Good news, bad news…

Brickmuppet is recovering from his stroke, but Funimation finished acquiring Crunchyroll.

Alexa’s Advancing Assholery

J: Alexa, five minute timer.

A: Five minute timer set. Why not pass the time by listening to a…

J: Alexa, stop.

A: (keeps talking)

J: Alexa, shut the fuck up.

Related, the Amazon package that was promised for Friday has allegedly been sitting at my local post office since 7:30 AM Saturday with no further updates, and another one that was part of an order on July 30th was Prime-but-not-really, so it’s supposed to arrive by Tuesday, and still hasn’t shipped as of Monday night.

(Jahy-sama and friend are completely unrelated, and provide much better service than Amazon products)

I Can Haz CA COVID QR!

After six weeks, California is finally willing to provide digital proof that I got vaxxed (despite texting the availability confirmation to my cellphone, it couldn’t match by that number, and I had to supply the email address I scrawled on the back of the form back in May). Sadly, Japan’s lockdowns spread again, so the odds of them letting tourists back in by Thanksgiving are not looking good, but at least I can… no, wait, Lucy pulled the football away again.

Just got email from my doctor’s office that proof of vaccination is now required to enter all hospitals in California in any capacity other than that of patient or minor guardian. Please plan ahead if you expect your wife to go into labor in the coming months or wish to take a neighbor to the emergency room.

(platonic-harem dragon girls are unrelated, except for their mood)

Also, California has effectively banned bacon. Word must not have gotten out yet, since there’s still plenty in the stores. If you have freezer space, buy now!

Mail-order Tried

I tried out a meal-delivery service called “Factor_” (factor75.com). Unlike some of the others that do ready-to-cook meals for 2+, they ship refrigerated heat-and-eat single-serving meals, with a fair amount of variety in their menu. Their three-week promotion on keto meals made the price only twice as high as a decent frozen dinner, and I’ve been trying to improve my portion control while stuck at home, so I signed up.

Sadly, like many food-faddists, they achieve the “keto” goal by creating facsimile foods (“rice”, “mash”, “noodles”) out of assorted vegetables, which for the most part were pretty vile. Worse, though, was that every single one of their beef meals was too lean and cooked to death; one poor “burger” patty even had gristle ground in.

Basically, the best of their offerings had texture and flavor slightly inferior to a $4 frozen dinner, and without the promotional discount, they cost $12. Sorry, Factor_, but that’s just a bad deal.

(Halkara’s cooking may not be good for you, but her flavor and texture are first-rate)

Dear Best Buy & Whirlpool,

I do not understand how A leads to B:

Since the family is sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by appliances, I’m forced to assume that the ad is specifically referring to the washer and dryer, which are so far away that they can’t be heard, and which will frequently interrupt “game night” because… they run for an hour or more at a time? Or is the app warning them that the roast is burning, which they can’t detect because they all have no sense of smell?

But what really bothers me is the kitchen layout. The giant pillar in the background appears to run from the countertop to the ceiling, so it’s not structural, and yet it not only blocks the windows, it splits the counter space in half. What’s it for, and what’s behind it?

(this was actually one of the least-baffling ads I’ve had pop up on Reddit recently…)

Victory Over Corona-chan Day!

Joe Biden announced that over 350 million Americans have received the COVID vaccines. This includes approximately 100 million photocopied vaccination records that arrived in unmarked panel trucks, and were stored under tables in the counting room “for later”.

Or maybe he’s just including all 57 states. 😁

(samurai corn-pop is unrelated)

How A Realist Anime Director Padded Out The Runtime

Episode 6 had approximately 20 minutes of as-you-know-Bob, followed by 30 seconds of plot advancement. The credits show the fourth future wife (and she had a cameo already), but they’d have to get through book 4 to properly add her to the collection, and they’re apparently pretty early in book 2 right now. Maybe they’re ending it after crushing the rebellion and hoping for a second cour?

