You get what you subsidize, SF:

“We’re losing tourists. We’re losing conventions in San Francisco. All of this is happening because we aren’t addressing the root cause, which is we need more temporary beds for street homelessness.”

Seriously, how hard is it to figure this out? “We’re going to tax tobacco/guns/etc out of existence, because people respond to incentives!” while simultaneously “We’re going to make our city a welcoming sanctuary for illegals and addicts, because people don’t respond to incentives!”.

I was calling San Francisco a shithole long before Hillary elected Trump…

Raymond E. Feist is starting a brand-new epic fantasy saga, and I couldn’t care less. Back in the day, I really liked the Riftwar books, but the more of them he wrote, the less I liked them, and every time I’ve tried to re-read one of the early ones, it just didn’t grab me. I’m not even sure I bothered finishing the Serpentwar books; I found one of them on my shelves, but I remember nothing about it, and I was surprised to discover that wasn’t even the halfway point (30+ books now?).

In any case, my eyes were glazed over before I was halfway through the blurb for King Of Ashes, “Book One of The Firemane Saga”. It reads like a trope salad topped with boggle-dice names, and is the exact opposite of a compelling hook.

…clearly you’ve never been in a Japanese video store.

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It’s porn, of course, so the youthful actresses are at least 18. Unfortunately, I can read the description at the bottom of the cover, and it’s basically a rape video (loosely, “‘Sparta’ training camp gang-bang of the flat-chested track team”). If it had just been three pretty young women in and/or out of their bikinis, I’d have been interested. Sadly, the product description on Amazon doesn’t even include their names, so I can’t find out if they’ve done any less-explicit work.

Okay, I confess: I finally watched the Endless Eight episodes of Haruhi. Dear Ghod, what were they thinking? There wasn’t nearly enough fan-service to justify that much repetition. For more “fun”, Crunchyroll clearly doesn’t have enough streaming servers, since I often can’t watch anything on the iOS or FireTV apps during prime evening hours, and for about half of these episodes, the streaming was interrupted in a way that caused the app to repeat lines of dialog until the video caught up.

In other news, I did some de-duping on the leftover folder, because I noticed some familiar images popping up. Somehow I’d managed to download the exact same images as part of different themes. I also caught a few that were re-uploads with slightly different hashes, and there are some that I’m pretty sure are alternate takes of the same image, but I can’t automate that cleanup, and it’s too much work to sort through the 2,000+ images I’ve already posted. So, just think of it as “the cheesecake so nice, I found it twice”.

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I’ve been out sick the past few days, with my head a bit foggy, so in my more lucid moments I’ve just been playing Death Road To Canada (on Windows; I got sick of the crashes in the Mac version) and watching anime. For reasons involving low-braincell-count, I just rewatched the first season of Haruhi in broadcast order.

I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years, and I still haven’t seen any of the newer stuff (‘Endless Eight’ sounded so immensely tedious that I didn’t even try). One of the many things I’d forgotten since it originally aired was how annoying Mikuru’s voice is. Other than that, it was decent enough.

Maybe if my brain unfogs, I’ll watch something new this weekend…

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If you like Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar novels, Stone Unturned is a good one. The only quibble I have with it is that I wish he had put just the year at the top of every change of PoV, not a full date, to make it obvious that the characters are separated by time. It rapidly becomes obvious, but why bother obfuscating?

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