Love Flops

Out of idle curiosity, I watched the trailer for one of the last shows to premier this season (the last appears to be Urusei Yatsura, which will run 2 cours, take a break, and then run 2 more), and the girls are cute. That’s the good news. Other than that, it looks like a real paint-by-numbers ecchi harem comedy with conveniently color-coded haremettes throwing themselves at a guy whose only attractive feature is Being The Protagonist.

(unrelated harem is unrelated)

Posted by a human…

“Stable Diffusion made this”.

Daring Fireball swings and misses

“Smartphones replaced everything Radio Shack sold 30 years ago: still cameras, video cameras, music players, radios, alarm clocks, calculators, tape recorders, and, yes, cellular dumbphones.”

Gruber clearly never set foot inside of a Radio Shack. Probably scared he’d catch something, like a clue.

Let’s take a look at some of the things sold in a 1992 Radio Shack catalog (that took five seconds to find with google):

• electronic keyboards
• police-band scanners
• intercoms
• baby monitors
• PA systems
• bullhorns
• strobe lights
• alarm systems
• air purifiers
• printers
• surge protectors
• RC cars
• electronics kits (not just for kids)
• soldering irons, multimeters, breadboards, ICs, semiconductors, tubes, crystals, LEDs, resistors, logic probes, diodes, transistors, cables, adapters, wire, crimping tools, relays, transformers, fans, motors, switches, fuses, etc

(those last items being the things people went to Radio Shack for long before 1992…)

(sadly, they never sold these)

Things I never expected to write…

Gunsite accepts TSA Pre and Global Entry as proof you’re trainable.

Unrelated,

I appreciate the way Engadget randomly serves up WEBP images to Safari users, the only major browser that has no idea what to do with them. It really speeds up their site.

The Ultimate FN PS90 Accessory

TP-Link delivered!

As promised, they sent the rack-mounting kit for my 24-port switch, so I can clean up the rack in the basement.

I think I’ll celebrate with a Coke…

NSFW

Quick preliminary test of the new camera body’s low-light capability (double-sized if you open it in another tab):

This is the view of the neighbor’s house from my back yard, with no streetlights or other lighting, at midnight with no moon. It’s soft and quite noisy, but it’s clear and in-focus.

It’s also about three stops overexposed, because this is what the scene looked like to the naked eye:

In other words, it was able to successfully meter and auto-focus (admittedly with help from the built-in focus lamp) in conditions where I couldn’t even see that there were fences. Exposure was 1/30 at f/1.2, hand-held at ISO 204,800. By comparison, the latest and greatest iPhone tops out at ISO 12,768 with an f/1.78 lens, which would give a ~1.2-second exposure, if it could meter the scene at all.

Here’s a crop showing what the noise looks like on the full-sized image. Rough, but there’s still some good detail, and it can be cleaned up and sharpened.

No temple, castle, or museum is even close to this dark inside, and I haven’t even tried the built-in HDR features or adjustable Dynamic-Range Optimization yet, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting clear, crisp pictures of anything I can see. The zoom I’m taking has a constant f/4 aperture, so there may be conditions where it has to use a noisier ISO setting, but I don’t think I’ll need to crank it up to even 100K, much less this setting.

And, of course, I’ll be carrying my small LitraPro color-corrected USB-powered LED light. Which is sadly discontinued now that Logitech owns Litra and just used their IP to build a clip-on light for streamers. It looks like the Luxli Fiddle is the current hotness for pocketable LED lighting, although it’s only half as bright as the LitraPro.

Metering digression: the Sony A7S III’s meter sensitivity is EV -3 with an f/2.0 lens; with the 50mm f/1.2 that’s still only EV -4.5, and this exposure computes to EV -5.5, so it got a little help from the focus lamp, even though it was half-blocked by the lens hood.

Juxtaposition, Twitter style

66% No Yuuwaku revisited

So, quite some time ago I posted the cover art for the Japanese release of Meatloaf’s Two out of three ain’t bad single, which translated the title as “Two-thirds of Temptation”. Randomly, I found two things recently: a fan translation of the English lyrics, and the actual lyrics that were included with the single:

一晩中話し合ってもいいけど、
どうにもならないさ
言うことはすべて言ったよ、
もう何も残ってないさ

一晩中でも泣くがいいさ、
僕の気持は変わらないよ
外には雪が積っている、
僕に行かさないでおくれ

僕は努力した、
君を大切にしてる事を示そうとした
僕は言葉に疲れ、声も出なかった
僕の目からは涙でなく、 つららが下がった

僕に出来ることはこう言い続けるだけ
“君が欲しいんだ、君が必要なんだ”　とね
でももう君を愛することは出来ないよ
さあ悲しまないで
３人の内、
２人が出て行くってのは悪い事じゃないさ

TL/DR: it’s just the first verse, simplified but pretty much on target until you reach the last two lines, which are as far off as the title but in a completely different direction: (roughly) “out of three people, it’s not a bad thing when two of them leave”.

