Cheesecake is a vegetable!

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Pro tip: if you plan on integrating your Philips Hue bulbs with Alexa, give every bulb a name that can’t easily be confused with your room names, so that “Alexa, kitchen lights on” does not result in a question about which one you meant.

Guest tip: buy the Hue motion detectors or dimmer switches rather than expecting visitors to learn your naming scheme. Especially if they’ll be staying the night.

eBay tip: even a vendor with a long positive history can do stupid things like buying returned merchandise at a Wal-mart and not checking inside before putting it up for sale. The refund will go more smoothly if you don’t accuse them of fraud.

 Back       1-porch-back
 Driveway   1-driveway, 2-driveway
 Entry      1-entry, 2-entry
 Front      1-hall-front
 Garage     1-garage
 Guest      1-bedroom-guest
 Hall       1-hall-main
 Kitchen    1-kitchen, 2-kitchen, 3-kitchen, 4-kitchen
 Master     1-bedroom-master, 2-bedroom-master
*Nook      *1-nook (bri=67%, ct=313)
 Office     1-office
 Porch      1-porch-front
 Side       1-porch-side
 Stair      1-stairs-landing, 2-stairs-landing, 1-stairs-top
 Upstairs   1-hall-upstairs, 2-hall-upstairs, 3-hall-upstairs

Once the refund gets processed on eBay, I can buy bulbs for the family room and sewing room¹, and then come up with a plan for the 21 G25 bulbs in the bathrooms. I’m thinking standard warm white LED bulbs and dimmer switches, because replacing the actual fixtures would involve some painting, and I don’t see the need to remote-control the lights in there. Also $3/bulb on Amazon.

1: well, more of a kumihimo/library/music/ironing/ammo room, really.

More and more, though, after seeing a new k-pop girl group, I find myself wondering what their faces were like before all the plastic surgery. And a side order of boob jobs.

I hear there’s some sort of game on today. Meh, whatever.

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Evenings and weekends considered harmful! Just got this notification from work:

I wanted to send out a notice in case you are not aware—the AC in our office only runs Mon. to Fri., from 6am – 7pm. Our property manager does not automatically run it on the weekends, to conserve energy and costs. If you will be working on the weekend and would like the AC on, I would need at least 48 hours’ notice to give to our property management office. Please note that there is a fee for this so if you will only be in for a short time, I would recommend we not turn on the AC.

(this does not, of course, apply to our computer room air conditioning, or we’d have noticed really quickly…)

When it comes to cheesecake, 13 is not unlucky. I’d have put this up sooner, but I really like the picture of I-8 that I opened the last set with.

Speaking of which, here’s a bit of SFW I-8 cosplay.

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The previously-linked adorable I-8 cosplayer is Pingky aka Momo aka Shimon.

• “the first blockbuster-format release featuring a black hero front and center”, according to the newborns at Salon who’ve never seen a movie or learned to google.

• so good that only racists could possibly dislike it, according to some HuffPo clown upset about the existence of a negative review on Rotten Tomatoes.

• probably better than the Ghostbusters remake, despite the virtue signalling of idiots like the ones above.

• full of really loud hip-hop and rapping, according to the trailers, which seems a bit odd for an incredibly high-tech African country with a long history of secrecy and isolation and no connection to American urban black culture.

• not on my list to see in theaters, because most cinema audio systems are set to REALLYREALLYLOUD, and that’s not the sort of music I enjoy hearing at high volume for two hours.

• hitting all my Marvel Fatigue buttons. It took me two months to finish watching Age of Ultron, I still haven’t bothered with Civil War, I skipped the Spiderman reboot, I blew off Ragnarok until I can rent it on Amazon, and I’m unlikely to see Infinity War in theaters. Ant-Man And The Wasp, maybe, but there’s a suspicious lack of wombats in the trailer.

• not as cool as Deadpool 2.

“That’s no moon, it’s a cheesecake.”

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Yeah, I got nothin’. Honestly, the most important thing I’m doing this week is mailing off a present for my kindergarten teacher’s 70th birthday.

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Is it just me, or shouldn’t it be obvious to anyone capable of rubbing two brain cells together that “Initial Coin Offerings” are a total scam?

Seriously, in this latest one, the con artists actually responded to a request from a potential investor with the following:

“To benefit from our service you have to invest in our LoopX Coin. Already proofen by other successful coins guaranties this the stability of our system.”

Yeah, that just makes me want to invest my savings!

So, as the fleeced gather together to attempt a class-action lawsuit, I’d like to remind them that judges rarely get involved when Pokemon trades go bad.

