The time for isekai tourism is over. We get a lengthy reminder of last week’s heavily-telegraphed “shocking twist”, just a teensy bit more on The Big Big Bad, some mustache-twirling from The Gluttonous Little Bad, and some excellent truth-pheromone work from Our Naughty Ninja Pony Gal. Next week, more fighting.

Verdict: I’d like to remind the animators that when a rescue is urgent, and Our Skeletal Paladin can see the attack happening, it is completely pointless for him to spend the next five minutes riding toward the scene. Seriously, I don’t care how fond he’s gotten of his new steed, we’ve seen how he teleports right into the middle of things whenever there’s a crisis. And we’ve also seen that Our Threesome can each take out one of these giants with almost zero effort.

Dear Adobe,

Not expecting much, I attempted to contact support to ask how to disable the unwanted pop-up notifications from Creative Cloud when all categories of notifications are already disabled.

The first-level AI chatbot, “Sinish”, took twenty minutes to confuse itself into thinking I had a subscription problem, and transferred me to chatbot “Dinesh”, who took ten minutes to apologize for not being able to do anything that was not subscription-related. I was then transferred to “senior technician” Sugeeta (chatbot), who spent twenty minutes misunderstanding English before requiring me to reboot my computer as the first step of diagnosing the problem. I pointed out that this would end the chat.

Five minutes later, “Sugeeta” returned to inform me that I would receive a callback afterwards. Having wasted enough of my time, I ended the session and left a one-star review and non-profane feedback, which will no doubt be processed by another AI and never reach a human being.

TL/DR: while it’s possible that “senior technician” Sugeeta was a human being in an Indian call center, I doubt it.

Ready for the punchline? The next day, my “support ticket” was closed out and filed under the category “performance”.

(by the way, the cause of the pop-ups is an auto-restarted background job running a script called “UpdateNotifier”, one of more than a dozen constantly left running, at least two of which run node.js, and which don’t get killed off even if you completely uninstall Creative Cloud from your Mac)

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