I still have to get a POD and some people to load/unload it for me, but I’ve booked the truck I’ll be filling with stuff that moving companies either won’t take or won’t adequately insure (or that I simply won’t risk with them), as well as worked out the route options. I’d like it to work out that my brother and I arrive in the truck around noon on one day, empty it into the house, and then have both the POD and the Internet installers show up the next day, but that part’s not firm yet.

In other news, I have been persuaded that there are multiple children who would be sad to see Mooch disappear from the neighborhood, so I won’t be stealing a porch cat when I go. This also simplifies the logistics of the final move, but he seems to be prepping himself for it. Or else the nicer weather has just increased his range of part-time homes.

I’ll just have to find a new catgirlkitten after I’m settled in.

(note to self: make sure the IP block at the new house geolocates outside of Russia…)

Review fatigue

It’s getting harder and harder for me to read anime commentary at ANN, because the kids writing it haven’t learned the simplest and most significant lesson of all. I have no interest whatsoever in examining anime through the lens of race/gender/politics as articulated by someone with the life experience of a freshly-graduated liberal-arts major.

Follow The Science!

Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science has a new exhibit featuring fossil pokemon. I am sympathetic to their goal of attracting more kids in a way that might actually get some of them interested in the sciences. I just find myself glad that it’s happening in Japan instead of the US, so it might not get polluted with leftist claptrap the way the “science” exhibits at the De Young were the last time I went there.

Not one of mine…

“Suddenly transported to a fantasy world I discovered that my obsession with Minecraft-ish games gave me super-crafting powers but everybody hates humans so the only way to survive was to become the slave of a gorgeous mega-busty dark-elf virgin who immediately gave it up for me and introduced me to all her sex-starved monster-gal-pals so I think I can make this work”

Apparently volume 2 comes out real soon now, and the blurb says he’ll be slipping it to all sorts of fantasy girls (mostly off-camera) while exploring his world-breakingly-OP crafting tree. Probably looking for the viagra potion, since a quick peek at a translation of the original web-novels revealed that his harem eventually grows to well over 20 girls, one of them lured to his bed by the power of hamburgers.

Amusing interview

We had a post-interview huddle recently for an opening in my group, and we all agreed that we liked the candidate and wanted to work with him, but that he’d be a better fit for a different group (and I hope they agree). A few people expressed a team-fit concern that he gave off a lone-wolf vibe where he considered himself the smartest guy in the room and preferred to work alone.

My response to that was that he reminded me of me about 20-25 years ago. 😁

Tiny site tweak

The multi-topic “fun” posts I’ve been doing for a while led me to finally figure out the rendering hooks that were made possible by switching Hugo to use the Goldmark markdown renderer, and I added itty-bitty permalink icons to every H3 header, which is the standard section break I use.

It also supports hooks for images, so I think I’ll try adding them to the cheesecake posts. Because it’s a hook, it would be retroactive for all the ones I did in the past, which is a better way to refer to them than my current hack of adding “picN” to the alt text. Not today, though; the headers were an easy hack I could do between bouts of packing and pitching.

Related,

I found that the one-second delay of using hugo list all to randomize my top quotes was too much for my workflow, since I do a lot of preview runs with a subset of the site as I’m composing new entries. So I wrote a little Perl script to open every markdown file in the quotes directory, parse the TOML metadata, and check for draft/expired ones. This was faster, but still surprisingly slow.

Sure enough, the standard TOML module is pure-Perl. Downloading the C-library-based TOML::XS module and switching to it (not API-compatible with the regular module!) dropped the runtime to less than a tenth of a second.

Sadly, my attempt to file a feature request to add support for a single-section option to hugo list was met with obfuscating stupidity from someone who simply couldn’t accept that the command could ever possibly be slow in any environment at any scale.

(picture is unrelated, but makes a nice antidote to obfuscating stupidity)

Nothing against Apple…

Apple is being attacked across the world for its “everything within Apple, nothing outside Apple, nothing with QA” walled-garden approach to computing. This week, it’s iCloud private relay, which protects i{,Pad}OS users from everyone except Apple.

Governments resent Apple in the same way they resent organized crime. They can’t stand competition.

