Complete tonal whiplash, as Our Duped Heroes rush back to town to find it half-destroyed, with most of the people dead or missing and the survivors wounded, exhausted, and hungry, then the scene switches to Boxxo making time with his two Best Girls.

Verdict: again, the character art is the only thing that’s working for me so far. Some of the individual scenes are fine, but they don’t fit together. Lacking any source material to draw on, the show is all over the place.

Prime + ads - ads = ads

Amazon folded Freevee (free-with-ads) into Prime Video, but kept the ads. I pay extra for Prime-without-ads, so naturally I am forced to watch ads for anything marked Prime that used to be on Freevee. For now. I have this sneaking suspicion that they’ll silently expand this new category of Semi Prime over time.

Time to find a new hotel…

For years now, our preferred hotel in Kyoto has been the Citadines. Great location (two subway stops up from Kyoto Station, grocery and dry cleaners down the block, easy walk to all sorts of shopping, kitchenettes, solid wifi, comfy beds, etc). Sadly, they recently shut down.

Top contender for next Spring trip is The Blossom, which is a block further away from the subway and a block closer to the grocery. I’ve got time to look around, but the last time we tried another place, it ended up being a lot less convenient, with the only major “pro” being that it was near a bigger, better grocery. It was very close to the station, but on the south side, so it took a lot longer to reach the trains, subways, and other shopping.

This trip will be an interesting variation on our usual, since it overlaps with my sister’s work events. I’ll be on my own for a week in Tokyo while she’s working, then we’ll have a week together in Kyoto, and then I fly home while she heads to her next conference.

With a week on my own, I might be able to set a big-camera-friendly pace…

X mars the sport

I don’t know what Elon’s Elves think they’re doing, but the end result is that the “for you” feed has turned into a complete disaster full of spam, scams, and an intense focus on English-language “news” from non-English-speaking countries.

I deselected all of the topics it insisted were based on my (nearly-nonexistent) activity, which included such gems as “Allstate”, “auto racing”, “Big Brother Brasil”, “Clay Travis”, “David Hogg”, “Ezra Miller”, “figure skating”, “Jill Biden”, “McNeil-PPC, Inc”, “NCAA Women’s Basketball”, “Other competition”, “Super Mario”, “The Home Depot”, “Zohran Mamdani”, etc. I unchecked every item on the list, and two days later most of them were back. And it had no effect on the garbage in the feed.

The only thing that seems to work is playing whack-a-mole with block-by-word, which currently looks something like this, and slightly reduces the amount of crypto crap:

binance bitcoin blockchain chain crypto dapp decentralization decentralized defi ecosystem eth ethereum fintech founder funds gm gn haters liquidity migration monad nft pumps stablecoin transaction transactions venture web3

What really works is… never checking the “for you” feed. This is probably not the desired result.

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.