Sure, it will likely suck, but…

In Virgin Road, the people of a fantasy world are so sick of overpowered Japanese expats showing up with ridiculous powers and zero self-control that they have a full-time exterminator for them, Our Hero.

I approve of this message. Also the yuri elements.

(…and leave the witch of the highlands alone!)

Live School Live!

I kind of stopped watching the live version of School Live a bit over halfway through. It does a decent job of streamlining the core story, but loses a lot of the charm of the original by making Our Survivors into pretty ordinary-looking schoolgirls.

Question in Slack

Co-worker: Why is the Netflix virtual fireplace video only an hour long?

J: They had to rotate the logs.

Legal question

The obviously-coordinated gangs of looters hitting high-end California stores recently are clearly organized crime, so if they scheduled their events on social media, does that open Facebook up to RICO charges? Asking for a friend.

Moron Update: Professor Firestarter

The asshat who was found suspiciously close to the start of one of the arson-caused wildfires in California this summer has now been charged with starting four of them. They suspect he’s responsible for more fires, but can’t prove it. And he wasn’t the only (Leftist) arsonist working the wildfire season. Apparently, just like hate crimes, the demand for climate-change consequences exceeds the supply.

Sour cheesecake

Pixiv has recently recommended some pictures to me that I won’t be adding to my collection or sharing here, tagged with 催眠 (“hypnosis”) and 洗脳 (“brainwashing”). Not every picture with those tags is “vigorously non-consensual sex with anatomically distorted girls who are canonically way underage”, but most of them are. Pokégirls hardest hit.

(practice safe cheesecake!)

Double-checking, I did post one picture (#121) that was tagged “hypnosis”, but it was one of the rare exceptions: the girl in the manga reflects on the results of hypnotizing her girlfriends at school. And that isn’t even in the panel I selected; she’s just cute and naked.

Komi, interrupted, episode 5

The sinister specter of chuunibyou appears, in past and present. Our Heroine is baffled, but takes one small step for Komi-kind. Then Agari gets a chance to show off a non-doggy skill, as Komi takes yet another step forward. Also, casting You-Know-Who as Komi’s mom allowed them to slip in a “forever 17” reference. Still liking this.

Restaurant To Another World, 2.8

This one was very delayed on all the Crunchyroll apps. It was only showing up on the desktop version of the web site all day long, and even in the evening I had to start rewatching episode 7 and manually select “next episode” to get it to show up.

Some nice subtle shots of Kuro figuring out the truth about vampires, and a cute scene of her handling the brawling cheesecake cheesecake brawlers. The latter segment did include a bigger crowd, but managed to keep up the quality pretty well.

(supply-chain constraints have interfered with my ability to provide Aletta/Kuro fan-art; let go, Brandon!)

School Live! (live) live on HiDive

The’re now streaming the movie, in addition to the prequel mini-series they’ve had up for a while. I think I’ll try to watch it Saturday night.

GTA dead, dead, dead on PC

The definitive, mod-free, only-version-you-can-buy-now release of the Grand Theft Auto series has turned out to be a definitive dumpster-fire that is not only worse than all previous versions, but includes music tracks they no longer have licenses for and parts of the infamous “hot coffee” unreleased feature that got them into very hot water back in the day. All this wrapped in layers of DRM and crapware that even made it a challenge to pull the release while they scraped off the worst of the spittle.

Had they done a proper cleanup release that supported mods, I might have picked it up on Steam, but it sounds like they’ve lost all credibility. I guess Apple isn’t the only company that doesn’t know what “QA” means.

How To Spot A Shitshow

The Ars Technica preview of Amazon’s Wheel of Time series includes the following praise:

“I really appreciate a lot of what the show is doing to add nuance to the books’ dated and rigid gender roles.”

Why say that? Because Moiraine grabs all of Our Future Heroes just in case Nynaeve or Egwene might be The Dragon Reborn in a gender-swapped reincarnation.