(picture is unrelated, but may provide aid and comfort to people who enjoy a little white-hair/dark-skin in their cheesecake)

Speaking of Apple…

Today, March 14 2022, Apple released iOS 15.4 with FaceID Mask Unlock, which would have been really useful a year or so ago.

(speaking of things that are arriving way too late to be useful, here’s decent fan-art of Rit from No true comrade)

“…for the end of that game is oppression and shame…”

To celebrate the Brandom regime’s attempts to Make Iran Great Again, the Iranian military fired missiles at a US consulate.

Apparently they’re unhappy about the late ice cream, too.

Update Your Firmware, HP edition

Why, yes, the increasing complexity of computer firmware has created a new market in firmware analysis, as evidenced by Binarly finds 16 serious vulnerability in HP firmware. I’m not the least bit surprised, since this sort of low-level code is generally maintained by Some Cranky Old Guy who isn’t given nearly enough resources or time, I just want to know if the company’s name is pronounced bi-gnarly, bin-arly, or perhaps an Irish-ish b’narly.

Realist Hero, episode 23

Note to Our Producers: when Our Realist Hero casually says that he wiped out gangs and illegal drugs while cleaning up the slums, it does not count as lampshading to have another character say “did he really say he did that?” and then move on. You’re just pointing out how ludicrous it is for him to announce that his otherworldly book-knowledge has handwaved away a serious problem.

Also, “I’ll skip the explanation because it’s complicated”?!? Yeah, that’s a first for this talky series. At least we got to check in with Our Bold Raccoon Girl and the man she’s raising.

(picture is unrelated except for the presence of underrim glasses…)

Kuroitsu, episode 9

In which The Days Are Just Packed, and We Thank You For Your Service. Seriously, there’s so much going on in this one that I won’t even try to summarize, and the only missing member of the extended cast is Our Part-Time Hero.

Screencaps from last week’s episode, courtesy of Tenka Seiha’s usual downer of a review.

Breezy storytelling…

I checked in on WTF? I turned into an OP loli wizard! this week, and it starts with a female character shoving her head up Our Loli-Wizard’s miniskirt and asking why she doesn’t wear panties. Later, she accompanies a party of soldiers on the road, walking on air above them to scout, and the writers completely forgot about her going commando, even when the soldiers are looking up to talk to her. They could have at least tossed in a shot of one guy in the back enjoying the view. And, yes, she continues to face no challenge to her unparalleled OP-ness.

Still later, she travels to a magical forest while following the trail of a missing ally, only to be bullied by mind-reading dryads who pick up her desperate need to pee and demand she fertilize the plants with her high-mana urine. (this is apparently the second time her tiny bladder has been a plot point)

I… won’t be checking on it again.

(unrelated loli is unrelated)

Meanwhile, on Amazon,

The top two ebooks recommended to me right now are Instead of becoming a hero, I’ve reincarnated as a billionaire and Reincarnated as a dragon hatchling. For the hoard!

The top three electronics devices recommended are a pseudo-Switch, a psuedo-Amiga, and a pseudo-C64.

Apple AI at its finest…

…also Apple QA.

I went to rip the soundtrack CD from Interspecies Reviewers, after using up my Amazon store credit to overcome the painful price. My Macbook simply could not successfully read the disc without erroring out after one or two tracks (with several completely different USB CD/DVD/Bluray players), but it could load album art, and it chose… Fifty Shades of Gray.

All three players mounted it successfully on my HP Aero 13, and gave me no trouble ripping the disc.

Dynamic Static Page Error

I accidentally broke the page structure here for a while. I had set a few quotes to expire to take them out of the top rotation, but hadn’t tested it against the script that randomizes them.

Back in The Before Times of 2019, I replaced my original scheme for random top quotes with a new data-driven one that ran faster. In my makefile for updating the blog, I added a script that groveled over the file system to find Markdown files in the quotes directory, shuffled their order, and added the filenames to a TOML array, so that their contents could be inserted with Hugo’s page-lookup function. But that just meant that each site build had different quotes, that would remain the same for hours or days.

To make them update more frequently than that, I added very specific CSS around the top-quote section, so that a fraction-of-a-second server-side script could pull them out of all ~540 index pages, shuffle them, and put them back in a new order. The result is that every quote gets used at least once, the subset that gets used a second time changes every build, and the quote on each index page changes every three minutes.

