Yes, California is on fire. Mostly in the mountains right now, but the mandatory evacuation zones cover a lot of the highways leading out of the affected areas, so, y’know, leave now while you still can. The LA Times has a useful but graphically muddy map covering all the active fires.

The one nearest me, the River Fire, is mostly working its way through mountain areas that are very sparsely populated, with the exception of Carmel Valley. The perimeter doesn’t seem to have shifted much in that direction, so presumably that’s part of the ~10% they have contained. It’s not a threat to me at this time, apart from the smoke and ash; it would have to go through a lot of irrigated fields and the entire city of Salinas, which would admittedly suck.

The SCU Complex Fire (East Bay) is huge, prompting evacuations in parts of Fremont, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, etc, and is getting close to I-5 near Patterson. The evacuations are only advisory for Morgan Hill and Gilroy at the moment, according to this map. While the northwest edge is getting close to I-680, the southwest edge is still comfortably far from Highway 101.

The CZU Complex Fire (Santa Cruz Mountains) is currently completely uncontained and the mandatory evacuation zone now includes parts of Santa Cruz and all of Scotts Valley, as well as Highways 1, 9, and 17.

North of the Bay Area, Napa and Sonoma are threatened by the LNU Complex Fire, and west of that, the 13-4 Fire stretches from Highway 101 to the ocean, northwest of Santa Rosa. And there are a lot of smaller fires scattered around the state.

On the bright side, the heat wave that had the utilities threatening rolling outages has subsided somewhat, although the advice to open your windows at night when it’s cool is probably not being followed in most areas (coughcough).

After being exposed to the trailer, I skimmed the fan translations of the original web-novels of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, the upcoming isekai series about a girl and her bear suit. The web-novels were written chapter by chapter with no plan, which I presume was cleaned up for the print edition, currently up to 16 books. The author’s notes are sometimes more amusing than the story, which is the over-familiar “Japanese teen becomes ridiculously overpowered in a fantasy world”.

Judging by the book covers, Our Heroine’s hobby is loli-collecting.

Afternoon Update

At the present time, my neighborhood is not on fire, and is not predicted to be on fire any time soon. The wildfire that’s south of town is apparently moving further southeast into the mountains. This would be a good day to wear real masks, though, rather than the mandated sneezeguards.

Just Say No

MoveOn just spam-texted me to ask if I’ll be supporting Joe Biden, because (no shit, it really says this) “we deserve real leaders who govern for all of us – not just the wealthy few”.

Related, did anyone ask Billy Porter why he borrowed his DNC wardrobe from the set of The Hunger Games? Is he working on a Broadway musical version of it?

When October Goes

As I continue casting about for things to watch, I tried out Netflix’s October Faction. It’s a one-a-day sort of series that doesn’t binge well, and so far Deloris is the only character I find interesting. Also, while the twins are delivering lines written in comprehensible Japanese, the actors obviously don’t speak it. Their phonetic delivery reminds me a lot of Jack in Asobi Ni Iku Yo!. At least it didn’t remind me of this (Not Safe For Sanity).

This discussion of its non-renewal pretty much nailed it:

“For fans of the monster-of-the-week genre, you can think of it like Supernatural with a more stagnant setting and less charismatic leads.”

This rare moment of clarity doesn’t mean that every other article on Looper isn’t completely full of shit, of course.

Amusing connection: the actress playing mystery gal Alice was on an episode of Forever Knight.

Bullfight of Love

Completely unrelated, I happened to be listening to a mix of the top 100 songs in Japan from 1981, and Ai no Corrida is on it. I’m inclined to think that Quincy Jones kind of missed the point of the original movie.

Amusing note: one of the short pieces we went through in my Japanese group reading class mentioned filmmaker Ōshima and this film, and the teacher realized for the first time that the title included the Spanish word for “bullfight”. Difficulty: she has a PhD in Spanish literature.

By the way, that top-100 list also included Fame and Morning Train. And, yes, City Connection.

Lindsey Stirling has recorded a new theme song for the Azur Lane mobile game. Not terrible, but I hoped for better.

My favorite mobile game song is still Saori Hayama’s DanMemo theme, Lumière. And she has a new album coming out soon.

Meanwhile, the Act-Age manga series has been cancelled after the writer was arrested for not acting his age. I haven’t followed up to see precisely what the cameras showed him doing (or trying to do) to those two junior high school girls, but they reported him to the cops for it, and he was identifiable in the video.

