The California Work-from-home Tax

I just got a letter from PG&E informing me that unless I take action by a certain date, my billing will automatically change to a new plan that charges extra for home electricity use between the hours of 4 PM and 9 PM, including on weekends. The letter “helpfully” informs me that based on the past 12 months of usage, the new plan is my “lowest cost rate”, with an estimated 12-month savings of precisely $0.

Coincidentally, this is one of the coolest summers of the past twenty years in Salinas, and I rarely had a reason to use the air conditioner last year, either. And since there’s no plan to build any new power plants in California, peak rates are sure to keep rising. So they’re offering a pig in a poke.

Also coincidentally, I lost power for several hours in the middle of the day on Monday due to a blown transformer. The text message informing me of the outage arrived about an hour later.

Letting the kitten out of the bag

Caught the new Porch Kitten dropping by for dinner yesterday; the light wasn’t great, and he’s still very shy, so I had to switch to multi-exposure mode and zoom way in to catch him in focus.

Denial of systemd

Sloppy code added to systemd six years ago finally got noticed, resulting in any unprivileged user being able to crash your system.

Fun with seiyuu…

Seras Victoria == Lotte Yanson

Filing As A Service

I just got email from Amazon changing their terms of service from resolving disputes via “arbitration process” to “by the courts”, as a result of enterprising lawyers digitally flooding them with tens of thousands of individual arbitration requests. As an individual, arbitration is such a hassle that big companies hold all the cards, but at scale, it’s cheaper to file the complaints than to process them.

The interesting thing is that this change took effect two months ago. I recall reading about it at the time, but apparently it’s taken Amazon this long to formally notify everyone.

Expanding The Hero’s Harem Through Realistic Forest Management

Why, yes, episode 3 does bog down when Our Hero wins the heart, soul, and boobs-of-steel of the sexy dark elf warrior by handwaving an explanation of things that even Californians don’t know. In fairness, the elves’ reluctance to cut down trees was based on religious beliefs. Oh, wait.

Most of the animation budget went to about thirty seconds of the blue-haired haremette’s gainaxing powers, with many reactions shots (to things other than her jugs) that weren’t even panned stills, just the same 3-4 small-crowd shots repeated several times.

Also, “episode 3” was the answer to my previous question, “how long until the princess gets her uniform off?” Sadly for Our Hero, he’s not in her bedroom at the time.

(office lady is unrelated, but cute)

Classic SF isekai bleg…

Our Hero was summoned to Asgard by Loki in order to tip the balance at Ragnarok and ensure the good guys win. One of the first things he does is reinvigorate the gods by pruning the tree that grows the golden apples, to the immediate horror of pretty much everyone. Fortunately, his plan… bears fruit. Just in time. You can see why the latest Realist Hero episode brought it to mind.

Along the way, he also makes use of modern alloys to produce lighter, stronger swords, etc, etc, and gets the girl (Idun herself, if I recall correctly).

But I have no idea what the title or author of this story was. It was almost certainly in one of the many random SF books I pulled off the shelves at the local public library in the early Seventies, but lacking any real specifics to search for (like the time I was able to find Manly Banister’s Conquest of Earth via the phrase “The Scarlet Order of Men”), I’ve had no luck tracking it down so far.

(cat-girl train-santa is definitely unrelated, but cute)

Bacon Against Climate Change!

A study with numbers at least as solid as those produced by The Doomsayers Of Climatography asserts that wild pigs release more CO2 than cars. And they taste better, too.

This means that anti-meat activism is literally destroying the planet. No surprise there.

(yakiniku girls are mostly unrelated, but cute)

Non-optional Options

Because MacOS is actually a certified version of Unix, it’s picked up some oddities like having df default to reporting the number of inodes used/available for each file system, despite the fact that modern file systems have no real concept of a fixed pool of “inodes” (which is a good thing; having to modify a file system because it started to be used for lots of little files instead of a smaller number of large ones was a pain in the ass). You have to add the -P option (before any other options!) to restore sensible output.

But that’s old news. While debugging my OpenBSD router problems, I started getting sufficiently annoyed by my inability to get reasonable output from one of my standard debugging tools to sort out the correct incantation to suppress some other useless garbage. Fixed now:

netstat () {
    /usr/*bin/netstat -Ffinet "$@"
}

Now I have less garbage to wade through in -rn and -an output…

(Python-programming girl is unrelated, but cute)

Porch Kitten

Currently, I have three pretty regular visitors coming by for handouts at least once a day, often more: Mooch (the gray-dipped-in-white-paint one who seems determined to become an indoor cat), Evil Twin (nearly identical except for being a cool gray rather than a warm one), and Bones (extremely skinny young gray tom who spent much of the Spring so thin and patchy that I was worried he’d come down with something).