Related, a quick look at Tenka Seiha’s review of the second episode of Jahy-sama confirmed my worst fears: she’s going to spend almost all of her time in annoying-loli form, so not much grown-up Jahy eye-candy. Which is the only attraction. Pass.

Speaking of overly-talky anime, season 2 of Slime Demigod just drags on, and yet the few things that actually happen don’t get enough exposition. I’m sorry, but everyone at the conference should have wet themselves when Rimuru casually invented a spell that rendered national borders obsolete, and then used it at a massive scale twice in one night without any sign of strain. Instead, they don’t react at all.

Dear Amazon,

I’m not loving the new Prime:

“Get delivery tomorrow if you order in the next 10 minutes!”
…
“Your product may arrive up to four days later than promised.”

Promised for Friday, don’t complain about it until Wednesday. Now that’s what I call service! No, wait, that’s what I call poor service. The US Post Office is involved, naturally, and the tracking status claims it made it to the Salinas PO only to be sent back to San Jose, adding an additional delay.

(I ran out of shocked/enraged Misty pics, so barmaid Jahy-sama it is…)

For the children: don’t buy them iPhones

Apple is in mass-ass-covering mode this week, as they very carefully avoid explaining precisely what their accidentally-leaked new surveillance features are for. So far, the scenarios they’ve come up with for How To Protect The Children sound like they’d be a lot more useful for How To Erase Tiananmen Square. For instance.

However, even if their motives were pure, their intentions noble, and their walls secure against armed government agents, it would still be a bad idea, because Apple has terrible QA.

…but excellent lawyers.

(political fellatio is definitely related)

Look, a unicorn!

I’ve previously complained that Korean glamour models, even the amateurs, all appear to have been trained for ad and catalog work, so that when they try to look sexy, they give off that stiff, bored vibe that says “I’m just here to sell the product”.

So, credit-where-credit-is-due for this lingerie shoot featuring a sweet, smiling, soft-bodied cutie (NSFW! Javascript off!).

NSFW

Fun with SmartyPants…

In November, 2019, the Hugo static-site generator switched its Markdown processing from Blackfriday to Goldmark, a new library with a real parser that supports rendering hooks that allow you to do things like tag blocks with custom CSS classes. One of the supplied extensions is an attempt at the common automatic conversion of straight quotes to curly quotes, etc. Most implementations of this idea are at least loosely based on Gruber’s SmartyPants Perl script, but since this one is a parser, it’s not hacked together with regexes.

It’s also complete shit at quote-smartening, and that’s as true today as it was when Hugo adopted it. Unfortunately, in the new 0.87 release, Blackfriday is officially deprecated, which means that if I want to continue using supported versions of Hugo, I need to switch to Goldmark.

The Goldmark developer has no interest in improving this aspect of the library; English isn’t his first language, and frankly he doesn’t understand how it’s supposed to work (in an old bug, he admits that it’s implemented in exactly the same way italic/boldface markup is). In nearly two years, no one else has stepped up to fix it (including me; just not interested in learning how to hack on parsers in Go).

Which leaves me with two basic options: run one of the existing scripts to post-processes my entire site after every build, smartening the HTML output, or do a one-time conversion of 4,000+ Markdown files to be pre-smartened, and add a step to my workflow to smarten new blog entries as I create them.

Trying to run the Python implementation of SmartyPants on my HTML took, well, a really long time; I gave up waiting for it to finish. The original Perl version took about 45 seconds, which is more than twice as long as it takes to build the site.

So the only practical choice is to smarten the Markdown source directly. I’ll need to strip out the front-matter, pass the body text through some smartening tool, and then merge them back together.

This turned out to be surprisingly easy, because the reference implementation of CommonMark not only has a decent quote-smartener built in, but can generate Markdown as output, passing through HTML comments. All I really ended up needing to do was convert the front-matter delimiters into an HTML comment block so they get passed through untouched, and then convert them back at the end.