Get out of jail free

According to the official daily numbers for my county, fully 25% of jail inmates have tested positive since they started covid-counting, with zero deaths.

Geofail

Engadget’s inline ads continue to think I’m located in Quincy, this time to shill for match.com. Pretty sure I don’t want to drive 300 miles to meet an available woman. Mostly because stories that begin that way often end with “found in shallow grave”. Also, not desperate.

9 to 5

With two weeks left to go before I start the new job, I’m trying to come up with a “workday routine”. It has, after all, been over four months since I had a “work day”.

Since I don’t have actual work to do yet, those portions of the routine will be devoted to things like tearing my home office apart and putting it back together in a way that looks good on Zoom. I believe the large framed photo of Carmen Berg in lingerie would invite unwanted attention from HR, and I should probably keep the sword rack out of sight for at least the first few weeks.

I’m thinking travel posters, Funko Pops, plushies, and the usual pile of obsolete computer hardware should work nicely. Maybe some camera gear.

Wide base to prevent loss

I parsed this image wrong at first. At least, I hope I did.

In the Mac version of Office 365, it is not only impossible to prevent the list of “recently-opened documents” from storing details about everything you’ve done in Word, Excel, etc, until you manually right-click each document to remove them, documents that were opened from a network share that’s no longer available can’t be removed at all.

Any attempt to right-click on them pops up an alert three times, then dismisses the right-click menu before you can reach it.

Monday’s series of interviews was the most I’ve talked to human beings in months. It’s had the effect of making me a bit more stir crazy, because now I’m back to just chatting with the Porch Cat. Things went well enough that they called me with a great offer this afternoon, so I think I’ll celebrate by leaving the house.

The Dumpster Fire That Is LinkedIn

I started updating my résumé at the end of May, when I started getting bored with a lockdown that was apparently never going to end. I signed up for LinkedIn’s premium service, but saw no real benefit to it; among other issues, it added an item to my feed that said “you’d be a top applicant for these 3 jobs”, and when you clicked on it, you’d get their generic job search that didn’t necessarily include any of those companies on the first few pages of results.

In two full months, the most-relevant results in the search never included Pure Storage. Instead, their recruiter found me in his search results and set up a call. After he forwarded a link to my profile to the hiring manager and set up the first interview, this finally showed up in my LinkedIn feed:

That’s some mighty fine sleuthing there, Lou.

Optical Deportment

My preferred eye doctor isn’t in-network for me right now, because my former employer switched their insurance a few years back and I’m still on their plan. This turns out to be a good thing in 2020, because she’s located inside Lenscrafters, which is inside the mall, which is closed by decree. My current plan is accepted by Costco, which is open. The waiting list was six weeks, but someone cancelled and I got in the next day.

No change in my prescription, and they still had the discontinued “big man friendly” frames I liked, so now I’ve got spare bifocals. Since they had a sale going on, I also bought a pair of dedicated computer glasses in another “large head” frame; the doc confirmed that I’d calculated the adjustment correctly when I ordered a pair online last year.

More fun with WSL2

Surprisingly, one of the things I haven’t done in these months of lockdown is fire up my big gaming PC. At all. Last night when I was rearranging my office, I ran a full backup, downloaded all the updates since March, manually upgraded to the May release of Win10, and set up WSL2/Terminal.

Despite their docs telling you to use the Microsoft Store for Terminal and your Linux distros, both are available on Github (I’m using the good CentOS 8.2 build). And once you’ve got a distro set up the way you like it, you can just export it to a tarball and copy it to another machine.

On this machine, my primary use for the Linux environment will be editing game save files. 😁

(if the lockdown continues much longer, perhaps I’ll finally get around to sorting through all of my obsolete computer hardware, wiping the disks and e-wasting anything that’s not useful to me)

Historical isekai novels…

“Accidentally sent back in time, I used my superior knowledge of science and technology to impress the king, reform the country, and get the girl, only to be done in by a malicious wizard.” By Tsuwein Maruko.

Astra Service

After carefully examining the relevant scenes in the “simulcast” and “uncut” versions of Kanata no Astra, I can confirm that whatever changes made did not include adding more detail to either Quitterie’s shower scene in episode 4 or the bikini atoll scenes in episode 5. Pity.

Mostly Peaceful

Will the last adult to leave Portland please turn out the lights.