So, the only one of my current co-workers that I’ve met in person just left the company for another job. When he announced it in our morning “scrum” (yes, we do a virtual stand-up on Zoom every day; not a fan), I insisted that it’s not my fault.

Unrelated, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Zoom meetings with a co-worker, for the purpose of prepping a major version upgrade. Note that I did not say we were actually working or actually prepping. We have in fact accomplished dick-all in four 90-minute meetings, and I was so frustrated with this after Friday’s session that I stepped away from the keyboard for several hours so I wouldn’t reach through the Internet and smack him. The nice way to put it is that we have fundamentally different approaches to upgrading production services.

So, for the first time since June, here’s some non-animated cheesecake.

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Reasons not to use Cults3D, #4

Stolen designs. Seriously, these are obviously professional product photos of objects that are not 3d-printed, and a quick Google image search finds them for sale all over the world. Some clown just scanned them in and is trying to sell them as their own work, using the original product photos as bait.

And, yes, there are plenty of scanned copyrighted statues on all the sites, but usually they aren’t brazen enough to try to sell them. Thingiverse tries to cover their costs with ads, while Cults3D is a marketplace that happens to have some free items.

Not Going There

Yesterday was not a good day for America. I will not discuss it further at this time, so here are some pictures of cute girls with cats.

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I’m not sure why Pixiv users tag pictures ‘before sex’ (事前, literally ‘prior to’); aren’t they all? Maybe it’s just for the ones where the characters know about it…

Unrelated, Solo Leveling

(no, not that way…)

Official English versions of this popular Korean fantasy story are scheduled to be released early in 2021 by Yen Press. Light novel, January 19th; manga adaptation, February 23rd. Hopefully they won’t meet the same fate as some other Yen Press titles that are inexplicably not available for Kindle. (all the missing titles seem to be available on BookWalker, although at higher prices)

Unrelated, “fuck you, readline devs”

I hates me some workflow-breaking changes to default behaviors in a new release, buried at the end of the release notes of a project that got silently upgraded as a dependency:

This document details the changes between this version, readline-8.1, and the previous version, readline-8.0.
…
2. New Features in Readline
…
h. Bracketed paste mode is enabled by default.

To which my answer is:

echo set enable-bracketed-paste off >> ~/.inputrc
bind -f ~/.inputrc

I’ve been cutting and pasting commands into terminal windows for many, many years. 99.9% of the time, when I paste something with newline characters in it, it’s because I want the shell to see the damn newlines and execute the damn commands.

Today Years Old…

“Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy”

For decades, I had no idea what this line was.

Sometimes, ‘before sex’ isn’t a good thing…

But usually…

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With a stage name like Yume Miru, you know she’s got some persuasive arguments…

If your election stays up for more than four days, consult Rio Teramoto.

As for the ongoing clusterfuck that is the US presidential election, Larry Correia weighs in.

Speaking of security…

In the nearly-there Big Sur release of MacOS, Apple won’t allow third-party software to even see the network traffic from their applications and services, much less block it. If, for instance, you’re on an expensive or slow wifi connection, and iCloud or Software Update decides to slurp up all your bandwidth, well-known tools like Little Snitch, TripMode, and even your VPN software won’t know about it.

I haven’t seen anyone mention tcpdump or Wireshark yet.

The tags 褐色 and 褐色肌 are translated as “dark skin” or “tan”, but there are very few truly dark characters in anime and manga, and most of those are painful stereotypes, especially the males. Fortunately I don’t collect pictures of male characters, so I can avoid the angry mobs for a little longer.

This set’s a bit shorter than the others I’ve posted recently, because a lot of the stuff that gets this tag barely qualifies as “has been outdoors recently”.

Good Eats Reloaded: Art of Darkness

Yes, this theme is inspired by a cocoa episode featuring mousse and microwave cake. No chocolates were whipped or nuked in today’s cheesecake selection.

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With California under mandatory masking, it’s hard to tell what kind of mood people are in when you’re in public. So here’s some cheerful cheesecake.

Mildly Related Anime

I want to see an inverted harem comedy where each of the girls gives up and finds a guy who’s into her and willing to commit to a real relationship, leaving Our Hero progressively more alone until in the final episode, he ends up the Best Man at their mass wedding. Call it Shoumi Kigen! (賞味期限, “sell-by date”). The beach/hot-springs episode would come at the beginning.

Unrelated, Singin’ “Bye, bye, canceled Eskimo Pie”

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the “Eskimo Pie” brand of ice cream sandwich in a store, but now I never will. Honestly, I can’t see them introducing a replacement product at all; you can’t keep brand loyalty if you don’t keep the brand. Without the name, logo, or mascot, they’d just be another new product in a crowded market. I nominate “Effrontery Bar” as the new name, with an angry middle-class white woman as mascot.

Still Unrelated, Dear Delonghi,

Hire a proofreader for your next small-appliance manual:

Back to the cheesecake…

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I was going to do something with a theme today, but then the software update on my Synology NAS failed, a reboot got stuck at a blinking blue light for more than 20 minutes, and I feared it would need major surgery. A hard power-cycle didn’t produce any change, so I was prepping to follow the “blinking blue light of death” FAQ (which involves pulling all the drives, reinstalling onto a scratch drive, then reinserting all but one disk of the first volume and doing a repair), when it suddenly came back to life. The only thing I’d changed was disconnecting the USB cable leading to the UPS, so I’m guessing there was some disagreement between the two.

Glass TTYs Hardest Hit

The Lurn2Codh Police are busily extracting all “offensive” terminology from computing: male/female, master/slave, blacklist/whitelist, peek/poke, parent/child, fork/exec, kill/killall, dump/restore, finger/man, nice/renice, strip/tail, true/false, zip/unzip, etc, etc. This isn’t new so much as it is becoming more visible as part of signaling to the mob that you don’t want to get burned, metaphorically or literally. I find it completely hilarious that GitHub is going so far as to rename the default branch in software projects from “master” to something not-currently-protested like “main”.

Of course, promoting one branch over another is inherently problematic; all branches are equally important.

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