A shopping site I occasionally order things from, which I will not name (but which isn’t Amazon), has the usual “remember me” checkbox on their login page, but it never works. Close the browser, and despite the presence of multiple cookies, the next time I go there it will not remember me.

Except it kinda does. While checking out their Cyber Weak Week deals, I happened to log in with the wrong password. I thought I’d clicked the button in my password manager, but in fact the clipboard still had the string “エデンズゼロ” in it, because I’d been searching for a cat-eared picture of the heroine of Edens Zero. It let me in anyway, apparently because of the existing cookies, but fortunately required the correct password to check previous orders or place a new one.

And now you know the reason I’m not naming the site, until I can test it to see if there’s things it will let you do with the wrong password. Which I will then attempt to responsibly disclose to the folks who run the site.

(Thursday update: the login button doesn't require any password at all, but so far, all of the options that would disclose information about me require the correct one)

Addresses An Issue

Windows 11 patch notes are a real guessing game:

• Addresses an issue that causes devices that have certain processors to stop responding when waking from hibernation.
• Addresses an issue that affects the System Memory Management Unit’s (SMMU) fault handling after hibernation.
• Addresses an issue that causes get-winevent to fail, and the error is an InvalidOperationException.
• Addresses an issue that occurs when a dialog opens within Internet Explorer.
• Addresses an issue that causes certain apps to stop responding to input. This issue occurs on devices that have a touchpad.
• Addresses an issue that might improperly redirect OS functionality when you invoke microsoft-edge: links.
• Addresses an issue that automatically removes the Serbian (Latin) Windows display language from a device.
• Addresses an issue that causes File Explorer to stop working after you close a File Explorer window.
• Addresses an issue that prevents your device from starting up, and it becomes unresponsive because of licensing API calls.

Hey, wait, go back to that last one!

Loli power

Pixiv chooses the representative image for tags by popularity, so it’s perhaps revealing that for a while now, the most popular image tagged 女の子 (girl) is an ass-shot of Sagiri Izumi, aka Eromanga-sensei. Note that even with the “all ages” filter, most pictures of Sagiri are highly suggestive.

The F is for fleece

Pre-buy a ticket to see the new Spiderman flick at AMC, and get an exclusive NFT. One of only 86,000! Worth almost as much as if each ticket came with a variant foil cover that restarted the numbering at 1! Best of all, they’re eco-friendly.

(applying real-world physics to anime might kill catgirls, but applying cryptofuckery to comic-book movies is likely to trigger an apocalypse)

Edens Zero Marathon

I got caught up on everything else I wanted to watch, so since I had Netflix open, on a whim I started watching (and ended up finishing) Edens Zero, where the creator of Fairy Tale recycled his previous heroine’s character design (among others) in a SciFi universe, with results that feel weirdly like Kanata No Astra, including the music.

Weirdly, because there’s very little overlap in the staff and cast, none in the music, and Edens Zero has a lot of fighting. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that EZ has a complete story arc to tell that doesn’t end abruptly in a steaming pile of infodump. Very saturated in shonen tropes, of course, including generous scoops of mouthwatering flesh fan-service, but good-hearted. 25 episodes covering the first 8 of 18 manga volumes, so they have enough material to do a full second season, which is pretty much guaranteed.

Roast Komi With Stuffing And Gravy, episode 6

I think this show has reached the “comfortable as an old shoe” stage for me, where everything delivered what I’ve come to expect (including baby steps of progress for Our Heroine), but nothing really stood out. Or maybe it was just that they ambushed me with the promise of a swimsuit episode next week.

Restaurant To Another World, 2.9

This week’s episode picks up two threads showing Nekoya’s growing influence on the other world. First, the daughter of the baker who bought a recipe from the travelling halflings in a previous episode demonstrates her trusting nature by following her boyfriend out into the woods for a meal. Then it’s elf-chef Fardania and her ward discovering a bustling seaport filled with products created by Nekoya regulars, and hooking up with a local who’s trying to unravel The Mystery of Jello. Some cute scenes of Aletta and Kuro, which are always welcome.

Next week, more cute girls eating cute things. And boys getting picked up by an older man, but in a good way.

Unrelated,

I idly found myself rewatching a few episodes of The Witcher (season two in three weeks), which is really well done yet leaves me with no desire to ever read the books. It’s not just that I’ve developed an allergy to epic fantasy over the years, it’s that the derivative work is less derivative than the original work.

(Jahy-sama is unrelated)

Cockblocked By A Budding Hero, I Still Advanced My Relationship With The Busty Princess, episode 8

The official web site for 真の仲間じゃないと勇者のパーティーを 追い出されたので、辺境でスローライフすることにしました (in case you’re wondering why I’ve never typed the full title of this one before) is shinnonakama.com, so they’ve pretty much just given up on finding a “standard” four-mora abbreviation.

On that note, the spinoff PC game Slow Living with Princess, with translated version in early access on Steam, has adopted the abbreviated name SuroPuri, or “slow princess”, which sounds like it belongs in a completely different genre. 😁

This week, Our Couple nearly couple, before remembering that there’s a tween sleeping over while they work to resolve the convoluted drug/demon plot. Motivated by their new double bed and oversized bathtub, they wrap it all up quickly, leaving time for exposition and foreshadowing of how Ruti’s arc finally crosses theirs.

(extremely patient princess is unrelated)

A Day For Giving Thanks…

Santa Cruz county has mandated mask-wearing indoors at home, if you let any outsiders in:

Indoor mask mandate in effect in Santa Cruz Co.
An indoor mask mandate is now in effect in Santa Cruz County and it covers private settings like a home. If you are getting together with others who don’t live in the same household the county says you should mask up regardless of vaccination status. Businesses are also required to follow the guidelines. You can take off your mask when eating or drinking.

Speaking of Thanksgiving…

I’m thinking of making a huge batch of spaghetti sauce tonight, baking bread in the morning, and then making pasta for lunch, dinner, and the next two days. More fun than eating leftover turkey, and not as pathetic as having pizza delivered. 😁

Getting serious

I am officially working with a realtor to find a house to buy in Ohio. My director’s only condition was that I continue to do the job well enough to get a solid annual review in February, which seems fair. I was planning to do that anyway. 😁

Now I just have to hope that the Brandon regime doesn’t destroy the entire world economy before I can sell my current place in April/May.

No smiley-face on that one, I’m serious.

Hey, you can get the Hello!Project out of the girl!

36-year-old Maki Goto would like to remind the world that she is still plenty hot (NSFW! Disable Javascript!)

NSFW

(pity she only seems to be awake in two of the pictures, but hopefully this means there will be more efforts to remind people that she’s working again; it’s a long shot, but she might even hook up with management, stylists, and editors who have talent)

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)