USPS update

The two-day package sent last Wednesday was finally delivered this Wednesday, after traveling from Texas to Cincinnati to Iowa to Illinois to Cincinnati to Dayton to Miamisburg.

It wasn’t what I ordered.

We’ll see how long it takes them to make a new one and ship it out, preferably not by USPS…

(I’ll let Megumin tell you how I feel…)

Café Hooters episode 5

The early Buy-the-Bluray fan-service was a fake-out, and they really want to tell stories about how each girl comes to fall for Our Barista Hero. I stopped watching when Our Rocking Waifu finally had a concert.

Verdict: I should look up what else the character designer has done, to see if there’s a better show with girls that look like this.

(elf cheerleaders make much better waifus)

Z-Day - 7

I’m out of anime now, but at least next Friday the new Zelda game comes out, so I’ve got something to look forward to. Based on the carefully-sanitized spoilers I’ve scrutinized, it’s worth the wait.

(Leafa-chan is unrelated but blonde and elf-y)

Bang-bang-bang-bang-BANG!

That’s the sound of my two-car garage door coming down with excessive force when the 23-year-old spring snapped.

Good news: it’s a good door that was originally installed well, so it survived the trip.

Bad news: $700 to replace the spring (with two new ones) and refurbish all the associated hardware.

Good news: some months back I got a recommendation for Wayne Overhead Door Sales, and I’d been planning to call them this summer anyway to replace the 23-year-old openers. They sent someone out first thing the next morning, and I had him install a new top-of-the-line belt-drive opener for another $1,000.

Bad news: the new opener has wi-fi and a camera and an app.

Good news: you don’t have to set that shit up. I like the motion sensor for the light, though.

(Princess Stompyboots Best Girl Mela is unrelated, but likes to build things)

Dear Apple QA,

Since updating to macOS 12.6.{4,5}, many files fail to open when double-clicked; the app opens, but the file does not, with no error message. This appears to be related to hidden permissions, and making any change (copy, single-character name-change, etc) fixes it. It doesn’t just affect newly-downloaded files; stuff that’s been on my drive for years was affected, and including one of them in a list of arguments to open canceled the whole list.

This is different from the behavior when the quarantine flag is set or the app doesn’t have permission to access the directory.

(not a representative of Apple’s QA team…)

Café Hooters episode 4

We’ve replaced this coffee shop’s bountiful cheesecake with cheesy plot tropes; let’s see if anyone notices. Our Oh-Suddenly-He’s-Chuu-Ni Hero opens a booth at the cherry-blossom festival to boost business, giving Our Tsundere Waifu a chance to shine with design. And also to get hit on by a trio of assholes backed up by the power of last week’s Snidely Whiplash, who trash the booth when their advances are rejected. And then a few more tropes happen, until Our Bonkers Fighting Waifu saves the day with kicks that reveal they ran out of fancy-panties budget.

Verdict: the OP animation delivered the best cheesecake this week. Not a good sign. (not the only cheesecake, but Our Alcohol-Fueled Nympho Waifu's nearly-nude scene was brief and trope-driven)

(unrelated crossover show I’d watch the hell out of…)

Cry Uncle!

If you were waiting for Netflix to finally release the much-delayed episodes of Uncle From Another World, that happened Thursday.

(I’m not going to bother hunting down fan-art for a show I didn’t watch, so here’s Lasty bringing home the bacon)

Skynet snickers

Synopsys has announced AI-powered chip-design tools. What could possibly go wrong?

(this is the best-case scenario…)

Leak-be-gone?

I’d love to say that my contractor aggressively followed through on getting the basement leak fixed, getting the people who were already paid to seal any cracks to come out and deal with it before it got any worse, but that would be a lie.

A bit over a week ago, we had a lot of rain. Not news. The water pooled up on that side of the house and started coming in through the cracks. Also not news.

Then I walked by the door to the basement and heard splashing, and found water shooting a foot out from the wall. Definitely news. I put a full-sized garbage can under the stream, and by the time it was all over, I’d collected roughly 20 gallons of mildly-muddy water.

I sent the pictures to the contractor. A week later, I hear that they’re still waiting on a date for the appointment. And a separate appointment with someone who specializes in glass-block windows, since the crack-sealers are pointing fingers and saying their warranty will only cover half of the work.

At the same time, I’d texted my landscapers, who’ve been showing up again to work on the yard project now that it’s warmer and drier. Since the scope of their work included improving my drainage, I asked them if they could move that part up. As soon as the ground was dry enough, they had a crew out to completely rebuild the basement window wells, starting with the one that had the poorly-sealed cracks.

It looks like a little fort now, and the huge thunderstorm we had last night didn’t manage to get a single drop into the house. Gosh, who will I be recommending to other people in the future? Could it be Essential Landscaping & Irrigation?