Props to the big G for Google Lens; when I fed it this JPG in the hopes of finding a higher-resolution source (because no one had ever transcribed these lyrics), it couldn’t find one but still managed to OCR almost all of the kanji correctly. The few errors were easily caught and corrected.

Call Of The Night 13 (fin)

In Which Our Animators resist the temptation to wrap it all up and take the high road, continuing the story at a reasonable pace in the full faith that they’ll get a second season, thus allowing Our Surprisingly Sophisticated Hero to calmly refuse Domestication, Death, and the D, and Our Rebellious Heroine to step up to the plate. While I wanted to see more of Our Smoking Nemesis, they chose not to ruin their chance of being able to tell a coherent story when/if they get another season.

Anko Encore:

Dry weekend

I count 11 anime premieres this weekend. I plan to watch 0.

Monday is A-Cup Alchemist, Wednesday is Flatcat & Sword, and nothing else is on my list yet.

Garff!

I’ve had a lot of shipments coming in recently, and I’m used to some of them coming from company names that don’t match the web site. Some of them warn you about this up front, but some don’t, so I didn’t really pay attention when I saw a UPS notification from “Garff Enterprises”.

When I checked the notification, though, it was being delivered to an address in Arizona, and then I googled the company and found out it’s coming from a car dealership in Utah. And then I noticed that it was going to an iCloud email address, and realized that I must have another Evil Twin who thinks his email address is “jgreely@…”.

This time it appears to be a man slightly my senior named “James J Greely”, with addresses in Salt Lake and Chandler. If a really detailed “family tree now” site can be believed.

Switch mounting!

As I mentioned earlier, I lost the rack-mounting kit for my 24-port managed switch somewhere in the move, and the only people selling them, even on eBay, are in Australia, and while TP-Link’s knowledgebase directs you to their online store, they don’t actually sell it. So I sent email to their tech support address asking how to get one, and they’re shipping it to me for free.

Should be here Wednesday.

Dear Discord,

Please stop starting at boot on Windows 11. You’re not supposed to, and both your settings and the OS startup settings agree that you’re not supposed to, and I’ve completely uninstalled you once just in case, but you keep doing it, and I can’t find the double-secret-probation startup method you’re using. Stop it or I’ll sic Yor on you.

(unless you’re into that, I mean…)

Desert Pimp

This is not an aftermarket job; Magnum Research sells it this way.

Playing possum

Had a possum scratching at my back door Monday night. I imagine he was attracted by the lingering odor of chicken in my smoker (27 brined and rubbed thighs that will be devoured by family and friends if I don’t beat them to it), but I thought it was interesting that he was scratching at the door, not the smoker, and that he held his ground when I turned on the lights, made noise, and even opened the door. It wasn’t until I started to step out that he ambled off to the far edge of the patio.

It was like he was expecting a handout, so I suppose I ought to ask the former owner’s son next time I see him, “did your dad feed the possums?”.

Unrelated,

I had half a dozen bird strikes on my front windows Wednesday. I kept thinking it was knocking by the FedEx driver I was waiting on for a signature-required package.

(the driver ended up just leaving the quite expensive package on the porch without bothering to ask for a signature, once again making me glad that my driveway is highly resistant to porch pirates)

Related,

As part of my prep for the (finally!) upcoming trip to Japan, I now have a Sony A7S III full-frame camera body that goes up to ISO 409,600, as well as a 50mm f/1.2 lens. If I can see it, I can take a picture.

No anime for you!

AnimeSchedule.net had Flatcat & Sword premiering yesterday, but apparently that’s only on one network in Japan, and it doesn’t even show up as “coming soon” on HiDive yet. Everyone else is airing episode 1 next Wednesday, sigh.

(non-flat sword-bearing catgirl is unrelated)

Related,

Coming soon, Cute Girls Doing Yuri Things In Front Of A Man Who’s Been Reincarnated As An ASMR Microphone. Not an isekai, but it definitely takes place in a fantasy world, or at least a world that men fantasize about…

(no, not that kind of microphone)

AI-powered laser turret that kills cockroaches

We’ve seen where this leads…

No-crunch streaming

Both of the shows I plan to try watching this season (Flatcat & Sword and A-cup Alchemist, er, “Management of Novice Alchemist”) are streaming on HiDive. Crunchyroll has some good shows on their (partial) announcement, but just not ones I plan to watch.

Three Bodies, One Cour

I had lost track of Amazon’s film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and just discovered that the deal fell through and it’s now being done by Netflix, to be released in 2023. They’re throwing a lot of money and talent at a frankly terrible thriller with a thin veneer of technobabble. Seriously, it’s like Battlefield Earth without the SF content. I mean, really bad.

