Oh, FFS

(top-updating for once…)

Benito Newsom has abruptly re-closed restaurants and churches statewide. Pull quote:

Newsom has compared his strategy of opening and closing businesses as a “dimmer switch”

This is true, but not in the way he thinks.

Damn You, Corona-chan!

I pre-ordered a Pinky Funko Pop. It was supposed to arrive Sunday. When it didn’t, I checked my orders, and found the release date had silently been pushed back to March 15, 2021. Drat. At least Peace Talks should be here tomorrow (physically; I won’t pay $15 for a DRM-infested Kindle edition).

Porch Cat Gets The Hose

Well, squirt bottle, anyway. Less than an hour after receiving a dish full of premium wet cat food last night, he came around to the back of the house and tried to get attention by jumping up on the screen door and hanging there by his claws. He did not receive the form of attention he craved.

Pine Trees Matter?

Is it just me, or does this SMBC strip read like a metaphor for something?

Video hunt…

N years ago, I found copies of the Hello!Project side project Folk Songs, featuring the H!P girls singing an oddball mix of songs that their starpimp grew up with; on volume 4, there’s a song called “Kemeko no Uta” from 1968 (live performance by The Darts). It chronicles the all-too-familiar tale of boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl brutally cuts boy down to size. This gains something when sung by a girl group rather than the original boy band, especially since the key lines are delivered by Kei Yasuda, whose nickname in H!P was Kemeko.

This song was a hit when I brought the lyrics to my mostly-female group reading class at Foothill. At the time, I had a different video with the original band on a college campus, but when I went looking for it this morning, instead I found this, which includes various clips where the song was used, including one featuring Yuko Nakazawa, Mari Yaguchi, and of course Kei Yasuda (don’t ask about the costumes; the skits on Hello!Morning were at best “goofy”).

Old games are old

I finally broke down and downloaded OpenEmu to revisit some ancient console games, as well as try out earlier generations of things like Zelda and Pokémon. I actually have two DS Lites and an Atari Lynx, but I used the DS primarily for Japanese study, and I haven’t fired up the Lynx in decades. Indeed, the last time it got serious use was back in the early Nineties, when one of my co-workers wore out the power connector and did a half-assed soldering job to get it working again. As far as I know, it still works.

Short take: nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I think I’ll stick with modern games and remakes that incorporate significant gameplay improvements.

Speaking of Pokémon…

I’ve significantly improved my Cram-o-matic recipe generator. Mostly I wanted to allow all reasonably-common ingredients while still excluding rare and unique ones. As a side-effect, it runs a lot faster.

The previous version focused on excluding uncraftable ingredients, which excluded a lot of common drops. I had added back several common types, but there were enough one-offs that writing additional exceptions was more trouble than it was worth, so I took the time to mark up the data files with availability. Basically, if the only way to replace it is to visit the vendor in Stow-on-Side every day until you get lucky, it’s rare (8 items), and if the only way to replace it is “play the entire game again on another user profile”, it’s unique (25 items).

I also gathered buy/sell prices for most items, for rating recipes by whether the result sells for more than the ingredients. At the moment, TR88 is the winner, with several ways to make it out of free drops and/or berries you can buy in bulk. Next time I get bored, I’ll add a “profitable-only” option to the script. 😁

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