Banished from the Hero’s Party, I became Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper

At least, that’s what I get from the trailer for this upcoming anime series. Out of 93 seconds of video, I think 90 were focused on stacked haremettes. The other 3 featured a loli…

(Jahy-sama is unrelated)

Amherst College and the Madness of Clowns

Students must:

• be vaccinated
• wear two masks indoors
• no social gatherings
• eat in their dorm rooms
• shelter in place

Note that there’s no cafeteria service, restaurants/bars are completely off limits, and their rooms are the only place they’re permitted to unmask indoors.

In other news, Amherst College has canceled all STEM programs, because no one working there is capable of “following the science”.

(sad Lefiya is sad, unrelated)

Dear Amazon,

On Prime Video, I, Robot is filed under “Black voices”, and The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is filed under “Black cinema”. Your racism is not adorable.

(Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle is also filed under “Black cinema”, which you might be able to weakly justify based on Dwayne Johnson’s ancestry, except he doesn’t (ever) play the “black” character, and the movie has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s racial characteristics)

(Jahy-sama counts as a black voice under these rules, right?)

If this goes on…

…not even the photocopiers will admit they voted for Biden.

Qwality Ass-surance

Apple locked my iCloud account again with no explanation, requiring me to enter the answers to my security questions and then type my password eleven times. Number of times Apple has notified me of any unusual activity that would justify locking my account remains zero. (I was actually astonished to discover that I havehad some data stored in iCloud, back from when I was using Yojimbo; good thing it was all encrypted!)

(emoji keyboard is unrelated, because Apple could never QA it)

Not related,

…but just as annoying, Trello is completely reorganizing their service tiers, wording it in a way that doesn’t tell me if I’ll now get my existing functionality at the free tier, or if I’ll need to pay $10/month for the calendar and map addons.

That is, the free tier now includes “unlimited addons”, and I’ve been using Calendar and Map (and Planyway). But the $10/month tier is the only one that includes “Calendar and Map views”, so are they changing the status of the existing addons to force an upgrade, or adding new premium functionality? Reply hazy, try again later.

(cat/food is unrelated)

Everybody Wants To Slime The World #2.8

Somebody effortlessly kicks ass, somebody else effortlessly kicks ass, somebody else effortlessly kicks ass, then somebody else effortlessly kicks ass. In between, there was some effortless ass-kicking.

At no point are any good guys in danger of being killed, even when they’re the ones getting their asses effortlessly kicked.

Next episode: Shuna kicks ass. Effortlessly.

How A Realist Princess Shows Her Determination #9

In which lines are drawn, then talked about. A lot. If they don’t have a signed deal for a second cour, this is going to get wrapped up quite abruptly.

(Chupacabra’s most loyal retainer is related; she voices Juna in this show)

Harrying the lead…

This headline carefully amplifies negative claims about Larry Elder that were made by an angry ex specifically to keep him from becoming governor. The actual story is that prosecutors can’t just charge him with misdemeanors when someone makes unsupported allegations five years after the statute of limitations ran out.

“Wrong End In Focus”

I’m always annoyed when I see a glamour photographer fail to get the eyes in clear focus, but worse is when the entire head is an afterthought, either cut off between the chin and forehead, or, worst of all, completely out of focus. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the sight of female body parts, it’s that there’s nothing unique there; I’m not shopping for components to build my own, I want them fully assembled.

Kana Momonogi has a sleek collection of first-rate goodies, but what makes them stand out is the girl they’re part of. Which this photographer (NSFW! Javascript off!) did not get.

NSFW

And, yes, this is one of the worst positions to put a Japanese woman into for an ass-shot, so he’s not even showing the parts off well.

How A Realistic Isekai Story Would Play Out

“Reborn in a fantasy world, I barely scraped out a living as a peasant farmer, lost my wife in childbirth, sold my daughter to a brothel to pay crippling taxes, watched my one surviving son get conscripted and used as cannon fodder, and then died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven.”

Faster, please

Restaurant To Another World 2 trailer. And if they need another waitress, hire Jahy-sama away from her show; the ambient magic should be enough to keep her in adult form.