Thanks for letting me know I can skip this one.

“Alexa, shut your whore mouth.”

When Amazon asks me why I won’t be installing any voice-activated devices in my new house (yada-yada-still-not-confirmed), my answer will be “by the way, did you know that you can alienate customers by responding to their simple commands with lengthy uninterruptible promotions for features that they’ve heard about a dozen times already and firmly rejected multiple times?”

(army of sharks is hopefully related…)

I’m in love with a working girl, episode 7

(sometime I should look up how Japanese fans are shortening the ridiculous title for “banished from the hero’s party…”)

Drugs are bad, but putting in a hard day’s work tracking down the dealers is a great reason to jump into your roommate’s lap for a relationship-advancing cuddle. Detective Rit is on the case, and also on Red like white on rice. The plots continue to thicken, with Ruti’s story being advanced by killer loli Tisse (have I mentioned Tisse yet? she’s the adorable little assassin brought into Ruti’s party for support), and the axe-crazy druggies inciting a possible coup that would interfere with Our Couple’s Slow Life.

They’re on target to get through the first four novels, which form a pretty complete arc while leaving the future open for more stories. (there are currently 8 light novels)

(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

Okay, I finally drank the koolaid and switched on your not-really-two-factor authentication, to stop you from constantly disabling my AppleID and forcing me to log back in 10+ times across all my devices. So how am I rewarded? With iTunes (excuse me, “Music”) demanding that I log back in after an update, and then rejecting my correct password twice (pasted directly from my password manager) before finally letting me in so I can use the application.

Not, I shit you

This is the full text for this month’s second-breakfast-patch-tuesday Adobe update for InDesign, an application dedicated to presenting prose professionally:

This Max we bring you adjustable UI size to suit your resolution the best and the power of Adobe Capture through a new Capture panel extension within InDesign. We have replaced non-inclusive terminology to support core Adobe values of diversity and inclusion and also updated to include bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Thanks, Adobe, for letting us know that copy-editing is white supremacy, and must be destroyed for the sake of equity.

(graphic designer is unrelated, and blissfully unaware that her profession is inherently racist)

Maskholio

Okay, on October 29, Monterey County passed their new mask-up regulation, scheduled to go in effect 7 days after certain conditions were met. Communication of this has been typically inept, and it apparently went live on November 5 but not everyone knows it (I will not “out” the unmasked clerk who served my unmasked self over the weekend and then again today), and while signs went up at some stores, they came back down a few days later. There are instructions on how to report offenders, but there seems to be no critical mass of volunteer Stasi eager to do their dirty work.

The regulation does not, to no great surprise, contain a matching set of conditions under which the mask mandate will be relaxed or expire. The county website doesn’t even have a little banner to tell you what the current status is. Just comply, you filthy peasant.

Unrelated,

I’d like to file a complaint with the editors of Weekly Playboy for following zettai with muteki rather than ryouiki. Stockings would look better on Minami Yasui than that katana does. Although, if she’s got a Red Sonja thing going on, I’d be happy to defeat her and claim valuable prizes.

(via Everia.Club; NSFW! Javascript off!)

Er, that’s “waitresses eating shaved ice”. 😁

Restaurant To Another World, 2.7

Keeping out most of the regulars improved the character art again, allowing for some particularly adorable closeups of Aletta and Kuro, beating out the food for quality. First, two regulars that Aletta (and by extension, the audience) has never seen before show up to argue about everything and then eat okonomiyaki together, and then a naive and sheltered high elf gets his first exposure to the world outside his floating island, featuring green-tea shaved ice.

This season’s catgirl showed up in the background, but only as a still; they’re making up for that by having her return next episode with her friends. Also, the vampire lovers will encounter more of their kind, while still somehow managing to overlook the presence of their (inadvertent) creator.

