M2, brute?
Frieren, episode 12
In which it’s Stark’s birthday, but Frieren ends up in the birthday suit. Fern-fan fan-artists hardest hit.
Verdict: some nice character-building for Stark and Himmel, and even Eisen and Heiter get rounded out a bit.
Tearmoon, episode 8
In which Our Shotacon Princess gives two little boys a happy ending, finishing off the book. Not “light novel volume one”, that book, so she has officially changed her fate. Along the way, she acquires more converts to The Church Of The Accidental Genius, while narrowly avoiding losing the first one due to a sudden attack of common sense.
Verdict: the first appearance of Our Royal Daddy explains a lot about how Mia got into this mess in the first place.
Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 8
I will not comment on the quality of the swordplay, because there wasn’t any. Quality, that is. And I truly “enjoyed” the way the guy who was so enraged that his eyes were popping repeatedly stood still and waited for conversations to finish. As one does when confronted with enemies one’s vowed to murder to death. Never mind that one’s in a sim where people can’t actually, y’know, die, making the dramatic moment kinda pointless.
Verdict: utter crap, and they’re convinced it tastes so good that we need another helping next week.
The Apothecary Diaries, episode 8
The return of Great Detective Maomao, The Holmes Of The Whorehouse. Also of the poorhouse, since the price she paid for the escort home will leave her indentured again, one way or another. In addition to escort service, we get a bit of fan-service, not so much from Maomao herself as from her big-big-sister Meimei.
Verdict: plausible deniability. And a heart attack for poor Shinji.
Giving Thanks
Thanksgiving dinner was at my house, with my parents and my brother’s family, for seven total. Mom brought turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, corn salad, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, etc, so I could have gotten away with just setting the table, but I made mashed potatoes, tangzhong dinner rolls, and a less-spicy version of Those Potatoes (replacing our usual mix of powdered chiles with slightly less of the original Chef Paul spice mix).
Given how rich and filling Those Potatoes are, it’s a recipe I hadn’t made since before Covid, and I had managed to forget that while I can chop onions all day long, grating them really fills the air with tear gas.
Random MacOS Sonoma incompatibility
A while back I finally worked out the correct incantation to restore the long-since-removed window-cascade feature to MacOS (at least for Terminal.app, which is the one I most cared about).
Upgrading to MacOS 14.x broke it in a non-obvious way. TL/DR:
Terminal.app now has a mystery invisible window that has to be
excluded by changing every window to every window whose visible is true. I updated the script in the original post, since it’s
backward-compatible.
Random M2 Mac performance note
Tinkering with an M2 Mac, the supplied Rosetta2 transcoder is pretty
awful. Transcoded x86_64 binaries range from “twice as slow as a
3-year-old Macbook Air” to “completely unusable”. Sadly, Homebrew’s
decision to move from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew makes it
difficult to build things that don’t look there, and MacOS has no real
support for alternate lib-dirs. Looks like there’s also a fair amount
of software out there that has hard-coded ifdefs for MacOS that assume
Intel, and won’t build without hackery.
(perlbrew’s giving me grief about installing anything less than the bleeding-edge dev release, and that one can’t install XS modules, so I’m stuck with the version installed by Homebrew)
(oh, and the asshole who wrote PDF::Cairo needs to fix his tests so it installs cleanly in recent Perl/Cairo/Pango releases; oh wait, that’s me (SVG import lost its transparency, and rotated text is mis-kerned, so technically the tests work and the underlying libraries are broken))
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