Nothing to see here…

Hundreds of CA recall ballots found in car with armed, drugged-out felon. Also thousands of other pieces of mail, drivers licenses and credit cards in multiple names, etc.

Key quote: “This is an isolated incident.”

…because we really, really don’t want to look for more.

I plan to vote in person again (which requires that I turn in the entire packet that was mailed to me, including the outer envelope), just to make sure that someone hasn’t already cast a vote in my name…

I hate it when I’m right

For many years, I’ve said that I only vote for Republicans because Democrats destroy the country faster. The Bidenhandler regime has provided more evidence for this than I ever imagined possible, and “I don’t think he’s gonna stop.” (classical reference)

91% false-positive rate

No, not Covid tests (they won’t admit to real numbers on that one), Chicago ShotSpotter alerts. Not only are they wasting police resources, they’re priming street cops to treat suspects (even) more harshly, and providing a way to alter evidence to fit the narrative.

(Officer Friendly is unrelated)

Ah, the good old days…

Pizzeria struggling to recover says, “we will hire literally anyone”. A long, long time ago, when Bush senior was in the White House, I stopped off at a Shell station for gas, and saw a hand-lettered sign in the window:

“Help Wanted, must be able to read and count.”

The future’s looking bright… if you run on batteries.

(classical reference)

Latest scam email

(links removed, obviously)

Subject: Letztes Update, bevor Ihre E-Mail blockiert wird

Apple QA: “​…but first, a little bobo”

Apple’s latest iOS update fixes a serious active exploit, but completely breaks phone service for many users. Nice one.

How A Realistic Hero Reacts To A Mangled Corpse

The theme of this week’s episode is disaster relief and talking, but mostly talking. Highlights include Our Hero tossing his cookies when he finds one of the villagers they weren’t in time to save, which is more realistic than another extended discussion of forest management.

(Jahy-sama is unrelated)

Porch kitten status: cuddled!

He did not approve. His desire for meaty sticks overwhelmed his skittishness long enough for me to scoop him up and provide a brief moment of socialization, before he insisted on being put down (no claws or teeth were involved, simply determination). Since then, he’s been wary-but-slightly-pettable, and I’ve caught him snoozing on top of one of the chair cushions.

I want to try to get him to a vet, to at least ensure that if he hasn’t been chipped by an official owner, that he at least gets shots and neutering, and maybe a shot at adoption while he’s still small and adorable.

(Jahy-sama is still unrelated)

Benito Newsom’s thugs in action

Mere days after being libeled as “the black face of white supremacy”, Larry Elder is coincidentally being investigated for maybe possibly I-heard-a-rumor failing to disclose all of his sources of income before becoming the candidate most likely to dethrone Nancy Pelosi’s nephew. This is being promoted on Twitter, who wouldn’t be caught dead promoting something positive about him.

(un-undead idol klutz is unrelated)

Dear, Dear Amazon,

The package that shipped from California to California on August 5th, that was promised for the 6th, that was declared lost on the 10th and successfully refunded a few days later, finally arrived on the 20th. I don’t need it any more; I had plenty of time to search for something better elsewhere, for a better price, which arrived the same day.

The punchline? There was a hand-written note attached to the box documenting that it arrived at a post office in Carmel on the 18th, where someone dug into the mystery and sent it back out with my address circled and the words “Try this one!!”. Underneath that was a tracking slip documenting its delivery to someone else in Salinas on the 8th.

Why? Because somehow when it left the Amazon fulfillment center in North Las Vegas, it had two USPS shipping labels on it on opposite sides. These probably get caught fairly often when a box gets palletized based on one scan and then flagged as misrouted when it’s scanned again later, but in this case, both labels sent it to the Salinas post office, so “both boxes” were successfully tracked right up until it was loaded onto an actual delivery truck based on one of them, at which point the other stopped moving.

Its brief trip back to the San Jose post office in the middle was probably based on getting flagged by automation (one claimed 49 pounds, the other 6, for instance) but never inspected by a human; both labels said Salinas, so back to Salinas it went.

No idea what I’ll do with it now. Take it to Goodwill, maybe?

