Witcher 3, episode 1

First impression: this is where the source material gets increasingly convoluted, making the show hard to binge. There was basically an entire episode of review material to remind you what happened in the previous two seasons, and it barely scratched the surface. Then the actual episode began and larded it up good.

Verdict: rough start, but some good character moments that made it worthwhile.

ST:SNW, season 2 episode 4

Nothing says Classic Trek like mashing up half a dozen classic trek tropes. Chief among them: “finessing the Prime Directive”.

Verdict: I’m okay with this. More than okay, really; I’m for it.

Today (okay, yesterday) I Learned…

…that you can’t buy rubbing alcohol at the self-checkout; a senior clerk needs to come over and check your ID to verify that you’re over 16.

I can’t find out if this is state law, local law, or Kroger policy, but like every interrupt on their self-checkout systems, it’s uninformative and silent. They seem to think that customers constantly look at the screen while they’re running their groceries across the scanner, instead of just getting it over with, beep-beep-beep.

Solution To Wrong Problem

If I had a QNAP NAS, their security history leads me to think I’d need something better than anti-vibration feet.

“…I’ll wait for my police to get here…”

Atlanta-area mayor arrested for breaking and entering. He was held at gunpoint by the irate homeowner until the cops took him away (the mayor, not the homeowner).

Loctite Harder!

I recently had a set of TruGlo TFX Pro sights installed on a 1911. I took it to the range yesterday, as one does, and the first three shots were three inches to the left at 10 yards. Still touching, but way off target. So I dropped the mag, emptied the chamber, inspected it, and found the rear sight loose. About to fall off, in fact.

The TFX Pro has a set screw on top, which the gunsmith had called out to me when I picked it up, letting me know that he’d secured it with loctite, and if I ever needed to adjust the sights, I’d need to redo that. I actually watched him loctite the screw into place, but it managed to work its way loose in less than 500 rounds.

Fortunately that wasn’t the only thing I packed for this range trip; I had the P322, the Buck Mark, and a K-Mart blue-light-special Winchester 190 .22 rifle from ~1974. It (the 190, that is) needs a good cleaning, since it had difficulty getting the first round into battery every time I loaded the tube, but once the first one made it up the pipe, it emptied the mag reliably and accurately.

(as with many old guns, a clean copy of the manual can be purchased online)

Sorry, Pete, but…

…I gave up trying to make sense of jpop lyrics years ago. Best guess, they’re advising girls to put out early and often, which is aligned with their fan’s desires. 😁

(I didn’t know the “rolling stone gathers no moss” idiom (転がる石には 苔は付かない) existed in Japan, but since it’s a literal translation, perhaps it was a Meiji-era import)

Today I Learned…

…that a Sig P322 .22LR fits perfectly in a holster for a Ruger American 9mm. Actually, it fit better than the Ruger did. First range impression: the magazines are fussy to load, and the gun is very finicky about ammo. Fun fact: if you try to load the magazines with a .22 double-stack UpLula, the spring doesn’t compress correctly and the magazine body swells slightly.

On the bright side, if you manage to correctly load ammo it likes, it’s a very fun pistol to shoot. And it comes in a decent little case with a second magazine and a basic loading tool. Pity they skimped a bit by not including a printed manual, just a QR code to download one.

(Miss Paizuri’s tight-fitting holster is unrelated)

Reddit won?

The only subreddit I follow that’s still locked down and claiming “we’ve moved to the fediverse” is r/functionalprint (~1,500 people out of ~400,000 have signed up for kbin.social, which has no defined terms of service, so good luck out there). The rest have all gone back to normal.

Bitcoin in its natural habitat…

I guess there wasn’t room next to Barely Legal (which probably sold more copies).

Limited appeal…

Following…

My current twitter feed: ad, titty, kitty, snark, ad. Dear Elon, I could do with a bit more content between the ads.

Followers…

A few days ago, I helped a friend solve a problem with his new .45 ACP Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0. It comes with 10-round magazines, but it’s almost impossible to actually squeeze the 10th round in, especially if you use a magazine loader like an UpLula. The two most common recommendations are to leave the magazine fully loaded for a few weeks/months until the spring breaks in, or to snip a coil off the bottom of the spring, reducing the tension.

Neither of these actually works well, because the real problem is California. In order to sell any handguns in CA (and other states allergic to civil rights), magazines cannot hold more than 10 rounds. A good magazine will still have a bit of slack in the spring when the last round is loaded, so that it can be inserted into the gun without force when the slide is down, and that slack could allow a Sufficiently Motivated State Agent to squeeze an 11th round in, converting all owners to felons and banning sales of that model in that state.

