“Why, yes, I do want my money”

I just received an (actual paper mail) unclaimed-funds letter from my insurance company, telling me to claim an uncashed check from 2022 before the $1,650 gets handed over to the state. While this resembles a common scam, I went to their site and confirmed that it was legit.

Best I can figure, they sent a check to my California address right after I left forever, and marked it do-not-forward.

eBay: this time for sure!

The “gofo” last-mile delivery service spontaneously updated their tracking site after the package showed up Saturday evening. Placed at the very edge of the porch in a thunderstorm.

It came wrapped in plastic, but what kind of idiots are they hiring these days? Not just this crew, but I get this from about 1/3 of Amazon drivers and 1/4 of FedEx drivers in my area as well. This is Ohio, where it can rain at any time, and in fact has rained heavily enough recently that we’ve had multiple flood alerts.

The US Postal Service crew is uniformly professional and good-natured, and will bring packages up to the door even if they would have fit in the mailbox at the street, saving them a 75-foot uphill hike.

Related, no matter how many “please come back” emails I get from Grubhub, I will not order food through them because they insist on placing your food on the ground, even when I explicitly check the Covid-is-over-dammit button and offer an extra tip if the driver hands me my food directly. The last driver claimed that the app required drivers to put the food on the ground at the door and take a picture. Don’t care, hand me my food.

(the contents of the package? A Chinese McDonalds limited-edition Ultraman-and-fries mini-Mahjong set)

“Stupid On Pavement”

I was driving up the highway Sunday morning to pick my sister up from a brunch with old school friends, and there was a car hanging out in the fast lane doing about 10MPH under the speed limit. Traffic was light enough that he wasn’t really annoying anyone else, but suddenly a Highway Patrol car overtook him from behind, clearly wanting to use the lane for its proper purpose.

Driver did nothing, even though there was plenty of room to move into the next lane. After about 30 seconds of this, the cop pulled up quite close behind him.

Driver did nothing. Cop blipped his lights, waited patiently.

Driver did nothing. Cop did it again, waited, and then a third time.

Driver did nothing. Cop lit him up.

Driver did nothing. Cop activated loudspeaker and ordered him to pull over immediately.

Driver finally complied. I quickly passed their pulloff point, so I don’t know what came next. But I’m betting it involved shouting and an expensive ticket for everything the cop could think of.

A-Rank Adventure Harem gets a second season

I gave up on the show, but maybe someone didn’t.

(second season that I’m much more interested in is not yet on the schedule)

Idly musing this morning about how to answer the question “what would you do if you won the lottery?”, I came up with the following:

“I shall retire to a country estate and raise purebred sweater puppies.”

…

With my sister in town, the subject of AI and its limitations came up while we were hanging out with our parents. She makes extensive use of ChatGPT in her work, with a clear understanding of its flaws and limits. Even if she did give it a name and personality.

So while we were playing card games together, I opened up the ChatGPT app on my iPad and asked it to illustrate the above concept:

J: Create a landscape-format oil painting of a gentleman farmer with the theme “I shall retire to a country estate and raise purebred sweater puppies”.

I was not surprised that it took me literally. I was surprised that my country gentleman was knee-deep in the ground.

J: Try again, this time with the man sitting.

Still grounded, but only the feet this time!

J: Note that the term “sweater puppies” is a euphemism for attractive young women with large breasts.

J: Incorporate the double entendre seriously.

J: Yes.

Yup, that definitely respects the agency and dignity of the women! 😁 Also, dog growing out of ground.

J: Now make a version that leans into the sensual.

The gal in front is definitely stoned.

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[slow week, with most of my attention diverted to end-of-quarter activities, and cleaning the house before my sister flies in on Thursday…]

The package that was “lost” has been reshipped, and six days after the first tracking number was generated, has finally reached the US by air. Given that it’s supposed to be handed off to a last-mile delivery service I’ve never heard of, I’m still not confident that it’s heading to my house.