This week, I’ve been hearing the rustling of something small and shy in the bushes, and yesterday an adorable little black kitten was finally bold enough to edge his way onto the porch and try for some food. Unlike the others, he was wary of me, but unlike the large black cat I’d been seeing a month or so back, the others didn’t chase him off.

When I put wet food out today, he very gingerly crept up to within three feet of me to eat out of Bones’ bowl, who looked up at me as if to ask, “hey boss, do you have a third dish you could fill up for me? this one’s taken”. No pictures of him yet, but if he’s back tomorrow, I’ll try to get a few.

(Princess:Catgirl is vaguely related, and cute)

Recursion Considered Harmful

For the benefit of anyone who uses the ScriptRunner add-on for Jira, use of the linkedIssuesOfRecursive(arg) function in a board filter may be an accidental time bomb.

As we learned when the time to update any Jira issue suddenly went from an average of 0.3 seconds to 6+, at 5:45 PM in the evening one day.

The search in question had been returning about 35 issues, until someone updated one of those issues, somewhere in the recursion chain, in a way that inflated the result of the query to 2,500+.

Every time any data in a Jira issue is updated, it is reindexed, and apparently the active board filters are run to ensure they’re up to date. And this filter was suddenly taking 6 seconds to run.

Changing the board filter to use linkedIssuesOfRecursiveLimited(arg, 10) immediately solved the problem. Which means the change that triggered the whole mess was deep in the recursion. Sigh.

Can Cali Covid?

I made another attempt at getting my Official California Covid QR Code, and this time the supply-missing-data site was actually functional. I won’t know if it worked for a week or two, but at least they didn’t try to get me to sign up for the state Obamacare system just to prove that I’d been vaccinated. (this was their previous workaround for the inability to upload supporting documentation through the broken form)

Why bother? Because I want the Japan trip to be hassle-free, and there have been reports of people getting hassled over the informal-looking hand-written CDC cards when traveling abroad.

Punisher of the Wild

With the help of a bunch of cloned amiibo cards, I made it far enough in Breath of the Wild’s “master mode” to overcome the combination of cardboard weaponry, increased monster hit points, and fast monster health regeneration to reach the Big Boss. The four preliminary bosses were no big deal, but during the second phase of the boss fight, he goes invulnerable, and a single mistake is enough to ensure that his health regenerates fully.

It’s a “do it again stupid” fight where you are actively punished until you do it the way they want it done. Which is through precisely timed controller combo moves. Even the powers that take out his invulnerability long enough for you to get some hits in require careful positioning to use, since you need to be close enough to reach him with a melee weapon once the shield is down, but not close enough that your weapon accidentally touches his invulnerable body during the activation animation and aborts.

When I originally played through the game, I finally got good enough at the combo counter moves to reliably farm the harder-than-the-final-boss lynels, but I found it too tedious to play through on master mode and apply those skills to taking down Ganon, and now it’s been nearly two years, and I don’t have any motivation to re-learn the moves. (and the combos are sure to be different when BotW2 comes out next year)

Ah, well, it was an amusing time-killer between the end of The Legend of Beelzebub and the beginning of the new season of… anime I’m not going to watch much of. Sigh.

How Realistic Is A Hero’s Harem In A Fantasy Kingdom

I was bored enough to watch the first two episodes of Realist Hero, and spent all my time wondering how long it would be before the princess takes off her uniform and reveals how she stacks up against her quite-young-looking mom. JC Staff has assembled a pretty experienced crew, so if there’s any there there, they should find it, but it feels pretty thin at the moment; honestly, I’d be more optimistic if they were adapting the vending machine isekai, and that idea ran dry after only three books.

In fairness, skimming the fan sites reveals that Our Hero doesn’t just collect a harem that he doesn’t know what to do with, but eventually manages to wed and bed them all, openly and honestly. Also, neither the loli fox-girl nor the lush-bodied slave girl are haremettes, which is nice. But it seems like a great deal of the light novels are spent ruminating on how Our Hero is either following the advice of Machiavelli or emulating famous generals and kings from Chinese and Japanese history, which I expect to either be skipped or else grind the story to a halt whenever it comes up.

(chick-magnet is unrelated)

Delay Of Spider

Episode 24 of The Adventures of Kumoko in the Land of the B Ark was delayed a week and a day. Perhaps they noticed that shifting the focus away from the only engaging character kinda sucked.

