Boxxo and Lammis have nothing to do this week, as the supporting cast fills the episode with complete bullshit. The entire episode is a very-long-winded betrayal by their allies, who really, really, really want everyone to understand the good reason why they’re joining the bad guys, setting up The Big Conflict.

I didn’t want a Big Conflict. I wanted the light-hearted adventures of a sentient vending machine and his super-strong girlfriend.

Verdict: blech. Still some good character art, although there was some odd facial animation for the blue-haired chick as they rotated her head several times for no significant reason.

Casual portrait

Over the weekend, I finally consolidated all my Adobe Lightroom libraries (most of them converted from Apple Aperture with Avalanche), finally ran my 2022 Japan pics through a full five-star deathmatch, and finally reviewed some of my old stuff for possible printing and framing.

I still think this is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

(May 30, 2010, San Francisco Japantown Mall’s “Kimono Day”; Sony A-850, Minolta 70-210mm f/4; 135mm, ISO 1600, f/4, 1/80; had to shoot through the crowd, or I’d have been able to get his other hand into the picture)

Nuke it from orbit, Gmail!

We recently switched our Mom from a godawful-slow Android phone (that’s been giving her grief for at least two years) to a new iPhone. At first, it looked like just putting the Gmail app where she couldn’t miss it would handle 90% of the transition (gaming and browsing are done on her tablet), but it turns out that Samsung split things across two address books, so most of her contacts got left behind.

I had to fire up the old phone, select them all from the local address book, share them via Bluetooth to my Mac, manually edit the export file (because Apple refuses to accept VCard 2.1, and I had to search-and-replace the version number to 3.0…), and then log into her iCloud account and import them. Which I couldn’t do until I took my laptop over to her house, because authentication requires the presence of her phone.

Then came the real fun: cleaning up her Gmail account. Her inbox had 900+ unread messages, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Google had helpfully filtered years of random promotional email/spam so that she never saw it; there were over 100,000 of them, and the Gmail app only lets you select 50 at a time for deletion.

If you login with a desktop web browser, you get a “select all” button that works on deletes in the background. It spent a few hours chugging away to finally delete the 100,000+.

(I also discovered that Samsung had a setting that had kept the phone from ever charging to more than 85%…)

Fuck off, ChatGPT

I tried to coax it into generating a picture based on the “distracted boyfriend” meme, as an oil painting in the style of Alex de Andreis. The vague refusals were sufficiently annoying that I canceled my subscription, but the icing on the cake was insisting that this meme is about the specific real people in the picture, and that no substitutions removed that taint. Even starting a new conversation based on just a description of the meme had it insisting that I was asking for something based on those models.

This is, of course, complete horseshit.

(I’d play with Midjourney if they didn’t charge $60/month for privacy. Grok completely ignored the instructions and generated bland pics of modern couples. Locally-hosted Stable Diffusion models struggle to do multi-person compositions at all; it’s basically an exercise in inpainting)

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