Shorter headline: “investor promotes investment”

Jony Ive’s OpenAI device gets the Laurene Powell Jobs nod of approval

Seriously, OpenAI and Jony Ive are trying to summon the persuasive corpse of Steve Jobs through the medium of his widow, who has a financial interest in The Magical AI Thingy’s success.

(who else is on board?)

The world’s tiniest violin is bigger on the inside

For those old enough to remember when Doctor Who was a thing, Russell T. Davies has been desperately pandering to that nostalgia while simultaneously offering to feed you a shit sandwich and promise you’ll love it. It’s gone so far downhill that I think the only person watching the show is the one writing episode reviews for Engadget.

And even that poor sucker finally couldn’t find enough hot sauce to mask the flavor.

Anyway, Gay Black Doctor is out, Billie Piper is in, but there’s no audience and nobody willing to write checks to produce another show, so there’s not actually anything for her to be in.

Repeatable

The best part about my xTwitter “for you” feed switching to Japanese-hottie mode when I scroll to the end, is that it’s not a bunch of heavily-manipulated photos from click-farming bots with random account names. It’s feeding me tweets from the official accounts of actual recognizable professional models, some of whom I’ve mentioned here over the years.

Just got an ore-ore scam phone call!

First time in years. “Hey, Grandpa, how are you?” It was such a change from all the Medicare/Medicaid scam calls I get that I kinda wish he hadn’t stopped talking after I laughed at him.

Fantasy Life i

This newly-released slow-life RPG on Steam looks interesting, with a wide variety of things to do, but it’s infected with a mandatory third-party “anti-cheat” malware install. If you don’t care about playing online, there’s a way to prevent “Easy Anti-Cheat” from ever being installed, but you have to re-disable it after every update to keep it from trying to install.

Or wait for the Switch 2 version, which relies on Nintendo’s closed platform for security.

Note that player avatars are not shaped like this; in fact, it follows the common trend of pretending that gender is all just a fashion choice, and allows you to freely mix-and-match parts on your pre-adolescent character. For the realism, I’m sure.

Never mind that as soon as you get the story going, you meet a king and his princess sister, who exhibit stereotypically male and female behaviors, because that makes sense.

Just another government database…

Japan Post has announced a digital address system. No, it does nothing to overcome the deficiencies of Japan’s baroque block/intersection addressing schemes and help people find places quickly and reliably. What it does is assign a random code to anyone who requests one, which users can then type into shipping forms instead of typing their actual address.

If customers don’t ever type the code wrong, and if vendors update their databases to store the code instead of a multi-field address, and if the customer moves and remembers to update their record in this government database, then they will not have to also update those vendors’ web sites to ensure that future orders go to the right place. They will, however, have to remember which vendors didn’t accept the codes the last time they placed an order…

(vendors will of course also cache the actual address, because they don’t want all of their logistics to depend on real-time calls to some random government-maintained API)

The funny thing is, taxi driver GPS systems have been doing this for years with phone numbers, because it can be a pain in the ass to type addresses in Japan and make sense of them. I make pre-perforated inkjet business cards for planned destinations before our trips to Japan, and always prominently include the phone number.

(people have already thought of a bunch of other potential problems with this system; probably more than the creators of the system have thought of…)

“German-inspired craftsmanship”

There’s a brand of home & commercial cookware being sold on Amazon, Wagensteiger. It name-drops Germany in the ad copy (with a “brand by GERMANY” rollmark on many of the products), and even uses a cute little line drawing of a farmer to reinforce the image. In reality, the company is 100% Korean with much of their manufacturing in China, but they’ve hired Germans to do some design work.

It’s not hidden on their web site, but you won’t find it stated on Amazon, just the weasel words. Which is kind of sad, because these days South Korea probably has a better reputation for quality than Germany…

(I bought this bowl/strainer set for $21, by the way, and it looks quite well-made)

Action!

Somewhere on a dusty VHS tape, I have someone interviewing a nude model, answering a question about what her job is like. She laughs and says (from memory) “‘more titty action!’, photographers shout it at me again and again, having me run and jump and make them bounce around; it’s all they want”.

In that vein, while reviewing the extras on Matsuri 5, I found an ad for Matsuri 4, where they had her jumping rope nude. Poor gal must have had bruises after every shoot of her career.

TL/DR: train wreck in progress.

Coming soon on Netflix, something I learned only because one of the songs is done by members of the girl-group Twice.

Department of faint praise:

Note that this is not from any of the writers, directors, animators, or actors involved in Across The Spider-Verse, just from the same studio. At best, maybe the animation team used the same rendering farm.

If they had confidence in the production, they’d say, “director of Wish Dragon” and “writers of Gabby Duran & The Unsittables”.

(not a lot of literal “trainwreck” pictures on Pixiv, and “cute girls jumping in front of trains” isn’t on my list, so I’ll go with a less bloody disaster to get some girls into the picture)

Unrelated AI bullshit

Hype: “Our new AI refuses to let us shut it down!”

Reality: sudo killall justanotherllm

Seriously, “agentic AI” is a random sentence generator that can make API calls, nothing more. You can deliberately create a function that lets it run arbitrary commands and then watch it cut-and-paste from Stack Overflow with all the grace and style of a junior intern who barely speaks English, but that’s only if you’re an idiot.

Google AI turns up the heat…

As for OpenAI…

If I were an investor, I’d have serious questions about spending $6.5 billion on a hardware startup that’s never demoed a product, with announcements that name-drop the look-and-feel designers, not the hardware team. Especially when the Chief Used-Car Salesman claims they’re going to sell 100 million of the gadgets at record speed.

(“look, we’ve got Jony Ive!”)

