…sure enough, it becomes a door stop.

Ten days ago, panic-buying hadn’t reached my neighborhood; the only things out of stock were hand sanitizer and masks (most of which weren’t the antiviral kind). Last night, both CVS and Safeway had empty shelves where the bottled water and toilet paper would be, and half-empty shelves of rice and beans.

But everything else was still in stock. Propane, candles, coffee, canned foods, kleenex (even the “anti-viral” kind), tampons, cereal, beer, bandaids, vitamins, aspirin, cold medicine, soap, bleach, cough drops, etc, etc.

Um, if all you’re buying is water, toilet paper, and rice, you’re preparing for a very peculiar apocalypse. What, you’re gonna sit on the porch in the dark boiling bottled water over a toilet-paper stove to cook your rice as the zombies roam the neighborhood looking for brains? Relax, you’ve just proven that you’re safe from them.

Vaguely related, don’t ask me to explain how a search for “propane” on Amazon returned Black Scorpion: The Series on Prime Video…

Even worse, she’s gone viral.

What’s the quickest way to improve the horrible Silicon Valley traffic? Have Google tell all employees to work from home.

I had to make a short trip to Ohio on Friday to attend a relative’s funeral. Security at SFO was pre-9/11 in its simplicity: empty your pockets, keep your coat, belt, and shoes on, keep your laptop in your bag, and walk through the metal detector. They didn’t even have bins out to put your stuff in. Coming back from DAY today, they wanted laptops and coats in bins, but belts and shoes stayed on.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in an airport or on a plane before where no one had a cough, sneeze, or sniffle. The closest thing to a cough was the guy next to me who wolfed down his Wolfgang Puck pizza too quickly and had a short bout of reflux. Lots of hand sanitizer and wipes, very few masks on non-Asians.

The small regional planes (no such thing as a direct flight to Dayton any more) were pretty full, but the long Chicago flights were no more than 2/3 full, for which my elbows and knees were grateful.

Today’s easy-to-assemble Pixiv tag is 剥ぎ取りたいブラ, “bra I want to tear off”. To be followed by “cops I want to be arrested by”, “lawyers I want to defend me”, and “prison guards who won’t make me cry like a little girl”.

Work-safety is, of course, dubious.

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If even half of what I’ve heard about the recent Revelations (“chapter six”) in Doctor Who is true, no one can ever claim that she hasn’t been rewritten to be the specialist snowflake ever. Also, I have no desire to find out if it’s true; I didn’t make it through the first episode, and it sounds like the only possibly-interesting thing they did was briefly bring back Captain Jack.

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.