"I circled the building to check. There were protestors blocking each entrance but the building wasn't completely surrounded - like, no one was surrounding the walls, just the doors."
— David Weigel excuses his Hamas-loving rioter palsIsekai: 2.3
Angel was always trying to make our exploration more effective, so it surprised me one day when she said, “I think we need to go back.”
We’d been together for about two years, moving steadily away from the cave in a widening spiral, learning about our world and each other. I stopped picking fruit and gave her my full attention.
“I think we’re looking for the wrong thing. Or the right thing in the wrong way.”
“I tried smoke signals once; nobody turned up.”
My weak joke earned me an expected weak smile and an unexpected big hug, which lasted long enough to remind me that she was growing up fast. If at ten she’d looked twelve, at twelve she looked fifteen, but I was saved from further fifteen-will-get-you-twenty thoughts by her next words.
“I don’t think this world is real. I think it’s part of there.”
“I don’t understand. If we’re there, how come you’re getting older?”
“How come you’re not?”
Isekai 2: Electric Boogaloo
Foaming Isolation
Living in Occupied Corona-fornia, I’m still stuck at home with limited visibility outside the bars. The same bureaucrats who’ve spent the past year failing to find their asses with both hands and a cattle prod are telling us the future’s so bright we have to wear shackles. But the check is in the mail, they’ll call us, and they promise not to cough in our masks.
Meanwhile, on the border…
Anyway, I bought another toy
I’ve mentioned that I’m not a milk drinker, keeping the stuff around mostly for cooking, and switching to UHT-preserved single servings over the past year to keep it from going bad on me.
But home-brewed coffee-based beverages don’t have a fraction of the calories and sugar that the street-corner pushers at Starbucks deliver, so, staring at a half-dozen best-before-really-soon UHT milk packs, I decided to give it a whirl.
The good news: the industry-standard allotment for cappuccino and macchiato-ish drinks is 100ml of milk (lattés at ~150ml), and that amount of whole milk only has about 60 k-cals, putting it in the range of my daily dose of liquid pie. Still something to keep a lid on, for the sake of my girlish figure, but not outrageous.
Nespresso has a new-customer offer with a 40% discount on their 4th-generation Aeroccino frother (the aptly-named code “NEW”, requiring a purchase of only 5 sleeves of coffee to go with), but they’re still selling the 3rd generation, and a lot of folks recommend much cheaper options from Miroco, Secura, or Bodum, or even the little stick frothers. But there’s also the pricy-but-excellent Breville Milk Cafe Frother, with induction heating and a full range of manual controls.
And then there’s the toy, Nespresso’s top-of-the-line Bluetooth-connected Barista Recipe Maker, which is of course what I bought. Induction heating, yes, and magnetic stirring for easy cleanup, but designed to be programmed from a smartphone, with coffee-as-a-service named settings rather than manual controls.
You will search in vain to find out exactly which settings do what to the liquids poured inside, at what temperature, and for how long. You manage a local cache of 13 recipes that can be selected from the front panel, which consist of a few numbered steps and some flavor text (literally). Planned future versions of the app will supposedly allow you to create your own recipe programs, but for now you’re limited to their overlapping set of 25, plus the also-overlapping set of 45 online, which usually reference one of the 13 default recipes to choose a setting.
The Original 13 also have glossy printed instructions in the accompanying manual, for non-app use. In eight languages, so now I know what a horká čokoláda is.
The app is a bit stale (full of references to coffees they don’t sell any more, and missing a lot that they do), and the instructions for some of the recipes are simply wrong. For instance, the app version of a Cortado has you pouring 100ml of foamed milk on top of a shot in an espresso cup (more than twice as much as will fit even before it’s foamed). The online version has you prepare the same amount of milk, but only use 20ml of the hot milk and two scoops of the foam, failing to mention that you’re making enough milk for two.
Some online recipes have you firing it up with as little as 60ml of milk, which is borderline; it won’t produce the same results with that little, and it may simply stop and insist you add more before it will continue.
It is widely reported to handle matcha well, and I happen to have a nice bag of not-Japanese-in-the-slightest matcha that I picked up at Costco recently, so I’ll give it a shot. So to speak.
So far, I like it. This morning’s 16 ounces of liquid pie gained a 100ml cap of capp foam, making my daily indulgence significantly more indulgent.
Clone Decapitation, Continued
I cracked four of the Gevalia incompostable pods into my Aeropress to see if the coffee was decent when it all actually went into the cup. Yeah, not so much. It took some work to pop the caps with a paring knife and extract the contents, and the lack of resistance when I pressed the coffee through a single filter told me it wasn’t an espresso grind, which explains why it’s pretty weak sauce. Verdict: they should have shipped their coffee to the same folks who pack Peet’s and Illy into compatible aluminum pods, rather than focusing on feel-good marketing compost.
In other news,
The Harris/Biden administration has turned Banned Books Week into a yearlong celebration. How long before people start digging up their guns to make room to hide their children’s books?