This works great until you expire some of the quotes, so that they’re still in the source file system, but don’t get included in the build for the page-lookup function.

Hugo Is Not A Database, but it does include a command to dump a CSV file containing the details of all of your content, which can be parsed to find draft and expired entries:

With Miller:

hugo list all | mlr --csv --headerless-csv-output \
	filter '$expiryDate == "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z" && 
		$draft == "false" && 
		$path =~ "^content/quotes"' \
	then cut -f path | sed -e 's/^content\///' > $TMP

With q:

hugo list all | 
	q -Hd, 'select path from - where 
		expiryDate = "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z" and 
		draft = "false" and 
		path like "content/quotes%"' |
	sed -e 's/^content\///' > $TMP

Takes about a second to extract the list of valid top quotes. And now I don’t have missing quotes corrupting the DOM structure on random index pages, which then end up percolating up to the main page.

…then of course I forgot to turn the cron job back on, so the same quote was on the main page for two days…

On the bright side, the latest release of Hugo renders this site 28% faster. Most users are seeing at least a 20% improvement and some are seeing 50% or more. Which can save minutes or hours for really large sites, but in my case is a still-respectable 5 seconds.

(note that almost every time someone complains on the forums about build time, they’ve designed or borrowed extremely expensive templates filled with lookups and cross-references that explode at scale)

(troubleshooting catgirl maid is unrelated, and probably doesn’t do windows)

More fun with spam…

This one went to my CPAN email address, so apparently my Perl code is very sexy!

From: Evangelist Cynthia
Subject: Sophia been all over me about getting in touch with you

Hi Handsome,

I am online today and was about to close my account since I already got a life partner here on facebook that was when my cousin, Sophia came across your profile as she was actually standing behind me, she has been all over me about getting in touch with you. she said you seems like a man she will like to know better. She lives in the same area as you. She was only here for a job inspection. You don’t need to write back here as I will be deactivating my account on this site soon. This is her direct email: (gmail acct removed)

I hope you get in touch with her and I promise you won’t regret anything. I believe you will thank me later for this.

My warms regards.
Evangelist Cynthia Stout.

The body text assumes this email address is tied to a Facebook account, so they purchased their contact list from the lowest bidder. And I’m not sure if “evangelist” is supposed to be a name, an occupation, or a religious signifier.

The actual sender is a Russian domain, laundered through pobox.com, so my spam filter is helping me boycott Russian con women!

(picture is unrelated, and I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on here)

Old Man Yells At Cloud

At the Democrat Retreat (which, sadly, does not involve them abandoning the US and fleeing to Cuba), Joe Biden lost his temper because the ice cream was late people were blaming inflation on his administration’s insanely reckless spending.

The ice cream was, in fact, late. The price increases, however, came early.

(classical reference)

A Series Of Fortunate Growth Spurts

I wouldn’t say I missed the Jim Carrey version of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events. That would imply some desire to see it. However, recently the Netflix miniseries with Neil Patrick Harris popped up on my recommendations, so I gave it a shot.

…and ended up bingeing all three seasons over a long weekend. It’s quite good, with Patrick Warburton narrating, Nathan Fillion fillioning, and brief appearances by familiar faces like Morena Baccarin, David Alan Grier, and Don Johnson.

But I’m here to highlight lead actress Malina Weissman, an extremely pretty young girl who was 13 when the first season was filmed. An appropriate age for her 14-year-old character, but after filming the first season she didn’t so much blossom as explode, to the point that the costuming became a source of comedy for me. They worked very hard to mask her curves, and weren’t quite up to the challenge.

(picture is unrelated, because thankfully no attempt was made to hide Raphtalia’s sudden growth spurt)

It came from BEYOOOOONDS…

I didn’t recognize this as a Hello!Project group at first, because the costumes lack almost all of the familiar elements. They each have slightly different outfits and hair styles, but where’s the taffeta, the bedazzling, the boots, and the feathers?

(pictures are safe for work, but the site is emphatically NOT; and disable Javascript before going there)

Arceus design flaw…

There’s a not-quite-death penalty in this game for whenever you fall off a cliff or get curb-stomped by wild pokemon: you lose some items from your inventory. The good news is that you can get them back. The bad news is that you have to go online, with a Nintendo online subscription, and wait for another player to find them. They receive a reward used to buy stuff at one of the vendors, and even if you’re not online, the game will generate NPC “lost satchels” for you to find, although not in the same quantity.

