Watching Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine (名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影（サブマリン）) again

So I watched Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine (名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影（サブマリン）) again.

The movie is into its third week in Japan, and this was the third Saturday since it started screening. And it was more or less a full house... with lots of kids and adults. I guess one cannot underestimate the power of a series that will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next year. Breaking through 5.8 billion yen in 10 days, it looks set to achieve that 10 billion yen mark that has escaped Conan movies in the past.

 

One thing that I couldn't figure out. Haibara Ai called Conan "Kudo-kun", "Shinichi-kun", and "Edogawa Conan-kun" (more or less in this order) as the movie progresses. I am sure there is some subtle meaning behind this change in how she called Conan. Hopefully, I figure it out (either by asking a Conan fan in the family, or watching some YouTube videos).

Watching Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine (名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影（サブマリン）)

I saw someone post on Twitter about "the two elementary school kids who earned 3 billion yen in 3 days" and that sparked my interest in Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine (名探偵コナン 黒鉄の魚影（サブマリン）). The two elementary school kids were Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai. The movie brought in 3.1 billion yen on the 3 days of its opening weekend, from Friday to Sunday, when it opened in Japan on 14 April 2023.

My work schedule for the past month was really tight, but things have settled down and I had quite a bit of free time these few days, so I decided to make a trip to the local theatre to catch the movie.

The setting of the story can be a bit... erm... authoritarian? I mean, we are talking about the police using security camera and face recognition technology to find people... this sounds like some real-world East Asian country to me. But putting this aside, the movie is like other Conan movies, with the skateboard and explosions. This time, though, the main location is out at sea, but Conan still manages to use his skateboard inside the offshore facility.

The relationships between Conan/Shinichi and Ran as well as that between Conan and Haibara are part of the story too, and this movie continues to add to those relationships. No spoilers, though. Let's just say some scenes even sparked uproar among fans in China... and it hasn't even started showing in China yet, those fans just heard rumours.

All in, I find this to be an enjoyable movie, like most other Conan movies. It is worth a watch, and yes, it should be enjoyed on the big screen because of the action and sound effects. I myself will likely be back a second time (for various reasons...)

Guyu 穀雨

After Qingming, or 清明, comes Guyu, or 穀雨, another of the 24 solar terms, or 二十四節気, and so I kept up the practice.

 

Workstations for Proxmox

After migrating my main VMs from the Dell Poweredge R720 to a HP Proliant ML110 Gen9, the next step is to migrate the VMs from the Dell Poweredge R430. While I love the rack servers because they can be fitted with 2 CPUs and tons of RAM, with support for hot-plug drives, they really consume a ton of electricity. Which was the reason for wanting to decommission them. Now that step one is done, next is to find a suitable host for the non-critical VMs on the R430.

The R430 uses Xeon E5-2600v3 or v4 CPUs and DDR4 ECC RAM, so I was searching to see if there is any alternatives where I can reuse the parts. One alternative was to get another ML110 Gen9, but it only has one x16 PCIe slot, which kind of limits the number of concurrent VMs that I can run. I also thought about the ML350 Gen9, but it is a huge monster and I don't think I will need something so big.

Searching around, I found that workstations that use the Xeon E5-1600v3 or v4 series of CPUs can usually use the E5-2600v3 or v4 series too, so I started looking for some possible candidates.

 

And found these two workstations.

On the left is a Lenovo ThinkStation P500. It came with a single Xeon E5-1620v3 CPU, 32GB of RAM, 500GB harddisk, and a Nvidia Quadro K2200 graphics card.

On the right is a Fujitsu Celsius M740 with Xeon E5-1620v4 CPU, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a Nvidia Quadro M2000 graphics card (this is a second-generation Maxwell card).

Although the K2200 starts with K, it is actually a first-generation Maxwell card. But I have more than enough GPUs (GTX 1050Ti, Quadro P600, T400, T600, T1000) so this is most likely going to end up functioning as paperweight. The M2000 is likely to share the same fate.

