I would tag this MagicaVoxel except MagicaVoxel doesn't work like this, so it must be something else.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 29/04/2026

Anthropic donating to the Blender development fund does nothing but help Blender and signal Anthropic's good taste. Anyone who feels betrayed by this can go log in to projects.blender.org/blender/blen..., click the "fork" button, and make a version whose future they can personally control, forever.

a screenshot of the blender repository with the "fork" button circled

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 13/04/2026

I am at my parents’ place and going through my Old Boxes and there are some powerful artifacts here……I may have dug too greedily….too deep……..

A cardboard box with a computer game box and other items. The computer game box has a picture of a city and the text "There's intelligent life out there." and "eWorld The new online service from Apple Computer."

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 12/04/2026

If you’re going to read one essay about manga translation this week, make it this one by Toren Smith that ran in the back of Oh My Goddess! issue #2, September 1994.

The cover of Oh My Goddess issue number 2

Greetings! Before we get into the heap o' mail that continues to pile in for Oh My Goddess!, I'd like to yield the floor to Toren Smith, who wants to provide Y'all with some background on our heroine and her fellow deities. For those of you not in the know, Toren heads up Studio Proteus, the tough-as-nails translating and production powerhouse behind Dark Horse's manga. Take the floor, Toren!
When fans ask how to become a translator, the usual reply is to tell them to crack those Japanese textbooks and get studying. Some translators are on the ball enough to encourage the eager student to learn to write well in English, too, since that is your end product.
But I've never heard anyone tell them that they need to know something about practically everything known to man.
Sound absurd? Unfortunately, as someone who's worked on plenty of Shirow material, I can assure you it is not. Masamune Shirow (especially in his text pieces) displays a far-ranging knowledge of, well, just about everything. One moment the intricacies of Tantric Buddhism, the next the cutting edge of high-energy physics, the next insect biology. Hisashi Sakaguchi's Version had me delving into the latest research on electro-organic logic circuitry, and even the usually straightforward Johji Manabe (Caravan Kidd) sent me scuttling to my West Point History of World War II to track down the proper spellings for the names of obscure German armor commanders.
My experience on Oh My Goddess! is a case in point, and perhaps provides a window into the less-obvious aspects of translating.
The title was no problem, since it was an obvious play on the Japanese manga artists' propensity to have English-speaking foreigners say "Oh my God!" during any moment of surprise or stress. The peculiar transliteration previously used in Japan ("Ah! My Goddess") was dropped after we confirmed with Fujishima that our understanding of his intent was correct. He also confirmed that the lead characters were named after Norse mythol…

Amory confirmed the original spellings and that the proper pronunciation of the names is "Verthandi" and "Urthr."
So now I have a dilemma. Technically, a proper and complete translation of the names would be Verthandi, Urthr, and Skuld (at least one out of the three would survive unchanged!), but I was concerned that such a large change (despite its inarguable accuracy) might cause unrest among the fans. I discussed this at length with Kodansha, Fujishima, and Robert Woodhead at AnimEigo (since he was facing the same problem with his subtitled video release). The upshot was that since Fujishima was playing it fast and loose with the mythos in general, no harm would be done by sticking with his preferred transliteration, Belldandy-despite the huge change from the proper Verthandi. Urd was less of a problem,
"Urd" being an accepted alternate spelling. And of course Skuld worked out just fine.
Then we hit "Mara," which had previously been bizarrely translated as "Marller." Again, since the character was obviously based on a combination of the Mara of Buddhist religion (sometimes called the Buddhist Satan) and Mara, the "arch-tempter" of Hindu mythology, we decided to go with "Mara." The Hindu Mara (also known as God of Illusion) has three daughters-Rati (Desire), Raga (Pleasure), and Tanha (Restlessness) who also attempted to dissuade Siddartha Guatama, the Buddha, from attaining his enlightenment. The Buddhist Mara leads an army of demons depicted in Buddhist art as hideous monsters similar to the devils that torment the damned in medieval European portrayals of hell. The demons that are a common subject of Tibetan iconography were originally native spirits connected with the shamanistic Bon religion of pre-Buddhist Tibet, who have been tamed by the power of Buddhist saints.
I hope this will give some indication of the work that is often necessary to translate these comics properly, and the effort that is often expended to see that it is done correctly. Decisions are …

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 29/03/2026

Velvet Ant in backyard!

A black and orange insect on a dirt surface. A small gray rock is nearby. The dirt is brown with small rocks and twigs.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 26/03/2026

I made an edit to a clunky paragraph in the MagicaVoxel essay that's been annoying me for months. Man, remember that? Jeez. disk.horse/magical/

When we look at the world around us, we are not sensing the shapes of the things that make it up. We sense only whatever light made it to our retinas after bouncing off (or being emitted from) those shapes. To turn the abstract mathematical representation of its scene into an image, MagicaVoxel has to answer the question "Given this scene and this point of view, what is the image created by the light that reaches the eye of the viewer?"

When we look at the world around us, we are not intrinsically sensing the shapes of the things that make it up. We detect only whatever light made it to our retinas after bouncing off (or being emitted from) those shapes.
Similarly, a geometric representation of a shape in a computer doesn't inherently correspond to a particular image. It's just a list of positions. To get from the abstract mathematical representation of its scene to a picture you can look at, MagicaVoxel has to answer the question "Given this scene geometry and illumination, what light reaches the eye of the viewer?"

