Another victim of Corona-chan

The Studio Ghibli Museum has a crowdfunding campaign seeking funds to help keep the doors open until normal tourism resumes.

Kiki:

Not Kiki:

Definitely not Kiki:

Thinking about Aletta’s future…

At the start of Restaurant To Another World, Aletta is only a few rungs up from the bottom of the social ladder. She’s homeless, hungry, actively discriminated against, and has to scramble to get crappy one-day temp jobs. In another kind of story, she’d be just a few weeks away from selling her body for a sandwich. Instead, she stumbles across a door to Nekoya (which are remarkably good at appearing where needed, by the way; just how does that work?).

In its welcoming environment, she quickly develops the confidence to stop hiding her horns, and as we see in the second season’s opening credits, becoming comfortable with who she is changes how people treat her in her own world. She’s not a “dirty little demon girl” any more, she’s a confident (and quite attractive) young woman with two good jobs and plenty of people who like and respect her just as she is.

By being (so to speak) “out and proud”, she’s changing the perception of demons in her city. But that’s just the beginning of the doors that Nekoya opened for her. She got her housekeeping job because Sarah Gold knew she was trustworthy, reliable, hard-working, and friendly. But who else would instantly spot her in a crowd and treat her favorably in her own world?

• Altorius, the great sage
• Tatsugorou, famous swordsman
• Alphonse, famous admiral
• Lionel, famous gladiator
• the head and the future head of the Alfade merchant family
• numerous high-ranking priests
• Silvario, Fairy queen
• Shareef and Renner, ruling prince and princess of the Land of Sand
• Heinrich, Duchy noble who’s a bit sweet on her boss Sarah
• Victoria, Duchy princess
• Adelheid, Imperial princess
• Lastina, Demon queen
• The Red Dragon (who has blessed her with protection)
• The Black Dragon (aka fellow waitress Kuro)

Aletta has better connections than most kings.

Memfail

Somehow my MacBook Air (running Catalina, because I’m not paid to beta-test Apple software) ran itself out of memory and started killing off processes. I couldn’t find the culprit, because I couldn’t get new windows to open. I also couldn’t cleanly reboot, because Modern MacOS will hang forever trying to cleanly shut down, so I had to power it off, which triggered a lengthy repair on the Time Machine backup volume. Sometime soon I’ll have to move more of my personal environment over to the new Win11/WSL2 laptop, and stop the madness.

Not enough room to have three laptops side-by-side on my kitchen table, though, so I suppose I could run the Mac headless for a while.

“Do not look into laser with remaining eye”

Since I’ll be looking at houses in person Real Soon Now, I thought I’d pick up a laser measure to get accurate room sizes, and since I want a detailed floorplan of both the old and new houses, I decided it should be a Bluetooth model supported by Magicplan. Lowes had a Bosch model that was on their compatability list, so I picked it up when I went to drop off the not-quite-last batch of Magic cards I’m selling to Card Kingdom.

I returned it an hour later, because not a single device in my house could detect its so-called Bluetooth. Amazon offered one-day shipping on the well-regarded Leica DISTO E7100i, which doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the Bosch, but does have working Bluetooth.

I actually have the original builder-supplied floorplan of my current house, but it doesn’t have the measurements, and the model I built 20 years ago was in some ancient Windows software that doesn’t work any more. It still came in handy the last time I had it appraised, saving the guy a good 20 minutes of sketching. An updated floorplan won’t be necessary for selling the old one if the market out here is still hot in the spring, but it will be good practice for the new house, where I’m sure to want some work done before I move in.

“Among those fired…”

“…were the diversity, equity and inclusion recruiting team.”

Professional Actor Rehearses

Alec Baldwin gave a tear-stained interview blaming everyone but himself for fatally shooting Halyna Hutchins. Speaking out in this way about a crime is generally considered a mistake, but as a sociopathic egotist, he did it anyway, creating evidence sure to be admitted in both criminal and civil trials.

He claims that he pulled back the hammer and then ever-so-gently lowered it (at Hutchins’ instruction, no less), but definitely never pulled the trigger. That is an incredibly stupid thing to have said, because the key element required to fire a single-action revolver (absent dropping it several feet onto a hard surface, muzzle-first) is “somebody cocked the hammer”.

There is now video evidence that Alec Baldwin is that somebody. Adam (unrelated) Baldwin rips into him for it.

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