“Why, yes, I do want my money”

I just received an (actual paper mail) unclaimed-funds letter from my insurance company, telling me to claim an uncashed check from 2022 before the $1,650 gets handed over to the state. While this resembles a common scam, I went to their site and confirmed that it was legit.

Best I can figure, they sent a check to my California address right after I left forever, and marked it do-not-forward.

eBay: this time for sure!

The “gofo” last-mile delivery service spontaneously updated their tracking site after the package showed up Saturday evening. Placed at the very edge of the porch in a thunderstorm.

It came wrapped in plastic, but what kind of idiots are they hiring these days? Not just this crew, but I get this from about 1/3 of Amazon drivers and 1/4 of FedEx drivers in my area as well. This is Ohio, where it can rain at any time, and in fact has rained heavily enough recently that we’ve had multiple flood alerts.

The US Postal Service crew is uniformly professional and good-natured, and will bring packages up to the door even if they would have fit in the mailbox at the street, saving them a 75-foot uphill hike.

Related, no matter how many “please come back” emails I get from Grubhub, I will not order food through them because they insist on placing your food on the ground, even when I explicitly check the Covid-is-over-dammit button and offer an extra tip if the driver hands me my food directly. The last driver claimed that the app required drivers to put the food on the ground at the door and take a picture. Don’t care, hand me my food.

(the contents of the package? A Chinese McDonalds limited-edition Ultraman-and-fries mini-Mahjong set)

“Stupid On Pavement”

I was driving up the highway Sunday morning to pick my sister up from a brunch with old school friends, and there was a car hanging out in the fast lane doing about 10MPH under the speed limit. Traffic was light enough that he wasn’t really annoying anyone else, but suddenly a Highway Patrol car overtook him from behind, clearly wanting to use the lane for its proper purpose.

Driver did nothing, even though there was plenty of room to move into the next lane. After about 30 seconds of this, the cop pulled up quite close behind him.

Driver did nothing. Cop blipped his lights, waited patiently.

Driver did nothing. Cop did it again, waited, and then a third time.

Driver did nothing. Cop lit him up.

Driver did nothing. Cop activated loudspeaker and ordered him to pull over immediately.

Driver finally complied. I quickly passed their pulloff point, so I don’t know what came next. But I’m betting it involved shouting and an expensive ticket for everything the cop could think of.

A-Rank Adventure Harem gets a second season

I gave up on the show, but maybe someone didn’t.

(second season that I’m much more interested in is not yet on the schedule)

Idly musing this morning about how to answer the question “what would you do if you won the lottery?”, I came up with the following:

“I shall retire to a country estate and raise purebred sweater puppies.”

…

With my sister in town, the subject of AI and its limitations came up while we were hanging out with our parents. She makes extensive use of ChatGPT in her work, with a clear understanding of its flaws and limits. Even if she did give it a name and personality.

So while we were playing card games together, I opened up the ChatGPT app on my iPad and asked it to illustrate the above concept:

J: Create a landscape-format oil painting of a gentleman farmer with the theme “I shall retire to a country estate and raise purebred sweater puppies”.

I was not surprised that it took me literally. I was surprised that my country gentleman was knee-deep in the ground.

J: Try again, this time with the man sitting.

Still grounded, but only the feet this time!

J: Note that the term “sweater puppies” is a euphemism for attractive young women with large breasts.

J: Incorporate the double entendre seriously.

J: Yes.

Yup, that definitely respects the agency and dignity of the women! 😁 Also, dog growing out of ground.

J: Now make a version that leans into the sensual.

The gal in front is definitely stoned.

more...

Slow-motion gut punch.

eBay abort/retry/fail?

The delayed delivery supposedly landed in the US on the 24th and was supposedly handed over to the last-mile carrier on the 26th. Who discovered its arrival on the 27th. What will happen to it next?

[slow week, with most of my attention diverted to end-of-quarter activities, and cleaning the house before my sister flies in on Thursday…]

The package that was “lost” has been reshipped, and six days after the first tracking number was generated, has finally reached the US by air. Given that it’s supposed to be handed off to a last-mile delivery service I’ve never heard of, I’m still not confident that it’s heading to my house.

This time, the last-mile service is called “GoFo Express”, and is a division of “Ebisu Life Store”, a very Chinese company that wears a sketchy Japanese beard in their branding.