 

The best part is, when powered down, with wake-on-LAN enabled and Intel AMT enabled, the workstations consume only about 1W of electricity. This means they can be turned off most of the time at minimum consumption, and remotely powered up using either wake-on-LAN or via Intel AMT. They also come with many PCIe slots, and at least two of them at x16 slots. This means they can easily be fitted with two GPUs that draw up to 75W. They even have power connectors for additional power to GPUs if needed. You can also set the PCIe slot of the GPU to use for boot in the BIOS. This means I can actually fit a simple GPU that draws little power in one of the x4 or x8 slots to use as video output for the host and leave the x16 slots for GPUs that will be passed through to the VMs.

In the end, I decided on this: AMD FirePro W2100. It is rated to draw 26W, has 2GB of DDR3 VRAM, and is natively supported by Linux via radeon and amdgpu drivers. This means it will just work in Linux, without having to install any additional drivers post-installation. I even placed it in a x4 PCIe slot and it worked! But then again, I am just using it to see output from the host, so it won't be doing any heavy lifting (not that it can, even if I wanted it to).

I promptly installed Proxmox on the Celsius M740, followed by Xfce desktop as per the steps here. Then, using the Proxmox Backup Server that I recently set up, I restored the VMs from backed up from the R720 and R430 to the M740. I then started each VM to check that they function.

The M740 came with a Xeon E5-1620v4 CPU, which was a bit underpowered, so I replaced it with a Xeon E5-2690v4 CPU (14 cores, 28 threads, base clock 2.6 GHz, boost to 3.5 GHz, all-core turbo up to 3.2 GHz, TDP of 135W). Plus gave it a lot of RAM, reusing what I had in the R430. The Nvidia T1000 with 8GB of VRAM is also in it now. It is not going to be stellar in single-threaded uses, but with 28 threads, applications that can make use of multi-threading will really benefit. If I am only running one VM, I can even use 26 threads.

I was going to do the same with the ThinkStation P500, but found out (the hard way) that it can only use E5-1600v3 or E5-2600v3 CPUs. No support for E5-1600v4 or E5-2600v4 CPUs... even after updating the BIOS. I guess Lenovo is saying, if you want to use Broadwell Xeon v4 CPUs, pay for the Lenovo ThinkStation P510 (which has the exact look and form factor). So, a Xeon E5-2698v3 CPU (16 cores, 32 threads, base clock 2.3 GHz, boost to 3.6 GHz, all-core turbo up to 2.8 GHz, TDP of 135W) is on its way from AliExpress.

Here are the "paperweights"...

Nvidia Quadro K2200 (Maxwell Gen 1 with 4GB VRAM)

Nvidia Quadro M2000 (Maxwell Gen 2 with 4GB VRAM)

Oh, even with 20+ threads, trying to run a large-language model on a CPU is very slow... The Nvidia T1000 has 8GB of VRAM and can probably squeeze in up to a 13B model that has been quantized, so maybe I will give that a try some day.

Update 24 July 2023: I found out, the hard way, that the Celsius M740's power supply's 8-pin connector for a GPU is... not compatible with the usual 8-pin cables that you usually find. The pinout for a 8-pin connector for GPU's usually have 3 pins for 12V, 3 pins for ground, and 2 pins for sense (which should be ground). The power supply's connector, however, has 4 pins for 12V and 4 pins for ground, which means it will not be able to power a GPU requiring external power if you just use a usual cable. You need to find a cable that connects only to 3 of the 12V pins on the PSU while terminating in the proper pinout configuration on the GPU's end. Or buy it from Fujitsu. In the end, I found a cable that had a 6-pin connector on one end and a 8-pin connector on the other end (with the proper pinout configuration) and was able to use it with my new RTX 4060.

Qingming 清明

Qingming, or 清明, comes after the spring equinox (春分). It is also one of the 24 solar terms, or 二十四節気, and so I used it for practice too.

Springtime poems of violets

Die blauen Fruhlingsaugen  (The blue eyes of spring)

The deep, blue eyes of Springtime
Peer from the grass beneath;

They are the tender violets
That I will twine in a wreath.

I pick them and I ponder
And all my hopes and aims,

All of my hidden fancies
The nightingale proclaims!

Yes, all that I think, he echoes
In a loud and lyric mood;

And now my deepest secret
Is known to all the wood.

