Grid of thirds

JetPens has an interesting kanji practice notebook, with a useful feature I hadn’t seen before: thirds markings. It has the usual half-grid lines, but also dots at the thirds to help you balance characters that aren’t split evenly. Naturally I immediately cloned this feature into my Perl script and made a PDF to try it out.

Explaining The Lost Dangerous Visions

So, The Last Dangerous Visions is out, finally completed after Harlan Ellison’s death by executor J. Michael Straczynski. I’m working my way through the stories slowly, but I thought I’d comment on JMS’ intro and explainer, in which he gives a brief history of his close relationship with Ellison over the decades. What explanation does he give for all the delays, broken promises, and outright falsehoods that surrounded this project?

TL/DR: Ellison was manic-depressive for his entire adult life and not only refused to recognize it for most of that time, but held off on seeking treatment until way too late.

Yup, that’d do it. I don’t discuss family here much, but I am very familiar with what happens when a bipolar person goes off their meds, and it maps well to Ellison’s reported behaviors. I would never have tried to diagnose him myself, since I was only ever in the same (large) room with him once, and his behavior that hour was quiet enough that I only knew he was there because he loudly harrumphed upon learning that C.J. Cherryh had just written a Lois & Clark tie-in novel. The crowd’s oh-Harlan reaction was louder than he was.

How are the stories so far? Pretentious twaddle from a vanished world where the Left still thought their ideas were “edgy”. Some of them have the excuse of having been written decades ago by people who died waiting for Ellison to publish, but others do not.

My-HiME, revisited

Not by me, I haven’t lit one up in years; the original show just had its 20th anniversary. The busty and titular heroine Mai was easy on the eyes, and the spoiler-heavy episode previews they inserted for the DVD release led off with a memorable slow-pan of her in lingerie, but the story was a mess, with too many heroines and too many mechs and too many easily-killed keys/hostages. Much of this was due to the fact that the original manga was more of an action/harem story centered around Tate, who got some memorable “unlocking” offers from various girls.

The second and third series were better planned out.

Unrelated, “secondhand smoke” was always bullshit

…and the American Cancer Society finally agrees. Yes, cigarette smoke is foul stuff. Yes, constant exposure has an impact on people with respiratory conditions. Personally, I’ve always rated it right up there with “excessive hairspray” for interfering with my breathing, and second only to pot for leaving rooms and clothing reeking.

Pipe smoke, on the other hand, is potpourri.

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 2

Baby steps this week, as Our Emotionless Killer Maid is confronted with her induced trauma about vicious wild dogs, with the gentlest, squishiest trigger imaginable. I’ll give even odds that the person who left the puppy at their door was also responsible for sending her there, and that we’ll be seeing more surprise events that help her adjust to normal life.

As for her potential emotional range, the voice actress was also responsible for the super-genki lead in Bakuon!!, so there’s plenty of headroom there.

Verdict: she’s warmed up just a little, enough that I’ll give it another week.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 1

I could do without hearing the OP song ever again. Other than that, the recap is brief, and they quickly pick up where they left off, with Our Birdbrained Hero tackling a new area with two bunnies and a cat. Our Would-Be Romeo Cat clumsily woos Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, but still contributes significant combat power. Our High-Strung White Rabbit mostly panics, but manages to take out a few exploding golems.

The Sunraku/Bilac dynamic gives me hope that we’ll see a lot of her this season, but I suspect this arc is the only time we’ll really get to see her shine. I was sad that she wasn’t in the ED animation.

Verdict: off to a good start, with Our Frenemies showing up at the end with mischief in mind.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

With all the classes overhauled and the loot rescaled, the seasonal content is fine, and fresh enough to be worth playing. As for the $60 DLC, the first problem is that you can’t skip the story quests on a new character until you’ve completed the whole thing at least once. Which is the second problem: the story is slow, boring, filled with unskippable gibberish (excuse me, “ancient language”), and padded out with tons of mindless mook fights. Spoiler alert:

In the base game, you only needed to get through the prologue once, and all future characters had a fully unlocked world. Here, they’re determined to make you sit through their writing and voice acting. There are some tedious scenes you can skip, but not enough. IMHO, if they wanted players to care enough about Neyrelle to make her the emotional core of the DLC, they shouldn’t have introduced her as an annoying omnicompetent snarky teen sidekick in the base game.

