“Rejoice, Comrades! It’s the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Be sure to torture a dissident, starve a kulak, censor a newspaper, and shoot anyone who disagrees with you. Comrade Lenin would’ve wanted it that way.”

— Rotten Chestnuts celebrates

Cheesecake: sleepy


This one’s a bit of a stretch. And a bit of a yawn. And a surprising number of cats.

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Easy as One, Tsu, Three


No chance for ambiguity here. When you’re going to (津市), つ Station is definitely the place to get off.

(via)

Talk Talk, Titty Talk, Truthy Talk


DanSora 8

Talkiest. Boss Fight. Ever. (okay, “recently”)

Also, “As you know, Bob, this famous event that’s never been mentioned before not only explains the odd behavior of the character who was introduced last week, but will be crucial to the plot this week.”

Despite having leveled up to take on Busty Tamer, Aiz’s rematch with her is overshadowed by the rest of the party fighting The Monologer. After he takes his expository lumps, he’s written out of the story forever when Busty Tamer eats his heart.

Like much of what happens in this series, the action is an excuse to fill in the blanks about the DanMachi universe. It’s basically the novelist’s background notes baked into a cheesecake and covered with whipped cream. Lefiya is the cherry on top.

Speaking of Lefiya, she’s in full-on Action Girl mode in the fight, which compensates for her awkward-but-earnest girl-crush on Banshee whatshername. This chick really needs to get laid (see previous paragraph).

This is not quite an actual conversation from the episode:

“Bete’s a dick”.

“Oh, that’s just his funny little way.”

Eromanga-sensei 9

Note to Our Hero: just because you’re too shy to enjoy the view at the beach doesn’t mean you can deprive us of the opportunity. Next time, hold off a little before offering her the shirt off your back.

I am very disappointed that neither editor-san nor bookstore-chan managed to crash the Bikini Confession Party. Fortunately, Elf has bigger tits than I expected. In other news, Fifth Wheel Guy’s homosexual panic added nothing to the episode.

Doctor Who 10.8

Well, that was… better than last week without actually being good. I preferred the 2007 version.

Shorter Kathy Griffin, Youtube movie clip edition


What she thinks happened

What actually happened

Dear Walmart,


No offense, but I don’t think I want your employees coming to my house, no matter what sort of background check you run before having them deliver packages on their way home from work.

Things you can't unsee, Flash edition


As usual, Honest Trailers is dead on in this one, but the single most painful revelation is The Barry Bobblehead.

Cheesecake: who wears short_shorts?


In anime fan-art, the question is really what qualifies as wearing short shorts. When they’re not just made of body paint, they’re often either halfway to her knees or wide open in the front. For some characters this is canonical, for others it’s wishful thinking by an artist who draws with one hand in his pants. Pokemon’s Misty/Kasumi, whatever age she’s drawn at, generally falls into the latter category. And, of course, the shortness of the short shorts is often emphasized with M字開脚.

There are quite a few characters whose official costumes include short shorts. Browsing through the search results on Gelbooru, it quickly became obvious that I could just do a top-20 list of the most obvious ones, without even coming close to running out. But I’m not trying to be comprehensive, just provide an amusing diversion, so if I missed your favorite girl as I skimmed through the hundreds of pages of results, it’s not because I don’t like the way she fills out her short shorts, it’s because there were too damn many pictures of Yoko from Gurren Lagann. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 😉

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Fun with Hugo themes


One of the challenges with Hugo is that, out of the box, it doesn’t do anything. Create a site, fill it with content, run the generator, and you get… nothing. You need to download or create a theme in order to actually render your content; there isn’t one built into the site-creator, although several volunteers are working on something (much the same way that usable documentation is largely a volunteer effort).

It is not immediately obvious that the theme gallery is sorted by update date, so that the farther down the list you go, the less likely they are to work. There’s a top-level set of feature tags, but they’re applied by the theme authors, and don’t include useful things like “scales beyond 100 pages”.

As part of my ongoing MasterCook molesting, I decided to take the now-sane XML files and render them to Hugo’s mix of TOML and Markdown, generating a static cookbook site with sections and categories. Having done some experimentation in response to a forum post, I knew that a site with 56,842 pages would take several minutes to build, so I grabbed the simple, clean Zen theme and fired it off.

And waited. And waited. And watched the memory usage climb to over 40GB of compressed pages.

The Hugo developers pride themselves on rendering speed, but when I checked the disk, it was taking upwards of a second to render a single content page. Looking at one of them made it obvious why: the theme designer included every content page in the dropdown menus and sidebar. It had honestly never occurred to him that someone might have more than about 8 categories with about 20 pages each. In fairness, this is a port of a Drupal theme, and the original might have had the same problem.

After modifying the templates to only use the first 20 from each category, I got the site to render in about 10 minutes. The category menu looks horrible, because I split the recipes up alphabetically into chunks of about a thousand, and the theme only allocated enough space for about 2/3 of them, with the rest covering the title field. The actual recipe rendering is excellent, including the handling of sub-recipes and referenced recipes.

I could modify the Zen theme until it did everything right, or spend several hours rebuilding a small sample site with other themes until I found one that required less work, but once you’ve built one theme from scratch, it’s just faster and easier to do that than to try to use any of the pre-built themes. Their real value is as examples of “how do you do this in Hugo”, which you can’t generally find in the documentation.

There are also quite a few working code snippets in the forums (some provided by me; problem-solving is kinda my thing, if you haven’t guessed by now), but with so much of the code under active development, any forum example more than a few months old is likely to be wrong now.

It’ll be a while before I bring the cookbook back up, since this is definitely a copious-free-time project, and not only do I have to knock together a theme and set up search (most likely Xapian Omega again, since I’m fresh on it), but also molest the recipe data and impose some consistency on categorization, tagging, and ingredient naming. Currently it has 782 distinct categories, many of which differ by only a few characters, and about 2/3 of them should really be tags instead. All of these issues should really be fixed in the MX2 files, so that they can be cleanly imported back into MasterCook, but since that’s not XML, the scripting is a little more “interesting”.

Tentatively, I’m going to start with my blog theme, since I’ve already tested it at scale (and learned that large taxonomies are a significant bottleneck). I can strip out a lot of the blog-specific stuff without much effort, I’ve already done the work to switch over to dropdown menus for categorization, so the only real trick will be embedding any referenced recipes in a hidden DIV at the bottom of each page, and setting up a print-only stylesheet that hides the nav and exposes the embedded recipes. The references are already turned into links to the appropriate recipe’s page, thanks to the builtin relref shortcode.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”