(From "Poems of Heinrich Heine")

「春の野に すみれ摘みにと こしわれそ
野をなつかしみ 一夜寝にける」

(『万葉集』)

Watching Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves at a Dolby Cinema

A while ago, I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves at the nearby theatre... without realising that I got a ticket for the Japanese dubbed version until the movie started screening. While I truly enjoyed the dubbed version, I really wanted to see how the original English version was like, so I went again to catch it in English this time.

And since I was going to watch it again, might as well catch the Dolby Cinema version. 😅

It has been a while since I actually bought popcorn for a movie, but why not?

I must say, I truly enjoyed the original English version too. And it was a bit easier for me, since the names were more familiar (I didn't need to try and figure out the English equivalent of katakana names) and the references to places, people, and spells came more naturally.

At the same time, I can't really compare the normal version with the Dolby Cinema version, since one was dubbed and the other was subbed. Still, I think the Dolby Cinema version was just that much slightly more vibrant in terms of colours, and impactful in terms of sound. The difference, however, is not really going to be that noticeable unless you intentionally set out to look for them.

By the way, there were many non-Japanese people at the cinema too. I guess this is because the English (aka subbed) version is not really showing at many places, and so those who are like me searching for the English version end up in the same place. A bunch of them gathered after the movie to talk in the lobby. They looked like a RPG gaming group to me. Those were the days...

A more detailed post about my thoughts of the movie is here.

Watching Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Japanese dubbed version)

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves opened in Japan on 31 March 2023. As someone who played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (aka AD&D or ADnD) as well as computer games (like the Gold Box series, Eye of the Beholder, and even a MUD set in the Forgotten Realms) from this franchise and read the novels (such as Dragonlance), I was all hyped out about this new movie. Before the movie was released, I got myself a pre-sale ticket, which came with a packet of bath salt as a gift. I wonder why bath salt...

The movie opened on a Friday, but I was not able to squeeze it into the schedule, so I ended up watching the movie yesterday on its second day in Japan.

When the movie started, "TOWA" flashed on the screen, and "吹替翻訳" (dubbing translation) appeared on the bottom of the screen. I was like, "Wait! Did I booked a ticket for the dubbed instead of subbed version? Oh no!!!" Well, my fears were immediately confirmed because the characters in the movie started speaking in Japanese. But in the end, I found the Japanese dubbed version to be really enjoyable too. Still, I want to find time to watch it again in English.

(I later realised that the movie is only available in the dubbed version at the nearby theatre. I will need to travel a bit further for the original English version.)

The movie itself is like a D&D adventure module. It starts with a quick recap of the two main characters' back story, something you would expect when starting a new adventure after rolling up your characters. This is followed by the adventure proper, and at the end, a "rewards" scene that goes through how the adventure ends with the adventurers being rewarded.

Unlike recent Hollywood films that try to be overly conscious about diversity and political correctness, this movie makes use of its original story in a fantasy world to weave in diversity in its cast. For example, using wood elves in the story allowed casting of non-white people, since wood elves have darker complexions.

 

The story is very much about completing a D&D quest, and like a D&D adventure module, which is first and foremost a game, it is about having fun and being enjoyable. It doesn't try to make you cry. It's doesn't have a social message to convey. All it seeks to do is let the audience have an enjoyable time watching the movie and laughing along with it. There's even a cameo by the characters from the 1980s D&D cartoon series. It made me feel like reading the original Dragonlance trilogy again. It was almost as if the production team sat down and played a D&D module, recorded down what their characters did and said, then turned that into a script.

 

It also uses mechanics that is familiar to those who have played D&D or AD&D. Spells like lightning bolt and meteor storm are recognisable, you immediately know one of the main characters is a bard from the lute, and anyone who has heard of the Forgotten Realms knows about the Harpers. The Red Wizards of Thay, Neverwinter, the Underdark, references to Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep, Elminster, the cold Icewind Dale, and more--as someone who has adventured extensively in the Forgotten Realms through the Forgotten Kingdoms MUD and read tons of books from this campaign setting (such as the Drizzt Do'Urden series), it all felt like home. Even though it was the Japanese dubbed version of the movie. 

 

Time to go back to Faerûn! 😉