Isekai: 2.2
Sometimes, late at night, comforting each other, I told her about my life, and she told me about there.
How much of it was metaphor, and how much was real, I never understood. It was hard for her to put it into words, but somehow important to try. She talked about a room full of doors full of rooms, where the way back was never the way you’d come, and once said it was less a place than a “collection of layered experiences”, most of them imperceptible to a merely human mind.
Angel counted herself among the merely human, something I suspected wasn’t completely true. The others like her, the ones she wasn’t sure weren’t her future selves, were capable of navigating between the layers of there. I was pretty sure she’d done it herself at least once, escaping to here, but I never asked.
I didn’t care what she was, or might have been, or could become. She was my friend, my partner, my damsel-out-of-distress, my anchor. I believed she had the power to leave, but chose to stay.
I was happy, maybe for the first time. I think she was, too.
Isekai: 2.1
It was good, not being alone. The dynamics were a little weird at first, with Angel being older and younger, more stable and more vulnerable, but we fit somehow. As partners, I mean, not physically. I’d be lying if I said that I never desired her as the woman she was rapidly growing into, but I never made a pass, and she never teased. We often slept together for warmth or comfort, touching-but-not-that-way as she’d put it, but while it occasionally came up, she never reacted to its presence.
Partners. Friends. Explorers in a world that didn’t seem to have anyone for me to save, or anything to save them from. A world that she didn’t know any more about than I did.
On the plus side, she was awesome at catching rabbits, which significantly reduced the amount of bugs in my diet. I was the better cook, which surprised us both, once we had a variety of things to cook. She was smarter and better educated, filled with ideas for how to improve our lives and extend the reach of our exploration together.
Always together. By unspoken agreement, we never went off on our own, never went out of earshot.
Chaptering…
Low-Code Noodles
Noodle Stoppers are a thing
Things I learned on Amazon recently: there is an entire class of anime figurines designed to sit on your cup noodle to keep it closed while the hot water does its work.
I think the $62 Nitocris is a bit pricy for this, though. I don’t think it would even be safe to work at home with the Super Sonico or Kanu toppers, but the Yui is cute.
Pricing is between reasonable and outrageous, naturally.
Which one did I buy? I’m not telling, but it isn’t one of the ones I’ve linked above. And it won’t go onto a cup noodle; I’ve upgraded to a better class of ramen over the years.
Apple: “I have altered the deal”
Apple’s Rosetta x86-to-ARM translator to be removed in OS update?. Sounds like a licensing issue, since it’s region-specific.
Learn To Low-Code
Microsoft is embedding Excel in YAML. Even after reading the “PowerApps” blog, I haven’t the slightest fucking idea what low-code is good for, apart from scattering business logic across an environment even less sensible than malware-infested spreadsheets.
Pod extract
I cracked open four of the useless “Archer Farms” Nespresso-incompatible pods and successfully brewed Aeropress coffee with the contents. Not bad at all. As expected, it was too finely ground for the Aeropress, requiring quite a bit of pressure even with only one filter (by comparison, with standard commercial ground coffee, I use three filters and still don’t have to press as hard).
Four pods was a bit less than the two scoops I generally use for 12 ounces of coffee, but with the fine espresso grind, it extracted more in the same amount of time/water, so it worked out. One more cup will use up the rest of the box of pods, and then I can crack open the Gevalia pods and see what I get.
1Password CLI notes wrapper
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# simple wrapper for creating/editing 1password secure notes from the
