After nearly 500 hours with the original Skyrim, I can’t really take the new Special Edition seriously; nice-looking, but been-there-done-that. I’m playing at the default difficulty level and not even bothering to level up. This means that dynamically-leveled opponents are trivial to kill, but it also means that there are plenty of monsters that can one-shot me. I had to run like hell to dodge the frost troll on the way to High Hrothgar, I stumbled across a skooma den filled with vampires and got my ass handed to me, and the less said about blood dragons, the better.

When I realized that a few lucky loot drops meant I could afford a house, I decided I needed to adopt a child. Specifically, Dorthe, the daughter of Riverwood’s blacksmith. So I became a werewolf, killed and ate her parents, assassinated the woman who ran the orphanage, and convinced her replacement that I’d be an excellent parent.

I think we’ll be very happy together.

"Chizu's reaction to Mahoro's cooking was a running gag in the series which I never got tired of." --- Steven Den Beste

The link (pictures SFW, site Not) said, 「九州に尻が凄いアナがいる」, which even someone using an online translator can understand as “There’s an announcer in Kyushu with an amazing ass” (some interpretation required; Bing and Google return, respectively, “Kyushu has amazing ass Ana” and “There are ass is amazing Ana in Kyushu”). This SFW site has links to various places that have noticed her non-ass assets; she’s a cutie.

The real fun comes when you turn the translators loose on her Wikipedia page, where Google changes her last name to Pauli at the top of the page, and Bing not only changes her last name to Takeuchi everywhere, but converts the hiragana reading to “Maria holic Sayuri”. Still a few bugs in the system…

[Update: to make the game a little fairer, and to give appropriate credit, each picture is now a link back to Gelbooru; I hadn’t realized they let you link by the MD5 checksum, which I fortunately preserved as the filename. A quick bit of scripting, and I can also confirm that there’s only one tag (other than “1girl” and “solo”) that applies to all 22 images.]

In his cheesecake roundups from Gelbooru, Steven relied on an ever-expanding list of negative tags to exclude thing that definitely didn’t match his interests. The last version of the exclusion list was:

-1boy -multiple_boys -male_focus -penis -testicles -vore -rape -loli -fellatio -sex -bondage -furry -monochrome -amputee -anal -yaoi -abs -pregnant -shota -leash -tears -chained -noose -restrained -rope -asphyxiation -execution -hanging -corpse -blood -photo -peeing -gigantic_breasts -large_penis -huge_penis -futanari

I’d never really looked at the list before, and honestly, even after you exclude all of those, you still have to wade through a river of crap to find some decent pictures that match the positive tags you include.

See if you can guess what single positive tag I added to get the following pictures:

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Just got back from the polls. When you’ve got multiple offices where the only two choices are “Democrat” and “Democrat”, you know it’s going to suck, but at least there wasn’t a line at this time of day. I can only hope that there are enough sane people left in California to shoot down the worst of the jaw-droppingly bad propositions, but I can’t say that I expect it.

[Update: expectation fulfilled; there is no law too stupid to pass in California.]

After the surprisingly good Doctor Strange movie, I decided to refresh my memory on just how the early comics stories went. It’s been a few decades since I read any of the stuff from the Sixties, and I know I’d never read all of it. Amazon has a Doctor Strange Omnibus for $67.50, but Marvel has a $60/year deal on their Unlimited subscription, which includes all of that material.

So, this morning while reading election results (spoiler: California just gave a huge boost to Internet tobacco/vape sales and Nevada gun shows), I opened up my iPad and found this waiting for me:

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With widespread reports of violence, vandalism, and vast despair, it’s important for those of us not currently going through the five stages of grief to help the devastated deal with defeat.

As they act out on Twitter, Facebook, and CNN, remember this important truth about wrist-slitting:

Across is for attention, Down is for death.

99% of what we’re seeing right now is Across. They’re not going to leave the US or follow through on their death threats, they’re just going to have a two-year tantrum and then try to retake the House and Senate.

When I went back and extracted the tags from my previous cheesecake post, I found a popular and baffling one: cowboy_shot. I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t a fetish, but a cinematographic term: getting everything from head to mid-thigh in the picture, from Westerns that needed to show the characters’ six-guns. Gelbooru taggers seem to be a bit unclear on the concept, since many of the matching pictures include the knees or even feet, but it narrowed things down a bit.

Since this is all scripted now, the mouseover comment includes the matching tags for each image.

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“Peaceful” anti-Trump demonstrators vandalizing storefronts in Portland.

I’m guessing that they’re rioting in Democrat strongholds for the same reason anti-fur/leather activists go after little old ladies and not Hell’s Angels.