“As I was going to St. Ives…”

A group of researchers tested LLM solutions to grade-school math problems, and reached the obvious conclusion that they weren’t capable of mathematical reasoning, being trivially tripped up by injecting variety into straightforward word problems of the type used to train them. Simply changing up the numbers reduced the success rate, but adding irrelevant clauses really killed it. They basically stumped the “smartest” LLMs with MadLibs.

(via Language Log)

Loner Harem, episode 3

The mild fan-service compensates for the shouty freak-outs. Mostly. Our Hero shows off some very mild examples of his unsane view of the world, and proves his trustworthiness by not assaulting the girl who comes into his tent to announce that breakfast is served. (a low bar, sure, but one not cleared by Team Delinquent)

Verdict: decorative, but still very early in the first arc.

Super Dragon Balls, episode 2

I don’t know which is harder to believe, that the village women are happy with their men lustily drinking milk freshly squeezed from the local busty cowgirl (whose daughter looks ready to tap), or that Our Formerly-Draconic Hero has lived sixteen years as a human boy without getting slapped silly every day by the village girls for his clueless behavior. Fish-out-of-water comedy doesn’t really work when the fish is in the water.

Verdict: the premise is already wearing thin. Seriously, this can’t be the first time he’s seen a villager in danger and thought, “oh, no, I have to use my dragon speed to save him”, but they keep setting up situations where he behaves like a dragon disguised as a villager, Clark-Kenting his way through life.

(white-haired dark-skinned dragonette is unrelated, but easy on the eyes)

Cosplay Harem, episode 15

Good news! Gal Gal doesn’t unload her psychological baggage on us. Bad news! Because we spend half the episode dealing with Awkward Lass’s residual trauma. Super Cuddly’s just happy to embrace another cosplayer, while Busty Pro and Hot Teacher mentor the team. We’re also given a hint about The Secret Adventures of Soft Gay and Ambiguous Woman; he’s another teacher at their school who Looks That Way, and she(?)’s an old friend who runs a photo studio that is conveniently free for noob cosplayers.

Verdict: it ends right before we get to see Gal Gal strip down and suit up for photos, so we still have no idea what her costume is; also, no one remembered seeing her at last week’s event. I kinda wish they’d spent some time with Tsuntail before adding two more girls.

(I’m going with a League of SuperPlayers naming theme this week, because there’s a callout to The Avengers assembling)

GGO 2, episode 2

The OP animation needs a seizure warning. Also an explanation of why there’s a flash of LLENN in barely-there lingerie; not the service I was looking for. Now, if they’d swapped that with the tank-top-and-shorts outfit Karen’s wearing in the ED…

Anyway, on to the gun-service, as we jump right into the fight, with all the well-known teams separated to the far corners of the field, and nameless mooks sacrificed to the gods of bullet hell. Next week, two side characters get developed.

Verdict: a good chunk of this is wasted on a CG-heavy extended dance mix of last week’s “LLENN runs away while being shot at by everyone” sequence, which is also quite shouty. Meh.

(a few hours late showing up on Crunchy)

White Clouds Can’t Sync

Earlier in the week, my brother called to inform me that his kids wanted to come over to my place and hang out on Saturday. I thought this was a grand idea, so I blocked out the time on my iPhone’s calendar. This morning I was rearranging a few things on my Mac’s calendar, and noticed that it wasn’t showing their visit.

I had to edit it on the phone and add an alert, and then it immediately appeared on the Mac. How long has “sync” been a feature of Apple’s cloud offering, and they still can’t get the basics right? It’s not like I’d been wandering in and out of coverage areas; they were on the same wifi when I made the calendar entry.

