“Russian Spy Snowden Weds Freelance Spy Manning”

SFW, but large animated GIF.

more...

Once again into the NAS, selecting items of interest from a random subset of the “hc” folder! I’ll fill in more names later, but if you want to play along at home, read this entry in Chrome, right-click, and select “Search Google for Image”.

No, this collection does not include the sleek smiley cutie from the Makudonarudo song, Meu Ninomiya. Shame about that, but her gravure portfolio is rather slim. One of her movies has been subtitled and made available on Amazon Prime Video, though.

more...

“Microsoft saves sinking ship; passengers leap to their deaths.”

My parents are on a stuff-eliminating binge as part of their move into a new place, resulting in a number of rather surprising packages arriving at my house. Clearly I come by my packrat ways honestly.

This never-used gem turns a 14-inch wok into a tea smoker. The company still exists and still sells woks, but Google suggests that I may be the only one in the world with an honest-to-gosh Swoke Kit.

I’m pretty sure the included wood chips and tea leaves have lost their flavor since 1983, though. 😜

“There is no data, only Zuul cheesecake”.

more...

This was more a challenge than a solution to some need:

#!/bin/bash

while read l && read n <&3 ; do
    echo $n "$l"
done 3< <(hexdump -v -e '/4 "%u\n"' < /dev/urandom) | 
    sort -n | cut -d' ' -f2-
exit 0

And, yes, B5 is now on Amazon Prime, and I just watched “War Without End”.

When Momoko Tsugunaga joined Hello!Project, it’s hard to say whether they assigned her the role of “batshit-crazy one”, or simply recognized the part she was born to play.

(via)

Still, when she lets her hair down, I have no complaints.

more...

The power went out at home (~4,000 people affected…) while I was prepping this set, so no names for now.

[Update: filled in most of the first half; annoyed that Google just returns “girl” for the first one…]

more...

No mods.

No NPCs.

No companions.

No pause button.

No offline play.

No save/restore.

No console.

No game at all when they decide to shut down the servers.

Update

Thinking about it a little more, I think there’s going to be a much bigger problem than any of the above: nerfs.

Even if it’s not just a gankfest of foul-mouthed randos, the simple fact that it emphasizes PVP is going to produce frequent “game balance” updates that force you to change your play-style whenever someone comes up with a min-maxed buildout that lets them roflstomp your painstakingly-crafted homestead.

Clearly, the only way to play is in carefully-curated groups of like-minded friends, so of course I expect them to make that hard to do, and default to dumping you into public sewers servers.

I’m a little OCD about my $PATH…

cleanpath () {
    local path p result
    local -A seen
    PATH=${PATH//::/:}
    IFS=":" read -r -a path <<< "$PATH"
    for p in "${path[@]}"; do
        if [ -z "${seen[$p]}" ]; then
            result="$result:$p"
            seen["$p"]=1
        fi
    done
    PATH=${result:1}
}

more...

“Any thing done for the first time unleashes a cheesecake.”

more...

Florida Man robs liquor store with knife. So far, just another day in paradise.

His getaway car fails to start, so he tries carjacking, getting a few cuts in before his victim pulls a gun on him and scares him off.

He then jumps into the passenger seat of a car in a Starbucks drive-thru. Driver hops out, opens the trunk, and pulls her gun on him, scaring him off.

Eventually he surrenders when police track him to the restroom in a nearby Supercuts.

Art by Shell

Working on upgrading my posting script to extract keywords and proper URLs from Pixiv downloads. PixivPy mostly works, although Python is my least-favorite language to hack about in. I haven’t found a good mapping table to create English versions of most tags, even though I know Pixiv has one. The API is kind of goofy, since it’s straightforward REST, but relies on pretending you’re the official Android/iOS client to get authentication to work. Documentation is lacking in two languages.

more...

Need a little touchup on the script still, but I merged together tag translations from two sources (1, 2) and cleaned up a lot of the cruft, ending up with 8,238 tags and (mostly-reasonable) translations. Next will probably be adding a uniq() function to cover duplicates created by the translations.