The ‘original’ tag at Gelbooru is often, but not exclusively, used for “original character”. Then again, the second picture, a fully-dressed girl surrounded by autumn leaves, is tagged “hentai”, “porn”, and “sex” for no reason. At least the “rubber_duck” tag is being used correctly…

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…how much faster home Internet gets when you replace a flaky switch. It’s annoying that I had to drive to three different stores to find one (Office Max even had PoE-capable and 24-port switches, but I only needed a basic 8-port today).

I went from 1.4 Mbps down/0.88 up to 58/12; one of the nice things about having an OpenBSD router is that I can run iperf3 on it and verify that it’s not Comcast’s fault before opening a ticket.

(via)

Related.

[Update: More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon]

If you drag URLs around on a Mac, you get .webloc files. If you drag text around (successfully…), you get .textClipping files. Getting data back out of them can be annoying; some applications treat them as attachments, and most insist on grabbing the rich-text version of a clipping rather than the plain text.

webloc () {
  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'print URL' "$1"
}
clipping () {
  DeRez -noResolve -only utf8 "$1" |
    perl -e 'while (<>) {
      chomp;
      next unless s/^\s+\$"([0-9A-F ]+)".*$/$1/;
      tr/ //d;
      $x.= $_;
    }
    print pack("H*",$x),"\n"'
}

"Our employees were all crying," she said. "And the question that they're asking, especially those who are not white, 'Are we safe?' Women are asking, 'Are we safe?' LGBT people are asking, 'Are we safe?' I never thought I would have to answer those questions."
      --- Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo

In other news, PepsiCo plans to triple their mental-health plan, and supply all employees with diversity crayons and people-of-coloring books.

Google just announced that their new translation engine now handles Japanese. Let’s see what it does with the exact same text I fed to Office 2007 about seven years ago, the first scene of Kyōtarō Nishimura’s murder mystery, Ame no naka ni shinu. TLDR: it’s quite a bit better, although the pronouns are all over the place, and the “embroidered sleeves” bit is hilarious:

It was raining.

It is cold winter rain. It was close to the sleeves.

Even if it enters at night, there is no sign of stopping. Because of that, if it passed ten o’clock, the embroidery figures rapidly decreased.

Even when that man pressed his belly with one hand and came out from behind the alley, there was no sign of a person in the rain.

He was a middle-aged man. The tired suit was wet with rain and was dark.

The man gripped by the utility pole with one hand. However, as if suddenly bravely fumbled, it crumbled and broke into a wet pavement.

From around the man’s belly, red blood is blowing out. The blood is raining.

“help me”

Said the man. However, the low screams have been erased by the sound of rain.

With a splash of water, a taxi passed by. The driver took a look at the man who fell over and down, but he thought he was drunk. Just dropping the speed a bit, I passed by.

The man lifted his face and looked around. There are no figures of people anywhere. I opened my mouth, but it seemed that no voice cried for help.

Blood still continues to flow. The face of a man gradually lost his blood and went.

The man tried to write something on the pavement with a fingertip stained in blood. However, the raining lasting will erase it.

Despair seemed to have caught him.

The man wants to let you know something. However, there are no signs of people, and letters written on pavement are erased by rain.

Also, the taxi passed by. However, for men, there was no power left to raise their hands.

The man looked at his palm stained with blood with a blank eye. The fingertips were stiff.

The man slowly folded the little finger of his left hand. On top of that, my thumb was broken and piled up. The index finger, middle finger, ring finger stretched out.

“three”

, The man muttered with a small voice. But it was not almost a voice. The man fired off his last power and stretched his left hand. Just say that you would like someone to see.

But no one had seen it.

There was the darkness of the night, only the rain continued.

Another cinematographic term that sounds like it ought to be a fetish. Then again, if your blow-up doll is askew, that would be a dutch-wife angle…

This turned out to be a surprisingly porn-y search tag. I had to skim through several thousand thumbnails to come up with pictures that didn’t include bare tits, bare asses, fuck-me poses, girl-girl, horribly-broken spines, untagged lolis, etc. Not that those are all bad things. Indeed, many of them were quite nice; they’re just not what I’m going for here.

If I were tagging pictures on Gelbooru, I’d have to add a whole bunch of new ones (to avoid…): absurd_breasts, invisible_corset, magic_spine, inflatable_ass, helium_implants, bodily_functions, traced_from_porn, artist_hand_in_pants, oh_that_poor_girl, etc. Fortunately it’s too much work just to browse them.

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Based on their behavior since the election, a lot of People Of Leftness are going through the four stages of grief, simultaneously. “Acceptance” just isn’t on the menu.

So, the ISP who hosts jgreely.com has been sending email since February announcing an upcoming transition to a new platform.

On November 2nd, they sent one that said “we may not get to your domain before our November 28th deadline, so if you don’t want it to be shut off, you might want to run our migration tool yourself and do your own testing.”

On November 15th, they sent a friendly reminder.

On November 16th, they said the migration had been completed successfully, and I should now update my registrar with their new name servers.

