“What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.”
— Erin Ching, jackbooted thugThe data Apple hides from you
Was looking at free disk space on my MacBook (which, since Mojave, has
always been less than the sum of used+snapshots), and tripped across
something new: DataVaults. TL/DR, unless you turn off System Integrity
Protection in the firmware, Apple apps can create data stores that no
other software can access. Not for backups, not for privacy
scrubbing, not even for running a simple stat() call as root. I
don’t even know why Mail.app has a secret vault, but it does, and
it’s not the only one.
I do not like this.
Cop Craft 10, DanMachi 2.11
Since last week’s clip episode gave the Cop Craft team extra time to make an exciting, coherent story… No, wait, it’s a mess. I really wasn’t expecting this series to end up at “who’s interfering in the mayoral election?”. The chase scene wasn’t bad, but Kei finding the needle in the haystack broke up the action in a way that just sucked all the fun out. It’s possible I’ve already forgotten half of this episode. Also, blah-blah-blah-technomancy-blah-blah.
Meanwhile, DanMachi pulls an “as you know, Bob” to chop out 80% of the Ares plotline in book 8 and focus on the important things in life: Bell’s reaction to Haruhime’s panties, Hestia’s reaction to Haruhime’s attraction to Bell, Lili’s reaction to Hestia’s overreaction, Hestia’s reaction to Bell’s reaction to her “hypothetical”, and everyone’s reaction to Ares’ reaction to Ganesha’s stupidity. Followed by a literal cliffhanger ending.
This week’s new character in the game is of course Ares. I didn’t even look at his stats and skills, since as I mentioned in my update to last week’s comments, Haruhime is so OP that she utterly dominates the current Wargames, and when both sides have her counter rate buffed, the fight is like watching paint dry. She lacks the cleansing power of the 3-star Lili that carried my party for so long, but her combination of heals and buffs and debuffs is insane, and she has good AoE damage.
Seriously, if you could configure your Wargames party with a “kill the foxgirl first” button, everyone would. Her in-game powers have almost nothing to do with her book/anime power, but the net effect is pretty much the same.
UPDATE
Looks like the whales have figured out which units to combine to counter her. For those of us unwilling to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a mobile game, victory is “killing the other guy’s foxgirl first”.
Dear Amazon,
[this late-night blog post brought to you by a blown transformer that took out power to my neighborhood for three hours tonight…]
There’s one thing you could add to your web site that would vastly increase my shopping satisfaction: a checkbox to exclude randomly-named Chinese knockoff products with obviously phony 5-star reviews.
Here are the “brands” of the top-rated (“4 Stars & Up”, with Prime!) handheld vacuum cleaners. In order:
- KITHELP
- MOOSOO
- HOKEKI
- Onshowy
- Holife
- Homasy
- WELIKERA
- Kimitech
- Kimitech
- GOOVI
- Dibea
- NOVETE
- Cofuture
- PHYSEN
- MECO
- ONSON
- VacLife
- LOZAYI
- Hikeren
- Dibea
- Holife
- NOVETE
- AUELEK
- Aiskki
- Kimitech
- zswell
- EMHFLYFN
- TopWolf
- Bissell
- Shark
- Shark
- (16”x13” Emoticon Drawstring Backpack 12-Pack)
- Janker
- Silipower
- VacLife
- DataVac
- NOVETE
- Shark
- Nayamo
- FUJIWAY
Seriously, the first actual recognizable brand you might find in a store other than Walmart was #29! Sure, they’re pretty much all made in the same three Chinese factories with different labels and quality-control standards, but I can’t even pronounce “EMHFLYFN”, much less get support or service from them.
To add insult to injury, take a good look at “Amazon’s Choice” box for the actual most-popular, best-selling product in this category:
The G is for 'game'
Spoofing that stupid “rpg consent form” helped me decide what I most dislike about it: it’s adversarial. It’s the exact opposite of friends and strangers coming together for a shared narrative fantasy experience, replacing it with an attempt to control the experience for others.
You don’t sit down with a group of friends and say, “you can’t say or do anything that bothers me, including but not limited to everything I’ve marked on this form”.
You don’t sign up for a 1920s Call Of Cthulhu game at a con and say, “you can’t discuss blood, gore, torture, police, claustrophobia, racism, sexism, kissing, hurting animals, forest fires, or thirst”.
About the only scenario where the overly-specific contents of this form could be useful is if you were a teenager who just moved to a new town and wanted to join an open game at the local hobby shop without getting eaten alive by a group of total assholes. Who would just use your answers as ammunition to make you run off in tears, so maybe not there, either.
So I inverted it.
"Fixed that for ya..."
I’ve made a modest revision to that “rpg consent form”…
Oh, Sweet Meteor Of Death,
Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea, please write on the board a thousand times:
Therapeutic Role-Play Is Not Gaming.
UPDATE!
Someone has responded with the treatment it deserves:
This is a DM-less narrative RPG. Before play commences, players need to have read and filled (anonymously) the RPG CONSENT FORM. If any items where ticked, then do not, I repeat DO NOT, play the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE FREEFORM RPG.
The object of the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE RPG is to create a romantic scene that tried to break from the normal tropes and cliches. Here is how to do this.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Alice Wndr'lnd wgah'nagl fhtagn
Proof that the stars are aligning to seal our doom is the announcement of a new Hogan’s Heroes tv series, sure to destroy my few remaining childhood memories.