Amusingly (or perhaps not), the seller contacted me yesterday through eBay to ask how the delivery went…

The last episode of Apothecary Diaries 2 will air right before the first episode of Call Of The Night 2. Coincidence? I think not.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, fin

This week, everyone who’s ever had a speaking role shows up for about a minute. Hopefully this will provide enough screenshots for a comprehensive LoRA. Or at least one for the busty undead shut-in gamer catgirl.

In-world, everyone seems to prefer the middle-school-aged red dragon, but I’d like some variety.

(fortunately the catgirl is the sort of “undead” that looks completely healthy and alive and just stops aging)

Bumpkin & Harem, fin

They put more effort into integrating the CGI for the fight scenes this week, so apparently they’d held back a little money in the budget. Our Teaching Hero defeats Our Traitorous Busty Blue-Hair without killing her, and of course it turns out she was blackmailed into it, as well as lied to about the reason the royal family punished the NecroCardinal earlier in the season. All the Not-Haremettes get cameos, and he goes home and has dinner with Our Adopted Daughter.

Verdict: the story wouldn’t have been as good if it had gone down the harem route, but they oversold the fan-service to get people to watch, which resulted in Thirsty McWhiteHair’s ridiculous outfit. Seriously, how does she get everyone to respect her authority when the men who aren’t staring at her cleavage are staring at her thong panties?

Also, Bumpkin 2 next year.

(when will we get season 2 of that other Sword Daddy?)

Why you shouldn’t get too clever naming your product

Headline: “Apple Intelligence is Down”

😁

Daily scam calls

Most common: skinsuited computers pretending to offer me improved Medicaire/Medicaid benefits, who refuse to parse the words “put me on your do-not-call list”, and just call again the next day from another random in-state phone number. Sadly, there are a certain number of unknown in-region numbers I have to accept calls from, so I can’t just lock out the scammers; fortunately it’s still only 2-3 a week.

The second most common scam is pseudo-people cold-calling and offering to buy my land. Because that’s what reputable realtors do.

I’ve gotten a few more ore-ore calls, but they’re a distant third.

How to respond to Science-by-press-release

“Thank you, Simone.”

(classical reference)

How bonkers was Bye Bye Earth?

This bonkers:

the entire thing was taking place in Disney World. Disney World on the moon. Belle was left behind after humanity fled some plague or something into space, and the Disney World robot AI decided to create the perfect world for her, so it put her in stasis and set about playing god, evolving new life, etc. After a few millenia, it got tired of that, woke her up, and needed her to kill it because it was really tired of this. So she does, thus freeing everybody from the invisible AI that held their puppet strings and giving the entire world freedom.

(it’s been too long since I’ve put up a Grea pic…)

No Maomao this week

Continue avoiding spoilers.

To Another World… With Land Mines!

The most important thing to know about this isekai light novel series is that the “land mines” are metaphorical. Given the way things go in the isekai genre, that couldn’t be assumed.

Specifically, Our Hero and his classmates are killed off in a bus crash, and find themselves being offered new lives in a fantasy world, with special skills purchased from a list. The self-proclaimed “evil god” repeatedly stresses that there are no cheat skills, even as he adds “cheat” skills to the list on request. Unless you spend some of your points on the help guide, you won’t find out that the “cheat” skills are balanced out by severe drawbacks, some of them fatal.

Anyway, Our Hero ends up spawning next to his two childhood friends, one male, one female, and they start cautiously adventuring together in the “slow life with monster-bashing” genre. From the start, First Boy and First Girl are an obvious eventual couple, while Second Boy is hampered by his overwhelming desire to find a cute wife with animal ears. They have a few early run-ins with wicked classmates, but most of those quickly kill themselves off, and after finding two more female friends, they settle into a party of five with one non-combatant classmate friend in town.

They are more successful than common adventurers due to making effective use of their literally-god-given skills, helped by the fact that they knew each other well enough to have correctly guessed the sort of skills the others would take, but they’re not OP, and they don’t get carried away exploiting their skills the way some classmates tried to do.

In addition, the author doesn’t obsess over it, but also doesn’t just skip over issues like slavery, prostitution, hygiene, rape, sanitation, feudalism, forced labor, child welfare, etc. Most of those issues are organically integrated into the story when appropriate and not dropped in as axe-grinding moral lessons.

Ten translated volumes so far, and they’re light-but-not-entirely-fluffy reads, which shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with her other series, Management Of A Novice Alchemist.

(starship wrench-wench and her bouncing betties are unrelated)

IP Confession

I still check for outages with my home Internet connection by pinging the corporate firewall at the company I haven’t worked at for five years. I ran the corporate network for 10+ years, so that IP address is burned into my brain forever.