(it’s a bit frustrating that two of the shows I like this season get so little fan-art, and most of it inept porn)

Dear HP,

Would it kill you to update the text occasionally in your driver installers?

🎶 Her name is Rio…

…she don’t seem to understand. 🎶

From the look on her face, Rio Yoshida (吉田莉桜) wasn’t expecting the photographer to drop his pants and follow her into the bath.

(via Everia.Club; NSFW! disable Javascript!)

Land Tax

Between anticipating the need to report my Magic card sales to the IRS (you can’t really argue against the 28% tax on collectible sales when you have multiple payments from a major collectibles dealer) and trying to speed up the process of selling off the dregs of my collection, I’ve started pulling everything into a spreadsheet. Their CSV uploader only works with Firefox and Chrome-based browsers, but logging in on a second browser is a small price to pay for saving twenty minutes of manually scrolling through the lists and clicking on quantities.

I initially scraped the list of card names from the Apple default webarchive save format, but couldn’t extract the prices; plain HTML works better, since you can just grab input fields with field names “name” and “price”, and then strip up to the first colon from the name to get rid of the set title.

(picture is unrelated, but about as thematically consistent as a typical MtG expansion)

Bashful Pharmacist And Bikini Princess, episode 6

With my Internet connection restored, I can catch up on Banished From The Long Title…. TL/DR: drugs are bad, bikinis are good, and blessings suck. The plot advances more than Our Couple’s relationship, with a bonus L’il Ruti flashback, but their lips actually touch. Finally.

(tanuki child-bride is mostly unrelated, but this episode does have some head-in-lap action)

4-Komi Komi 4: Taming The Yandere

Red & Rit aren’t the only ones dealing with axe-crazy weirdos this week, as someone decides to move in on the coveted Friend Number One slot.

Baby steps, Komi. You may give your voice actress a workout yet.

We have reservations…

…but we’re going anyway.

We’re now engaged in an email back-and-forth about the duplicate hotel charges after modifying our Japan reservations to a date when we can hopefully actually enter the country. The hotel manager in Kyoto understood exactly what I was saying, but when he worked his way up the chain, it came back down as “confirm that they have paid reservations”. Sigh. Round two, away!

Fun with Comcast

The best part about Monday’s VMware outage was that just as we were starting to bring things back up, everyone lost their Internet connections, because we were all on Comcast. Even after basic connectivity was restored, I couldn’t reach any google-hosted services for several more hours. This included the Philips Hue remote access for controlling my lights, both from the app and from Amazon Echo devices. Fortunately I have a small Perl script that speaks directly to the Hue hub.

For more fun, Thursday morning, as I was hosting our daily ticket triage meeting, Comcast dropped off again (locally, not for all of San Jose), and it took a good eight hours for service to be restored. I actually got a half-decent connection through my phone, good enough for Zoom-without-video or vpn-and-ssh, but not both at the same time.

For a few dollars more…

While I was connected through my phone, I put in another sell order at Card Kingdom. This involved 11 cards from the Legends set, all commons, worth between $0.70 and $10 each. Being commons, I had a lot, and for most of the cards, they were willing to take them all. The star performer was 43 copies of Chain Lightning at $8.50 each. Next up was Darkness, which they only wanted 12 of, but at $10 a pop.

Their inventory changes quite rapidly, so I might be able to sell off the rest of these in a few weeks, along with some of the others they didn’t want out of my last two batches. Then there’s a bunch of Legends uncommons that were listed around $1/card; worth it because I have maybe 300 of them.

Shipping update

Dropped off the box of cards at UPS, and found the clerk working through a big stack of boxes from yesterday, because he had Comcast, too.

Maskhoooooole!

As I walked up to the grocery-store entrance today, I was greeted with fresh “masks required!” signs. Benito Newsom reappears after his mysterious two-week absence and suddenly the masks are back on; coincidence?