Of course, the moment I ran the script on this small set of images, it immediately barfed out 107 tags that weren’t on the list…

(Seriously, though, in all these years, no one had added translations for horn, saké, bento, white_hair, black_bra, long_hair, frilly_panties, or high_quality_panties? Most of the rest were series-related, at least)

more...

The ‘Kiki at 17’ ad was cute, but this is just cool.

(art by snatti; much larger version at artstation)

Just stumbled across a hilariously-incorrect translation in the Pixiv tags file I’m using: 黒パン (kuro-pan) as “Rye_Bread”.

Google it, and you will in fact find pictures and recipes featuring dark rye and pumpernickel.

Pixiv it, and you’ll find black panties. 😄

I think you’ve gotten enough abuse this week over your stale computer hardware with terrible keyboards and nosebleed pricing, so I’ll abuse you over something else: com.apple.quarantine.

In the course of pretending you’re all about security, you’ve slapped this attribute on everything downloaded via the Safari browser, including all image files. This means that FuckWithPreview.app kinda-sorta-sandboxes them, and dragging the thumbnail into a Terminal window will give you a uselessspecial path rather than the image’s actual location.

Only Preview, though; everything else seems to behave as expected, and I’ve gotten in the habit of inoculating downloaded images before reviewing them, with: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *.*

What makes this particularly obnoxious is that this is the same Safari that still has this setting enabled by default for all users:

If you actually cared about security, this option would have been removed around ten years ago. I’m sure there are plenty of critical bugs pointing this out, all closed with “working as intended”.

I only care because when I open a few dozen images at once in Preview, instead of one window with lots of thumbnails, it opens two, with the second reserved for those bearing the Scarlet Q. Annoying and pointless.

She may have some problems fitting in…

NSFW

Art by rokurobuna

The reason I miss the old “recommended for you” paginated, categorized list is that your new tag-tile system constantly throws up nonsense like this:

Bottom line, the behavior that your new tile system encourages is anti-browsing: if the picture on a tile isn’t something that I want, I won’t click on that category at all. For now, it’s still possible to get the old list view for new and upcoming releases, which you don’t (usually) have a tile for, but the URLs aren’t visible on the site any more.

I should also point out that the tile system makes it much harder to improve recommendations. Old and busted: for each item, click “I own it” or “Not interested”. New hotness:

1. click a tile
2. click “View All & Manage”
3. click “Edit Recommendations”
4. click “Remove” on an item
5. click either “I already own this item” or “I’m not interested in this item”
6. wait for the thumbnail image to load, because your next click might not register when the layout changes
7. click “Ok”.
8. Repeat steps 4-7 for each item from that tile, then scroll back to the top and click “Yournamehere’s Amazon” to get back to the tag-tiles screen.

This, in a word, is bullshit.

A couple of days ago I stumbled across the German name for the Chinese dough-enhancing technique called Tangzhong: Mehlkochstück. That was amusing, especially since there were two other related German techniques that involved different ratios and temperatures (quellstück and brühstück), none of which had been translated into English.

Today, I stumbled across an article by the author of the BraveTart cookbook, insisting that the Japanese name for the technique was yukone. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since it doesn’t match the kanji used by any of the Japanese bread companies I found recipes from (at least one of which punned on the name with “Ii yu da ne!”).

Bonus: yudane bread-machine mix.

Her source initially seemed persuasive, however: a Japanese research paper involving using an MRI to examine bread structure with and without the “water roux” paste.

Unfortunately, the paper is in English, and does not include the kanji for “yukone”. My guess is 湯粉練 (“hot water” + “flour” + “to thicken into a paste”), but plugging that into Google returns absolutely nothing in Japanese, and just 湯粉 returns soups. The hiragana ゆこね doesn’t work, either.

So now I’m wondering if the paper’s phrasing “a process known as yukone in Japanese” just means “jargon invented by our research team”. This is supported by the article’s citations, which include a much more recent paper with the translated title: “Effect of Heated Gluten on Bread-making Qualities of Yudane Dough”.

Also, unlike the typical 5:1 water/flour ratio in tangzhong or 2:1 in yudane, they used a 1:1 ratio, which really is papier-mâché paste.