Best part: 30 seconds to do the whole repo. Spot-checking the output, it looks pretty good, but it does insert mostly-gratuitous backslashes in a number of places to conform to the CommonMark standard, which creates a bit of a problem when it modifies the arguments to a Hugo shortcode, such as the URL of every picture I post. I can turn those into HTML comments, too, but it ends up inserting an extra blank line sometimes, which might break a few things. And it breaks definition lists, which is something that the CommonMark folks still can’t agree on a syntax for; fortunately I’ve only used that maybe 10 times.

I’ll probably convert everything next week after poking around with a full build. Might be a few more edge cases to sort out that require adjusting the script, which is why I version all my content with Mercurial.

(loosely related, in a “Brickmuppet physical therapy” kind of way…)

Hoping it’s minor and recovery is full and swift

Brickmuppet had a stroke. No further information available yet.

Rocs fall, everyone dies

I have long been a fan of Robin McKinley’s books, but as with so much of what’s available these days, the Kindle edition of Pegasus was overpriced, so I left it on my list until I noticed that it had dropped to $4.99.

What I didn’t realize is that it just stops. In 2010, it was meant to be the first book of three, but life got in the way, and the others remain unfinished. This is not like Sunshine, which leaves plenty of hooks for a sequel but tells a complete story; this book creates an interesting world, builds a Heroine and sketches the path for her to follow, sets up a crisis in the final chapter, and… (crickets)

Worth the $5, but I would have been quite annoyed at the $11+ price the publisher was insisting on until recently.

Bitch, please

Went to the youtubes to watch an anime opening-credits scene (a bit of a “name that tune” exercise). It autoplayed an ad of Elizabeth Warren squawsplaining why you should vote against the recall of Benito Newsom. Must be heap big wampum involved for them to circle the wagons like this.

Oh, and mail-in ballots will be sent out to everyone again, to maximize the opportunities for fraud and corruption.

(zombies are always related to California politics)

Power? Fail!

My work MacBook Pro runs Big Sur, because I don’t have any software on it that I care about; 90% of what I’m doing is either in Terminal.app or Chrome, with coding work done on a Linux VM in the data center.

To reduce clutter on my kitchen table when I work downstairs, I’ve been sharing a power supply between it and my personal MacBook running the almost-out-of-beta Catalina, swapping when they get below 20%. Except that Big Sur “learns” when to charge your laptop fully, so it ends up never going over 80% during work hours, leading me to swap cables more often.

It doesn’t look like you can reset its “learning”; you can only disable it completely or force a one-time charge if you remember an hour or so before you need to take it somewhere…

(hey, it had the word “energy” in it…)

Fun with Reddit…

When someone posts trollbait on a subreddit I follow, I tend to click their username to see what else they’ve been up to. Often it’s all they do, site-wide. This week’s was special, however, because he turned out to be into two things: trash-talking coffee makers, and trying to score free tail on r/AmateurSlutWives. 😁

NSFW

Stop shouting!

Tried to watch the first episode of Girlfriend, Girlfriend based on Mauser’s comment. Didn’t make it past the opening scene due to the over-the-top shouty reaction.

Gave Jahy-sama a second chance based on Tenka Seiha’s review that suggested it didn’t linger on the humiliation-panic scene. Regretted it because the director thinks shouting creates humor.

Nothing new here; the constant shouting was the reason I never understood why people thought Archer was funny.

“At midnight, all the agents…”

San Francisco re-mandated indoor masking, until further notice, starting Monday morning. This was a decision by an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat.

Six of the other Bay Area counties joined in at midnight. My county is sticking with “recommended” for now, but it can of course change at the drop of a hat, because we all know that “the science” is as stable as California’s electrical grid and water supply, and as well-thought-out as its forest-management policies.

When I went out to a store last night (Walmart, of all things), they had someone at the door handing out single-use masks to everyone who’d stopped wearing them. I said “that’s adorable”, put it in my pocket, and continued inside.

(slime-hunting is definitely related)

iPad survey…

For no obvious reason, Apple sent me a survey about my iPad Mini, which I’ve now owned for quite some time. Most of the questions were about Apple-branded peripherals and Apple-supplied applications, to which my answers were basically, “yeah, no”.