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 23/03/2026

took no less than three abortive attempts (including one that was "complete" until I realized I'd created a shape with the wrong chirality) to get this one. I can't believe I play this stupid game

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 21/03/2026

My only De Re Metallica solution so far that's not a total mediocrity.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 18/03/2026

Slay the Spire? I don't know her

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 17/03/2026

believe it or not I have a piece of writing in progress about it

The funniest joke I've heard or seen in months was a sight gag: a single automotive tire, thrown out through the open doors of a truck trailer containing hundreds of its comrades and onto a loading dock, rolled unsteadily for a couple dozen feet before wobbling in such a way as to make a quick 180 degree turn and begin rolling back toward the trailer from which it had been thrown.

Imagine that you have unloaded perhaps 700 similar but less gifted tires in the process of receiving the day's inbound shipment at the American Tire Distributors warehouse in Columbia, SC. Your counterpart in the trailer has been rolling the tires to you. Your job is to place like tires in stacks five or six or seven high onto pallets, which will be forklifted across the dock and scanned into the warehouse inventory.

The tires are sometimes heavy---the knobby off-road ones can weigh close to a hundred pounds each---but above all they are numerous, and you (recall, now, 700 tires into the unloading process) are therefore winded and muscle-sore. In the midst of the tedium and exhaustion of the work, an unremarkable car tire rolling towards you in the manner of the last several hundred of its brethren suddenly turns on its heel in a manner ineluctably _decisive_ and begins rolling precisely back toward the trailer, as though it has changed its mind. As though it has _forgotten its wallet._

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 17/03/2026

the job search is becoming dire lol

A screenshot of text from an Adobe Indesign text frame reading:

In Closing, A Freeform, Impressionistic List of
Hopefully Interesting Things I Have Done

Translate 14 volumes of a fantasy book series about medieval microeconomics from Japanese into English • Explain to a room full of comics editors why regular expressions are good • Compose and produce music for a friend’s Kickstarter video • Write a node.js tool to help authors check the status of their submissions to a science fiction zine • Play drums in a jazz band in rural Japan • Compose formal sonnets for the back cover copy of an Eisner Award-winning manga • Write Adobe InDesign scripts to automate certain very specific types of editorial drudgery in the manga production process • Justify the delicate art of translation to a convention hall full of anime fans • Write LaTeX macros to correctly typeset classical Japanese poetry • Create a piece of music for Homestuck • Implement three separate iterations of a document editor for composing comic book scripts as structured data • Create a detailed 3D computer model of a 200-year-old traditional adobe ranch house using roughly 250 million individual voxels • Invent a novel form of doggerel • Create an animated visualization of ad performance data as a swarm of flocking birds • Make a driving-through-the-rain sound simulator entirely from algorithmic noise • Write a shell script to convert an idiosyncratic 1400 page memoir formatted for print into an ebook • Animate and render a prestige TV-style camera move over a digital model of Chauvet Cave • Create a system of geometric tiling based on the grammar implied by the Spectre aperiodic monotile • Write a Python script to optimize SVG files for laser cutting • Design a crossword puzzle • Produce, edit, and publish a podcast • Throw tires, professionally • Visit every roller skating venue in every city I’ve lived in since 2008

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 13/03/2026

*touching the ground and closing my eyes* a great battle was fought here...both sides shed blood... *cocking my head slightly, brow furrowed* but neither can claim victory........

A section from a wikipedia article with the heading "Title Discrepancy" that reads:

Translating the original Japanese title of Aa! Megami-sama proved to be problematic. Fred Patten, in writing the preface to the collection "Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews", stated that fans were still debating whether "Ah! My Goddess" or "Oh My Goddess!" should be used at the time of writing, approximately 15 years after the first Oh My Goddess! manga was published. When the United States anime import company AnimEigo obtained the original video animation (OVA) rights, they titled the series Oh My Goddess! This approach was also followed by Toren Smith and Dark Horse Comics when translating the manga, released in concert with the OVA series in 1994. Smith has since stated that he saw the title as a play on "Oh my god!", and felt that there was no problem when translating it. Smith confirmed that his interpretation of the author's intent was correct by consulting with Fujishima. Nevertheless, Kodansha's bilingual release of the manga used Ah!My Goddess, as did Pioneer's North American release of the film, and Media Blasters's 2005 DVD release of the TV series.

Fujishima stated in Animerica that "Oh" was closer to his intent, but acknowledged that the title should be rendered so as to make sense within the country that it is published, and specifically stated that films may warrant different titles than other works. 19 He did, however, state that he would prefer to see consistency between the titles of the manga and those of the animations.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 08/03/2026

the artifacts I’m someday going to have to explain

A beige tote bag with black handles leaning against a wall. The bag has red text that reads "#HITOZUMA."

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 03/03/2026

In other personal news, I finally came up with a solution to one (1) of the Opus Magnum bonus puzzles. The bonus content has always been way too hard for me but I finally got there.

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 03/03/2026

haha wait there were some extraneous instructions in that last one...managed to get it down to 129 cycles from 141 with the same layout. Still well within the comfortable middle of the performance histogram though...

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 03/03/2026

aaaah its ya boy.... still mediocre as always.....!!

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 03/03/2026

with only marginal improvement.....

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Paul Starr @pa.ulst.ar · 03/03/2026

getting my shape-rotating skills warmed up for the immanent Opus Magnum DLC....three solutions to the same puzzle...

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