So S&W deliberately made the magazine followers too tall. If it barely holds 10, then the manufacturer is safe, and only a consumer who deliberately modifies their magazines is at risk of prosecution.

Anyway, we took a quarter-inch off the bottom of his followers with 100-grit sandpaper, and they now comfortably hold 10 rounds. Then he went out and bought some 14-round extended magazines, which are much easier to load to full capacity, despite using the exact same followers.

(there are a number of videos out there documenting this process for the 10-round 9mm mags, but you don’t need a video to learn how to rub plastic against sandpaper)

(and if you screw up the process, Midwest Gun Works sells replacement S&W followers)

Unrelated proper setup

Ambi safety, long trigger, arched mainspring housing (grooved), tritium/fiber-optic sights, no frontstrap checkering, Wilson mags.

Inflatable Revenge!

Three men swept out to sea on giant inflatable duck

The only picture shows the rescuers, not the victims of this fowl attack, so I’ll just post a picture of Rena Moriya instead:

Related, my sister was recently in Amsterdam, and sent me a picture without realizing that it would make me a little sad:

How Reddit moderators prevent spoilers

…by shutting down.

Popcorn will be popped

I’m just going to leave this here for later reference:

No Nearer To NieR

The much-delayed episodes 9+ of NieR remain in Covid limbo. Fortunately I have the new Zelda game.

(don’t read any forums if you plan to ever play Tears of the Kingdom; most people who got it early and played on emulators at least pretended to mark spoilers, but since the release date, every detail is constantly being spoiled)

Snap Caps that don’t Snap

The common blass&plastic snap-caps (Tipton, etc) have always worked well for me, until I tried to use the .45 ACP variety with moon clips (required to load them into a S&W 25-2 revolver). They don’t fit in the clips, which means they’re simply not dimensionally accurate. The A-zoom metal ones work fine.

(Purah is all grown up again, and people are wondering if she went to band camp…)

Shipped!

I see now why Amazon can’t be more specific about my latest order than “June 7-9”…

Wednesday, June 7  
   3:17 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.
   2:22 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   2:00 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:33 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  12:24 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  12:00 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
Tuesday, June 6  
  11:45 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  11:43 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   8:07 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:02 PM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  10:42 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  10:13 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   7:40 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   6:30 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   5:45 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   2:29 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   2:08 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:39 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
Monday, June 5  
  11:24 PM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   2:56 PM  Carrier received the package.  
Sunday, June 4  
  Carrier picked up the package.  

(Riju has graduated from Queen Jailbait to Queen Barely Legal, and is the most useful of your companions, but whoever thought it was a good idea to have to chase your AoE attacker into melee to activate her power was… almost as dumb as the person who made the “activate companion power” button the same as the “pick up object” button)

(you’ll know what I mean the first time Tulin runs through while you’re picking up loot. Pro tip: once you get the fifth companion, use it for mining and looting, because then the A button won’t activate the other companions)

My house came with a flagpole mount by the front door, and filling it seemed like an obvious thing to do for Memorial Day. Except that the kit sold at Sam’s Club had a 1.25-inch pole and I had a 1-inch mount, so I had to take the old one off and install theirs.

Then I went to Home Depot, and discovered that every flag they sell comes with a 1-inch pole, so if this one ever wears out (and despite being “Made in the USA”, it’s built like Chinese junk), I may have to switch back.

(specifically, the plastic hooks that attach the flag to the pole don’t stay shut, and required a quick application of gaffer tape to keep my flag from ending up several blocks away; I’ll likely end up replacing them with wire)

Long pepper, extra organic

A cookbook I bought my mom recently touted the virtues of long pepper, so I bought some on Amazon, five-star rating, Prime shipping.

When I shook some out into my hand, a live insect was included in the mix. Despite shipping directly from Amazon, this product could not be returned, replaced, or refunded. And Amazon deleted my one-star review for including the “no return/replacement/refund” line.

(…then I ordered from The Spice House, which has never included live bugs in any order…)

Things that make me twitch…

I was at a public indoor pistol range the day before Memorial Day, and there was a grizzled old Marine vet precisely and accurately putting holes in paper with a pistol-caliber carbine. He was in (unofficial) camo covered with USMC and related patches, and he was in the lane to my left. Every once in a while he’d switch guns and fill the center of the target with a single ragged hole with his .22. The range officer was standing a few yards behind him, and the two were discussing their service records as he shot.

That’s the setup. The twitch came when I went to throw away an empty ammo box, and saw his carbine swinging freely from the sling, alternately pointing at his own thigh and the RO’s foot. The RO who was too busy chatting up a fellow vet to do his fucking job.