Foreigner, C.J. Cherryh

I got interested in the characters and situation, then it skipped forward a hundred years. I got interested in the new characters and situations, then it skipped forward two hundred years. At this point, I decided not to get too invested in the third protagonist, and of course that was the one who lasted the rest of the book. Unfortunately, his story was less interesting than the other two, and so was he. When it petered out, I took a look at reviews of the second one, and decided that I didn’t care enough about a thinly-disguised story of high-tech white colonialism backfiring because they just can’t understand the native black culture.

Od Magic, Harrowing The Dragon, Alphabet of Thorn, *The Book of

Atrix Wolfe*, Patricia A. McKillip

Always reliably entertaining, McKillip’s backlist is getting more reasonably priced on Amazon. None of these really jumped out at me as exceptional, but they’re all good. I have a few more on my ‘overpriced’ Kindle list, and if they ever drop below $10, I’ll buy them.

Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology

A bunch of good authors either writing their own stories in one of Zelazny’s worlds, or earnestly attempting to emulate his prose style in their own worlds. Honestly, it made me wish they’d just written their own worlds in their own styles. Especially Brust.

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction, Terry Pratchett

An oddball mix of material from across his career. For some of the early stuff, the commentary is better than the story.

Tfimes Three, Robert Silverberg

Three time-travel novels. Not his best, but well worth the cover price.

A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore

The last truly fresh Moore novel I read was Bloodsucking Fiends. Several years ago, I gave up on this one in the first chapter. This time I was more in the mood for it, but not enough that I’d pay $11+ for the sequel. Maybe $7 on a good day.

Northwest Smith, C.L. Moore

Classic SF short stories that I’d only ever seen a few of. Good stuff, but it made me wish she’d written at least one story where Smith didn’t run into some sort of Lovecraftian horror, and just dealt with the SFnal side of his universe.

The Planetary Adventures of Eric John Stark, Leigh Brackett

More classic shorts from another of the legendary women of SF that the current gatekeepers like to pretend never existed. Maybe because she wrote about strong men and feminine women…

Norstrilia, Cordwainer Smith

I’d only ever read The Ballad of Lost C’Mell, not realizing that she’s a major player in this novel. Good stuff, of the sort you just can’t get outside of indie any more.

I’m still waiting on the final Pennyverse novel, currently in small-press limbo. Meanwhile, I’ve got Poul Anderson’s The Corridors of Time and C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry downloaded and ready to go. In the queue to buy are Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! and Theodore Sturgeon’s Selected Stories.

Change of plans!

New Ethshar novel released three weeks ago.

(via)

If you like Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar novels, Stone Unturned is a good one. The only quibble I have with it is that I wish he had put just the year at the top of every change of PoV, not a full date, to make it obvious that the characters are separated by time. It rapidly becomes obvious, but why bother obfuscating?

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I’ve been out sick the past few days, with my head a bit foggy, so in my more lucid moments I’ve just been playing Death Road To Canada (on Windows; I got sick of the crashes in the Mac version) and watching anime. For reasons involving low-braincell-count, I just rewatched the first season of Haruhi in broadcast order.

I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years, and I still haven’t seen any of the newer stuff (‘Endless Eight’ sounded so immensely tedious that I didn’t even try). One of the many things I’d forgotten since it originally aired was how annoying Mikuru’s voice is. Other than that, it was decent enough.

Maybe if my brain unfogs, I’ll watch something new this weekend…

Okay, I confess: I finally watched the Endless Eight episodes of Haruhi. Dear Ghod, what were they thinking? There wasn’t nearly enough fan-service to justify that much repetition. For more “fun”, Crunchyroll clearly doesn’t have enough streaming servers, since I often can’t watch anything on the iOS or FireTV apps during prime evening hours, and for about half of these episodes, the streaming was interrupted in a way that caused the app to repeat lines of dialog until the video caught up.

In other news, I did some de-duping on the leftover folder, because I noticed some familiar images popping up. Somehow I’d managed to download the exact same images as part of different themes. I also caught a few that were re-uploads with slightly different hashes, and there are some that I’m pretty sure are alternate takes of the same image, but I can’t automate that cleanup, and it’s too much work to sort through the 2,000+ images I’ve already posted. So, just think of it as “the cheesecake so nice, I found it twice”.

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…clearly you’ve never been in a Japanese video store.

(via)

It’s porn, of course, so the youthful actresses are at least 18. Unfortunately, I can read the description at the bottom of the cover, and it’s basically a rape video (loosely, “‘Sparta’ training camp gang-bang of the flat-chested track team”). If it had just been three pretty young women in and/or out of their bikinis, I’d have been interested. Sadly, the product description on Amazon doesn’t even include their names, so I can’t find out if they’ve done any less-explicit work.