(skateboarding maid is unrelated)

Smart dorm?

Related, I see the home page has a “Smart dorm deals” section, trying to push Echo+accessory bundles, featuring a smart light bulb, a smart desk fan, a Blink camera, and another brand of smart bulb. The best-case scenario for putting Alexa in a dorm room is drunken drive-by shoutings, and the smart bulbs will most likely be forgotten at the end of the year. The camera is just for blackmail.

And, really, what good is a smart desk fan, in or out of a dorm?

WeMo wobbles, falls down

Also related, the WeMo warning I mentioned a few months back has come to pass, and it is no longer Alexa-compatible unless you create an account with them; it just stopped being reachable from the Echo one day, although it still works just fine from their app and continues to accept programming and updates. Plonk goes the WeMo into the IoT trashbin; I’ve got an Amazon-branded smartplug around here somewhere that still works without Yet Another Account.

(cat/food is unrelated)

Twitter randomly throws a switch

Twitter is once again allowing non-users to click on tweets to view pictures and read threads.

(Bathing Best-girl Beelzebub is tangentially related, since fully half of my Twitter browsing is Waifu Supply and Waifu Aesthetic)

Um, how about “no”?

We’ve been doing our vacation planning in Trello, and it works great for categorizing things to see/do/buy and getting them onto a day-by-day calendar. What it doesn’t do well is handle arranging items within a single day, but the free Planyway addon does that really, really well.

Or used to, until Apple nailed down cross-domain embeds in Safari. Now instead of seeing their content within Trello, you get the following bad advice:

Unable to load Planyway. Please go to Safari > Preferences > Privacy and disable “Prevent cross-site tracking”.

That’s a mighty big switch you’re asking me to throw for you. How about I just load my calendars in a separate browser tab?

Dragon’s Blahgma

The Switch version of Dragon’s Dogma gets good reviews as an open-world RPG, but while I knew it was a remaster of a 2012 console game, and I was expecting Skyrim-era graphics, it doesn’t quite deliver. Maybe it improves once you’re out of the opening village, but so far something about the color palette and rendering make everything flat and hard to distinguish. Sadly, the fact that they felt the need to make interactable objects pulse and glow when you’re near suggests that it’s not going to get better.

Also, the way they’ve chosen to present the story doesn’t grab me. Despite the promise of a custom avatar, the game starts with you in control of a named character who’s in the middle of his final battle with The Dragon. It goes through N minutes of typical tutorial topics without really giving you the freedom to try them out, with a few battles they ensure you can’t lose, and then… no dragon. Instead, time skips forward, and now you get to create your avatar, struggling to make something human-looking out of a collection of distorted body parts, and when you’ve finished, you’re treated to a lengthy cutscene of How I Escaped My Slow Life In A Fishing Village By Doing Something Really Stupid And Becoming The Chosen One.

Then it dumps you back in the village with no goals. When you manage to stumble on the first Fetch 10 Items quest or just try to leave the village, the game airdrops in your first mandatory companion, who follows you everywhere with useful buffs and repetitive advice (hey, did you know that goblins and wolves don’t like fire?), nudging you to run down the road to the only available destination, where another scripted fight you kind-of contribute to confirms you as The Hero, and leads an entire army of recruitable companions (one of which you get to struggle to design in the character-creator) to swear to serve you, a few at a time, if the price is right.

Or something like that; I stopped there for the night, and I don’t know when I’ll pick it back up. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed review that tells me when the “open world” part starts. Also how long the day/night cycle is, because it’s really dark at night, and wearing a lantern on your belt doesn’t do anything but make you a target for all the goblins and wolves that constantly spawn once the sun goes down.

One of the touted features, by the way, is that your companion pool optionally includes those created by other players (with their names sanitized for your protection), and other people can optionally use yours. Both of these turn-offs can be turned off.

(most-requested-feature-in-BOTW2 is a bit related)

Oh, and according to the wikis, how you design your character’s looks affects the gameplay, including movement speed, endurance, and inventory space.

Finally got the Best Buy/Whirlpool “smart appliance” ad on Reddit again, and this time I played the 20-second video. The change in angle makes the layout of the room clearer, although I still think the pillar is absurd.