They don’t actually tell you that you have to be online to get your stuff back, but that’s not the flaw. The flaw is that it only works while there are a lot of other people playing the game who are at the right level to reach your corpse satchel. Unless they release a patch, this feature will degrade in functionality over time.

The workaround is to have two Switches and two copies of the game, so that you can find each other’s satchels via local networking. This will also be the only way to reliably farm satchels once there are few active players; you’ll just have to keep suiciding to generate satchels for each other.

Isekai From The Depths Of Pixiv

“That time I rescued a wizard from a runaway truck and was granted my wish to live in a fantasy world with a harem of sexy monster girls but forgot to specify that I’d be their master so she turned me into a busty bunny-girl futa and sold me to a tentacle monster”

I figure it would take three minutes, tops, to find matching cover art.

(The Witch of the Highlands is definitely unrelated, and would never, ever do something like that!)

Another first…

I haven’t gotten any spam in Japanese for quite a while, and I honestly miss it a little, since it gave some rather entertaining insights into what pitches were considered likely to succeed (“wealthy younger women will pay you for sex”, “we’ll hook you up with high-school runaways who’ll do anything for the chance to sleep in a bed”, etc).

Sadly, today’s junk-folder refugee is just one of those spams:

良い一日、

私はこの手紙が非常に驚くべきことにあなたに会うかもしれないことを知っています。 しかし、それはただ
外国人パートナーの緊急の必要性。 知りたいのですが
この提案は
あなたの受け入れに役立ちます。 私はあなたの誠実な助けが必要です
私の人道的プロジェクトを実現します。
残念ながら、私は末期症状で死にかけています。 お金を使ってほしい
私の相続は350万ドルです
（$ 3,150,000.00）あなたがそれを受け取ったときにあなたの国の慈善団体のために
お金。 このプロジェクトをあなたと一緒に終えることができれば幸いです
私が死ぬ前に。
あなたが私の提案に答えるとき、より多くの情報があなたに与えられます。
あなたの肯定的な反応は高く評価されます。
（mrs.jenniferabas@gmail.com）

あなたの妹、
ジェニフィアス・アッバス夫人、

Their Japanese is no better than their English…

(picture is unrelated, but she did perk up when she heard ‘futa’…)

How A Bold Raccoon-Girl Slave Rebuilt Society, episode 22

In which Our Realist Hero is reduced to a framing device for a side story about what happens when a nice guy inherits a slave shop.

(no, not that raccoon-girl slave, but still quite tasty)

Kuroitsu, episode 8

“Leave him alone, he’s master-blading!” (classical reference)

In which Our Magical Girls go undercover (but sadly not under the covers), Our Evil Chief Of Staff does his job quite well, Our Evil Researchers take two steps forward and three back, The Temp On The Mantelpiece almost goes off, and Our Hero lost the manual (classical reference courtesy of Pixy).

In keeping with my new tradition of giving up on fan-art for this show, here are some screenshots from last week’s episode, featuring the delicious-but-inedible Melty:

Separation of Work and Porn

A vtuber shared his entire screen by mistake, and eagle-eyed fans spotted his stash. The story doesn’t make clear whether it was “porn, downloaded illegally” or “illegal porn, downloaded”, but either way, he’s off for a few weeks.

…and that’s one of the reasons that I carried two laptops to work, back when I had an office to go to. Porn is the most obvious mistake, but there are a lot of other over-sharing possibilities, even before you take into account online conferencing and streaming to people outside your company. All the streamers at that company are now having their work machines thoroughly examined by IT/management, which is something you never want to happen.

Speaking of porn…

Once upon a time, I had a manager with a strong interest in adult materials, which were often viewed on his company-owned Mac laptop. One day, he stopped by in a panic, and asked me to quickly-and-quietly retrieve the DVD that was stuck in it, because not only wouldn’t it eject, but at random intervals the OS re-recognized it and auto-started the DVD player. And he was set to present in front of the execs in a few hours.