Raymond E. Feist is starting a brand-new epic fantasy saga, and I couldn’t care less. Back in the day, I really liked the Riftwar books, but the more of them he wrote, the less I liked them, and every time I’ve tried to re-read one of the early ones, it just didn’t grab me. I’m not even sure I bothered finishing the Serpentwar books; I found one of them on my shelves, but I remember nothing about it, and I was surprised to discover that wasn’t even the halfway point (30+ books now?).

In any case, my eyes were glazed over before I was halfway through the blurb for King Of Ashes, “Book One of The Firemane Saga”. It reads like a trope salad topped with boggle-dice names, and is the exact opposite of a compelling hook.

You get what you subsidize, SF:

“We’re losing tourists. We’re losing conventions in San Francisco. All of this is happening because we aren’t addressing the root cause, which is we need more temporary beds for street homelessness.”

Seriously, how hard is it to figure this out? “We’re going to tax tobacco/guns/etc out of existence, because people respond to incentives!” while simultaneously “We’re going to make our city a welcoming sanctuary for illegals and addicts, because people don’t respond to incentives!”.

I was calling San Francisco a shithole long before Hillary elected Trump…

I thought they’d banned you from participating in the girls’ bikini photo shoots, insisting on using trained professionals instead. Apparently I was wrong.

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I don’t know how these things pop into my head, really I don’t.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Where have all the good trolls gone,
and where are all the frauds?
Where’s the foul-mouthed twitter-mob
that spits upon the Odds?

Won’t somebody white-knight
their own misogyny?
Late at night I go online
and I get all that I need.

I need a Tumblr!
I’m holding out for a Tumblr full of anger and spite!
It’s gotta be lame
and it’s gotta be woke
and it’s gotta be picking a fight!

I need a Tumblr!
I’m holding out for a Tumblr SJW insight!
Self-righteous for sure,
acting out like a loon,
and it’s got to be from a lowlife.
One with no life.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

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The next six episodes of The Tick are up on Amazon.

Update

…and watched. Honestly, the only thing I was disappointed about was that when they used a bit of footage from the pilot, they didn’t fix the Tick suit. It really looks terrible compared to what they used for the rest of the series.

Back when the first half aired, it felt a bit unTicklike with its slow pace and in-depth character development, but it all paid off. Everyone got to be awesome.

Reading through the manual for an LG TV, I came across the following line in the notes:

When connecting via a wired LAN, it is recommended to use a CAT 7 cable.

This must be for the Skynet upgrade, so when your TV asks you to upgrade to a 10 gigabit switch and add multiple fiber drops to the house, just say “no”.

I figure it’ll start crying like a little girl when I plug it into the 5-year-old gigabit switch that connects to the 50Mb/s cable line through the house’s Cat 5 wiring.

There are still ~900 images in the leftovers folder, but I think it’s time to start coming up with some new themes, and maybe also move away from Gelbooru to Danbooru or Pixiv as my source. The downside is that I’ll have to sign up for them to get decent search capabilities, and of course rewrite my scripts, which currently do everything but fill in the headers.

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A lot of people are talking about turning the tables on the NRA boycotters by going to progressive bakeries and insisting they decorate cakes with pro-2nd messages. This is unlikely to work, since the sort of people who try to shut down Christian businesses for opposing gay marriage are unlikely to be able to run successful businesses themselves. You’d only be annoying people who aren’t really your enemies.

Fun to fantasize about, though…

“Hi, I’d like to order a special cake for a civil rights party.”

"Great! We'd love to have your business!"

“I want a big picture of an AR-15 with the words μολὼν λαβέ underneath.”

"You what now?"

“Yeah, and surround the AR-15 with rainbow sprinkles, because it’s a gay little poodle-shooter.”

click

New Broward County Sheriff’s Department logo:

Side note

The Weasel Patrol graphic novel is available from Amazon. The patch is not.

No time yet to look at switching my posting script to use Pixiv or Danbooru URLs, so once more into the Gelbooru.

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Well, Amazon Prime has my movie nights planned out for March:

• The Color Of Magic (season 1)
• Earth Girls Are Easy
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• F/X
• F/X 2
• Hackers (just for the young Angelina Jolie, honest)
• I’m Gonna Git You Sucka
• big batch of Bond films
• Valerian (based on the reviews, “free” sounds about right)

Update

Attempted to watch Valerian last night. I had to stop, because everything about it was just dull. At first I thought, “is the guy trying to sound like Keanu Reeves on ’ludes?”, then I thought, “is the chick trying to sound like a zombie version of Android from Dark Matter?”.

In the end, I decided that Luc Besson had the entire cast snorting the herb Valerian, which is why they all talked like they were sedated.

I think I’d like to see stills of the CGI backgrounds, but they’d be too busy to use as wallpaper on my laptop. They were certainly too busy to enjoy on-screen.