Pokémon takes place in a universe without the concept of “stranger danger”, where it is perfectly reasonable to send pre-teens out on their own to travel the world, battle other kids for their lunch money, go home with newly-met adults, and take candy from strangers. I find this innocence oddly refreshing. In any other game, you’d be asking what exactly this little girl is doing in a hotel room with a dirty cop and two hookers:

In Pokémon-land, though, it just means you’ve found the CEO’s avatar and can battle him for useful loot.

The first sign that the new Pokemon Sword & Shield game(s) would be a hit was Nessa/ルリナ, who hit the fan-sites like a leggy, barely-clad ton of bricks:

(yes, she dresses her early-teen “assistants” in the same outfit, and gives the protagonist a set to wear as well…)

But the real draw has proven to be pouty-punk rival Marnie/マリィ, who’s so popular that in the upcoming DFCDLC, you’ll be able to cosplay as her in-game:

Or in 3D, if you’ve got the chops:

“It’s a Berry tree. Do you want to shake it?”

As for choosing Sword versus Shield, there’s no contest:

This is reinforced in the expansion with Sword-exclusive Clara, who had sexy fan-art about ten minutes after the announcment ended:

Something supporting character Sonia can relate to:

Not that any character has been spared…

Warning: objects in fan-art are larger than in-game.

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No, it is not true that these recommended items are things “other customers often buy again”. Honestly, once is probably enough:

In other news, it’s nice to see that the recommendation engine is back online. Nothing jumped out at me as particularly absurd this morning, but I thank you for pointing out that the new Doctor’s sonic is designed to stimulate the G-spot.

Sitting at home contemplating the Nueske’s gift box that just arrived, and my doorbell rang again. This time it was a small neighbor child who said, “your cat is hungry”.

“I don’t have a cat”, I replied, causing the child to look utterly baffled. I explained that I knew the beast and fed him when he stopped by, but had no idea who he actually belonged to.

I also have no idea who the small child belongs to. My neighborhood is sufficiently unwoke that they roam freely without anyone calling to have their parents arrested.

Apparently I’ve gone too far poking fun at the results of your recommendation system, because you’ve stopped recommending anything except a few “buy it again” tiles:

• “Buy it again in Business, Industrial, & Scientific Supplies”: Loctite, flush cutters, screw caps, and threaded screw inserts. (aka “crafting supplies”)

• “Buy it again in Office Products”: super-sticky Post-Its, NFC tags, and inkjet business cards. (I go through Post-Its like candy; the cards are for giving the addresses of our hotels in Japan to cab drivers and luggage shippers)

• “Buy it again in Home”: trash bags, Boveda humidifier refills, and a 12-pack of stick-on pen loops. (I only needed 2-3 pen loops, one for each Rocketbook and the third for my old Surface Pro, so it will be a long time before I run out…).

• “Buy it again in Home Improvement”: Loctite, Loctite, stick-on plastic feet, and Philips Hue motion sensors. (seriously, Amazon, how much Loctite do you think I go through in a month?)

• “Buy it again in other categories”: charcoal soap, toothbrush heads, USB3-to-Micro/C/Lightning cable, Gevalia Mocha Latte K-Cups.

That last one is amusing, because I actually have a subscription for the k-cups, but in a different box size, so Amazon knows I like the stuff, but doesn’t realize they’re already sending me 36 of them each month. (4 boxes of 9 is $5.65 cheaper than 6 boxes of 6)

This is my daily “liquid pie” indulgence. I drink it with two Splendas and two Mini-Moos, which is like pouring coffee on cupcake batter, yet still only 100 calories.

If I have any further coffees (instead of drinking Diet Pepsi), they consist of Gevalia or Peet’s medium-roast ground coffees, made in an Aeropress (or the new Aeropress Go travel kit) with three Splendas, a Mini-Moo, and a pinch of sea salt.

(for the AeroNerdly: non-inverted, 2 filters, 2 scoops, 2-ounce pour to wet the grounds for 30 seconds, 2 more ounces and ~40 seconds of stirring, slow press all the way down and scrape the foam into the mug, then milk-n-sugar and add 8 more ounces of water)

More precisely, I made it 20 minutes into the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who before giving up in a combination of exasperation and boredom.

Update

Ah, not a new season, just a “Who Years Day” special. It’s called “part 1”, but since I couldn’t finish it, I don’t know if it’s really a two-parter. And I don’t care enough to look it up.

Pelosi/Schumer, decrypted:

“We won’t turn in our homework until you agree to finish it for us.”

Woke up this morning, looked at my phone, and saw that I hadn’t received any work email since about 1:15 AM. Since I’m guaranteed to get at least one hourly cron-job result, that’s bad.

Login to mail server (good! that means the VPN is up and the servers still have power!), check the queue, and it eventually returns a number in excess of 500,000.

Almost all of them going to the qanotify alias. Sent from a single server.

The good news is that this made it very easy to remove them all from the queue. The bad news is that I can’t just kill it at the source; QA is furiously testing stuff for CES, and I don’t know which pieces are related to that. And, no, no one in QA actually checks for email from the test services, so they won’t know until I — wait for it — email them directly.

For more fun, the specific process that’s doing it is not sending through the local server’s Postfix service, so I can’t shut it down there, either. It’s making direct SMTP connections to the central IT mail relay server.

Well, that I can fix. plonk

(this didn’t delay incoming email from outside the company, just things like cron jobs and trouble tickets and the hourly reports that customer service needs to do their jobs; so, no pressure, y’know)

First update

QA: “I see in the logs that the SMTP server isn’t responding.”

J: “Correct. And it will stay that way until this is fixed.”

(I find myself doing this a lot these days; User: “X doesn’t do Y!”, J: “Correct”)

Second update

Dev Manager: “Could you send us an example of the kind of emails that you’re seeing?”

J: “You mean the one that’s in the message you’re replying to?”

Third update

DM: “Can you give my team access to all of the actual emails?”

J: “No, I deleted the 500,000+ that were in the spool. But it looks like at least 25,000 got through to this list of people on your team, who would have known about this before I did if they didn’t have filters set up to ignore email coming from the service nodes.”

J: “And, what the hell, here’s thirty seconds of work from the shell isolating the most-reported CustomerPKs from the 25,000 emails that got through, so you can grep the logs in a useful way.”

Fourth update

John: “Ticket opened, assigned to devs, and escalated.”

(John used to work for me…)

Fifth update

Senior Dev: “Ooh, my bad; when I refactored SpocSkulker, I had it return ERROR instead of WARNING when processing an upgrade/downgrade for a customer that didn’t currently have active services. Once a minute. Each.”

SD: “Oh, and you can hand-edit the Tomcat config to point SMTP to an invalid server while you’re waiting for the new release.”

J: “Yeah, no, I’ll just keep blocking the traffic until the release is rolled out and I’ve confirmed with tcpdump.”

(one of my many hats here used to be server-side QA for the services involved, so I immediately knew it was coming from SpocSkulker, and could have shut it off myself; but then it wouldn’t have gotten fixed until January)

Anticipated update

J receives massive fruit basket from Production team for catching this before it rolled out to them and took out their email servers.

The single most useful feature of virtual desktops in Windows 10 is getting out of crashed full-screen games:

Win-Ctrl-D
Ctrl-Alt-Del
"End Task"
Win-Tab