“I used to be a writer like you…”

“…then I took an AI chatbot in the knee.”

(classical reference)

(picture is unrelated, but at least has an arrow in it; honestly, trying to find a decent Skyrim picture on Pixiv is an exercise in frustration. And lizard porn)

curl considered harmful

I’m a wget guy, personally, but for whatever reason, developers seem to prefer curl, especially for doing incredibly insecure things like directly executing a downloaded shell script as root (a common method of installing open-source software).

Right now, I have two upgrade-driven reasons to dislike this developer preference:

1. It doesn’t follow 30x redirects; they have to go through their code (in every branch) and add the -L option everywhere.
2. It has approximately 200 command-line options, which are documented in alphabetic order with no grouping by purpose.

#MeLied

We were instructed to always believe women who make accusations of rape, because who would lie about something like that? In the real world, the answer has always been “lots of people, for all sorts of reasons”.

Anyway, a woman who made up wild accusations against multiple men, sending them to prison on the basis of injuries she deliberately inflicted on herself with a hammer, has been sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Spring anime tryout?

I’m not enthusiastic about the new anime that start airing next week. So far, this is all I’ve got on my list, and I’m not optimistic aout either one:

• Goddess Cafe - harem comedy promising well-drawn, distinctive girls in and out of their clothes. Downside: Our Owner is a jerk.

• Konosuba Explosion! - Konosuba prequel about Megumin and Yunyun. Our Best Girl and Our Bust Girl having school adventures before the character development that happens in the main series, so I’m not expecting much. The trailers have a “shouting is comedy” vibe to them, which if true will put a fast end to my interest.

It looks like anime won’t be providing much couch-potato time for a while…

(er, wait, that’s “upgrade fallout”, in which we’ve been scrambling to fix all the swept-under-the-rug tech debt that’s been exposed by our weekend upgrade work)

Why we can’t have nice things, part 58008

New Ghibli Park plagued by naughty selfies.

Immoral Guild licensed by HiDive

This is the heavily-censored buy-the-bluray edition, but honestly, as ridiculous as most of the boobs are, seeing them in greater detail wouldn’t really add anything to the experience. It’s more harem comedy than hentai, despite the frequent non-consensual nuzzling and nipple-sucking, and, surprisingly, it passes Steven’s rule of the guy in the center getting a grip.

Our Would-Be-Horndog Hero just wants to get out of the adventuring business and go to college to bang coeds, but he’s ultimately a decent guy who cares about His Hapless Harem. He’s pretty much given up on preventing the monsters from molesting them, but he does intervene when they prove unable to solve the problem themselves (after the fan-service closeups, of course).

The world-building is crap, the production is cheap, and the ending adds a new character to deliver a crapton of exposition that’s a mix of overdue and unnecessary, but it’s more watchable than all the shows I dropped this season. Despite, not because of the giant jello-boobs.

Only amusing because nobody got killed…

Police trainer shoots recruit during training

Anyone who’s ever watched police shoot at public ranges knows that the average cop is a terrible shot, with at best a vague grasp of safety rules. For some, it’s because the gun is just one of many things on their belt that they have to regularly re-qualify with, and they practice just enough to pass. For some, ego gets in the way of learning. And for many, it’s learned carelessness: their instructors didn’t follow safety rules and taught by example.

That’s the most likely explanation here, because actual gun accidents are extremely rare, and caused by mechanical failure; almost always, someone negligently puts their finger on the trigger and pulls it while it’s pointed at a human being. See also Baldwin, Alec.

(and, yes, it isn’t an “accident” even when the trigger-puller is a small child, because the (criminal) negligence is on the part of the person who didn’t secure it)

History Of The World, Part II: The shameless cash grab

Hulu just started airing an original series based on Mel Brooks’ History Of The World, Part I. I couldn’t get through five minutes of the poorly written, unfunny first episode. Clearly Brooks is contributing only his name and voice to this turkey.

(classical reference)

Two months later…

Before this season of anime premiered, I noticed that the official site for Disillusioned Adventurers was completely broken, in an upgraded-to-incompatibility way.

It still is.

Bit of a downer, that…

The smiling bikini-clad young woman who led off my most recent cheesecake post was 17-year-old singer/actress Yukiko Okada. When I went to see what else she’d done, I learned that she’d commited suicide the year after that picture was taken. Management pro tip: when someone has just tried to kill herself two different ways, do not leave her alone in a tall building while you discuss how to manage the scandal.

(it’s hard to find an appropriate picture for something like this, so I’ll take a chance on a bodega cat)

Unicorn chaser

Reborn As a Vending Machine trailer. Airing in July. The light novels were more fun than they had any right to be, but there were only three of them before the author ran out of ideas, so they’ll have to use it all and contrive an ending. Or make it a complete train wreck. A lot is riding on Our Vending Hero’s internal monologue, so the role needs an experienced voice actor.