# command line, using https://1password.com/downloads/command-line/
# requires jq and md5sum (just to avoid uploading unchanged files)
#
# must do an initial full sign-in, like this:
# op signin my.1password.com jgreely@example.com --shorthand jgreely
# (using your sign-in url, account name, secret key, and password)
#
# The named vault must already exist in your account.
SHORTHAND=jgreely
VAULT=Notes
EDITOR=emacs
TOKENFILE=~/.1p_token
SESSION=
if [ -f $TOKENFILE ]; then
SESSION=$(<$TOKENFILE)
fi
if ! op list vaults --session $SESSION >/dev/null 2>&1; then
rm -f $TOKENFILE
SESSION=
fi
if [ ! -f $TOKENFILE ]; then
SESSION=$(op signin $SHORTHAND --raw )
touch $TOKENFILE
chmod go= $TOKENFILE
echo $SESSION > $TOKENFILE
fi
TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/$(basename $0).XXXXXX)
OPTS="--session $SESSION --vault $VAULT"
case "$1" in
create|new)
shift
TITLE="$@"
if [ -z "$TITLE" ]; then
TITLE="(untitled)"
fi
$EDITOR $TMPFILE
op create item "secure note" notesPlain="$(<$TMPFILE)" --title "$TITLE" $OPTS > $TMPFILE
UUID=$(jq -r .uuid < $TMPFILE)
echo "UUID: $UUID, TITLE: $TITLE"
;;
list|ls)
op list items $OPTS | jq -r '.[]|[.uuid,.overview.title]|@tsv'
;;
print|cat)
shift
UUID="$1"
op get item "$UUID" --fields notesPlain $OPTS
echo
;;
less|more)
shift
UUID="$1"
op get item "$UUID" --fields notesPlain $OPTS | less
;;
edit)
shift
UUID="$1"
op get item "$UUID" --fields notesPlain $OPTS >> $TMPFILE
md5sum $TMPFILE > $TMPFILE.md5
$EDITOR $TMPFILE
if md5sum -c --quiet $TMPFILE.md5 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo "(file not changed)"
else
op edit item "$UUID" notesPlain="$(<$TMPFILE)" $OPTS
fi
;;
delete|rm)
shift
UUID="$1"
op delete item "$UUID" $OPTS
;;
*)
NAME=$(basename $0)
cat <<EOF
Usage: $NAME [new|ls|cat|less|edit]
new TITLE
ls (returns UUID and TITLE)
cat UUID
less UUID
edit UUID
rm UUID
EOF
;;
esac
rm -f $TMPFILE $TMPFILE.md5
exit 0
Isekai: 1.14
“Angel.”
She jerked in surprise, then relaxed in my arms. “It’s… not entirely appropriate. Are you sure?”
“It was either that or Anchor.”
She laughed and pulled away slightly, staring at me with those older-than-she-looks eyes, understanding what I wasn’t saying. A tiny smile grew into a big one, and we finally met.
“Hello, Jack; I’m Angel. My name is Angel.”
“Hi, Angel. How do you feel about eating bugs?”
“Bugs?”
“Beetles and crayfish, mostly. Sorry, I’ve been away for a while, so the larder’s bare, and I usually have terrible luck catching rabbits.”
“This is a terrible resort and I shall be leaving a scathing review.”
Isekai: 1.13
I hugged her. She needed it.
She clung to me fiercely, and something shifted inside. She wasn’t the wrong redhead any more, not an underage replacement for the one I’d spent so much time wanting to screw or strangle or both. Suddenly I hated there, whatever it was, and whoever had made her live nameless and afraid. I wanted to destroy what had hurt her, protect her from being hurt again, and…
Huh. I wanted to be a hero. For the first time, maybe really the first time, it wasn’t about me.
Ji, ta, shizen. A phrase that mattered to my cranky old sensei, that I’d just memorized to keep him teaching me new things. Self, others, nature. Caring about more than yourself. Caring for more than yourself.
Turns out I’d been alone long before I got here.
Note: not Kaiso
Mega Moos
Long Since Begun, The Clone Wars Have
On the left are two Nespresso-branded capsules (Capriccio and Tokyo Vivalto Lungo). In the middle, you can see good third-party pods (Peet’s Crema Scura and Illy Classico Espresso); slightly different construction at the base, but dimensionally identical to the real thing and completely compatible, including recyclability.
On the right, two plastic clone pods. In front, Gevalia Luminous, which is extremely mild compared to, well, anything else I’ve tried; real espresso lovers seem to describe it as weak, pathetic instant coffee. Unlike the above, it’s not even worth trying it in the larger “lungo” pour, even for someone like me who likes his coffee tarted up in French lingerie and four-inch heels. Pity, really, because I like their k-cups and bagged coffee.
Back right is a thing of pure evil, the Target house brand “Archer Farms”. Where the Gevalia pod will put some of the coffee into your drip tray and some of the grounds into your cup, this nasty thing barely functions at all, making my Essenza Mini strain to push water through it, with the lights flashing in warning, and delivering maybe half the volume of coffee. Safeway’s house brand shows a picture of the same kind of cheesy plastic/foil pod, so I would never try those, either.
I’m going to cut open the remaining Gevalia and Target pods to see how the contents work in my Aeropress. The grind is likely too fine for easy pressing, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the coffee, just the pods.
(Gevalia markets their pods as compostable, but apparently they mean professionally, don’t-try-this-at-home compostable)
Carnation half-n-half tubs
How do they manage to keep customers with a 5% failure rate? I’m shaking each tub as I pull them out of the box, to make sure they’re still liquid. I’ve never had a failed Mini-Moo.
I’ll have to see if someone else sells real half-and-half creamers. You have to read the labels, since many will prominently claim to be “half-and-half” but contain no actual dairy products. “Half what and half what?”
Costco sells a different brand through their business centers, but doesn’t seem to stock it in warehouses. costco.com stocks Mini-Moos, and claims they may be available in warehouses; I’ve never seen them there.
I could also just buy actual pint containers of half-and-half while California remains under Corona-chan Quarantine, but I like the shelf life and portion control of the little tubs.
No shit, Pixiv…
I think we’d all figured this one out.
The real surprise is that only 60% of the recommended images were by Houtengeki (NSFW).