The drive had broken in a fashion that left a metal tab of some sort blocking the opening, so whenever it tried to eject, it would stop, pull it back in, and start the cycle all over again. Fortunately for him, I had the correct screwdrivers to not only open the case, but also the drive itself. When I pulled the top off, I was greeted with a picture of a naked filipina and the title Manila Milkshakes.

(Zelda doesn’t know what that means, but she’s quite certain it’s naughty)

Also speaking of porn…

I took a look at the Elgato FaceCam on Amazon, which promises pro-quality optics and autofocus for improved streaming. The “customers who viewed this item also viewed” list consisted entirely of sports bras.

(definitely not a sports bra!)

Sleep, reboot, same difference

I closed the lid on my MacBook Air last night, and once again it rebooted when I opened it this morning, once again without the expected dialog box reporting a reason for it to have done so. If I weren’t so busy packing and cleaning for the move, I’d spend the entire weekend migrating everything else off of it over to the HP Aero 13. Grrr.

The annoying thing is that now that I’ve stopped using the Time Machine backups that take hours-to-days, a reboot convinces Carbon Copy Cloner to do its next incremental by scanning the entire file system rather than using the quick update method. Which is still much, much faster than TM, but hits the memory just a little too hard, causing wireless-mouse lag and slow response when switching windows; more precisely, vm_stat suggests that the kernel is constantly compressing and decompressing pages in virtual memory. SuperDuper, on the other hand, hits the CPU hard and leaves the memory alone, spinning up the fans during a backup but not affecting performance at all.

Conceptually related,

It was nice to go old-school at work yesterday and debug a problem using tail -f and tcpdump, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if the VM team hadn’t silently migrated a key engineering resource to a cluster in a new data center during business hours. And by silently, I mean “we found out the next day when stalled mirrors shut down the CI pipeline”.

Seems there was a tiny routing difference for IPv6 traffic between the two data centers, so that return packets went “somewhere”. Forcing the traffic to go via IPv4 instantly fixed the problem, and since it was a Friday afternoon, we left that workaround in place while they sort things out.

(Raphtalia would like a few words with the VM team…)

Okay, that’s a new one…

Got an identity-theft spam in my junk mailbox today that reverses the usual direction:

Greetings to you my beloved one.
My name is Mrs. Edith Benson from the USA, a widow suffering from cancer disease.

My dear I want to donate some part of my inheritance US$6.5 million to you for charity project in your country.

please reply back for more details.

Mrs. Edith Benson

This was sent to one of my gmail addresses; reply-to is also gmail, but actual sender is a different, phony gmail address routed through the common spam-whore pobox.com.

(picture is most definitely unrelated)

House status: mine.

Now deploying… Yatta!

(fun fact: there’s a reason this song feels a lot like classic Morning Musume (and, no, that’s not a flattering look for any of them, especially with the aggressive ring-lighting), right down to the woo-woo-woo bit; same guy)

Shifting the closing date to the beginning of March set my first mortgage payment for the end of April, which means I’ll only have one month of paying for both houses if the old one sells quickly. Fingers crossed the current rabid housing bubble continues until at least June!

Anime status: crunchy

Sony is consolidating Funimation into Crunchyroll, not, as many feared, the other way around. There’s a list up for things that have already moved over, although most of them are dubs.

Dictionary status: undead

Slashdot has a headline about “animal-free dairy milk”. I expect woke dictionaries have received their marching orders, and soon the definition of “dairy” will always have been at war with Eastasia.

(free-animal dairy is unrelated)

Pokemon status: Japanese

I decided to step back from the do-it-again-stupid final boss fight in Arceus for a while and start a second run-through on my Switch Lite, in Japanese. It’s refreshingly difficult compared to Sword/Shield, where the game was so linear and the menus so fixed that you only had to recognize maybe 10 words, and then you could play through to the end in any language.

Arceus, on the other hand, has a variety of RPG-ish side quests, many of which gate access to features of the game. For a simple example, the inventory at the general stores is expanded by turning in specific items. As a result, in any language you’re not fluent in, you’ll need to lean on a site like Serebii to figure out the helpfully-numbered requests.

The most interesting thing about the Japanese version is that they didn’t have room to include the damage/accuracy details for your attack moves on the combat screen, so you have to actually remember what they do, making the game a bit harder even if you do read Japanese.