Not asked: “will you ever buy another Apple product?”

(penguin is unrelated)

Garbage in, AI out

There’s a new story making the rounds about how they tried to build a bunch of “AI” tools to help fight The War On Corona-chan, and none of them helped.

Spoiler: they trained them on the data released by China. Duh; they’d likely have sucked even with honest numbers, but why is anyone surprised they failed when fed pure fiction?

(pony-girl coffee-scientists are probably related)

Where the doors are…

Pete relocated a door, commenting that he’s 3 for 3 on living in homes where the door from the attached garage opens into the laundry room. I’m 0 for 6+ on that one, although I think a few of my friends in San Jose have the laundry machines in the garage, and not as a separate room at all.

My initial attempts to describe the layout of my built-in-2000 suburban California house turned into word salad, so here’s the first-floor floorplan, pulled from the original inspection report:

There’s no real concept of a mud room. If you come in from the front door, you’ve got a covered porch (now extended under the living-room windows, because nothing would grow in that space), but the entry area doesn’t really have room for more than a coat rack and a place to leave your shoes, while if you come in from the garage, the natural flow is to the left, to the stairs, entry, or family room. The floor plan is so open that I bought folding screens to divide the spaces.

Related, you can see that the initial design had the bathroom door opening in, guaranteeing that the occupant would get hit in the knees if the door opened. Before the first house got built, they fixed that so that it opens outward with the hinges on the other side, but they left the light switch in the original position next to the sink, so it’s behind the hinge. Nobody ever finds it the first time.

Fun fact: none of the windows that face the street open, on either floor, for curb appeal. A certain kind of person loves to suggest opening windows as an alternative to air conditioning, but I really can’t get airflow. If I replaced the cat-destroyed screen in the sliding door with something sturdy that locked, and installed a locking screen door at the entrance, then I could get north/south airflow, but east/west just isn’t possible due to the position of the only two windows on the left side that open (one upstairs, one down).

Eight Days A Waifu

I tried to watch Jahy-sama, the latest entry in the “fantasy evil overlord ends up with a part-time job in Japan” genre, because I liked the character design of the adult Jahy (she’s turned up in a few of my cheesecake posts). That was all I liked, and I stopped watching when she accidentally reverted to loli form at work and went into humiliation-panic mode. That appears to be the primary “twist” on the familiar formula; she has just enough magic left to restore her adult hotness long enough to hold a part-time job, so she plans to run around Tokyo as a half-naked loli, gathering up cards jewel seeds pokemon… “shards of the big magical stone that powered the demon realm”, as soon as she pays the rent.

Unrelated, in the fifth episode of Real-ish Hero, it is made explicit that it’s good to be the king, as the princess, the warrior elf, and the singing cleavage haremsplain polygamy to Our Hero and openly debate the logistics of sharing him, with the princess asserting herself by insisting on no more than one wife for each day of the (8-day) week. The story threatens to advance slightly with the introduction of a foxgirl in red half-rims (yes, her last name is actually “Foxia”), but fortunately the end credits interrupt just in time.

(note that there’s almost nothing on Pixiv for this series, despite 13+ novels and an anime series with some well-known talents involved; even the porn is really, really half-hearted and terrible)

🎶 Delta is ready when you are… 🎶

DNA Lounge in San Francisco is going into full-body covid-kool-aid mode for Corona Delta Delta Delta. Best part: approvingly quoting someone whose attempt at an analogy ends up describing AIDS.

Important Safety Tip

Yesterday, the new porch kitten learned a valuable lesson: just because you can eat everyone’s food doesn’t mean you should. I had to hose down the sidewalk.

Honest warranty

I’ve been watching a lot of James Hoffmann coffee-nerdery videos, and when it comes to making actual espresso at home, unless you drop at least a thousand bucks on gear and enjoy spending a great deal of time fussing with it, it seems to come down to “just don’t”. You can knock off a few hundred bucks by going with a really good manual press and a really good hand grinder, but you’ll be compensating by having to spend even more time fussing with fine-tuning your process.

