Cheesecake
Decision Desk 2020
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.
Pixiv: tan/dark skin
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.
3D cheesecake 32: smiles
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…
Pixiv Champloo 12
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.
3D cheesecake 31: room service
Hotel rooms are a very popular location for photo shoots in Japan for a number of reasons, including the popularity of “nanpa” pick-ups. There’s an entire genre of porn devoted to pretending that it’s really easy to pick up sweet and lovely young women/girls on the street and get them to pull a train for middle-aged salarymen. Pay no attention to their professionally-applied makeup and conspicuously-fresh fancy lingerie.
And of course, if you don’t have your own studio or can’t afford to rent one (or at least a nice suite), where else are you going to take your model?
For obvious reasons, this one’s pretty much all NSFW, so here’s some unrelated notes and images to pad it out:
Rewatch: The Witcher
Also The Umbrella Academy, and the thing they most have in common is that the more I learned about the source material, the less I was interested in reading it. IMHO, both Netflix series substantially improve on their sources as presented on their respective wikis, largely by throwing out convoluted baffling horseshit.
Seriously, it’s canon that Ciri is Snow White, complete with seven dwarfs, and everyone wants to knock her up to get a child of power, including her own father, who colluded with Vilgefortz to stage his death as “Duny” so he could overthrow the usurper and reclaim the throne of Nilfgaard. Meanwhile, in the UA graphic novels, dad was actually a poorly-disguised alien, which is not the biggest WTF.
Both also have some excellent performances by actors who work very well in their roles. UA’s first episode can be a bit of a chore, especially with the central character an emotionless zombie. That’s not really a flaw in the actress’ performance; she’s supposed to be that way. It just makes it difficult to get engaged in the story.
Oh, and don’t go anywhere near any Witcher fan discussions. When they’re not fantasizing improbable ships, they’re either ignoring what’s presented on the screen or arguing based on a canon that’s scattered across a bunch of inconsistent novels, comics, games, and previous movie/tv series.
Slow-playing the reopening
Turns out the local Sport Clips has not in fact reopened. The chain marked the store as re-opened in the app and people started booking haircuts, but when I went by at 10am Thursday, there were two disgruntled cleaning guys waiting for someone to show up and let them in. And a sign on the door said “check the app for our reopening date”. Sigh.
What could possibly go wrong?
Germany to require gas stations to also charge electric cars. Gosh, I’m old enough to remember when they told you not to use your cellphone at the gas pump because it might spark a fire. Imagine the fun when you’ve got to rebuild your station to handle a mix of people who load up on fossil fuels in five minutes and people who sit there for at least half an hour at a Van de Graaff generator.
Good Eats Reloaded
This week’s episode revised Flat Is Beautiful 2. I could have used that for a theme, but that’s another show.
On suppressing riots
Long ago, Colonel Cooper advocated identifying the cadre organizing the riot and reducing their enthusiam with a single subsonic .22LR to the lung from a suppressed rifle. Unlikely to be fatal, unlikely to start a stampede, just enough to take the wind out of their sails. No school like the old school, perhaps, but it could never happen here.
I’d like to at least see all the rioters forced to serve a few hundred hours of community service cleaning up inner-city neighborhoods. The survivors might even learn something.
Reminder
Ally: Trying to be eaten last.
Woke: Trying to be beaten last.
This hurts to look at
Not the girl, the… “thing” in her right hand.
Dear spammer,
A for swiping American Express’ actual fraud-detection email template, saving yourself from the possibility of inept spelling and grammar.
B for using an almost believable .com domain name consisting of the real one with “exps” appended.
C for not including any personal information in the body of the email that would convince me that you knew anything about my account.
D for routing the “click here” links through a URL shortener.
F for sending it to the wrong email address.
All of the above combined to send it to my Junk folder, so there was no chance I’d fall for it.
On classic cheesecake
Whoever shot this set of Nana Ogura was definitely a fan of the golden age of Playboy magazine. (disable javascript before visiting this NSFW site!)
Pixiv Champloo 11
Another day, another cheesecake. If I did that in real life, the “Covid 15” would be the “Covid 50”…
Unrelated…
On Monday, Monterey County supervisors announced their intention to beg the governor for permission to enter “second stage phase-two”. They didn’t actually do it, they just created an agenda item for today in which they will decide whether or not to send a letter in support of the medically-induced begging effort.
It will be in the eighties again today. Sure would be nice to get a haircut, but that’s somewhere in “phase three”…
Related to Unrelated…
Finally figured out where all the coordinated car-horn-honking has been coming from. The Monterey County Health Department is just over a mile away as the bat flies, and as they’re the ones issuing the compliance orders, they attract protests like wet markets attract disease. And as with all public protests, the people who show up inevitably have a variety of agendas…
3D cheesecake 30
The porch cat has started stalking me around the house. He’s figured out that if he finds an open window near me (generally, sitting at the kitchen table or reading/gaming on the couch), jumps up onto the screen and hangs there by his claws, he can look me in the eye and meow for attention. Reminds me a bit of my first college girlfriend.
This week’s episode of Good Eats: Reloaded involved buttercream frosting. I too wish to frost delicious cake.
Pixiv: shorts
The last time I visited the realm of Daisy Dukes And Other Delights, it was back when I was still pulling cheesecake from Gelbooru, using Steven’s extensive exclusion list to sift the vile haystack for shining needles.
This search was a lot easier.
Unrelated, A Wild Yeast Appears!
First sighting in weeks. The bread machine yeast was the only one left on the shelf (even the commercial stuff they’re repackaging in the bakery was all gone), but here’s a dirty little secret: bread machine yeast is just rapid-rise yeast, which is just instant yeast, which is just active dry yeast milled a bit finer to expose more surface area, so it starts rising sooner. No modern commercial dry yeast requires “proofing”, so the only significant difference is that a faster rise has less flavor. And you can always use a bit less and let it rise longer, to compensate.
They also had two bags of King Arthur All-Purpose flour, so I grabbed one.
Speaking of King Arthur, they’re listing both Red and Gold as in-stock today, along with Bread and Whole Wheat flour. And my 2 pounds of SAF Gold finally arrived Saturday, so I’m set for however long it takes California to open back up, with or without Benito Newsom’s blessing.
Churches across the state have announced that they’re more into forgiveness than permission, no matter what some judge says.
Back to the cheesecake, or at least a crepe:
