Driving home last night, I passed a Lincoln Navigator sporting a Bernie sticker.

Cavalry! Action! No, wait, heroic rant first, then action.

Pro tip: do not piss off Ottarl. Nice touch having him show a moment of kindness for contrast.

And Bell, you really need to work on the MCSA effect for your firebolts.

Next episode? Ares.

Haruhime is (finally!) the new character in the game this week, and I’m pretty sure she’ll be showing up in a lot of Wargame teams. Possibly all of them, since I went ahead and spent free Iris on her 10 gacha pulls, and got enough to max-limit-break her (guaranteed 3, got 6; even if I’d had any paid Iris, I wouldn’t have needed to spend it).

9/19 Update

New Wargames started last night. A Haruhime buffed with increased counter rate is as unkillable as an old-school WOW pally. Why?

This is her standard attack, which hits all opponents and significantly debuffs them:

Akane
[Foes] Fast Mid Fire M.Attack & Str. and Mag. -40%/3 turns

This is her passive effect:

Encouragement: I
When countering, instead of attacking regularly, it (Lo) Heals an Ally. Prioritizes an Ally with lower percentage HP.

There is no limit to how many times this effect can go off in a turn. If her counter rate is buffed, she’s constantly healing the most-damaged member of her party. If you can’t one-shot her, even damage-over-time effects won’t wear her down. And guess what one of her other attacks does?

Shiika
[Self] 15% MP Heal & [Allies] Counter Rate and Penetration Rate +30%/3 turns

And if you make her assistant “[Cyan] Naza Ersuisu” (which you should, just to have a bikini hot dog with a kimono hot fox), here’s her effect at level 80:

Cyan Drop++
[Allies] 20% HP Regen & Heal and Counter Rate +10%

Unlike last time, you at least did the math to make sure I know the 6-pack’s a ripoff…

Was watching an episode of Zombieland Saga just now, and realized that one reason people are disappointed with Cop Craft is that the OP isn’t over-the-top enough. It’s more exciting than the show they actually made, but within the bounds of plausibility. They could have made a show like the OP, and since they don’t seem to care how coherently they’re cramming six books into 12 episodes, perhaps they should have.

There are plenty of kitsune musume (狐娘) on Pixiv who are not 800-year-old lolicon bait. I have a few on tap…

more...

You know what I hate? Being alone in the car without a giant corporation listening to every word. Sure, I could turn on Siri, but I still haven’t forgiven her for her first failure. I’ve never even tried the G or M listeners, which means A is for Alexa!

Last Wednesday, just shy of a year after I signed up for an invitation, Amazon finally offered me the chance to give my car a voice of her own. Friday night, it arrived, and was quickly, easily set up.

Saturday morning, I spent about five minutes trying to find the correct incantation to get it to open Waze and navigate me to a friend’s house. I ended up settling for Apple Maps and looking up his street address, and only later found out that choice of navigation app is a global setting for your account, not something like “tell waze to take me to Scott’s house”.

Not a big fan of Apple Maps for in-car navigation, by the way; the colors seem off at night, and it automatically activates the matching Watch app to try to get you to look at your wrist while driving. Having walking instructions show up on my wrist is one thing, but driving? No. (and, of course, the place where I’m most likely to need walking instructions is Japan, where Apple Maps ain’t so hot)

Interestingly, one of my friends got his Echo Auto two months ago, and considers it a piece of junk, based largely on having to re-link it to his car and phone pretty much every time he tried to use it. He’s on Android, though, which may explain why the device is still invitation-only; iOS may be a moving support target, but Android is a swarm of locusts.

The biggest challenge I faced getting it working was the fact that it comes with a vent mount, and with my phone already vent-mounted, I really didn’t want to cover another vent. The results are kind of clunky at the moment, and the long-term solution may involve Velcro.

Functionality-wise, it only supports streaming; the 60+ GB of music on my phone is inaccessible, and it can’t even communicate with the phone’s iTunes app. It can link to an Apple Music account and stream from it, but that’s it. It can’t even tell an app to start playing, at least, not successfully; I managed to get it into a state where nothing would play audio via Bluetooth until I rebooted the car. Fortunately I had the audio cable hooked up as well, and the Echo successfully fell back to it.

I haven’t tried any skills or other app integrations, and haven’t tested it on a long trip or with dubious cell coverage. There are reports that it can consume quite a bit of your data plan if you use it a lot, but I don’t have any plans for a long drive until February.

Now, if I could just manage to convince Alexa to play a song without wasting 30 seconds mispronouncing the title and artist and reminding me that I’m using Amazon Music…

Today, the NY Times blamed inanimate objects for mass murder:

“Airplanes took aim”, huh? I look forward to their upcoming editorials demanding waiting periods and background checks for airline owners, bans on high-capacity planes that have no legitimate use, and quotes from experts showing that if you’re foolish enough to own a plane, criminals justice-involved-persons will just take it away and use it against you.

Not because they want to, you understand; because the nature of the object somehow demands it.

So, which is worse?

• NY Times editors don’t supervise the junior interns writing their twitter feed.

• They do.

Ponytail Shion is Best Shion, but Homare is still Best Girl. Especially since she finally ignored some of Dad’s advice.