Banished to the Boonies with Boobies, episode 6

TODO

(haven't had time to watch it yet, after my plans for the week were disrupted by a VMware outage. apparently a transient disruption of one of your backing datastores confuses the entire hypervisor, leaving you with a bunch of half-up virtuals, even if they weren't using that particular datastore; fun-fun-fun!)

Still not a lot of fan-art for this one, but at least one person liked last week’s bath-elf enough to sketch her, in and out of her adventuring costume:

NSFW

Exclusive offer. Excuse me, “offer”.

Dear Bank of America, it’s great that you’re offering me $500 if I open a checking account with you. However, the strings attached to the offer make me… “less than enthusiastic”: either set up direct-deposits totalling $10,000 over 90 days (must be salary, pension, or Social Security to qualify), or deposit at least $50,000 within a month and maintain that balance for 90+ days. 60 days after meeting one of those conditions, I’d get the $500.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that if I didn’t continue to maintain one of those conditions after receiving the $500, I’d be hit with enough fees to wipe out the modest “reward”.

No thanks, I’d rather keep digging through boxes of old Magic cards, which have already sold for about 50 times as much money, even after subtracting the 28% the IRS will be taking. (yes, the long-term capital gains tax for collectibles is pretty rude)

Also, Chase (who actually has branches in the city I might move to) just sent me a similar offer for $225, and all they require is a $500 monthly direct deposit, and then they’ll pay out within 15 days. So, y’know, up your game, BoA.

(pourover-pony is unrelated)

Left hand, meet right

A month ago, Citibank sent me an offer to convert my Diamond Preferred Mastercard into a Rewards+ Mastercard, which I did. Today, I opened my mailbox and found a pre-selected offer for… another Diamond Preferred Mastercard, with a slightly higher interest rate.

Not a re-conversion, an additional credit line. Which I most emphatically do not need, because I already have more empty credit cards than I have any realistic use for. Seriously, I could buy several brand-new cars if I wanted to, and if there were any not held hostage on container ships by Democrat ineptitude.

Unrelated,

My mail also included a “print-your-own-postage-stamps” offer from stamps.com. I last purchased a sheet of 20 stamps in 2018, and haven’t used them all up yet. I don’t think I need this.

iCloud For Windows, version 13

…for anyone whose kink is getting fucked by a cloud.

(seriously, Apple has enough trouble making their applications work on their own platform; they don’t do Windows)

Fun with HP Care Packs

Remember when I ordered my new laptop and expressed some frustration when selecting from the warranty options that didn’t have useful descriptions or linked detail pages?

I’ve had it for a month now, and the warranty option I chose (3-year with accidental-damage protection and lojack) wasn’t showing up on the support site. The lojack setup and licensing was there, but not the actual warranty. Twenty minutes on the phone with HP support this morning produced the discovery that the option I selected as part of the purchase wasn’t actually compatible with the product.

Their initial response was to offer a refund so I could purchase the correct warranty, but I pointed out that it was tied to the lojack that had already been activated, and they’d have to connect the new purchase with that, and after a few minutes on hold, she got approval to just put the correct warranty on it.

So, yes, the reason that the most comprehensive option offered with the original purchase was the cheapest was that it wasn’t supposed to be on the list at all. I wouldn’t have objected to paying the difference, but the support department isn’t set up to handle that.

(the Queen of Chupacabra knows all about double-checking contracts; now, anyway)

Speaking of paying the difference

When we moved our pre-paid hotel reservations for the Japan trip, they charged us the full cost of the rooms again. When I called the main number for the chain (on Monday, because it goes to voicemail on weekends, and nobody bothers calling back), they apologized and said that I’d have to talk directly to each hotel, and connected me to the first one. At 3am in Japan.

I have to call back tonight, when their reservations desks are actually open. Sigh.

I read this wrong…

Ad on Reddit: “Explore the epic end of the universe in the new season of Doctor Who”.

I saw: “Explore the end of Doctor Who”.