In retrospect, “from the director of Cop Craft” should have been a pretty big clue that it would fall apart halfway through…

(spider-girl is unrelated)

Delay of Raccoon

Season 2 of The Grooming of the Tanuki Child Bride has been delayed until April.

(tanuki-girl is unrelated)

Delay of vacation?

Tokyo has announced another season of Covid Emergency, this one running until August 22nd. Honestly, you think they’d at least delay it for a few cours to get the animation quality back up.

I really, really hate the thought of rescheduling our trip again, but if they don’t open the country back up for tourists this fall, we’ll have to.

Shamiko returns!

In the Spring.

Interspecies Reviewers, uncut

RightStuf is releasing it on Bluray on December 7th, under their adult label. Now if only they’d sort out the ebook releases of the manga…

The Storm of the Ai

BBJ (NSFW! Disable Javascript!) has been putting a lot of older content back online, and this week’s bounty covers pretty much every stage of Ai Shinozaki’s career. Just in case you missed anything.

Apart from the really obnoxious ads and sneaky overlays used to get you to click them, this really is one of the last sources for quality 3D cheesecake, along with “Overflowing Museum of Cheesecake” (which has added more ads, as well as two porn shoots per day) and Everia Club (ads just as sketchy as BBJ, but a wider variety of national origins for the models, and more nudity).

They all function with Javascript disabled, which is nice, although BBJ sometimes tinkers with hosting some of their pictures on external sites that might not.

Browsing the archives of these sites has confirmed my long-standing impression that Chinese glamour models tend to have so much plastic surgery that they’re only capable of a limited range of facial expressions, and that Korean models are only trained for catalog/ad work, so that no matter how gorgeous the woman, she’s trained to show off the outfit/product and avoid drawing attention to herself.

Related, long ago Toren Smith had a comment on Steven’s blog about a long-standing preference among Japanese men for real large breasts, with the market simply rejecting boob jobs. Those days are long, long gone, and apart from glorious freaks of nature like Ai-chan (as amply documented since she turned 14), it looks like the majority of even modest-busted models have purchased at least one cup size.

Although, “milk does a body good” (NSFW! Javascript off!), to steal a phrase.

Cali Can’t Covid

The California Department of Health reached out to me a few days after I followed the “Digital Vaccine Record didn’t work at all” instructions. They asked me to retry and give further feedback on the updated results. Sadly, “you still ain’t got shit” was not one of the available answers. A week later I got another “try again” notice, with the same results.

Another year or so of web development and data management, and perhaps they’ll have funded enough consultant hours to abandon the project and declare victory.

A wild best girl appears!

I Killed Slimes For 300 Years And Summoned A Platonic Harem has ended, with Our Heroine coaxing everyone into maid outfits. As usual, Beelzebub was the clear winner.

I wouldn’t mind if they did another season. Maybe mixing the remaining source material with the Beelzebub side stories.

Yeah, no

Engadget’s preview of the next MacOS release is titled “All about FaceTime and Safari”, two things that are way, way down my list when it comes to upgrading an operating system.

Of course, with the Windows 11 preview fiasco, there may not be any reliable, supported OS to run on a laptop by the end of the year.

…and don’t say “Linux”, because even if it had applications and real support, systemd took it out behind the barn and put a bullet in its head. And then another bullet. And a few spare mags, just to be sure. Then it fucked the corpse and posted a selfie.

Retail’s Key

Some may refer to this as The Joining Of The Unfixed Info And The Locked Secret.

HRZLN1typVcouR1ktqPCBXVuZml4ZWQgaW5mb3MAAA7bS54/RSePOX7/m0+5kwAABEkX3Ha0
lkDW+Dk5lg+u1O85L6qyFCiqIftU5UUFR2Z/dS0oc6IAF/74XAV1kEttbG9ja2VkIHNlY3Jl
dAAAEP3IoHaUuJ5MR9N96M5cdMEESRfcdrSWQNb4OTmWD67U7zkvqrIUKKoh+1TlRQVHZg==

Also, apparently IOS finally opened up the API for writing NFC tags, so I don’t need to use an old Android phone to burn these any more. Annoying to see nagware in Apple’s app store, but I suppose he can’t legitimately ask for in-app purchases for this, and it is fully functional for free.