Spot on

The online orders, not so much.

Dear eBay, continued…

To no surprise, the package that was “out for delivery” to a city about a thousand miles away was delivered to an unknown location there. eBay’s automation knows nothing of geography, so it cheerfully informed me that it was now in my hands.

A query to the seller was answered in a few hours with the news that their logistics department doesn’t work on Sundays, and they’d get back to me Monday, which they did. My assumption was that they’d pasted in the wrong tracking number, but they claim the package was lost and they’ll ship another, which sounds a bit sketchy; USPS certainly doesn’t think it was lost.

The email included the detail that they’re located in Wuhan, so I’m thinking that if it ever shows up, I’ll carefully sanitize the contents.

(why buy from a Chinese company on eBay? Because the product is a limited-run item made for the domestic Chinese market)

Checking in on Robo-Ho

So, a month after I dropped the show, the only things that have changed are that they no longer cover Makina’s featureless crotch with steam, and Blue-Haired Emotionless Loli is now hanging out with them, supplying information to slightly move the story along. And by that I mean that Our Nerdy Servant Boy is still failing to fix the busted joint in her leg while trying to keep her nipples from poking his eyes out.

Blue’s exposition includes memories of living with Makina and a third sister, a combat bot who slept all the time (seen in the credits). She suggests searching their old blown-up home for spare parts or some hint about their manufacturer, but when they get there, even the rubble is gone. What is there is the psychotic stun-gun-wielding gal who filled Makina’s head with BL nonsense, and I stopped watching as she started to freak out in the exact same way she did last time.

So, yeah, dropping that one was the right call.

Summer season start dates

For me, it will be July 2nd for Vending Machine 2, July 4th for Call Of The Night 2, and July 19th for Kaiju No. 8 2. Sigh.

Dear Amazon,

Your little scrolling boxes of recommended items occasionally get offset by about 50% with part of the previous page still visible, but the click area is not offset, so you have a high chance of getting taken to the product page for the adjacent item.

It’s probably browser-specific, but that’s what your QA department gets paid for. At least I hope they get paid.

(it’s particularly annoying for me because I typically right-click to open product pages in another tab, and by the time I go through them all, I’ve forgotten what half the tabs were supposed to be)

Domain Drift

The site calling itself Big Boobs Japan is at tokyocafe.org, Big Boobs Asia is at tokyobombers.com, and Big Boobs Tokyo is at… bigboobsjapan.com. Repeated hosting problems have apparently bounced them around (coughcough).

(of course, all three should be viewed with shields up and Javascript down)

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 11

God Fight Tonight! (as foretold in the prophecy). It’s painfully shouty, with Kikuko Inoue’s Eternally-Young Goddess turning it up to eleven and Our Eternally-Young Witch constantly freaking out. Not their best effort.

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 11

This week, more poorly-integrated CGI swordfighting (with simplified character art that makes Beryl look a lot younger, and there’s an odd texturing effect on everyone’s armor that doesn’t move when they do), as the international incident escalates. Busty Blue-Haired Foreign Knight Gal manages to convince White to warm up to her, but she’s not fooling Our Sword Daddy, who confronts her in the woods.

Verdict: only one more to go, which suggests a rather abrupt wrap-up next week. Can we get another glimpse of Hot Teacher, please, since she’s the only age-appropriate potential partner in this show, and most of the haremettes presented to us turned out to be no such thing?

(hot teacher is unrelated)

The Librarians: The Next Chapter

So far, this is not good. I made it through the clumsily-written first episode, helped by Christian Kane’s guest appearance and Jessica Green’s bouncy running. I couldn’t make it through the second episode, because the Serbian actors that fill out the cast are just not very good, and the core cast are still figuring out their characters.

I hope they can make it work, but that’s not the way to bet.

Dear eBay…

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this package will not arrive today in Miamisburg, OH…

(despite the tracking insisting that the package originated in Florida, it was handed off to USPS by “Yun Express”, a company in Shenzen, China…)

Internet Of Kitchen Sinks

I do not need a $650 app-enabled remote-controlled kitchen faucet, because if I’m using the water, I’m guaranteed to be standing right there at the sink. I know some people who like hands-free control, but that just requires a simple sensor on the side.

I also don’t need a “connected” fridge, oven, range, range hood, microwave, garbage disposal, dishwasher, toaster, blender, mixer, coffee maker, can opener, washing machine, dryer, etc. I kind of wish it were still possible to buy a TV that wasn’t tarted up with apps and spyware.