Also, answering the question of “why would you want this?”, dad is shown using the app to program the smart oven to start cooking a frozen pizza. The oven that’s in the same room, maybe 10 feet away, and that he still has to, y’know, walk over and put the pizza into. Then he remotely programs the washer so that it starts up a load on the colors cycle at a specific time, instead of, y’know, setting it when he loads clothes into the touchscreen-equipped appliance. It’s not like it has a camera so he can look inside and tell what kind of load someone else put in; he’s simply loading it up, walking away, and then pushing the same buttons later, from farther away.

To paraphrase a classic, “that is a very specific level of convenience”. (be sure to check the comments for some familiar names…)

Komi Comes Calling

October 6th. New promo.

Biden-esque

Deadpool: “Who knew these winds would be so strong?”

Domino: “Everyone. Everyone on the helicopter. And everyone not on the helicopter.”

Downside of non-Amazon ordering…

Globalkitchen Japan is doing a great job of sending me the products I ordered, but DHL is driving me bonkers with random text messages tracking the box through Customs. I have never had an international shipment that was this chatty before. I hope to never have another.

Seriously, nine emails and at least as many texts in just over 24 hours, half of them in the middle of the night because it was business hours in Tokyo. Every status update at Customs triggers a new text, but since the status isn’t actually changing, there’s no useful information.

Slime Talkin’

You know what’s better than showing the big fight they’ve been building up to? Setting up multiple big fights with lots of talking, and then ending the episode.

By the way, have I mentioned that I hate the new OP song?

How Realistic Is It That Only The Hero Learns Things?

In a land where some races live for centuries, and tsunamis are a familiar concept, only cranky old men of the shortest-lived race know about a pretty damn big one that regularly afflicts the land Our Hero wants to build a city on but can’t understand why no one else was already using. Also, isn’t there a civil war brewing? Plenty of time for that before the season ends, right? Right?

(I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s probably unrelated)

Catch-25

Even if the Democrats admitted that Biden is (coughcough) “no longer” competent to hold office, they can’t allow him to be removed, because if they promoted Kamala, they’d no longer have a tie-breaking vote to confirm a new VP to be the new tie-breaking vote, locking up the Senate until they lose any seats they can’t afford to steal in the mid-terms.

Maybe when he signed off on the plan, Joe thought “Kabul Krumble” was a new Ben&Jerry’s flavor?

Twitter, Public Enema Number One

The browser version of Twitter is getting very invasive about insisting that you sign up before it will show public tweets. Over the past week, more and more often tweets have been obscured by a signup page, to the point that today I can’t even click on a thumbnail picture to see the whole thing, or see a thread that someone’s embedded. Because bullying is a proven strategy for converting casual visitors into users.

Never mind that I deleted my Twitter account over three years ago and have never had a reason to revisit that decision.

(Zelda has the right idea here)

(approximately 12 people would get this joke… in 1990)

IO Terminal 10

Development on Iosevka has been pretty rapid, enough so that since I last released my custom build a few months ago, it’s gone from 6.0.1 to 10.0.0. So I updated it:

IO Terminal (zipfile)

I had to make a minor change to the build plan. They’ve continued to make it easier to customize your version just the way you want it, down to the shapes of individual letters. I’m still mostly using the “ss02” (Anonymous Pro) base set, overriding some gratuitous serifs that were added back in 6.x.

Dear Amazon,

Three of the tiles on the “recommended for you” page currently show me products related to the one you completely failed to deliver and then took several days to process the refund for. Just sayin’.

I’m not sure why I even have a “women’s apparel” tile, but the contents consist of men’s socks, gaudy self-defense keychains, and pleather coin purses. Ditto the “baby” tile, which consists entirely of insulated lunch bags, ice packs, and bento boxes.

The “grocery and gourmet foods” tile would make sense, but it’s just canned cat food, powdered everything (milk, butter, cheese, eggs, etc), and Nespresso pods. None of which I need more of, especially the pods.

As for the home page, it seems to be evenly divided between “sending your kid to college” and “wedding gifts for people who don’t have registries”. Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?