Not being an idiot, I queried the new servers, and found: no MX record, no A records, and only one lonely little CNAME pointing ftp.jgreely.com to (nonexistent) www.jgreely.com. The new IP address, available only from their web console, did not listen for SMTP, POP, or IMAP, but a manual connection to port 80 showed that my trivial home page was there. The control panel also showed that my mail config had been modified, but that no data had been copied over from the old server (someone clearly doesn’t understand how IMAP works…).

There is no published support email address. Their online chat never connects. I spent 72 minutes on hold waiting for someone to pick up, and ten minutes explaining the problem to an arrogant moron. I demanded he escalate the call, and he put me on hold for another 20 minutes. I explained the problem again, in detail, and this guy understood, and said they’d regenerate the zone file and it would be fine in a little while.

And, oh-by-the-way, since the transition of my domain was marked complete in their system, the old server could be shut down at any time. But if I noticed it and called, they’d be happy to turn it back on for a little while.

Two hours later, dig still shows no MX, no A, and one pointless CNAME.

Oh, and the “obsolete platform” had shell access; the shiny new one does not. It does, however, have a lot of overpriced add-on services, like “backup/restore” (!), SEO optimization, blahblahblah. And while on hold for over an hour, they kept telling me how paid audio and video services would “keep customers on my site longer”, and other bullshit.

If they don’t get their shit together Real Soon Now, I’ll name and shame them. And, of course, move the account elsewhere. Maybe I’ll just host it on Amazon and run it myself.

[Update: DNS and old email finally showed up. I haven’t switched yet, since it takes a while for name server changes to propagate, and I still don’t really trust these clowns. First, I’m going to backup my mail archives, then switch the IMAP config to point to the old IP address, then create a brand new account that points to the new IP addresses, so I don’t lose days of incoming mail.]

I buy your spices, not your politics, so I’ve unsubscribed from your ‘newsletter’. Keep your reflexive bigotry to yourselves, m’kay?

I hacked Gifify to generate MP4 files instead of animated GIFs. Let’s see how this embeds:

This is 256 KB. 5.5 MB GIF version, created with the exact same parameters, below the fold.

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[warning! gelbooru.com is currently serving up malware in their ad rotation; view their site with shields at maximum and Javascript disabled. Nothing there actually requires Javascript anyway, so it’s no loss.]

It will come as no surprise to You Know Who that the rubber_duck tag is a target-rich environment for cheesecake. Or that something legendary for making bath-time lots of fun would lead to water, soap suds, and lots of bare skin. And, because Japan, lots of lolis, tagged and untagged, sigh.

I rejected many quite pleasant pictures for being horizontal, so I may do a roundup at some point with the images sized differently. I also rejected censorducks and strategically-placed steam, so maybe that one will also be more NSFW.

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It seems like just days ago that Adobe had to fix yet another critical security hole caused by their years of tarting up Acrobat (you remember, the “document reader”) with all sorts of unrelated, and generally unwanted, interactive features. Oh, wait, that was last month; it’s Flash that had critical security holes fixed two weeks ago.

Good thing you’re a security-focused company who would never do something stupid like introduce brand-new malware vectors into all of your products. Oh, wait, you’re automatically, silently processing calendar invites and photo-sharing email, no matter who they come from, encouraging spammers to inject data into your system. This not only creates annoying pop-up notifications, but adds new ways to get people to click on malware-infested URLs.

Then again, you still ship every Mac with a browser that will auto-open “safe” file formats when you download them (including… wait for it… PDF files), so maybe the real story is that you were never security-focused to begin with.

[Update: just got one of these, on my almost-never-used icloud account (so, truly random spamming attempt), and had to follow the 6-step process on icloud.com to get rid of this terrible default setting. Nitwits.]

Not to be confused with American Flagg!, drawn by “Wholesome” Howie Chaykin (as Stan Lee used to call him…), American flags are quite popular in anime and Japanese cheesecake photography. Given the history between the two countries, this can seem a bit odd, but for 16-year-old anime fans and 18-year-old bikini models, that was generations ago.

The category is currently dominated by Kantai Collection and Touhou, but if you page back a bit, there are other options. Red half-rims below the fold, and one loli crept in because she was paired with Kurumu-chan.

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Cigar Saturday!

Celebrate by firing up a hand-rolled stogie made in a free country, and toast the future with a glass of marxist tears.

In other news, Trump just made the left shit itself again by not following the ISO-666 standard on Publicly Praising The Evil Dead.

It’s clear that Gelbooru users currently have Rem ranked Number One Waifu, but I had to lead off with some classics. A lot of the pictures in this category should really be tagged wedding_night, but we’ll save those for later…

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Or, more precisely, Chii’s-cake. Rather large image after the jump, worth clicking through to the much-larger original if you like the character.

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