(why, yes, I recently played through Breath of the Wild again, using cloned amiibo to compensate for the annoying early-game limits on inventory space and weapon durability; I’m even trying “master mode” again, using the amiibo loot to quickly upgrade my armor, weapons, and runes to deal with the health-regenerating monsters)

Isekai Sekai

“Reincarnated as a fantasy world, I inverted all the tropes”

(sad Tanya is unrelated)

406 Mask Not Found

Went out to Costco and Safeway Friday in between meetings, and while all employees were masked, only about 80% of customers were. With luck, the lingering fear will soon dissipate. Unless Benito Newsom abuses his emergency powers again (Democrats seem to be pinning their hopes on “The Delta Variant”, which sounds like a bad spy novel).

409 So much for getting vaccinated!

California has started offering an online Corona-chan barcoding service, so you can prove you were part of the unmonitored public trial of the Covid vaccines.

Would you be surprised to learn that it’s riddled with data errors and crashed under load on the first day? I wasn’t.

Of course, if you got the wrong vaccine, proving your vaccination status could be actively harmful.

410 Pizza Not Found

Apparently even pizza delivery couldn’t survive Covid. The Pizza Hut in Salinas closed down for good a few months ago, and I just happened to drive by their old location Saturday and discovered that there will (someday) be a Straw Hat Pizza opening there. Or maybe it’s already open, and their online ordering pages are just completely busted. It’s been at least 20 years since I ate Straw Hat, possibly as many as 30; I don’t even remember what they’re like.

Unrelated, I was perusing the neighborhood around one of our Tokyo hotels for the upcoming (hopefully…) Japan trip, and there’s really nothing interesting in walking distance that isn’t located inside another hotel. And I’m including this, even though reviews suggest that it’s a very different dining experience than you’d find at their US locations. 😁

413 Oopsie!

Unit conversion is hard for me, let’s make pizza:

“In the ingredient list, the quantity for extra-virgin olive oil should be given as 80 grams (8 tablespoons or ½ cup), not 80 grams (5¾ cups).”

Unsurprisingly, one of the negative Amazon reviews for the book complains that there’s way too much oil in the dough recipe…

429 No room for your bullshit!

Hey, Benito! It’s not a “tax rebate” if the people who paid the taxes don’t get any of their money back! It’s just another handout to try to keep your sorry ass from being canned for gross incompetence and lust for power.

405 Cosplay Not Available

If I were working with a model named Suzu Harumiya, the first thing I’d do is dress her up as Haruhi Suzumiya. I mean, how could you not, even if there’s no real resemblance? (NSFW! Disable Javascript!)

308 Watch it at home.

Did you know HiDive blocks a subset of their streaming catalog on mobile devices? Pixy mentioned the series-I’ve-never-heard-of-either The Girl In Twilight, which JustWatch reports is streaming on HiDive. It won’t show up in the search results at all on the app, or in your queue if you add it from a computer or TV-attached streaming device.

HiDive is a bit player in streaming, but they still charge real money for their service, and this kind of crap makes me want to binge the few remaining shows on my list and cancel.

206 Still No Desert Peach

Out now: Operation Desert Pasta, a Tanya OVA.

Coming, whenever: Tanya season 2 (video isn’t).

Triangulation

Okay, the producers of the anime adaptation of the erogame Triangle Heart whimsically reimagined a minor (“not romanceable”) character as a magical girl and accidentally created the extremely successful Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise, which has inspired quite a bit of fanfic over its life.

Including one about a magical girl in the middle of a realistic 20th Century war. Which quickly filed off the serial numbers and turned into an isekai story where the main character was reincarnated as a little girl, with the memories and personality of a 30-year-old salaryman.

In other words, the eponymous hero of The Saga of Tanya the Evil is a porn game little sister’s evil twin. Explains a lot, really.

Unrelated…

…I’m trying to get Virginia’s voice back into my head so I can fix her story. What I initially thought would be a small course correction ended up revealing that pure seat-of-my-pants writing just doesn’t work when events have to be grounded in a real-world setting.

The root problem is that they leave the mall early enough in the evening to invite Kit over for dinner, but have to take her home first to get permission. This Does Not Go Well™, leading to a confrontation where Sally and Virginia have to trade truths about themselves. But Kit can’t be in the room for that, because she really is just a little girl who won’t understand, so I put her to bed in Virginia’s room while the “grownups” talked.

But it’s still only dinnertime. If it were later, it would be easy to just tuck her away for the night, but if she was affected (physically or emotionally) by what happened with her Wicked Stepmother, they wouldn’t leave her alone in another room. Virginia may be in deep denial about her budding humanity, but she’d find a rationalization for her compassion, and Sally is a genuinely nice person. I think I need to read it over from the beginning, set a fixed direction, and then see how much of chapters 3 & 4 I can keep.

Maybe I can figure it out during my upcoming flight to Chicago.