Speaking of which, I once again have the problem where all of the music synced to my iPhone has incorrect cover art, because I told it to sync some videos. So it’s not just their cloud…

Dear Apple,

Why is it that Terminal.app occasionally loses the Command-1 through Command-9 keyboard shortcuts for the open windows? This bug has been around for years now. Is it because the few MacOS QA people left only test the default “use shortcuts for tabs” option, and have forgotten the older mapping?

The interesting thing is that opening additional windows assigns the shortcuts to them starting at 1, so the app’s not losing the functionality, just the current mapping.

Coke adds cookie

Nope, not on a bet:

Why you shouldn’t use wide-angle lenses to photograph models, Reason #34C

The sad thing is that neither the photographer, the editor, nor the site that reposted this set noticed how ridiculous it looks. Fortunately there are some shots that actually flatter her.

NSFW

(via Big Boobs Japan, a site that should never be visited without an ad-blocker and Javascript-disabler)

One year ago, Joe Biden funded Iran, who funded Hamas, who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and slaughtered Jews.

If you’re eligible to legally vote in the upcoming US presidential election, your choice is not “Trump or Harris”. It’s “Western Civilization or barbarism”. If we can beat the margin of fraud, Harris will end her career the way it began, by blowing it.

Loner Harem, episode 2

While the ED consists primarily of cute girls, the OP is borderline psychedelic with an annoying song; I don’t want to see or hear it again. Anyway, this week explains the other side of the setup: what is the rest of the class up to?

The answer, of course, is “socialism doesn’t work”, with most of the class leeching off of the nerds who spent their lives prepping to live in an isekai, and the worst of them planning to use their new cheat powers to force the girls into sexual slavery. Our Loner learns all of this by… hanging out with the nerds and… accidentally enslaving Team Gal. His “loner” life is further compromised by running into the Class President the moment he thinks of her.

Lots of exposition, which explains why the trailers only showed his first girlfriend; they’re not going to reach the second one in only 12 episodes.

(with his class full of cuties, I’m sure there’s room for a Rem in there somewhere…)

Cosplay Harem, episode 14

Awkward Gal is awkward, but manages to speak three complete sentences that change her life. Also, Our Reformed Pro now gives pep talks, and Our Determined Tsuntail forces her way onto the team.

Verdict: I am pleased that we’re upping the cutie count, but I hope we don’t have to spend time resolving their psychological traumas, too.

(first-cour OP and ED were much better, especially the songs)

GGO 2, episode 1

Apart from a brief flash-forward to Our Little Pink Devil being shot at by basically everyone, this episode is mostly a refresher on the players and the basic structure. It’s unfortunate that the light-novel author is pretty much stuck on the idea of “squad jam”, because it rules out telling any other kind of story in this world or with these characters. This season, though, it’s still pretty fresh; if they make a third season sometime, it’s likely to drag.

Verdict: Miyu should not be the sole source of fan-service with her bath scenes (again); equal time for Karen!

Super Dragon Balls, episode 1

He’s a perfectly ordinary 16-year-old human male with the memories and powers of an ancient dragon.

She’s an airheaded husband-hunting 17-year-old snake gal with a killer body (literally).

Together, they fight monsters!

Verdict: if they can keep the Gainaxing budget up, this will at least be visually interesting. Definite harem vibes, although these days it’s surprising to see a lovestruck loli that’s just a loli.

(file under peculiar the fact that he wears thigh-high cuffed boots, being neither a pirate nor a cavalry officer; maybe he’s compensating for the lamia’s inability to wear thigh-high stockings?)

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 1

Wow, somebody really wanted to save money on the animation budget, with all the CGI, rotoscoping, and panned stills of lightly-filtered photographs. The two positive things I can say about the actual episode are that it was not a struggle to make it to the end, and I didn’t have to cover my ears to deal with the usual shouty freakouts that are so common these days. This week’s pretty much all setup, though, with some very forced This Is Adorable bits to counter the maid’s near-total lack of personality.

