The Return of Doctor Mysterio

Not a lot of rewatch value, but a fun Christmas special, and nice to see Nardole again.

1. The Pilot

Not a bad intro for the new companion, but the snippets-of-mystery season arc has an uncomfortable whiff of how they handled Missy in season 8, where the revelation wasn’t worth all the time spent setting it up. I spent a lot of time wondering who Bill’s step-mom was (last seen having kittens in season 3), which was distracting enough that I almost didn’t get the point behind the box of pictures.

I had to turn on closed captions to catch all of the dialogue. Also, I’d like to see the actress who played Heather in something that shows a little more emotional range. Or a little more skin. Either way, I’m good.

2. Smile

I can’t decide whether this should have been shorter or longer. Shorter, for the material as they used it; longer, if they’d actually put some real thought into it, and maybe given some personality to one of the walk-on parts. Not impressed.

3. Thin Ice

Dear Writer, if you’re going to put Profound Words into the Doctor’s mouth, could you try to make them a bit less trite? And avoid trendy buzzwords like “privilege”? Kthxbye. As for the plot, I’d rather not.

When the world was young, and this “blogging” thing was new, I maintained my site by hand, typing new content into index.html as I thought of it. Then I spent a great deal of time customizing MovableType to suit my needs, and used it for the next 14 years.

One of the common plugins was SmartyPants, which turned scruffy old typewriter quotes into pretty curved ones. As a long-time type nerd, of course I had to use it. The MT implementation was pretty good, and only rarely guessed wrong about open quotes. The one used by Hugo is, unfortunately, always wrong in a specific case that I use quite often: quotations that start with an ellipsis. For those, I’ve had to go through the archives and manually insert the Unicode zero-width space character ​ after the opening quote.

I never used MT’s web form for posting content, because, like so many other people have discovered, it’s too easy to lose an hour of work with a single mis-click or fumble-finger. Ecto was a great tool until it just stopped working one day (long after it stopped being supported), with only one quirk: at random intervals it would lose track of the UTF-8 encoding, and post garbage instead of kanji. A refresh would always fix the problem, so it was just a minor annoyance.

When it stopped working, I switched to MarsEdit, which is an excellent tool, and if I could easily connect it to Hugo, I would. As it is, I’ve gone back to running Emacs in a terminal window, with Perl/Bash scripts and Makefiles wrapped around an assortment of command-line tools.

For images, I insist on supplying proper height and width attributes so that the browser can layout the page properly while waiting for the download. Hugo can automatically insert those for pictures stored locally, but I upload them all to an S3 bucket with s3cmd, so I run them all through ImageMagick’s convert for cleanup and resizing, then Guetzli for JPEG conversion, and embed them with this shortcode:

{{ $link := (.Get "link" | default (.Get "href"))}}
{{ $me := . }}
<div align="center" style="padding:12pt">
  {{if $link}}
    <a href="{{$link}}">
  {{end}}
  <img
    {{ range (split "src width height class title alt" " ") }}
      {{ if $me.Get . }}
        {{. | safeHTMLAttr}}="{{$me.Get .}}"
      {{end}}
    {{end}}
  >
  {{if $link}}
    </a>
  {{end}}
</div>

None of the arguments are mandatory (even src, without which there’s not much point), but it will add any of the listed ones if you’ve supplied them, and allow you to add a link with either “link” or “href”. This can be embedded in the new spoiler shortcode I wrote yesterday (which relies on Bootstrap’s collapse.js):

{{ $id := substr (md5 .Inner) 0 16 }}
{{ $label := (.Get 0 | default "view/hide") }}
{{ $class := (index .Params 1 | default "") }}
<div class="collapse {{$class}}" id="collapse{{$id}}">{{ .Inner }}</div>
<p><a role="button" class="btn btn-default btn-sm"
  data-toggle="collapse" href="#collapse{{$id}}"
  aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="collapse">{{$label}}</a>
</p>

The results look like this, and yes, the picture behind the NSFW tag is NSFW:

{{< spoiler NSFW >}}
{{< blogpic 
  src="https://dotclue.s3.amazonaws.com/img/tumblr_o3wrl58ICr1rlk3g8o1_1280.jpg"
  width="560" height="420"
  class="img-rounded img-responsive"
>}}
{{< /spoiler >}}

NSFW

…well, Not Safe For Waterfowl, anyway…

It took about 30 seconds to convert my Gelbooru mass-posting script to generate shortcodes instead of HTML, so my most-recent cheesecake post was done this way. Now that I have the NSFW shortcode, I’ll likely include some racier images in the next one…

At some point I’ll pull out all my scripts and customizations into a demo blog on Github, so that I have something to point to when someone asks how to do something that is either not directly supported in Hugo (like monthly archive pages), or is just poorly documented (“damn near everything”).

“You have my sword”

NSFW

“​…and my axe”

NSFW

(via pixiv)

I needed a proper spoiler/NSFW tag for Hugo, and then of course I needed something to hide with it…

(via)

If you’re a novelist, and I’ve never heard of you, the fastest way to get knocked off my maybe-read list is to include anything in parentheses or after a colon that even hints that this is not a standalone novel. Saga, Series, Trilogy, Book N, A something something, whatever.

A series title that’s significantly longer than the book title guarantees that free is too much to pay for your work. Also, price over $7 for an ebook; I’m willing to go over that for writers I like, up to a limit of $9.99, but that’s it, and only if that’s not higher than the paperback/hardcover price.

A colon followed by the words “A Novel” is a no-shit-sherlock way to guarantee that I’ll cross you off my list, except in the extremely rare case of the moronic publisher who puts it on recent Tim Powers novels. But you’re not Tim Powers.

I read a lot of SF and fantasy novels, but you need to remember that when you put your book up on Amazon, you’re not just competing with this week’s best-sellers. You’re up against decades of novels by Ray Bradbury, Gordon Dickson, Gene Wolfe, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Andre Norton, Clifford Simak, Poul Anderson, Tim Powers, Diane Duane, Lois McMaster Bujold, Vernor Vinge, C. J. Cherryh, George Alec Effinger, Barbara Hambly, Patricia Wrede, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, John Varley, and Doris Piserchia, to give a partial list of whose books I’ve bought on Kindle over the past few years. And I’ve left out a lot of lower-tier names.

Admittedly, some of their publishers are imbeciles who think that a badly-OCRd thirty-year-old novel is worth $12.99 despite the easy availability of used paperbacks for $0.99 plus shipping, but enough of the stuff is out there for a decent price that I can afford to assume that your ambitiously-titled series is crap.

Update: Amazon has started showing a lot of recommendations that include a new warning label, the use of LitRPG in the subtitle. If your work is so weak that you need to call out its obscure genre in the listing, I want no part of it.

The Arlo cameras I installed outside have captured plenty of neighborhood cats hanging out on my front porch, but clearly I need to put out special bait if I’m going to catch catgirls like Mizuki Hoshina…

Not a big fan of the new haircut, but that’s like complaining there’s not quite enough whipped cream on your sundae. Or on your catgirl. Or something like that.

(via)

I feel triggered.

(via)

I am not pretentious enough for this.

Also, 91% lean? Screw that.