Backstory and worldbuilding

In the world of Kuroitsu, heroes, monsters, and magical girls are all real, and this is not a secret. Indeed, when (episode7-spoiler), it’s revealed that bad men often prey on cute monster girls because they have no civil rights and can’t complain to the cops. This also suggests that there are a fair number of non-combat monster girls around, at least in Tokyo.

Even in Our Progressive Monster Development Department,

spoiler

tasty-but-flawed seasonal monster Melty is stored in a file cabinet, conscious, although they do let her reconstitute herself to participate in the office drinking party.

On a lighter note, they haven’t made a fuss about it yet, but it’s an open secret that Our Bento-Making Hero Kenji Sadamaki (Kenshin Blader) is the younger brother of Our Monster-Making Doctor Hajime Sadamaki, making him doubly oblivious to the people responsible for the monsters he fights.

(picture is unrelated; moo)

“Papers, please!”

My gmail account bounced the PDF paperwork from the title company, so they contacted the realtor, who gave them my other email address. Yes, there was a flying trip to the notary. Still on schedule to wrap this up Tuesday afternoon.

Dear Pixy,

Been there.

Done that.

Good luck!

😁

Realist Hero, episode 21

In which the music has to carry the burden of dramatizing the talking-heads fiancée negotiations and subsequent reveal of the fatal flaw in the Big International Covenant, which is done through a tedious and only mildly ahistorical analogy. Personally, I spent most of the episode checking out Empress Maria’s well-exposed rack.

(picture is unrelated, if only because Our Realist Hero’s waifu harem isn’t this large yet)

Kuroitsu, episode 7

This week we go deep into business-culture tropes with the dreaded office drinking party. Fortunately, there’s plenty of wackiness as Our Monsters and Our Researchers let their hair down, leading me to wish for much more detail about precisely which parts of Melty are dark versus milk chocolate.

The Morning After gives us a completely different set of tropes to wallow in, as Our Conflicted Werewolf learns more about Our Ambitious Researcher than she ever expected to, with bonus Unwanted Revelations.

Meanwhile, Our Temp Minion faces a Rocky future, and learns the importance of warming up before a workout.

In lieu of fan-art, here are some screenshots from Tenka Seiha’s usual sort of review of last week’s episode.

No. No, no, no, no, no!

It’s nice to see a lot of older anime getting cleaned-up and re-released on Bluray, but come on, did you have to go and do Eiken?

NSFW

(picture is unrelated, because the breasts are much too small)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Our Hero, a loser with no friends, finds a Cheap Apartment With A Secret, where he rescues Strange Cute Girl From Another World who is gorgeous, stacked, gullible, and instantly falls for him, so she moves in. Checking to see where she came from, he finds Tiny Cute Slime, which he brings home and somehow loses in a stack of ecchi books and figurines that it uses to study the human form and how to please its new master. Who, the next time he goes out, stumbles across Lusty Busty Elf Girl who’s managed to remain a virgin for 200 years but instantly falls for him, so she moves in. A chance meeting hooks him up with Horny Loli Catgirl (a true S-Class Flatcat) who’s looking to make babies, and the harem sleepstakes is on!

Welcome to My Room is a Dungeon Rest Stop, in which a bottle of soda is the finest of healing potions, schoolgirl cosplay outfits are better than magic armor, and Our Hero’s secret unique skill requires that girls kiss him. Conflict is basically non-existent, and Team Harem facerolls the dungeon. I think the only original element of this story is that Our Hero has a job as a short-order cook.

…and that’s the kind of fluff I stoop to reading while waiting for a new episode of Kuroitsu…

(picture is too original to be related)

“Do not release the strat”

(classical reference)

The biggest flaw in Pokemon Legends: Arceus is the do-it-again-stupid nature of the boss fights, especially the final one. Catching a bunch of legendary mons on the way there was trivial by comparison, because it used the mechanics you’ve been practicing all along. The boss fights, however, require you to dodge a series of unique attacks while throwing objects at the boss, and without looking them up, you basically can’t get it on the first try. You have to fail repeatedly to learn the pattern of attacks, which you’ll never use again.

By the way, is it just me, or does every Pokemon-related forum quickly degenerate into a worthless morass of shiny/trade spam?

