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Landfill Road with ‘Putrid Stench’ to Be Named After Barack Obama

The SFGate source for the story leads with the Republicans Pounce angle, of course.

In the DanMachi universe, the economy of Orario is adventurer-driven. Not only do they protect the city (and the world), the magic stones that monsters drop are the basis of all technological advancement, and their most lucrative export. But to get magic stones, you need adventurers, and to get adventurers, you need gods to provide their blessings.

So when the gods make requests…

(from the mobile game)

The novelist came up with a pretty good way to make sense of classic fantasy RPG tropes, but while he’s fleshing that out and exploring some of the darker implications in the side series, if you really step back and look at it, the ugliness and brutality goes to the bone.

All those sweet, pretty guild advisors are sending children to their deaths every day. Not just in the sense that the gods view all their followers as “children”, but young teens and tweens, and if you look around in crowd shots, sometimes much younger. How long do they last, before it hits them that the upper levels are a meat-grinder lined with the bones of the kids they sent in?

It’s not a story I’d enjoy nearly as much as the cheerful harem comedy we got, but sometimes I think about how the world we’re not shown is seriously fucked-up.

Don’t ask me why the episode list on the Food Network web site is in a completely different order from how they’re actually airing. By air date, the most recent episodes are:

• 7: Oyster poor boy sandwich
• 8: Steak tartare and poké
• 9: Dates (stuffed; sticky toffee pudding)
• 10: Sourdough (cheese crackers; waffles; post-apocalypse)

All entertaining to watch, none of them things I’ll ever make.

Three more to go (one double-length) before we’re back to reruns, although there’s the promise of more revised classic episodes.

One of the side effects of having the power go out Saturday night was checking the Amazon app on my iPad to see what I had downloaded, and suddenly remembering that I hadn’t watched Alita yet.

I have only a very vague acquaintance with the source material, and while I could see a few seams and obvious cuts, I found the result quite entertaining. In particular, the Big Eyes that seemed off-putting in early publicity shots quickly faded into the background as Just Part Of The Character, helped by the fact that no one ever called attention to it. Honestly, the only thing I disliked is that Jennifer Connelly is in desperate need of some calories. The severe look worked for the character, but oh, what has been lost.

The usual discrepancy between media reviewers (61%) and movie-watchers (91%) once again demonstrates how irrelevant they’ve become to the whole process. (not that every movie I like gets high audience ratings; I may be the only person in the world who thinks the Sam Rockwell/Anna Kendrick flick Mr. Right is a fun romp with high rewatch value)

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.

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”.

[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:

1. KITHELP
2. MOOSOO
3. HOKEKI
4. Onshowy
5. Holife
6. Homasy
7. WELIKERA
8. Kimitech
9. Kimitech
10. GOOVI
11. Dibea
12. NOVETE
13. Cofuture
14. PHYSEN
15. MECO
16. ONSON
17. VacLife
18. LOZAYI
19. Hikeren
20. Dibea
21. Holife
22. NOVETE
23. AUELEK
24. Aiskki
25. Kimitech
26. zswell
27. EMHFLYFN
28. TopWolf
29. Bissell
30. Shark
31. Shark
32. (16”x13” Emoticon Drawstring Backpack 12-Pack)
33. Janker
34. Silipower
35. VacLife
36. DataVac
37. NOVETE
38. Shark
39. Nayamo
40. 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:

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.