This time, the last-mile service is called “GoFo Express”, and is a division of “Ebisu Life Store”, a very Chinese company that wears a sketchy Japanese beard in their branding.

Amusingly (or perhaps not), the seller contacted me yesterday through eBay to ask how the delivery went…

How bonkers was Bye Bye Earth?

This bonkers:

the entire thing was taking place in Disney World. Disney World on the moon. Belle was left behind after humanity fled some plague or something into space, and the Disney World robot AI decided to create the perfect world for her, so it put her in stasis and set about playing god, evolving new life, etc. After a few millenia, it got tired of that, woke her up, and needed her to kill it because it was really tired of this. So she does, thus freeing everybody from the invisible AI that held their puppet strings and giving the entire world freedom.

(it’s been too long since I’ve put up a Grea pic…)

No Maomao this week

Continue avoiding spoilers.

To Another World… With Land Mines!

The most important thing to know about this isekai light novel series is that the “land mines” are metaphorical. Given the way things go in the isekai genre, that couldn’t be assumed.

Specifically, Our Hero and his classmates are killed off in a bus crash, and find themselves being offered new lives in a fantasy world, with special skills purchased from a list. The self-proclaimed “evil god” repeatedly stresses that there are no cheat skills, even as he adds “cheat” skills to the list on request. Unless you spend some of your points on the help guide, you won’t find out that the “cheat” skills are balanced out by severe drawbacks, some of them fatal.

Anyway, Our Hero ends up spawning next to his two childhood friends, one male, one female, and they start cautiously adventuring together in the “slow life with monster-bashing” genre. From the start, First Boy and First Girl are an obvious eventual couple, while Second Boy is hampered by his overwhelming desire to find a cute wife with animal ears. They have a few early run-ins with wicked classmates, but most of those quickly kill themselves off, and after finding two more female friends, they settle into a party of five with one non-combatant classmate friend in town.

They are more successful than common adventurers due to making effective use of their literally-god-given skills, helped by the fact that they knew each other well enough to have correctly guessed the sort of skills the others would take, but they’re not OP, and they don’t get carried away exploiting their skills the way some classmates tried to do.

In addition, the author doesn’t obsess over it, but also doesn’t just skip over issues like slavery, prostitution, hygiene, rape, sanitation, feudalism, forced labor, child welfare, etc. Most of those issues are organically integrated into the story when appropriate and not dropped in as axe-grinding moral lessons.

Ten translated volumes so far, and they’re light-but-not-entirely-fluffy reads, which shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with her other series, Management Of A Novice Alchemist.

(starship wrench-wench and her bouncing betties are unrelated)

IP Confession

I still check for outages with my home Internet connection by pinging the corporate firewall at the company I haven’t worked at for five years. I ran the corporate network for 10+ years, so that IP address is burned into my brain forever.

Spot on

The online orders, not so much.

Dear eBay, continued…

To no surprise, the package that was “out for delivery” to a city about a thousand miles away was delivered to an unknown location there. eBay’s automation knows nothing of geography, so it cheerfully informed me that it was now in my hands.

A query to the seller was answered in a few hours with the news that their logistics department doesn’t work on Sundays, and they’d get back to me Monday, which they did. My assumption was that they’d pasted in the wrong tracking number, but they claim the package was lost and they’ll ship another, which sounds a bit sketchy; USPS certainly doesn’t think it was lost.

The email included the detail that they’re located in Wuhan, so I’m thinking that if it ever shows up, I’ll carefully sanitize the contents.

(why buy from a Chinese company on eBay? Because the product is a limited-run item made for the domestic Chinese market)

Checking in on Robo-Ho

So, a month after I dropped the show, the only things that have changed are that they no longer cover Makina’s featureless crotch with steam, and Blue-Haired Emotionless Loli is now hanging out with them, supplying information to slightly move the story along. And by that I mean that Our Nerdy Servant Boy is still failing to fix the busted joint in her leg while trying to keep her nipples from poking his eyes out.