Verdict: I’ll give it another episode in the hopes that she either rapidly develops some emotional range or starts providing fan-service.

Ranma 1/2

No. The early episodes amused me 35 years ago, but I see no reason to watch them again, and I particularly don’t want to suffer through any discussions that filter it through the lens of modern gender politics. FYI, it’s licensed by Netflix for some reason.

(also, girls no longer have nipples; given that boobs are involved in at least half the jokes in this series, that is a criminal act)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, next Sunday

…but at least it will run for 2 cours.

Definitely on-brand…

The hits keep coming from Molesting Magical Girls, with their xTwitfeed announcing a tissue dispenser:

Also a naughty pop-up shop in Akihabara…

And the moment we’ve all been waiting for… season 2 announcement with teaser video.

Now, let’s see, what was I watching before I left for Belfast?

Red Cat Ramen, fin

Human-chan has found her place in the world.

Verdict: this show receives the Most Reliable Warm Fuzzies Award.

(picture is sadly unrelated)

Cosplay Harem, episode 12 & 13

12: Surprisingly Watchable Exposition

Our Cosplay Couple becomes an official club, as long as they keep everything PG. So much for the hentai doujin collection and the light bondage photoshoot from a few weeks back. Our Sympathetic Principal’s monologue was actually well-done, although I found myself picturing him wearing a KISS costume. We do not get to see Our Hot Teacher stripping down to teach Our Cuddly Heroine how to properly measure her curves, but Our Lovestruck Tsuntail does, and even in the face of massive competition, she’s determined to convince her management to let her join the fun so she can Win His Heart.

Meanwhile, Our Student Council President has just taken the Number Two Best Girl slot.

(file under peculiar that he actually threw out the porn, and didn’t try to take it home)

13: Enter The Autist

I think I just watched a compilation video of Every Komi-san Freak-Out Moment, as Our New Rising Star spends the entire episode failing to communicate. Cute little thing, though she could use a sammich or two to cover up those bones with healthy body-fat. Our Hot Teacher cements her position as Number One Best Girl.

(new OP/ED, so we’re officially into the second cour)

Dungeon People, episodes 11 & 12

11: Cosplay Or Death!

Our Dungeon Mistress finds another excuse to dress up Our Miss Clay: executing player-killers. So this is a slice-of-life episode in two ways.

fin: “But what do they eat?”

I’ll miss this show, too. Warm and fuzzy with a side of murder. Our Miss Clay hasn’t caught up with her father yet, but she’s got a friend.

Pom-Pom Girls, episodes 11 & 12

I decided to finish this one, despite the way it’s been circling the drain with the sudden focus on a completely different set of girls. TL/DR: cheap melodrama, complete with over-the-top musical cues, and then it just stopped.

Verdict: this show just fell apart, and poor direction and series composition are to blame. The last three episodes were about someone who was only briefly visible in the background of The Big Accident that they built Our Traumatized Genki Gal’s story around, leading people to initially think that Wheels was the one injured. Nope, totally different ponytail girl.

And then Our Parkour Gal spontaneously announces, “it’s been fun, but I’m leaving town to join an idol group, bye”.

Spice Wolf, episodes 15-25

I think I’ll catch up on this next season; based on the previews, I won’t even give most of the new shows a chance to disappoint me.

Loner Harem, episode 1

Speaking of next season, it’s here. This week is all setup, as it’s established that Our Hero is someone who’d rather sit alone and read books than interact with any of his classmates, and who tried to avoid being pulled into another world with them. When it happens anyway, all the super-cheat skills have been taken, and he gets all of the leftovers. Which he quickly learns to combine and use to build a comfortable life.

At this point, you might think that he’s a well-adjusted loner. If they’re working from the light novels, though, he will swiftly be revealed as a complete wackjob with no filter between his brain and mouth, and no interest in or ability to remember anyone’s name. And, yes, a sexy, eager girlfriend.