(Expo 2025 mascot is probably unrelated, and better designed)

I broke the scammer!

I just got a scam call offering “supplemental Medicare assistance”. In response to the first question, I said “I am not eligibile for Medicare”. The computer (complete with phony call-center background noise) proceeded to congratulate me for thinking about my health insurance options, then asked if I had thought about supplemental Medicare insurance. I repeated my answer. It then asked how old I was, and I answered “twelve”.

Silence. Two minutes of silence, then it finally hung up.

“Trending” on Twitter

Saw this one in passing: “Roevember is coming”. My immediate response was, “…followed by Dobbsember”. 😁

Achievement unlocked: new house networked!

• 5U vertical rack in basement with PDU & 48-port patch panel
  • 1 coax cable routed from exterior Spectrum Cable box
  • 1 24-port managed gigabit switch
  • 1 vendor-managed cable modem
  • 1 vendor-managed wifi router with wifi disabled (because the cable modem wasn’t bright enough to bridge my static IP block)
  • 1 OpenBSD firewall router (Shuttle DS61)
• 12 drops spread across 8 rooms (each 2x Cat6a, 1x coax)
• 1 8+2-port managed 2.5/10-gig switch (office)
• 3 8-port managed gigabit switches (office, family room, living room)
• Orbi Quad-band Wifi 6E and 2 satellites, claiming “up to 10.8 Gbps”, but has 2.5-gig ports on the back, so they’ll all be moving to the 2.5/10 switch soon (office, family room, living room)

I seem to have lost the rack-mounting ears for the 24-port switch, and the only people selling replacements for that brand are in Australia, so I need to find a simple wire shelf that sits inside the rack, so I can organize the contents and still close the door/lid.

I hadn’t realized until they’d left for the day on Saturday that they ran the cable bundles directly adjacent to the main gas line that runs the length of the house. Not how I’d have done it.

They also ran speaker wire from one side of the living room to the other as requested, but I had to convince the guy that no, I did not want 6 feet of speaker wire just sticking straight out of the wall on both sides of the room. I wanted wallplates with screw/banana terminals, like every other AV install I’ve ever seen or heard of. Baffling.

Related, if I’d known that the rack was a top-opener with the patch panel at the top, I’d have asked for it to be mounted lower on the basement wall, so I didn’t have to use a stepladder to plug in ethernet cables.

(cat-sitting is different in the city)

Japan reopens for tourists on October 11. Our last rescheduling is still in place for November, so we are, as they say, good to go. Some of the events we had on our trip calendar are missing, including a harvest festival about halfway between Kyoto and Osaka, so we’ll probably have to do some improvising, but we like that sort of thing.

And, yes, it’s “three shots or a test right before the flight”; I suppose I’ll finally have to get a booster, to avoid any possible delays caused by testing. No word yet if they’re still going to require tracking apps on your phones.

They’re really, really eager to get tourists back, offering a number of incentives, including some sort of cash-back deal for your first night.

Call Of The Night 12

In which BOOBS! Also, Vampire Hunter D-Cup flirts and teases, in a manner suspiciously similar to how Our Not-Really-The-Hugging-Type Vamp does. In the end, though, It’s A Trap!

Slave Harem Dungeon 12 (fin!)

(you can pretty freely rearrange the title words for this show…)

In the final episode, Our Pimp Daddy just bought and boned all of the other girls during the end credits, without bothering with any of the actual backstories. Like the reason the blonde is being sold to him by her own family, or how she was broken to service by the senior girls. They’d have needed another two seasons to get through the actual story content involved in collecting the whole set, given how much time they spend on acquiring skill stones to upgrade their gear (the official reason for buying Sherry), so they just montaged the hell out of it and ended with a (gang) bang.

(the only reason this picture is unrelated is that it isn’t covered in censorship dialog boxes)

Vermeil 12 (fin!)

After repeating the last few minutes of the previous episode, and five minutes of talking, Our Scenery-Chewing Villain insists that it’s time for the climactic battle!

Which lasts about a minute, before the ref calls it on account of time and they just walk away. The rest is padding, because damn did they run out of material. About the only nice thing I can say is that the student council girls beat up Our Loving Hero in the guise of “training” before Our Loving Succubus gets nekkid and delivers the last Buy The Bluray ad.

(unrelated busty demon gal is unrelated, and also, I’m suddenly feeling hot for teacher)

Checking in on Dungeon Slave Harem…

In the next-to-last episode, Our Slavering Hero finally made the call to buy another loli fuckslaveparty member. Her first service will have to wait for the final episode this week, since she spent half the runtime marveling over his worldbreaking awesomeness.

(Roxanne will continue to put on the red light out for Master alongside her new kouhai)

Winter and Spring…

Bofuri 2 for January, Edens Zero 2 for Spring. That’s it, so far.