Bonus: really terrible picture of Doctor Sue in a hands-up-don’t-shoot pose.

(yeah, I’m not buying it)

Converting trolls to whores

In the latest pointless (alleged) adoption of crypto, Reddit (supposedly) will convert karma points into crypto. Many of these reports have turned out to be fabricated to inflate the price of whatever funny-money is involved. In this case, they advertise it as Ethereum, before the fine print reveals that it would be a separate blockchain instance.

To drive home the message that this is complete bullshit, one of the pull quotes is:

“When we all pull this off, we would onboard 500M web2 users into web3 and then there is no going back. Let me say that again - 500 million new crypto users.”

I count four bald-faced lies in that quote. Did I miss any?

Buying a pig in a poke…

Alec Baldwin, cop-hater, now demands an off-duty cop on every set. Way to change the subject there, killer.

Warning: Graphic violence

Well, graphics-card larceny, at least. One more reason you won’t be getting a new gaming PC for Christmas…

(The witch-detective of the highlands is on the case! And the Demon Queen Pecora is on the witch!)

You don’t need Alder Lake to break Denuvo DRM

…just wait until they let a domain registration lapse.

(Raphtalia says, “never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake”)

Restaurant To Another World, episode 2.6

Elf girls just want to have fun… and vegan burgers. Boys just want to have pizza… and a touch of gay subtext. The art quality is definitely inversely proportional to the number of characters on-screen, but they kept it fairly well-controlled this time, and, as usual, the food looked great.

Both stories feature returning characters, with the traveling elf chef picking up a stray kitten, and the merchant heir dragging along a chef friend to try to figure out the recipes. So far they’ve done a pretty good job of mixing the mostly-independent stories from the novels; I haven’t bothered working out the adaptation order, because there are really only a few significant plot threads, and the rest can be rearranged pretty freely.

The only downer this week is that the Crunchyroll app is basically useless on the FireTV box. On a good day, it randomly drops from HD to SD a few times an episode, but on a Friday night, it’s clear they’re bandwidth-constrained, and the app doesn’t buffer nearly enough to keep streaming at all. I ended up sitting in front of my 55-inch TV watching it on an iPad Mini.

(I could have brought over my Win11 laptop with its full-sized HDMI port, but I didn’t want to get up; it was a long day. Crunchyroll does allow downloading shows, but not with the standard paid account; you need to pay extra for it)

Stranger than satire…

For many years, there existed a sharp, funny publication with the title Journal of Irreproducible Results, now available only via The Internet Archive.

It is no longer necessary, because in recent years it has become clear that all journals are filled with irreproducible results.

Don’t mispartisan them!

People are busy arguing if the massive “infrastructure” bill is truly “bipartisan”, which just exposes their bigotry and badthink. Get with the times, sheeple! It’s transpartisan, identifying as revenue-neutral infrastructure-building inflation-reversing job-creation, and its pronoun is “suck it taxpayer!”.

(two-drink minimum is unrelated)

Pig in a poke…

After looking at a lot of houses on Zillow, I’ve reached the point that my nose twitches at certain listings, and I immediately start looking for the catch. Like the words “sold as-is to settle an estate”, or the careful framing of the pictures to hide the fact that the neighbor’s basketball court is ten feet from the master bedroom windows, or even just the eight feet of kitchen counter space that doesn’t have a single power outlet on it.

But this one is special. Only a four-minute drive from my mom’s house, with 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, 2,800 square feet, central heat and air, fireplace, natural gas furnace/water heater/range, 2-car attached garage, finished basement, large deck, etc, all on just over half a wooded acre. There are no interior pictures, and the description does say “needs some TLC”, so you might think that’s why it’s only $325,000: a classic fixer-upper.

No.

Not even close.

Google Maps shows that it’s next door to a church parking lot.

A seven-acre parking lot (that’s 28,000+ square meters, for y’all furriners), for a mega-church with a large concert hall.