Now that’s what I call evolution! Although, technically I suppose it’s Gainax rather than Gigantamax…

Related, on a whim I watched the new all-CGI Netflix Pokémon movie while on the elliptical, and while it’s shallow and cliché and poorly acted and basically impenetrable to anyone not well-acquainted with the anime, what really rankles is that they completely failed to make Misty cute. Most of the other females were at least presentable, but damn, the character designer must dislike her.

The Witcher series, on the other hand, is quite good. I bounced on the most recent game, and I’ve never read any of the books, but one of the random people still on Tumblr that I follow is obsessed with it, and it sounded like it had potential.

Corona-chan kind of stole her thunder last week, but as of her birthday on February 26th, Ai Shinozaki has spent 14 of her 28 years deftly using bikinis and lingerie to turn boys into men.

Unrelated, Interspecies Reviewers first does some LARPing, and then shows what a real succubus can do to a man. We thought Crim was an angel, but it turns out he’s actually a Kewpie.

Okay, it’s kind of related.

What isn’t related is that we’re probably going to reschedule the upcoming Japan trip. Our flight into Haneda hasn’t been canceled yet (although lots of Narita flights have, likely because most of the passengers were going on to China or S. Korea), and our hotel has slashed their prices in half, but as I mentioned earlier, a lot of things are closing or already closed, and my sister’s doctor is telling her “not just no, but hell no” (recent recovery from bacterial pneumonia…).

What’s completely unrelated is that I just got a Naganadel in a wonder trade on Pokemon Home. Not obviously hacked like the level 100 6IV Reshiram that showed up a few days ago, at least, and it’s one of the few things that people are willing to trade a MewTwo for.

Now back to Ai-chan.

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This week has had far too many “news” stories to count that appear to be desperately hoping for Zombie-Apocalypse-level results from Corona-chan that kill uncountable numbers of Americans, destroy the US economy, and, most importantly, keep Trump from being re-elected.

I wish I were kidding, but Paul Krugman cheering this week’s massive drop in the DOW is only a small example of the current trend in batshit crazy leftism. Even his.

The problem is, if the world doesn’t end by October, then the party that’s gone all-in for open borders, globalism, and rationed healthcare will find itself holding bake sales to pay back its campaign debts (hashtag brownies, no doubt). Their own demands, proudly broadcast, will be the best evidence that we should never let them back into any position more intellectually demanding than “wrangling the turdcutter through the sewers”.

Before Corona-chan, their primary path to victory was massive vote fraud. Now it’s Mad Max.

“Cave Johnson here. Just a reminder that the core goal of Aperture Gas-Finding Science is to find gas, so make sure you let us know if you see any. If we meet our quarterly gas-finding target, I promise you we will don our bondage gear, fuel our death cars, and drive around in circles, whooping it up and shooting arrows at people. Who is ready to rule the wasteland? Alright, start looking.”

Personally, after the coordinated character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh, I wouldn’t vote for a Democrat to clean toilets with xyr tongue.

Remember when you decided that the multi-player interactivity in Sword and Shield would be restricted to seeing player names and pokemon nicknames, participating in raids without even hand signals, and burning curry together?

The following screenshot from the shiny new trade tool Pokemon Home tells me that your system needs a little work:

NSFC

Seriously, how do you not block the all-caps N-word in an online service where you validate the data before allowing someone to start a trade?

Also, this was on Pokemon Day, when it was announced that Greninja was the most popular pokemon in the world, and sure to be searched for by lots of players.

In other news, I think I’m ready to face the first gym challenge in my new German Shield playthrough…

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Hillary Clinton is launching her own podcast. I figure the opening theme will involve fingernails on a chalkboard.

Or they could use this little ditty, to the tune of Camptown Races:

🎶🎶🎶🎶
Epstein didn’t kill himself,
    doo-dah, doo-dah.
His death wasn’t suicide,
    it was a Clinton hit.
🎶🎶🎶🎶

The government has ordered all schools to close until April. Graduation ceremonies and many public festivals have been canceled. The Studio Ghibli Museum has shut down until March 17th, hoping it will be safe to re-open by then. The US State Department has a level 2 advisory on travel to Japan, instructing travellers to “exercise increased caution”.

I keep checking to make sure our flights haven’t been canceled. And I really need to get rid of the last of the usual sinus infection that followed the cold I had at the beginning of February; I don’t think even the slightest cough or sniffle will amuse the Immigration counter at Haneda.

The good news is that we’re unlikely to get stuck in a huge sweaty crowd at Immigration this time. If they’re still letting people in at all by then…

As for what to do once we’re there, crowds are out. I suspect the monthly craft and flea markets will all be canceled. Popular shopping areas like Teramachi and Nishiki will either be ghost towns or very off our list. This may end up being a temple/museum/restaurant trip with carefully-selected shopping.

Bored and busy, but wanted something more amusing at the top of the page.

SFW but not SFD.

Unrelated thoughts:

• It sucks to spend three days explaining a simple and obvious regression in an open source project that was created by an unannounced breaking change, only to have the author not just blow you off, but suggest that you file a bug on a completely different broken feature that he thinks you should be using instead. Seriously, this is a Jobsian “you’re holding your phone wrong” level of fucked up.

• Corona-chan is harshing Japan’s mellow, leaving me wondering what things will be like when my sister and I get there. There’s also a Rubella-chan tour in the Kanto region.

• I caught them all. For amusement, I then played all the way through the game in Japanese. Then, annoyed by the flood of inane shiny/trade posts in the subreddit (and all the docs about how to exclude particular flairs on Reddit are wrong), I decided to see just how hard it would be to play through far enough to catch your own goddamn foreign Dittos. So I’ve now caught a 4IV free-range organic Korean Ditto, and I don’t speak a word of the language. Honestly, the hardest part was typing in a name for my character (I picked 수영, because I could figure out how to type it in the IME).

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I invite you to speculate on precisely where I think you should shove your ebook pricing model for the upcoming posthumous Heinlein novel:

I was planning to buy it, but now I dislike you and want your company to fail.