Just got an ore-ore scam phone call!

First time in years. “Hey, Grandpa, how are you?” It was such a change from all the Medicare/Medicaid scam calls I get that I kinda wish he hadn’t stopped talking after I laughed at him.

Fantasy Life i

This newly-released slow-life RPG on Steam looks interesting, with a wide variety of things to do, but it’s infected with a mandatory third-party “anti-cheat” malware install. If you don’t care about playing online, there’s a way to prevent “Easy Anti-Cheat” from ever being installed, but you have to re-disable it after every update to keep it from trying to install.

Or wait for the Switch 2 version, which relies on Nintendo’s closed platform for security.

Note that player avatars are not shaped like this; in fact, it follows the common trend of pretending that gender is all just a fashion choice, and allows you to freely mix-and-match parts on your pre-adolescent character. For the realism, I’m sure.

Never mind that as soon as you get the story going, you meet a king and his princess sister, who exhibit stereotypically male and female behaviors, because that makes sense.

Just another government database…

Japan Post has announced a digital address system. No, it does nothing to overcome the deficiencies of Japan’s baroque block/intersection addressing schemes and help people find places quickly and reliably. What it does is assign a random code to anyone who requests one, which users can then type into shipping forms instead of typing their actual address.

If customers don’t ever type the code wrong, and if vendors update their databases to store the code instead of a multi-field address, and if the customer moves and remembers to update their record in this government database, then they will not have to also update those vendors’ web sites to ensure that future orders go to the right place. They will, however, have to remember which vendors didn’t accept the codes the last time they placed an order…

(vendors will of course also cache the actual address, because they don’t want all of their logistics to depend on real-time calls to some random government-maintained API)

The funny thing is, taxi driver GPS systems have been doing this for years with phone numbers, because it can be a pain in the ass to type addresses in Japan and make sense of them. I make pre-perforated inkjet business cards for planned destinations before our trips to Japan, and always prominently include the phone number.

(people have already thought of a bunch of other potential problems with this system; probably more than the creators of the system have thought of…)

“German-inspired craftsmanship”

There’s a brand of home & commercial cookware being sold on Amazon, Wagensteiger. It name-drops Germany in the ad copy (with a “brand by GERMANY” rollmark on many of the products), and even uses a cute little line drawing of a farmer to reinforce the image. In reality, the company is 100% Korean with much of their manufacturing in China, but they’ve hired Germans to do some design work.

It’s not hidden on their web site, but you won’t find it stated on Amazon, just the weasel words. Which is kind of sad, because these days South Korea probably has a better reputation for quality than Germany…

(I bought this bowl/strainer set for $21, by the way, and it looks quite well-made)

Action!

Somewhere on a dusty VHS tape, I have someone interviewing a nude model, answering a question about what her job is like. She laughs and says (from memory) “‘more titty action!’, photographers shout it at me again and again, having me run and jump and make them bounce around; it’s all they want”.

In that vein, while reviewing the extras on Matsuri 5, I found an ad for Matsuri 4, where they had her jumping rope nude. Poor gal must have had bruises after every shoot of her career.

---

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.

---