Here are the desktops to all three of my Linux computers. I’ve switched from Shantae back to Nadia. First up is my Mint Mate desktop, my main computer. I just recently learned how to set the terminal transparency. Neat effect!
Zorin OS on my laptop. I’m still getting used to Zorin. It’s not bad. Pretty friendly.
Raspberry OS running on my Raspberry Pi 5. I’m only using a 32gb SD card for the hard drive and I maxed it out by just adding some Rifftrax movies to the Home/Videos folder. I intend to buy at least a 128gb SD card to upgrade.
I posted before about how the Nadia movie was a real dud, especially since it reset the characters and failed to feature Jean and Nadia’s wedding in this post here although it was featured in a doujinshi manga I included scans of here. Well, I recently learned of this novel published by Tokuma Shoten called “Jean and Nadia’s Longest Day,” written by Hirotoshi Kobayashi and illustrated by Kazuhiro Miyake. I bought it from Rakuten rather cheaply. There are novelizations of the TV series in three books, but this one is under the “Nadia Stories vol. 1” category. Vol. 2 in this series apparently involves an older Marie and Samson. Maybe it’s a story about how they get married? It’s the same writer and artist team.
In this book’s prologue, it says that Jean and Nadia were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I’ve only read the first page so far. It’s pretty easy to understand so far, with only a few kanji I had to look up. I’m sure the reading level will become more difficult though as this is an adventure story after all. By the looks of it, the antagonist in this story is some weird non-human with some weird Illuminati-style horns growing out of his forehead. Anyhow, it’s neat seeing Nadia a bit older. Aside from the full color images I’ve scanned below, there are some occasional black and white illustrations interspersed through the pages of the novel.
An older Nadia, apparently sewing her wedding dress?
Nadia as a happy bride. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto did not do the artwork for this book, but as I mentioned above it was done by Kazuhiko MIyake. Not bad. So now I’ll show you some of the black and white pictures from the book, namely the ones featuring Nadia.
The only nice thing about the Nadia movie were the older character designs, and the art i this book remains faithful to that image of an older Nadia.
OK, so apparently Nadia makes a re-appearance at the circus she was once the star of? She’s wearing the same clothes, but they’re getting a bit small since she’s no longer 14 years old. Her top barely fits her tits now.
Looks like Nadia’s not having a good day. She got attached to yet another Y-shape, although this time it’s some sort of wall recession. The guy at the bottom is the villain of the story.
I’ll give the book a shot, but I’ve no idea how far I can get into it as I am not fluent enough, even for this novel aimed at adolescents. Nearly 10 years ago, I got to the point where every new kanji started looking the same, and all the pronunciations started sounding the same.
Since Nadia is one of my favorite anime series, I like looking for random Nadia-related merchandise on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions Japan. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, like Nadia pencil boards, a Nadia ruler, and a booklet of Nadia postcards. Some of the stuff, however, is rather weird.
Oh look, it’s a gun… just like Nadia used in the show. Right? Not. So this is a “fire gun” that is made to resemble the Nautilus. I’m guessing that it creates sparks.
Ha! So this bottle of water came out for the 30th anniversary of the Nadia anime. At least the water isn’t blue due to food coloring. So it’s not really the “Secret of Blue Water” but rather just the “Secret of Water” in this case.
So this is a 1:6 scale Nadia garage kit by T’s System. The proportions look weird. She looks like Gumby who got pulled in both directions. I mean, look at her abdomen! She just wasn’t sculpted right because she is too skinny. The rest isn’t too bad, but dang! Look at her belly! She has the proportions of an alien who’s being starved to death. Eat a sandwich, girl! Plus whoever painted this really got her skintone all wrong. She’s supposed to have dark brown skin. Why do they keep whitewashing her in recent years? They didn’t do this to her 30 years ago. All the merch back then showed her with a proper skin tone.
Here is my newest desktop wallpaper, and it’s Nadia with a beautiful sunset. I was running Mint Mate 20 Ulyssa, and my 1TB SSD hard disk was maxing out. In august I bought a 2TB HD, and in September I installed Mint Mate 22 Wilma. It wasn’t a smooth experience like version 20 was. The first problem I had was when I plugged the old 1TB drive in and tried copying my files directly from there. Upon reboot, it wouldn’t even boot up and was scrolling text. I re-installed Wilma. Then updating the Nvidia driver caused the computer to freeze up. I had to get help on the Linux Mint Forums and learned how to modify the boot kernel. After that, it was fine. However what remains is apparently the USB device manager might not function properly.