Touch Grass Boobs!

I decided to collect a few names and links for the next time I have to criticize someone who tries to create a LoRA for generating “natural” large-breasted women using only pictures of obvious plastic titties. It’s just sad that they don’t know what breasts look like.

NSFW and sites filled with predatory Javascript and sketchy ads, as usual:

• Momona Koibuchi
• Yuu Tano
• Matsuri Kiritani
• Nanami Matsumoto
• Ai Sayama
• Nana Fukada
• Yuria Yoshine
• Miharu Usa
• Kana Tsuruta

Disturbingly accurate, but also deeply wrong

Still going…

New DOGE recruiting poster

Google AI: always confidently wrong

I searched for “otagiri history”. Random facts were merged together:

It does link to its sources, but fails to provide any reason to connect them in this way.

Actual facts, which can be derived by completely ignoring the prominent “AI” summary and reading through the buried search results:

1. Otagiri is a mildly-collectible brand of handmade dinnerware, made by a variety of Japanese kilns from the late Fifties through the mid-Nineties. Several American designers were hired to provide Hallmark-ish designs (not for tiki mugs). It’s widely available on Etsy and eBay at reasonable prices, and every once in a while new old stock turns up in Japanese warehouses, often from patterns that never made it to the US (Umami Mart used to sell coffee mugs they found in the warehouse of Kenzan Ceramics, some of which had Otagiri branding).

2. They also imported ceramic tiki mugs, chickens, turkeys, houses, music boxes, etc, as well as some decorative laminated platters.

3. The importer has no documented connection to anyone by the name “Otagiri” (小田切 = “small field” + “bounds”).

4. Further down under “other connections”, it finally says “Otagiri was also a well-known dinnerware company, particularly for its pottery, known for its firing and glazing techniques”, not recognizing that it’s the same company.

5. It also cites a phony book on Amazon that clearly exists just to sucker people who search for the word.

6. Finally, it links to the Wikipedia article for Otagiri Dam, which qualifies as “otagiri history”, but has no known connection to any of the others.

Why do I know any of this? Because a while back, my mom was sorting through stuff that’d been in boxes through multiple moves, and she handed me a small lidded crock and said, “I think you’ll like this, it feels very Japanese”. I turned it over, saw the name and country of origin, and googled the sticker. Then I checked the labels on the coffee mugs I’d previously bought from Umami Mart, and sure enough, one of them had the same Otagiri sticker.

Later I found a few nice-looking affordable pieces in the same pattern (Bittersweet) and bought them. I now have a number of their more decorative plate designs on the wall in my dining room, as well as a slowly-growing collection of that pattern. I was briefly tempted by a very complete dinner set of Bittersweet, but you had to pick it up in person in Monterey and I’d just left California forever.

I also discovered that there are a number of “Otagiri-like” patterns for sale online, almost all of them unlabeled, and based on the similarity in design, I suspect there were other importers working with the same Japanese kilns.

These, for instance, have the exact same size and shape as Otagiri soup mugs and bread plates, but don’t match any known set:

One reason a lot of Otagiri pieces are unlabeled is that the importer initially used a gold sticker on the bottom for their branding, and people often removed it or washed it off. The only reason we have official names for most of the patterns is that they later switched to stamping/painting the details on the bottom (likely when they filed their US trademark in 1980). I’ve also seen it claimed that the stickers were only added once the crates were unpacked in San Francisco, but the mug I got from Umami Mart had it applied in Japan.

By the way, Kenzan Ceramics doesn’t make coffee mugs and dinner plates any more; they’re strictly high-end wall and floor tile. I guess the export business got them through some lean years while they were establishing their business.

Maomao’s going to have to stay in spoiler limbo for another week, because this week’s episode was apparently bumped. This would be less annoying if there were other good shows to watch.

Smoke-Signal Flag Day

Traeger has announced that you must update the firmware on your Internet-connected smoker by the end of September, or it will no longer be Internet-connected. Something-something-cloud-services.

BroadcomBot fixed it!

I have now successfully downloaded VMware Fusion 13.6.3. It even worked.

Yes, I saved the installer on my NAS, “just in case”.

No, they did not send the promised email; I had to keep checking.

Metaphor alert!

Vegan Toilet Bowl Cleaner. To put the sustainable organic cherry on top , it’s rhubarb-scented.

How to raise a busty waifu

Ina Enohara shows how it’s done: you feed them, you water them, they grow!

VMware (not) update

Finally advanced my VMware Fusion download failure to “Account verification is Pending. Please try after some time” (yes, I manually edited the page to enable the field, changed my one-letter name to a three-letter name, and overrode the disabled submission button; the fourth time it worked). Managed to get a chat window to connect me either to an Indian call center operator or an AI pretending to be one, who just sent me a link to the same download page that didn’t work.

Schrödinger’s chatbot claims to have escalated the ticket to “the concern team”, who will email me an update in the next 24 hours.

Those are definitely not noodle arms…

The text reads “Father’s a man”. Transphobic before it was hip!

Eighties Viagra

There’s an old cartoon that I think was in Playboy. Can’t find it online at the moment, but a man was walking past a construction site for a brothel, and the sign read, “soon you too can be erected on this site”.

Amazon proposes…

… J disposes. Latest recommendation for a novel was something called Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff, which the blurb promises will be a cozy-but-eldritch mystery with a bit of romance. Oh, wait, it promises to be “Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun”. With added boldfaced queer romance just in case you didn’t read the blurb to the end.

And to really make sure it appeals to a broad audience, the Kindle edition is $16.99. Yup, that’ll just fly off the virtual shelves. I liked the cover art, at least.

This isn’t the weird part…

spoiler

It’s the sniffing.