Usually I’d have made a loud-but-polite request to inform the fool and get the attention of the RO, who’s often at the other end of the range when this sort of thing happens, but given the specific holiday and the fact that the RO was right there, I just casually pointed out the two-for-one deal he had on offer. The carbine was quickly unslung and set down, muzzle downrange.

A spam comment? Here?

Someone spammed the previous post with a sentence that read like it was generated with one of the recent AI chatbots, in order to appear related. But it couldn’t disguise the “career coaching” web site it wanted to send people to…

Heat wave!

“The reason your 10-month-old air conditioner stopped working is that the condenser fan crapped out, and it’s too late in the day for me to call the warehouse, so we probably won’t be able to install a new one until Monday Tuesday.”

So I spent a few days hiding in the cool, dry basement, with the 4 screened windows open at night to cool the place down. I have more than 4 windows, but to install the rest of the screens that have been sitting in boxes in the basement for 23 years, the blinds have to be taken down, and I was planning to replace them, until the Bidenhandler regime doubled down on destroying the country.

The repair was free under warranty, at least.

(speaking of warranties, I hope this “SF-like gun” comes with one…)

Best Airpods Pro earpads (so far)

I have a set of first-generation Airpods Pro. The Apple-supplied earpads were (like many Apple products, including the Airpod cases) slippery and prone to falling out, so I bought third-party replacements, which lasted for quite a while before breaking off with half of it left in my ear.

I grabbed another set at Target, and they didn’t stay on the pods, didn’t fit my ears well, and of course didn’t have very good sound. So I threw these into my latest order, and the M size fits firmly and gives terrific sound and noise isolation.

Perhaps by no coincidence, they’re not made in China like most of the competition; they’re made in South Korea for the Japanese market.

Don’t buy ammo from guns.com…

…no matter how attractive the price. Why? Because this is bait-and-switch. The SKU is 53880 (cleanfire), and the description matches that product, but what they actually send out is SKU 53652 (indoor target). It took over a month to get them to resolve the problem with a refund, after weeks of back-and-forth in which they alternately claimed that they’d sent the correct stuff and promised to find it in their warehouse.

Ten days ago, they sent me an RMA label to return the wrong stuff (pro tip: do not take ammo to “The UPS Store”; they’re not UPS). On Monday, they swore the warehouse had found the 53880 and would ship it out that day. On Wednesday they finally gave up and refunded my money, but the incorrect listing is still up and “in-stock”. At no point in this process did they ever reach out to contact me; I always had to call and spend 15 minutes listening to really terrible hold music.

(now I have to figure out which credit card it got refunded to, because neither their site nor their emails include even a partial number…)

(update: ah, the only place your credit-card info appears is on the "billing information" page, and only for the most recent transaction, so if you bought something else after the refund was processed, it would disappear)

All dried up?

The glass-block window that had sprung multiple leaks during heavy rain has now been replaced, which when combined with the drainage work the landscapers did should keep my basement nice and dry and ready for finishing.

Except that the company stock dropped from 31 to 22 while I was waiting, so I really don’t want to start any big new house projects right now. Once they finish the landscaping and send the final bill, that’s going to be it for a while.

(we never got to see the hero’s reward in BotW, but one of the few minor spoilers I’ve read about Tears of the Kingdom is that five years later, the house that Link renovated is now referred to as “Zelda’s house”…)

Slow Fire TV, Fast Replacement

Just under five years ago, I purchased the Amazon Fire TV Cube, with 4K streaming support. About two years ago, it started getting sluggish. Saturday at 5:45 PM, it collapsed under the weight of their UI updates, so I gave up and ordered a replacement, trading in my first-generation Fire TV to get 20% off. (seriously, it still streams 4K HDR video without a hitch, but it can’t keep up with the crufted-up user interface, and force-restarts every app when you switch between them)

They promised delivery between 4 AM and 8 AM Sunday.

It arrived at 7:20 PM Saturday. The faster CPU and increased RAM allows it to run the UI and stream video.

(unrelated angel-waifu Tia delivers)

Please Don’t Tell My Fans I Released A New Book

Or, “how not to use social media to promote your work”. Richard Roberts, author of the fun “Please Don’t Tell My Parents”/Pennyverse novels, abandoned his Twitter account when Elon Musk bought the place, and he’d already abandoned his blog, so you have to follow the link to his non-book-related Tumblr and then follow the link to his book-related Tumblr.

Which you can’t read without a Tumblr account, because they very aggressively pester you for a login now after showing minimal content.

You know, like Twitter did before Elon Musk bought it…

Anyway, Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster came out a month ago.

(yes, NieR is still in limbo, kind of like Roberts’ internet presence)