In one of his videos, he manages to build a complete good espresso setup for about £250 by buying used gear and fixing it up, so yeah, fussy. This goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Nespresso’s products, which produce better-than-Starbucks drinks in about 30 seconds, with entry-level prices as low as $125, even in our current low-chip-supply dystopia.

…which is a long-winded introduction to the device I spotted at Costco yesterday, the $150 Chefman Espresso Maker. I had no interest in buying this device, since this price point is generally regarded as uniformly awful, with the machines ending up returned, re-gifted, or dropped off at Goodwill. For fun, though, I visited the product page, and found this charming item at the end of the warranty:

THIS WARRANTY DOES NOT COVER
…
Loss of Interest – Claims of loss of interest or enjoyment.

Coffee-Machine Deathmatch

The Nespresso Vertuo Next has lost its place on the countertop, because I only like 5 of the available capsules, and lately, between the once-a-day Keurig liquid pie and the N-a-day Nespresso original-line drinks, I’ve been using it maybe twice a week. It’s still a fun toy, and if I ever again have multiple guests in my house at the same time, I’ll break it back out, but for now it’s going to join the set of small kitchen appliances that have been carefully cleaned, bagged, and stored on top of the kitchen cabinets.

For reference, the Vertuo pods I like are Fortado, Melozio, Solelio, Scuro, and Caramel Cookie. Meanwhile on the OL side, I am extremely fond of Capriccio, Cosi, Volluto, all six of the current lungo pods and most of the Inspiriazone pods, and find several others enjoyable as milk or iced drinks. I’m up to at least one sleeve each of 38 different varieties, and I like at least half of them enough to keep multiple sleeves in stock. I’ve found that I’d rather brew two OL pods and add hot water than make a Vertuo coffee, which is what really sunk the Next.

The Keurig survives for two reasons: the supply-chain problems with Gevalia Mocha Latte k-cups seem to have been resolved (so much so that I canceled my monthly subscription for a while), and it’s “how my parents like coffee”.

Doctor Sue: No More!

To my surprise, they will give Chibnall and Whittaker one more chance (after this year’s upcoming single-story season) to piss on the over-50-year legacy of Doctor Who before kicking them to the curb. Dozens of people on Twitter who never watched it before it became so woke that it ripped a hole in the space-time continuum are sure to praise it in advance for its brave new approach to taking a dump on a pile of money and lighting it on fire.

Restaurant To Another World 2 teaser

On the youtubes. Even if the first season hadn’t been really good, I’d be looking forward to this simply because it doesn’t abuse all the tropes that other isekai stories do. Our Heroine’s powers are hard work and the determination to improve her life. Our Hero’s powers are being a well-trained, experienced chef who’s good to his employees and sympathetic to people who are down on their luck. Together, they run a nice little restaurant that brings different races together in peace, subtly improving their world.

Different animation studio and character designer, but same director and actors, so it should work out.

Speaking of isekai…

The brief-but-mildly-amusing vending-machine-in-another-world novel series is getting a new manga adaptation. I don’t see an anime series in its future.

(KFC waitress/maid is at best loosely related)

“Top Men”

Usually when you get burned by a contracting agency, it’s because they sent you incompetents or prima donnas. It’s generally not the case that they suddenly fire someone who’s been working for you for quite a while, who you’re happy with and rely on, without notice or cause.

Fortunately we were already connected on LinkedIn, so I could at least reach him privately after all his work accounts were disabled.

Also fortunately, I didn’t have to lie and pretend not to know why his VPN access didn’t work any more when they failed to notify him on schedule.

If I were the manager, something I’m happy to not be, I would be seriously looking at reducing our dependency on this particular vendor.

(arguably related, due to Tanya’s career history…)

Two weeks!

That’s how long it took Apple to discover that the 7.6 firmware release for their watches included a shiny new exploit. To paraphrase the old tone-deaf IBM PS/1 ad, “the less you know about QA, the more you’ll like Apple products”.

Resist!

