Despite setting up and then cheerfully ignoring Chekhov’s Warning Sign, this week’s angsty teen zombie drama reveals that Our Heroine is trope-ariffic.

They also drop some more clues about Our ZombieMaster, but do not go so far as The Big Reveal. Instead, we’re in that crucial moment of the classic underdog sports story, where the hero has lost confidence the night before the big game.

Will Vaughn pitch the strikeout that the Indians need to win the pennant? Tune in next week, for Idol League (no relation; also no relation).

…please, tell me more about you and your friends, Toumi. Better yet, don’t tell, show.

NSFW

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A bit too busy for a background screen, but still plenty of fun.

Before I do anything with this fabric, I’m going to press it, set it up on my copy stand, and shoot it with a flat-field lens to capture the design. This quick grainy snap doesn’t do it justice.

More than three million people have stopped watching Doctor Who. How many of those remaining are newly-minted anti-fans, we don’t know, but the BBC will find out when they get the merchandising and DVD sales figures.

I managed to make it through the season ender, but it wasn’t easy. Or particularly entertaining. It’s another “cosmic fly-swatter” story, where they’ve invented something new that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than necessary to explain its impact on the story. And since they blew the effects budget earlier in the season, the phenomenal cosmic power looks like it was actually copied directly from a Seventies DW episode.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a mop to clean up the stupid that leaked out of my television onto the floor.

[Update: whoops! forgot the link]

If you like melons…

and you like kitties…

more...

As this will be one of the few images to survive the coming Tumblr purge, we’d better get to work…

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While it’s kind of sad that a cheesy zombie idol anime is ten times more fun to watch than Doctor Who, it’s even sadder that it’s got more of a plot.

…which thickens in this episode, with a slap and a bang. Will they play it straight next episode, or go for the mind-fuck? Excuse me, braaiiiiins-fuck.

In other news, as the ratings for DW continue to drop, the rumor mill has Chibnall and Whittaker both leaving, either after one more season or as soon as the New Years special airs. The other rumors have the BBC just killing the show off completely. Either way, they’ll blame fans for being cisracistsexisthatinggarbage, which their shills are already doing in between bouts of ratings denial.

It started with an apparently-failing keyboard, a common problem with modern Apple Laptops. Painfully for a Unix guy, it was the “|” key, either doubling or skipping.

For a first test, I just wanted to power-cycle the machine rather than drive 40 minutes to an Apple store, but since there was a security update and a Safari update, I made sure my backups were up to date, installed those, and after it came back up to the login prompt, powered off.

When I powered it back on, the screen flashed red during boot, and then came up to a screen complaining that the OS installation was incomplete, with boilerplate making it sound like I had nothing useful on the disk at all.

My external backup drive took forever to boot from (FFS, Apple, your OS has gotten that slow on spinning disks now?!?), but when it came up, it showed the perfectly-intact internal drive.

It also tried to start syncing with cloud services and kick off a Time Machine backup, which I managed to cancel despite the incredibly poor performance.

I made Yet Another bootable backup, just in case, which took a few hours, and then tried to bring it back up. Same error. Booted in Safe Mode and it came up, so I fscked the disks and rebooted again.

Same error. I manually selected the startup disk, told it to restart, and (without resetting the progress bar) it booted successfully.

Checked installed updates, and the most recent security update isn’t on the list, and isn’t available, either. Power-cycled again, and all seems to be well.

Immediately kicked off Time Machine, followed by one of the bootable external backups…

Oh, and my “|” key? None of this changed anything, but some vigorous testing seems to have destroyed whatever tiny bit of dust crept into Apple’s fragile design.

Update

Three hours later, it’s offering me the security update again…

…and Time Machine is doing a full sync of 300+ GB, joy.