(a lot of fan-artists “exercise their imaginations to the fullest” when drawing the not-particularly-developed 15-year-old female protagonist of this game; in many of the pictures, she’d have trouble standing up straight even if she weren’t tied down)

Speaking of fan-art…

I think the real reason I hate the use of wide-angle lenses by glamour photographers is that a lot of artists trace photos to get anatomy and poses correct. And many fan-artists have no first-hand experience with nekkid wimmin that would enable them to recognize bad sources.

Ass-shots hardest hit. I saw one yesterday where two girls were bent over, and both of them had the exact same degree of perspective distortion magnifying their bottoms, despite the fact that they were at significantly different distances from the viewer, dropped onto a background with a completely different perspective.

(fun fact: this is the most tedious of the early side quests, and the difficulty is entirely due to rounding for display; you need to catch a max-height buizel, and you literally can’t tell until you try to turn it in, unless you managed to catch an alpha)

Nespresso squib load!

I had a few failed third-party pods with my original little Nespresso Essenza Mini (leading to a persistent leak that got it replaced under warranty), but yesterday’s was the first failure with the Creatista Plus, with a Nespresso-branded pod, and it was spectacular.

I was making my usual cappuccino with two pods, for which their workflow is espresso, milk, espresso. The first pod seemed to go well, then the milk steamer sort-of pulsed in a way, but it was still doing the job. I inserted the second pod, hit the button, and… it wasn’t right. The machine was straining, and what little coffee was coming out was full of grounds.

When I carefully opened the lid, pressurized coffee grounds sprayed across the wall behind the machine. The pod had not punctured correctly, so the cap burst under pressure, filling the compartment with very fine grounds and hot water. Cleaning the wall only took a few seconds, but I had to scrub the interior with a toothbrush and dispense over a liter of water to get it to run clean again.

Given the order of events, I think the first pod was the culprit, the equivalent of a squib load that lodged a bullet in the barrel. That interfered with the steam wand’s pressure, and then prevented the second pod from getting punctured. The narrow end was a bit crushed during manufacture, so the overall length was off.

(two coffee makers I don’t own…)

Phish, or not phish?

Since I first started the house-hunting process, I’ve seen a distinct uptick in spam and phishing attempts. I didn’t need my realtor’s warning to know better than to click on things that just happen to contain a few accurate pieces of easily-found data.

Friday, as soon as I got home from making the wire transfer to the title company and celebrating unmasked in a restaurant, I had email from an employment-verification service called “TrueWork”. They knew the names of my bank and my employer, but that’s about thirty seconds of search work. Combined with the contents “this link will expire in 24 hours” and “connect your payroll account from work”, the fact that this company wasn’t mentioned by the loan officer threw up a big red flag. In fact, she’d told me that they’d be using an old-fashioned phone call to HR for the final verification on the closing date.

Sure enough, while casual googling suggests that the company is legit, she’d never heard of them, and neither had her boss. It’s possible that someone at the bank started using a new system and just forgot to tell anyone in the loan department, but that’s not the safe way to bet. After all, even if TrueWork is legit, the email may not really be from them.

Speaking of wire transfers, my bank lets you do them online, but not large enough to actually be useful for the only thing I’ve ever needed one for. They tell you to book an appointment online, but the earliest any of the local branches offered was the end of next week, so I just drove over and planned to wait. The branch manager managed to squeeze me in within about 10 minutes. She was also quite jealous about how much house and land I was getting for my money, and lamented the ever-increasing difficulty of staying afloat in California.

The paperwork that needs notarized should show up Saturday or first thing Monday morning, and I’ll overnight it back to them for the Tuesday afternoon closing. Then my parents can pick up the keys and start emptying their house into mine (mom + estate sales = stuff).

Today, I was reminded just how heavy Ikea Billy bookcases are, as I brought five empty ones downstairs. Just because furniture is cheap doesn’t mean it’s light; veneered particle board is heavy stuff. I’ve already decided that the only bookcases I’ll be taking with me on the truck are a few lightweight bamboo ones; it’s going to be a while before I get around to unpacking 60+ boxes of books and movies.

Update: not a phish!

Despite presenting themselves as “(bank name) uses Truework to verify your employment at (company name)”, it turns out that it’s the other way around. Never mind that my company’s HR page doesn’t say anything about them either.

The link had expired by the time my loan officer got that info from another higher-up.