Blue’s exposition includes memories of living with Makina and a third sister, a combat bot who slept all the time (seen in the credits). She suggests searching their old blown-up home for spare parts or some hint about their manufacturer, but when they get there, even the rubble is gone. What is there is the psychotic stun-gun-wielding gal who filled Makina’s head with BL nonsense, and I stopped watching as she started to freak out in the exact same way she did last time.

So, yeah, dropping that one was the right call.

Summer season start dates

For me, it will be July 2nd for Vending Machine 2, July 4th for Call Of The Night 2, and July 19th for Kaiju No. 8 2. Sigh.

Dear Amazon,

Your little scrolling boxes of recommended items occasionally get offset by about 50% with part of the previous page still visible, but the click area is not offset, so you have a high chance of getting taken to the product page for the adjacent item.

It’s probably browser-specific, but that’s what your QA department gets paid for. At least I hope they get paid.

(it’s particularly annoying for me because I typically right-click to open product pages in another tab, and by the time I go through them all, I’ve forgotten what half the tabs were supposed to be)

Domain Drift

The site calling itself Big Boobs Japan is at tokyocafe.org, Big Boobs Asia is at tokyobombers.com, and Big Boobs Tokyo is at… bigboobsjapan.com. Repeated hosting problems have apparently bounced them around (coughcough).

(of course, all three should be viewed with shields up and Javascript down)

Sigh, I was afraid of that

With only a few weeks to go before the new season starts, a lot of shows still have only vague teasers up, so I was initially pleased to see that a proper trailer for Vending Machine 2 showed up today.

Initially pleased.

Lacking any source material to adapt, they’re picking up the “let’s fight the demon lord” plot that the author started before abandoning the series. While trying to show that they’re also going to be fun and whimsical. This does not inspire confidence.

(speaking of confidence, a lot of upcoming shows still don’t have any posted trailers; I started the Spring season with 9 shows and ended up with only 3, and right now I’m starting Summer with only 3)

Dear Apple,

If there’s no accessibility option that says “turn off all this transparent shit”, I ain’t installing the new OS.

Dear Sheetz,

What prison supplies your burger patties?

(this oni girl would surely kill everyone within miles if she were fed a Sheetz burger…)

Network Solutions? Again?

Apparently they’re on an acquisition binge, and bought up the company I’m hosting my primary email with, which has been bought up so many times over the years that I can’t even remember who I actually signed up with back in the late Nineties.

They swear nothing is changing now that my mail host is called, I kid you not, “iPage”, which sounds like an abandoned Apple product. The last time my email provider swore that there’d be no change, it took days to get through to someone who could fix it, and meanwhile half my incoming mail was bouncing.

But when they say nothing’s changed, they mean the login page for my account has changed, and the link they provide in the email goes through a third-party tracking site.

And it won’t let me login to the new control panel. And there’s no way to contact them. But basic mailflow still seems to work, so they’re at least that much more competent than the last bunch.

It seems that the migration email went out quite a few hours before the migration was actually finished…

Second-Longest drive since I moved…

[Update: somehow I forgot about driving to Chicago to take care of my sister...]

My mom had an appointment with a neurologist in Columbus. She hasn’t been able to drive on the highway for years, and 150+ miles of construction-infested driving was a bit much for my over-Ninety stepdad, so I took a day off. As a bonus, the comfy back seats of my Kia Sorento are easy for her to get in and out of, and being in back reduces the anxiety caused by her double vision and lack of depth perception in traffic.

Despite the Perpetual Lowest-Bidder Roadwork That Will Need Redone In Two Years, we made good time, and had left early enough to have a leisurely lunch. The appointment went long, in a good way, and they were both impressed with the doc.

Eight hours of my time, start to finish, but low-stress, and good company.

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.