February 2020

Okay, Game Freak...


Tired of one-third of all raids being G-max Alcremie for the past month? Good news! Now half of all raids are Milcery, plus a chance at the item that turns them into… (wait for it…) G-max Alcremie.

Sitting at home sick yesterday and today, I’ve gotten at least sixteen of them so far. In fairness, the pre-evolved ones all had strawberries, and this event is handing out all the other candies, so you can fill out the full set of 63, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It appears that this is heavily biased toward low-level characters, and people who’ve finished the story won’t see quite as many of them. I had whimsically decided to level up a second profile in Japanese far enough to catch some Dittos, so I’m drowning in マホミル.

Unrelated, in anime news, Funimation belatedly realized that a show about men screwing whores was about men screwing whores, and ran away screaming. Interspecies Reviewers is no longer streaming legally in the US, or some other related streaming services internationally (apparently Sony bought up a lot of them).

Creeping featurism, Jira plugin edition...


So there’s a third-party plugin for Jira called “Git Integration for Jira”, whose description claims that all it does is query your Gitlab server and display links to the commits that reference the current Jira issue.

Nowhere does it mention that it also defaults to sending warning emails to addresses mentioned in the commits, even if they don’t map to any of your Jira users.

Like, say, the Freeswitch mailing list.

The initial helpdesk ticket wasn’t terribly useful in figuring this out, since it consisted of a screenshot of someone’s inbox that didn’t include their email address or even a full subject line, much less something useful like, say, complete email headers. It took three rounds with one of our local devs to elicit the keywords “git integration plugin”, “project key FS”, and “smart commits”.

That last bit is what let me know I was looking at the correct configuration screen, since it’s right above the feature to randomly send email to addresses scraped from the git commit.

Dear Amazon,


Wait, Amazon Prime Video was also streaming Interspecies Reviewers?!? And didn’t pull it until today?

Seriously, there is nothing subtle about the premise of this show, and even an extremely tame adaptation would have aroused… “controversy”. Anyone paying even the faintest attention to the pre-release marketing in Japan knew what was, um, coming.

Unrelated, here are my latest amusing Amazon recommendations:

Celebrating Democratcy...


Here’s an advanced 3D rendering of the current state of the Democrat nomination process:

Apply memes as desired.

Build-A-Bare episode 6


Episode 6 of Interspecies Reviewers contains three very important pieces of advice:

  1. Always include a crafter in your party.
  2. Never confess your sins.
  3. Carry sunglasses.

And if Our Heroes stop to think about it, they really, really need to go back there and pay whatever it costs to have the evidence dismantled.

Unrelated, I’m back from Sedona. I might post a few pictures, but I still haven’t done anything with the ones I took last year in Japan, and the next trip’s coming up fast. It sounds like tourist traffic is way down right now, so as long as I don’t cough while going through Immigration, we should have a great time.

Meanwhile, in Central Californistan...


Some poor soul, apparently a young polisci major, decided to use Nextdoor’s poll feature to ask about the upcoming election:

I suspect that if Trump weren’t winning, there wouldn’t be so many complaints in the comments about it “violating Nextdoor policies”…

Sunday update

Now 44% Trump, 35% Sanders, 4% each Warren/Biden/Buttigieg/Bloomberg, and 1% Klobuchar. Totally unscientific with a small, unrepresentative sample, so it’s at least as accurate as a professional phone poll…

Dear 'CAEZIK SF & Fantasy'...


I invite you to speculate on precisely where I think you should shove your ebook pricing model for the upcoming posthumous Heinlein novel:

I was planning to buy it, but now I dislike you and want your company to fail.

Random pic dump


Bored and busy, but wanted something more amusing at the top of the page.

SFW but not SFD.

Unrelated thoughts:

  • It sucks to spend three days explaining a simple and obvious regression in an open source project that was created by an unannounced breaking change, only to have the author not just blow you off, but suggest that you file a bug on a completely different broken feature that he thinks you should be using instead. Seriously, this is a Jobsian “you’re holding your phone wrong” level of fucked up.