Update

It’s yugone, 湯捏ね = “hot water” + “kneading”. Still no references on Amazon Japan, but the handful of recipes I found with those kanji used the same 1:1 ratio as the research paper. Some of them used “yugone” for the technique and “yudane” for the resulting starter.

Anyway…

If you’re in a Japanese bakery, look for 湯種食パン (yudane shokupan):

I have a hate/tolerate relationship with so-called “programmer’s fonts”. Let me count the ways they suck, in no particular order:

0. Not fixed-width. Blech.
1. Too-narrow set width (ranging between condensed and crushed).
2. Inconsistent weight/color between alpha, numeric, and punctuation. The creator of Fira Code actually managed to make \ and / different weights!
3. Twee punctuation.
4. Failure to adequately distinguish 0O, l1, etc.
5. Dotted zero instead of slashed (so that 00 is staring at you; Hack takes this one step further, for an Eye-Of-Sauron effect).
6. Inconsistent centerline for special chars (^>~*+=-})]|\/#$%&@).
7. Special-char centerline inconsistent with digits.
8. - not same length as + and = (surprisingly common!).
9. Five-lobed asterisk, even worse when it’s upside-down.
10. Poor rendering either on or off high-DPI displays.
11. Special Dishonorable Mention to Monofur for having lower-case digits, seemingly-random centerlines, twee punctuation, and a generally obnoxious character design.

For a long time, I’ve been using Anonymous Pro, hand-edited to fix its centerline problem, but the new winner is Office Code Pro, which suffers only from a slightly-twee %, a slightly-italic $, a five-lobed *, and an ever-so-slight centerline offset for braces, parens, and the v-bar (most easily seen in the -{| combo).

It is hands-down the cleanest, most usable fixed-width font I’ve ever found, fixing almost every problem with its parent, Adobe’s free Source Code Pro. Pity the repo just has the compiled fonts rather than the source diffs, because I’d love to fork it and fix those last few niggling flaws.

No matter how hard they try (and they really, really do), the Hello!Project Costume Designers can’t make Maimi ugly.

Other not-uglies below, with the usual to-be-named-later.

more...

For some reason, it’s difficult to find not-entirely-unsafe images combining the 猫耳 and 極上の乳 tags, so most of this set ended up hidden in the NSFW section.

This is an experiment in using only positive tags to select images, as opposed to the laundry list of exclusions Steven had to use to weed out the mountains of hideous crap on Gelbooru. Having a paid Pixiv membership allows me to sort by likes, which tends to eliminate that sort of thing, although the Pixiv community has more affection for certain things than I do…

more...

The manufactured outrage about the processing of minors who were smuggled across the border (some with a parent) has exposed just how batshit-crazy the typical Leftist really is, but this one might be exceptional:

A criminal complaint shows Key is accused of calling Mast’s Washington, D.C. office Monday, and telling an intern who answered the phone, “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.”

Spoiler alert: they found him very quickly.

Between the travel ban, the Janus decision, and Justice Kennedy’s retirement, we’ve got a riot on the Left, a party on the Right, and a bunch of Libertarians wandering around in a daze.

In idle moments, I find my brain trying to come up with replacement lyrics for a song that has enough… energy.

I’ll spare you for now…

Update

Ad on reason.com just now, suitably modified:

With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein…

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Mech pilot teams filled with busty young lasses,
  Tsundere maids wearing under-rim glasses,
Alien catgirls all tied up with strings,
  These are a few of my anime things.

White cotton panties exposed in the sunlight,
  Magical girls fighting monsters by moonlight,
Angel and demon girls spreading their wings,
  These are a few of my anime things.

Robot girls, wrench wenches, girls-next-door, witches,
  Monster girls, pirate girls, stuck-up rich bitches,
Elves, fox girls, goddesses, co-ed hot springs,
  These are a few of my anime things.

When real life bites,
  Rejection stings,
    And I’m feeling sad,
I download a torrent of anime things,
  And then I don’t feel so bad.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Trying to find work-safe pictures of Ikumi Hisamatsu anywhere is pretty much a lost cause. Wearing very little very well is her job, after all.

more...