The Dungeon Harem Only I Can Hide-The-Salami In

The end of this series felt abrupt and forced, as if they’d skipped a book or two. Which is precisely what happened, if the description of the upcoming book five is correct. Of course, without that, the story would have just petered out, and Yui Horie wouldn’t have gotten to actually do anything, wasting her completely.

I rather liked the elf haremette dual-wielding healing pistols, but everyone’s just a bit too oblivious about the fact that Our Hero’s definitely-related-by-blood little sister is determined to be the winner in the harem sleepstakes, and in the interest of acquiring skill points, Our Hero leads her on.

And, well, what’s left to do? He’s saved all the girls, has an infinite supply of loot, and has a team of hot chicks competing to provide the points he needs to edit himself into an unbeatable demigod. Literally the only thing holding him back is that he’s not letting them take turns riding his cock yet.

Related, I see that absurdly-titled imitation light novels are picking up steam on Amazon, with series like “Who let a demon lord into the mage tower?”, “Reincarnated as a familiar”, and “Everyone knows you shouldn’t rescue maidens in alleyways” (gosh, what could that one be a ripoff of…).

(Our Hero and one of the few girls who isn’t a confirmed haremette yet)

The last three companies I ordered from…

…because Amazon let me down:

• Umamimart

• Globalkitchen Japan

• Noritake

All three have shipped; Umamimart already delivered, since they’re in Oakland. The other two packages arrive Friday.

🎶 “Hey, Joe, where ya goin’ with that cone in your hand?” 🎶

When I called Trump the last American president back in January, even I didn’t expect the Biden puppet show to do this much damage this quickly. I’d yell at the people who voted him into office, but I don’t speak photocopier.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

My Hero Academia live-action film. Good news, right? Nope, Hollywood, which doesn’t get the concept of heroism, and which is unlikely to get the character designs right.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

There’s a new biography of James Beard, one of the giants of food and food writing. It’s all about dragging his private life into the open, because he was apparently not a vanilla heterosexual.

Um, who fucking cares? I don’t care if he was taking eggplants up the ass; his private life is his own, and if you need to dig through his underwear drawer to validate your own life choices, you need professional help. And I don’t mean a hooker.

Worst thing about it? It’s #21 in “holiday cooking”, because people see “oh, a new book about James Beard! My friend Betty loves his cookbooks, so this will make a great gift!”.

(no, I’m not linking to it; the title is “The man who ate too much”, if you’re desperate for tales of his “queer life”)

(picture is mostly unrelated)

But is it creamy lemon?

JBOX has Tenga-shaped chocolates, which is probably better than chocolate-shaped Tenga.

Mapfail

After Amazon failed so spectacularly in delivering products to me, I thought I’d try local retailers. I searched an assortment of store web sites, some of which at least attempted to track local inventory, and it looked like Macy’s might have something, but when I tried to check if it was in stock anywhere, it thought the closest store was in Monterey. That’s odd, says I, I didn’t think they closed the Macy’s that’s 2 miles from my house.

Sure enough, their store finder thinks the Macy’s in the 93906 zip code is 42 miles away from the 93906 zip code.

In the end, the only thing they had that was a decent match would cost three times as much and take 5-8 days to ship, so maybe I’ll go to Del Monte Center in Monterey after work soon (that is, “after my last Zoom meeting of the day”). And stop off at the Safeway that carries Boar’s Head meats.

(shopping gal is at best loosely related)

I have no slime and I must stream

You know what the Slimeworld series was missing? Lengthy conversations between brand new characters, sharing their misunderstandings of things we already know. Also the person formerly built up as a major villain being shown to be a raving tool about to have his ass handed to him. In small pieces.

Giles on Fauci

“Don’t taunt the fear demon.”
     “Why, can he hurt me?”
“No, it’s just… tacky.”

(related, and reassuring, if true)

That’s Professor Arson to you!

Serial lecturer arrested as serial arsonist. Apparently, teaching sociology and criminal justice is a gateway drug to helping wildfires break containment.

(pistol-packing miniature bunnygirl maid is unrelated)