A Certain Demonic Agriculture Minister

Still haven’t finished the “new girl” Re: Zombie episode or the one after (apparently a historical piece set in go-go girl (5号) Yūgiri’s life). Kind of paused Demon Lord Slave Harem a bit after Horn went all girly and collared herself. Slime Diaries is becoming a bit of a chore. Girl Spider, Spider Girl is getting pushed aside for the B Ark, which is far less interesting.

Which pretty much leaves Best Girl Beelzebub And Her Amazing Friends (something-something-slime-something-level). Still fun, and that’s despite the fact that I’ve read well past this point in the light novels, so there are no surprises.

The only other thing I’ve really watched recently was Isekai Quartet, which I’d passed on when it came out because I hadn’t seen any episodes of two of the four shows, so their in-jokes were lost on me. Now, even though I dropped Overlord mid-season and Re: Zero fairly early in the first season, and would need the full Clockwork Orange treatment to ever watch more Konosuba, I did like Tanya.

TL/DR: season one okay, season two less so, and only partially rescued by Shield Hero cameos. Visha is Best Girl, thanks to the chibifying process removing The Innsmouth Look from her character design.

File under baffling the fact that the well-regarded (and still active) Nanoha franchise is apparently not available on any streaming service, and the used region-1 DVD box sets are outrageously priced. Seems like an odd thing for Funimation to completely drop from their catalog.

Unrelated, new trailer for Dragon Maid S, to be unleashed on the world on July 7.

Novel: A Hail Mary Project

The new Andy “The Martian” Weir novel came out a month ago, well above my price point for a Kindle book, so I put it on my Overpriced wish list to check up on in a few months. On Friday, Amazon sent me email offering a $5 instant credit on it, so I bought it.

It’s not bad, but I can’t say lightning struck twice. It tries to follow the Martian “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this” pattern, but it just doesn’t work as well when the danger is largely offscreen and the problems are more abstract and distanced, especially with so many exposition-heavy flashbacks.

Mark Watney was stranded alone on Mars and was facing certain death soon if he couldn’t quickly come up with practical solutions for the many problems he faced; Ryland Grace is alone on a spaceship and gradually learns that other people will die eventually unless he comes up with a solution to a single very specific and convoluted problem.

I would have been very unhappy if I’d paid 50%+ more for this book than a mid-list nuts-and-bolts SF novel. I still think I paid a good 20% more than I should have. Seriously, hunt yourself up a battered paperback copy of The Ring of Charon if you want to see it done right.

(and, yes, I find the sub-title “A Novel” pretentious and insulting; WTF do they think I expect to find, “A Canned Ham”?)

Pelosi’s nephew addicted to tyranny, too

While Benito Newsom hasn’t yet reneged on the promise to end the Californistan Mask Theater on June 15th, he insists on retaining his emergency powers.

Because it feels so good to force others to live by rules that don’t apply to you.

Cover art that doesn’t sell

I was browsing through Amazon, and buried at the end of a “you may like” list was a book that I automatically looked past based on the cover, and by pure chance happened to catch the author’s name just as I was clicking away to another page.

The cover art didn’t grab me, the title didn’t grab me, so I’d already given it a pass before scanning to the bottom to see the author. I mean, all I really saw was “poorly-lit ponytail gal leaning against something”; I didn’t even linger long enough to notice the details that said “boxer gal resting against heavy bag”, much less “forest/marsh background with human from another era”. And what does this have to do with an actor having to become the detective character she’s best known for to solve a murder? About the only nice thing I can say about this cover is that the author’s name is fairly readable against the background at thumbnail size; the title really isn’t.

There are better ways to inform me that Charles de Lint released a new Newford novel a month ago.

(as an aside, I’ll mention that I have a love/eye-roll relationship with de Lint’s Newford stories; there are elements that I have a hard time swallowing, and I’m not referring to the urban-fantasy parts)

No wine after its time

Some random wine discussion online reminded me of something amusing that happened when my sister and I took our parents to Japan. We were having dinner at an Irish pub in Kyoto, and since they had a wine list and the three of them are fans of good wine, they selected a bottle and ordered it.

It was undrinkably bad. So was the second choice. And the third. The manager humbly apologized, noting that they were the first people to order wine in as long as he could remember, and apparently no one had been keeping track of the stuff. It was after all an Irish pub, so everyone just ordered the Guinness.

Also, their “fish & chips” was a whole fried fish, including the head and tail. Fortunately I ordered the Guinness curry, which was decent.

Anime merchandise that isn’t

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that they’re not getting any sales to Tanya fans…