A number of restaurants and stores are jumping under the “no vaccination, no service” bandwagon. If they don’t just take your word for it, and demand some sort of proof, I think there’s only one sensible response:

“You charge what for a blowjob?!?”

(Ai-chan cheating at the “leg-hold pose” is how I feel about masking up to walk into a store, so it’s definitely related)

Safety tips for kids

There are two kinds of people who say, “don’t tell your parents what we did today”: child molesters and woke teachers.

Okay, maybe that’s just one kind of person.

(sad chibi zombie idol is vaguely related)

Apple’s Unpaid Beta Testers

iOS 14.7 was released a week ago. iOS 14.7.1 was released Monday, to, among other things, fix Apple Watch integration problems. It’s understandable when a vendor has issues QAing vast matrices of third-party hardware compatibility, but this is their own stuff.

14.7.1 also fixes an actively-exploited security hole, which also affects Macs running Big Sur, thanks to the iOS compatibility features. Um, thanks?

Kitten status: touched

I didn’t see the new porch kitten at all Saturday, and not until dinner time on Sunday. He was either hungry or comfortable enough to repeatedly let me within a foot or so as I filled up food bowls, but took off like a shot when I attempted skritches, and was equally wary Monday and this morning. Baby steps.

Exposition Is Hell(sing)

Recently rewatched Hellsing for the first time in about ten years, and then watched Hellsing: Ultimate for the first time. The original holds up pretty well except for the soundtrack, despite running out of source material and continuing on sheer force of style. The OVA remake was unbelievably talky, and it’s not just villains monologing; everyone goes on and on, and the sudden shifts to badly-drawn slapstick (more often than in the original) are the worst. FFS, who thought an N-minute Bruce Willis dream scene was a good idea?

I ended up watching it on my iPad Mini, because the Funimation app on my Amazon FireTV kept locking up in the first episode. I think it was upset that I refused to watch the English dub it offered as the default.

(bunny-girl is completely unrelated)

Realistic Harem Management

I peeked. The fiancée harem is fully assembled in book 6, and he finally marries them all in book 10, which takes place some time after the princess gives birth to their heir. If the anime is really only 13 episodes, they’re not even going to get all the haremettes introduced, especially with all the exposition.

Hmmm, wonder what I should watch instead…

(dragon maid is possibly related)

New porch kitten, now in bold!

He’s getting less skittish, allowing me to break out the big camera and grab a few pictures without scaring him off the porch. He’ll get within 3 feet of me to reach a food dish another cat is using, but back off the moment I move.

I’ll be back…with an eraser

Schwarzenegger movies are different in Japan…

Related, while the recent “Olympic anti-sex beds” story was typical too-good-to-bother-checking “wacky Japan news”, it’s important to remember that things are different there.

Nespresso discounts…

Sometimes Nespresso has special offers that are actually enticing. Then there’s the current one: “Purchase 12 or more Original sleeves to receive one (1) free set of three (3) Caran d’Ache limited-edition pencils.”

Having driven up to Mountain View for a work BBQ that allowed me to actually meet several of my co-workers (my manager, his manager, his manager’s manager, and one peer; most of the folks in attendance were from the large organization we got reorg-ed under in the Spring), I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the Nespresso boutique at the Stanford mall, and got to see these pencils. They were, well, pencils, the kind you shove into a pencil sharpener when they get dull, nibble on in class, and throw away when they’re ground down to a stub. This is the reward for buying $7+ x 12 = $84+ of espresso pods. I was… not impressed.

However, if you spent $200 on pods, they’d give you $20 off, a mechanical pencil made out of recycled pods with a lead made partially from recycled coffee grounds, and a silicone ice tray sized for use in coffee drinks (which I already bought the 3-pack of when they were very briefly in stock).

(normal pod price is $7/sleeve, but seasonal pods are $7.20 to $8, and the current limited editions range from $9 for Cafezinho do Brasil to $20 for Galapagos; Vertuo pods cost more, but I find I’m not liking them enough to buy any more before I finish off the current batch)