“Tens of hundreds of years ago, the planet named Fashan, the fourth planet in the Extre-Harvest solar system, suffered a war so devastating that even now its wake is felt. In terms of destruction it ranks as one of the worse wars the universe has ever seen. Energy waves released in its name circled the planet unmercifully, nearly dooming its inhabitants, setting the evolutionary cycle back millions of years.

“And yet the war advanced the world as well. The evolutionary cycle held its own. Fashan had been reborn, shed of its peaceful cloak of culture and plenty. The war brought upon Fashan the Age of Savagery and Chaos, an age without gods to lead them. And through it all, the Terror, the spark to the great war, survived.”

— Spawn Of Fashan, Foreward (sic)

Mahjongg girls in 3D


I’d prefer the version played in the AsoIku OVA, but life isn’t fair…

Saki live movie

(via)

Cheesecake: wrench


After last night’s Cheesecake Factory bombing in Pasadena, it seems necessary to fight back with factory cheesecake, or as close as I could get at Gelbooru, wrench wenches!

(and it looks like the as-yet-uncaught perpetrator was either the most inept terrorist of the year or a typical hipster)

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Have ya heard of Amazon?


I was browsing through a book on woodworking projects at the store (this one, in fact, apparently available for free to Kindle owners with Prime), and ran across the following paragraph in the tool recommendations:

Choosing a biscuit joiner is going to be limited by what's available at your home center--- most stores will have one or two brands at most. If you're ambitious, you can find a couple more to choose from at a local Sears.

This book was published in 2012. All the diagrams were done in Sketchup. It has its own web site for supplementary material. In the back it lists the URLs of 20 online suppliers, most of whom carry a wider variety of tools than “your home center” or “a local Sears” (if those still exist…). Now, admittedly Amazon’s biscuit joiner category is a bit confusing, given that it somehow includes soil compactors, cabinet legs, Super Mario Brothers magnets, jointers, electrical cover plates, and a CD by Vagon Chicano, but I’m pretty sure most tool-users were aware that Amazon had good prices and selection back in 2012, and the suppliers they did mention in the back included Woodcraft and Rockler, who have been known to sell a tool or two.

Basically, this is a “column compilation” book, and the part on selecting and using tools obviously didn’t get any editing love when they updated it. Hopefully the editor of the brand-new 2016 edition has replaced this and other dusty 20th Century artifacts.

[and, no, I’m not in the market for a biscuit joiner at the moment; it just happened to catch my eye]

Good news, bad news...


When I bought my house, there was a Nob Hill grocery 3/4-mile in one direction, and a Home Depot 3/4-mile the other direction. Both are gone; I haven’t kept track of how many different Mexican groceries replaced the Nob Hill, but there isn’t a lot that can take over for a Home Depot, so it took a few years for Walmart to move in.

Home Depot had moved about three miles down the road to a new shopping center that must have involved some juicy graft, since it added massive traffic to a main road while replacing a 45-mph corner with a 15-mph corner that causes so many accidents that they add new safety features almost every year. A few more years and I figure there will be a series of pop-up barriers designed to force drivers to walk their cars through.

Anyway, the empty lettuce field across the street from the Walmart is going to be a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center sometime in the next six months. It’ll probably go up pretty quickly once the rain stops, because, y’know, building supplies. It’s a great location, at a major intersection with no accident-prone turns, and very convenient for me, being 3/4-mile down the road.

Oh, wait. The road that’s been getting backed up quite a bit since they didn’t widen it when all the houses were built 15 years ago, or when the elementary school was built in the middle of a lettuce field, or when all those kids grew up and got cars.

So it was nice to see them slip the road-widening plans into the Lowe’s article. The shopping center will come first and make things worse, of course, but some time after that they’ll add more lanes all the way from there to the Mexican grocery, past my house.

Oh, wait. They’re going to widen the main road by my house in both directions. I guess I’ll be going out the back way to Main St for a while.

...with a grain of salt


Numerous poorly-sourced stories are making the claim that Team Hillary blames Obama for her loss.

While this is plausible, it not only ignores the toxic effect Obama support has had on other candidates in the past, but if embraced by her supporters has absolutely terrible optics:

She couldn't do it without a man.

Not the message you want your “feminist icons” to be sending, I think…

Dear Morgan Stanley,


This is a terrible list of possible security questions.

Insecurity questions

How many of these questions are trivial to answer for anyone with even a small social-media presence? How many of the rest are things that people over 30 probably don’t even remember? And seriously, zip code? Date of birth? Last four digits of SSN? To stop someone from trying to break into my brokerage account?!?

How about these, instead?

  • Who do you most regret voting for?
  • Who would you go to jail for sex with?
  • What's the ugliest car you've ever seen?
  • What pistol do you keep by the bed?
  • What's the name of the first person you begged for sex?
  • Did it work?
  • What do you only wear when no one else is around?
  • Lid up, lid down, seat down, or "Asian squat toilet"?
  • What's the most ridiculous food fad?
  • What do you keep losing?
  • What does cilantro taste like to you?
  • What was the first thing you had surgically removed?
  • Where do you usually masturbate?
  • What foreign country would you never visit?
  • What historical figure would you travel back in time to kill?
  • What's your favorite smell?
  • What part of your body was involved in your first emergency room visit?
  • What celebrity would you clone?
  • What's your favorite food you can't find any more?
  • What's the worst injury you ever caused by accident?
  • Who would you lock up and throw away the key?
  • What superpower would you abuse the most?

Don’t answer in the comments, or I’ll steal your identity…

Cheesecake: ninja & animal ears


“Ninja” was obviously too broad a category, but “ninja cat_ears” wasn’t quite enough. Besides, you can’t have too much Yuki, so I expanded the search to include all animal ears, real and fake.

No red half-rims, so let’s start off with a little Nonsense:

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Second impression


I decided to see how much detail I could get with the 20-degree v-bit. This was carved out of the end grain of a generic hardwood 1-inch square dowel.

Update: I shined a flashlight onto the seal to get a better look at it.

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