I’ve done three fresh installs of Retropie on Linux Mint Mate 22 and each time the controller input is screwed up. I am using a Logitech F310 USB gamepad, which is pretty standard. Retropie on Mint 22 is flawed. Controller problems.
When accessing the in-game menu by pressing the hot key (to take a screenshot, save state, etc), the joypad locks up. I have to press select for it to work again. When returning to the game, the joypad is again locked up and I cannot play the game. I must press select again to regain control.
When accessing Retropie-Setup from within the RetroPie GUI, joypad input ceases to work. Not even the arrow keys can be used. The workaround for this is to run the setup.sh via terminal and the controller works. Just not when accessed through RetroPie itself.
For this third time, I did not copy over any config files and I did the controller setup for my joypad from scratch. I thought perhaps that there might have been a problem by just copying the entirety of the ./opt/retropie folder and all of its subfolders, but this is not the case. I did a full uninstall, then a reinstall. The problem remains.
I am wondering if it is a problem with Mint 22 itself. I had zero problems installing and using RetroPie on Mint 19 and 20. However, with Mint 22 I’ve noticed that at least with Space Invaders Extreme on Steam, the game does not recognize my controller at all, regardless of which version of the Linux Proton compatibility tool I am using.
I’ve been advocating people switching to Linux for years now, but this latest version is making me hesitant. My experiences with installing Mint 19 Tricia and Mint 20 Ulyssa were smooth, but Mint 22 Wilma has given me some headaches. Posting my problems online, I was told by others who are disappointed with 22 Wilma’s USB capabilities. One guy said he has some external hard drives that 22 won’t recognize. Another said that his Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo is wonky, and replacing this with a generic wireless set did not solve the problem. I do hope that these issues will be addressed soon. I would not have known what to do with my Nvidia driver without the help of the Mint forum. I was told that my GPU is old, but it’s from 2017 so it can’t be that old.
For now, Steam is fine, more or less. Retropie is fine until I have to bring up the menu. Having to press the select button though, it makes me hesitant to plug in my Saturn controllers, since they do not have a select button.
EDIT 10/27: I ran an update over the weekend and the first issue with RetroPie freezing after calling up the menu is now fixed.
Recently I signed up for a Mercari account. It’s an online fleamarket. Often you can find stuff cheaper there than on YAJ, and a greater variety of smaller items. Lots of neat Sega stuff and whatnot. I’ve sometimes asked my wife to get stuff for me through her account and I’d pay for the items at the convenience store, but I decided to create my own account.
Although I bought the newer 1:1000 scale Nautilus model by Kotobukiya, I wanted to build the old 1:700 scale Bandai kit and give it another go. It is OOP and goes for a bit on YAJ, but I found it cheaply on Mercari (about half of what it goes for on YAJ). I built this when I still lived in America, and it was the first fully-airbrushed kit I ever built. This time, I want to drill lots of holes and use clear UV resin to try to light it. This Bandai kit is from the ’90s, back before they made all of their models snap kits. While this Bandai kit does not have as great of detail as the smaller Kotobukiya Nautilus, since it is not a snap fit model , I believe it has more hollow sections. I think I can drill out the window portals and replace them with Wave H-Eyes lenses, as well as casting the captain’s quarters on top in clear resin to light it up. That would be neat.
I made a page for my old build on my model gallery I stopped updating about 10 years ago here. It comes with a small 1:20 scale Nadia figure, and it was the first figure I ever painted.
Yet another reason to hate Disney! Disney has plagiarized Japanese animation before, with Aladdin and most infamously for Lion King. I found this post on Pinterest demonstrating how they stole the concept of Nadia with their Atlantis: The Lost Empire movie. 10+ years prior, there was the fantastic Gainax anime about a dark-skinned girl in a tube top who turns out to be a long-lost princess of Atlantis who teams up with a boy with blond hair and glasses. Disney took the gist of that story, gave the girl white hair instead of black, and plagiarized. Those stupid bastards. I took the image and cut it up into segments so that it can be seen in this blog format.
To hell with Disney. Plagiarist bastards. Interestingly enough, the Nadia anime places Atlantis in the heart of Africa. Lately, archaeologists are pointing towards this theory. It makes more sense than the “middle of the ocean” theory.
Just in time for the summer, Nadia relaxing on a beach now replaces the USS Enterprise wallpaper I’d had on my Raspberry Pi for a while now. I had to sudo apt install Kazam because Raspberry OS does not come with a default screen grabber that simply uses the print screen button on the keyboard.