  • Corona-chan is harshing Japan’s mellow, leaving me wondering what things will be like when my sister and I get there. There’s also a Rubella-chan tour in the Kanto region.

  • I caught them all. For amusement, I then played all the way through the game in Japanese. Then, annoyed by the flood of inane shiny/trade posts in the subreddit (and all the docs about how to exclude particular flairs on Reddit are wrong), I decided to see just how hard it would be to play through far enough to catch your own goddamn foreign Dittos. So I’ve now caught a 4IV free-range organic Korean Ditto, and I don’t speak a word of the language. Honestly, the hardest part was typing in a name for my character (I picked 수영, because I could figure out how to type it in the IME).

more...

Japan closing for March...


The government has ordered all schools to close until April. Graduation ceremonies and many public festivals have been canceled. The Studio Ghibli Museum has shut down until March 17th, hoping it will be safe to re-open by then. The US State Department has a level 2 advisory on travel to Japan, instructing travellers to “exercise increased caution”.

I keep checking to make sure our flights haven’t been canceled. And I really need to get rid of the last of the usual sinus infection that followed the cold I had at the beginning of February; I don’t think even the slightest cough or sniffle will amuse the Immigration counter at Haneda.

The good news is that we’re unlikely to get stuck in a huge sweaty crowd at Immigration this time. If they’re still letting people in at all by then…

As for what to do once we’re there, crowds are out. I suspect the monthly craft and flea markets will all be canceled. Popular shopping areas like Teramachi and Nishiki will either be ghost towns or very off our list. This may end up being a temple/museum/restaurant trip with carefully-selected shopping.

His Master's Voice...


Hillary Clinton is launching her own podcast. I figure the opening theme will involve fingernails on a chalkboard.

Or they could use this little ditty, to the tune of Camptown Races:

🎶🎶🎶🎶
Epstein didn’t kill himself,
    doo-dah, doo-dah.
His death wasn’t suicide,
    it was a Clinton hit.
🎶🎶🎶🎶

Dear Pokemon Company,


Remember when you decided that the multi-player interactivity in Sword and Shield would be restricted to seeing player names and pokemon nicknames, participating in raids without even hand signals, and burning curry together?

The following screenshot from the shiny new trade tool Pokemon Home tells me that your system needs a little work:

Seriously, how do you not block the all-caps N-word in an online service where you validate the data before allowing someone to start a trade?

Also, this was on Pokemon Day, when it was announced that Greninja was the most popular pokemon in the world, and sure to be searched for by lots of players.

In other news, I think I’m ready to face the first gym challenge in my new German Shield playthrough…

more...

Cheerleaders for The End Times


This week has had far too many “news” stories to count that appear to be desperately hoping for Zombie-Apocalypse-level results from Corona-chan that kill uncountable numbers of Americans, destroy the US economy, and, most importantly, keep Trump from being re-elected.

I wish I were kidding, but Paul Krugman cheering this week’s massive drop in the DOW is only a small example of the current trend in batshit crazy leftism. Even his.

The problem is, if the world doesn’t end by October, then the party that’s gone all-in for open borders, globalism, and rationed healthcare will find itself holding bake sales to pay back its campaign debts (hashtag brownies, no doubt). Their own demands, proudly broadcast, will be the best evidence that we should never let them back into any position more intellectually demanding than “wrangling the turdcutter through the sewers”.

Before Corona-chan, their primary path to victory was massive vote fraud. Now it’s Mad Max.

“Cave Johnson here. Just a reminder that the core goal of Aperture Gas-Finding Science is to find gas, so make sure you let us know if you see any. If we meet our quarterly gas-finding target, I promise you we will don our bondage gear, fuel our death cars, and drive around in circles, whooping it up and shooting arrows at people. Who is ready to rule the wasteland? Alright, start looking.”

Personally, after the coordinated character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh, I wouldn’t vote for a Democrat to clean toilets with xyr tongue.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”