Two weeks before I left for Japan, we had a crapton of rain, and I found a huge puddle in the basement. I took a bunch of pictures, sent them to the contractor, and asked him to contact the folks who’d done the crack-sealing a few months earlier.

Three months later, I discover that the reason they never came out to take a look was that they needed to see the wall wet, and the contractor was waiting for me to call them the next time it was actively leaking (a message that never reached me…). Meanwhile the landscapers had completely redone the drainage outside, so even if I’d been told about this requirement, it wasn’t going to be easy to reproduce.

So this morning the contractor brought over a hose and set it to soak the ground in the right area. Pretty soon we had a slow leak and a fast one, to the point that you could hear the water splashing on the floor from twenty feet away. Now they’re going to come out and do something about it.

Spring anime?

Not too promising so far. The first season of Edens Zero was fun, but I know from the source material that it basically turns into an endless series of escalating fight scenes. And I’m not convinced that Megumin and Yunyun can carry a Konosuba prequel. Other than that, lots of Nth seasons of shows I didn’t watch, convoluted plots that require giant expository dumps to setup, the usual variations on isekai cheats, and things that announce that they’re funny by SHOUTING EVERY LINE.

The goofiest 9mm ammo

It’s amazing what you can find in boxes that haven’t been opened in 30 years.

Before I moved to California in the early Nineties, I bought some reloads from a little hole-in-the-wall gun shop in Columbus, Ohio. They were fun to shoot, but only if you had a gun that they worked in. In fact, he wouldn’t even sell them to you unless you told him you owned one of the few guns that could feed them reliably.

My Ruger P-85 (sold off long ago, pity) was on the short list; that gun was a garbagemouth that would feed anything, including empty cases, so it was a natural for these ribbed semi-wadcutters:

I doubt he’s still in business, and I’m quite certain I don’t remember where his shop was.

Carnival Row

I had meant to watch this Amazon series a while back, but just never got into the mood. Then I noticed that they’re in the middle of releasing season two, so I sat down and gave it a shot.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that it’s not based on existing IP, and yet got a fairly large budget, decent casting, and dubbing into quite a few languages; it’s clear that Amazon really wanted it to succeed.

The first season mostly does, although the two major story arcs are almost completely separate, and the secondary one is about as subtle as a brick to the back of the head. Unfortunately, so far, the second season is a kitchen sink to the back of the head, full of political intrigue, secret meetings, a triple helping of fantasy racism allegory, another mystery monster, a ridiculous guillotine, and workers of the world uniting.

How Clarkesworld should respond…

Pixy linked to an SF magazine that’s had to stop accepting submissions due to the flood of “AI”-generated slush.

I think the thing to do is pick one that’s short and not completely horrible, and just announce their intention to publish it without any attribution or payment. There’s no author, so there’s no copyright holder.

Stick to coffee, dude

James Hoffmann is entertaining and informative on the subject of coffee, in print and video. Sadly, his latest video leads off with several minutes of Why We Must Stop Using Natural Gas And Electrify Everything To Save The World.

I have no idea how the rest of the video went.

Next on “America’s Dumbest Criminals”…

When your profile on a dating site includes the string “MAP4-10” (that’s “minor-attracted-person” for those not up on the latest euphemisms), and includes the phrase “when I say I want kids, I mean it”, and your gmail account is “pedozack82”, you just might be supplying probable cause for a search of your home.

TL/DR: pled guilty to 313 counts of possession, 8 counts of distributing, 2 counts of promoting, and 1 count of procuring child pornography; the only real surprise is that he wasn’t an elected official, who most likely would have gotten less than 70 years.

Many of the commenters aren’t happy with this being considered probable cause, with some of them hung up on the judge relying on a detective using his “training and experience” to identify the meaning of “MAP4-10”. Some also insisted that it was incredibly unlikely that a pedo would advertise on social media for kids to molest. Never mind that the whole thing was started by a referral from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which has some experience in this area.

Read The Fine Print

Nespresso is big on being green, with their fully-recyclable pods (and free shipping to their recycling centers), but a lot of it is marketing bullshit. Such as their recent deal that offered an upcycled throw blanket if you ordered N sleeves of pods, calling it out as made with materials from the pod-recycling program. Specifically, the coffee grounds; using aluminum from the pods themselves would make for a rather stiff blanket.

The fine print (contrast significantly enhanced by my phone; I could barely make out the text on the actual box):

So, 4 pods worth of coffee grounds is about 18-20 grams, and only 19% of the mostly-polyester blend is recycled plastic. This is about as significant as Kiss adding their blood to the printing ink of their first Marvel graphic novel. (yes, I have a copy somewhere…)