“Dear Amazon, do I use teflon tape to attach this to my pipes?”

Old and busted: bagel-slicing injuries. New hotness: avocado-slicing injuries.

Soon after I bought my house, my then-manager came down to get my help scanning in the manual for his sailboat, for the benefit of others with the same model (the manual having become somewhat rare over the years). A California native, he decided to introduce this Midwesterner to the joys of a good ripe avocado, and as he was starting to explain the proper way to carefully cut around the edges and extract the seed, I simply cut them in half.

He stopped in mid-sentence and said, “oh, right, you have sharp knives.”

Side note: when I was migrating the blog, I checked the logs first and discovered that there are still a number of sites linking to those boat-manual scans, so I kept them online.

This is your brain on Gender Studies:

Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.

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I apologize for not having previously informed everyone of the awesomeness that is Fumika Baba. Dunno how I forgot to mention her for two years; must have been distracted by something.

For such a pretty woman, it was hard to find a picture that focused on her lively, expressive face. The photographers must also be distracted by something…

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The pocky tag includes the pocky_kiss tag, which brings in issues of consent as well as lolis, so I had to reject quite a bit. Something about mixing symmetrical docking with phallic candy and little girls seems to appeal to fan-artists, but not so much to me.

Instead, I’ll lead off with the grown-up virgin bride who made Pocky the oral fixation for anime girls.

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I’m finding it really difficult to care about Trump firing FBI Director James Comey. After going all-in for Clinton, he discovered at the 11th hour that evidence would come out that he’d acted as a partisan hack, and tried to weasel his way out of it. Claims that the timing is suspicious because of investigations into “the Russian connection” are all smoke, no gun. I’m sure that four years from now there will still be die-hard believers in this nonsense, just like there are still people who think Bush stole two elections; you can’t reason someone out of a religious position, so there’s no point in arguing with them.

As for Hillary Clinton, she wasn’t really running for President, she was trying to unlock the achievement “First Woman President”. After working hard to make Trump her opponent, her campaign didn’t actually try to beat him. Instead, they spent most of their time and money running up the score in states she couldn’t possibly lose, assuming that they had it in the bag and could afford to try to make it “historical”.

In the end, the weakest Democrat lost to the second-weakest Democrat, and since my vote didn’t even count at the county level, I am free to laugh at everybody.

They should have just called it “Tiny Groot Adventures”.

The movie is 2 hours, 16 minutes, and I don’t know if that counts the multiple before/during/after-credits scenes. It definitely doesn’t count the 20 minutes of trailers I had to sit through with earplugs in. I should have just showed up 15 minutes late; the theater was pretty empty at 10:40 AM on a Monday.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that I don’t think it had 136 minutes of story to tell. The celebrity cameos felt forced, Kurt Russell’s performance turned to crap when he (spoilered), and the extended dance mix of (spoiler’s) (spoiler) at the end just went on and on. I was catching Pokemon for most of it.

Also, while the Stan Lee cameo in the previous film was amusing, his first scene in this one was a bit too wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and the second was just dumb. Howard the Duck’s performance was less annoying than Stan Lee’s.

Apart from the three major cameos, nothing really threw me out of the film, and those bits were short enough that I was able to forget them and enjoy the ride. I wouldn’t go see it again, even as a matinee, and I don’t think I’ll buy the Bluray. I’ll watch it again with friends when it comes out, but just the once.

Note: yes, that’s Ben Browder. And Ving Rhames. And Michelle Yeoh. And even Michael Rosenbaum playing someone bald…

DanSora, episode 4

In which it is revealed that Aiz once had a full range of emotions, before something as-yet-unspecified happened to her parents. Less time is spent on Lefiya’s desperate crush, but instead we get Tione going vigorously dere-dere over their pint-sized boss.

Speaking of which, I saw someone commenting that he had trouble remembering which name went with which amazon. The answer is simple: the last letter is their cup size. Tiona, DFC; Tione, boin!.

What really doesn’t work is splitting the party and having the annoying Loki annoy the annoying Bete. Their scenes advance the plot, but I just don’t enjoy the voice acting for either character.

By the way, this episode puts them about halfway through the second light novel, and it looks like book 3 wraps up the current plot. At the current pace, I’m guessing they’ll make it through book 4, at least, which includes Bell’s minotaur fight from their point of view.

Eromanga-sensei, episode 5

Okay, so Sagiri is a creepy middle-aged man in the body of an adorable loli, Our Hero is her pimp, and they both really need to get out more. The episode improved once Elf arrived, as usual.

Oh, almost forgot. WTF is up with the time-wasting shots of the fat jogger? Could you not find a better way to pad out the episode, like maybe animating the Elf-catch instead of showing a still?

Doctor Who, episode 10.4

Honestly, the best thing about this season is that it’s Steven Moffat’s last as showrunner. I don’t have a lot to say about this episode, except that, like the previous one, it feels like they’re just filing the serial numbers off of stories they did a few years ago and adding in a likely-disappointing season arc.