(picture is unrelated, as per Pixy’s lament)

Dear Amazon,

I love the fact that I frequently get next-day and same-day free delivery now, but could you work on the problem where items are being labeled as in-stock and Prime that ship from amazon.com, but when you get to the checkout they won’t arrive for two weeks?

Dear Atlassian technical support,

Yes, we read knowledgebase articles, too. Usually before opening the ticket, so it’s really not useful to just keep sending new ones to us that aren’t useful or relevant to solving the massive heap spikes that we started seeing after installing your latest security patch, which are giving the garbage collector a real workout.

Definitely not in California, part 4473

Once you have a training certificate in hand (8-hour class, with two hours on the range, including malfunction drills), it takes about a week to get a concealed-carry license in Ohio. In my county, at least, it’s a web form: fill it in, upload photos of the certificate and your ID, pay the fee, pick a day to go in for fingerprints and a photo, and then walk out with your CHL. Good for five years.

You don’t need a license for concealed-carry in Ohio any more, but having one is likely to improve any relevant interactions with police, permitless carry doesn’t work in the 19 states that accept Ohio’s license, and you don’t have to go through the instant-check when purchasing a new gun (which, by the way, means that the reports about how many gun sales Democrats have caused are likely significantly low).

I’m not in the market for another gun at the moment, though. More precisely, the guns I’m in the market for are simply not available, because pretty much anything vaguely concealable in 9mm or .380 is flying off the shelves as fast as it can be made, so manufacturers are reacting appropriately (although they seem a tad optimistic about the market for Coyote Ugly tan-colored handguns).

The training class was interesting. We had five people in it: a school bus driver, a construction worker, two competitive handgun shooters, and me. Everyone was shooting Glocks, their own or rentals; I had toyed with the idea of bringing my 1966 Browning Hi-Power, but I didn’t know how they ran the practical test, and it has terrible sights. Classic, but terrible.

Turned out the range test was trivial for any experienced shooter, although they required you to handle and shoot your gun in a way I’m not used to. I’ve never shot in a “proper” Isosceles stance from a close-body low ready position, nor used their very specific method of clearing malfunctions, so I actually had something to practice while making a large ragged hole in the paper.

(“and now a few words about the secure alarmed cabinet in the securely-locked basement of my alarm-and-security-camera-equipped house…”)

Related…

I was amused to see a particular brand of .45 ACP 230-grain ball ammo being marketed as subsonic. This is like saying “our bleach whitens”.

“Obscene sunny days that I thought would never end…” 😁

Vermeil 11

In Which If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right.

Seriously, that’s the entire episode, right there, literally coming out of the mouth of Our Observing Hero. Giant battle against unbeatable foe that was interrupted by exposition and a flashback? No sign of it. Maybe next week, since that’s the final episode.

Call Of The Night 11

In Which Buffy Wears Glasses And Kicks Vampire Asses. The plot, as they say, thickens, starting with an accidental pick-up line and leading directly to a healthy dose of teen bonding in the traditional late-night school-mystery hunt, which never ends well.

I’m really hoping this gets another cour soon; there are still two more episodes coming (which isn’t enough to do more than dip their toes into this new plot twist), but I haven’t seen any news about a continuation any time soon.

Dear Amazon, Please Stop

Blade Runner 2099, The Series.

Ridley Scott is attaching his name to it, but it’s being written by someone named Silka Luisa whom I’ve never heard of, and whose genre credits include three episodes of a show I’ve never heard of, and an episode of Halo.

Fall Season?

Planning to watch:

• Flatcat And Sword (“reincarnated as a sword”)

  • after Truck-kun sends some random guy into a fantasy world, he ends up with mysterious powers that make monster-fighting a cinch, hooks up with a cute loli slave girl, and begins a life of adventure with her. Where it breaks from the usual formula is that he’s a magic sword and there isn’t even a hint of a harem; it’s just a 12-year-old former slave and her stepdad-sword. September 28th on HiDive.

• Novice Alchemist’s Shop Management (“management of novice alchemist”)

  • after graduating from alchemist school, Our Heroine gets sent off to the boonies to open her own shop, make lots of friends, and beat the living hell out of giant monsters. October 3rd, streaming site not announced yet.

…and that’s it so far.

(picture is unrelated and out of season)

Fun Facts, 1Password Edition

A member of my team has been in India for a while, and went to file a ticket with a vendor. The password she had in 1password (v7) for that account didn’t work, so she reset it and went on with her day. Then the new guy in Prague and I went to open another ticket with that vendor, and the password (again, v7) didn’t work. So we checked with her, and eventually figured out that firewall rules prevented her from connecting to the 1Password servers, and the application never told her that sync had been failing for weeks. No indication whatsoever in the Mac client.