So he’s basically the perfect self-insert for the target audience.

Upcoming

• GGO 2 - next Friday
• Shangri-La Frontier 2 - October 13th? Ack!

Jibun Techō weekly page

Just for fun, I went through a bunch of fonts to find consistently-light symbols that would work for the weekly page design, and made a working version of it, leaving out the phase-of-moon and sunrise/sunset markup. I ended up using Google’s free Material Symbols Outlined Light font.

Note that Google buries the links to download the actual fonts. I assure you, they do exist as standard TTF font files in addition to the still-not-widely-compatible all-in-one variable OTF font.

“Back on the bus, y’all”

I have returned from Belfast. It was deeply weird sitting in an office surrounded by people for the first time since March, 2020. Good people, fortunately, although I had to keep my mouth shut at the occasional Irish-splaining of American politics. Fortunately Israel changed the subject quite spectacularly last week.

It’s easier to go to Japan

• Saturday, 3 PM UTC-4: arrive at Dayton airport.
• Saturday, 3:30 PM UTC-4: only United employee in the place opens counter.
• Saturday, 6 PM UTC-4: board flight to Chicago.
• Saturday, 6:45 PM UTC-5: land in Chicago.
• Saturday, 9:30 PM UTC-5: board flight to Dublin.
• Sunday, 10:45 AM UTC+1: land in Dublin, stay on plane.
• Sunday, 11:15 AM UTC+1: power restored at Dublin airport, plane directed to new gate.
• Sunday, 12:00 PM UTC+1: pass through Immigration/Customs.
• Sunday, 12:20 PM UTC+1: board bus to Belfast.
• Sunday, 2:20 PM UTC+1: arrive in Belfast, google-walk to hotel.
• Sunday, 2:30 PM UTC+1: check in at hotel.
• Sunday, 6:15 PM UTC+1: dinner with boss’s boss’s boss.
• Sunday, 9:30 PM UTC+1: brain and body switch off.

(the fresh batch of Maiko Mouths my sister sent after her recent business trip to Japan were a hit at the office)

Everything’s closed

I knew that retailers generally close earlier in Ireland than they do in the US, but I didn’t expect pretty much everything but bars and dinner restaurants to lock up by 6 PM every night but Thursday. It’s a good thing I added some vacation days at the end of the trip, or I wouldn’t have been able to buy gifts for family, much less anything for myself, since I was in the office 9-5 all week.

Admittedly I hedged my bets by getting the free trial of Prime and ordering a bunch of stuff on Amazon UK. Oddly, several of the things I put in my cart wouldn’t ship to Northern Ireland at all, but I could pay through the nose and have them sent to the US, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

(file under annoying that the WH Smith that swore on their web site that they were open until 9 PM is inside of a small strip mall attached to a bus station that just shut down for good, and now closes at 5 PM)

(amusing note: when I asked a security guy where it was located (because Google sent me around in circles), he was really curious why everyone he runs into seems so interested in going to a WH Smith, like it’s special; I couldn’t help, because my answer was “it was on the way back from my office to my hotel”)

DP Considered Absent

Until I went into Boots (pharmacy), I was convinced that there was no Diet Pepsi in Belfast. The sugared varieties were widely available, but for non, Diet Coke and Coke Zero were what was widely stocked. There was a very-subtly-labeled non-sugar Pepsi MAX in some stores, but it doesn’t taste like DP, which I’ve reluctantly gotten used to over the years.

I can drink Coke Zero, but I don’t like it much unless it’s been dosed with Splenda. (liquid; the sweetener packets have a Mentos effect)

Cookies Considered Cooked

European Internet is not my friend; it’s just too damn annoying with all those “privacy” popups demanding that I either accept all cookies or spend three minutes de-selecting “legitimate interest” checkboxes and dodging deceptive buttons.

Spoiler alert: hey, tracker-boy, your fucking cookies will get auto-deleted anyway when I close the window, so it does you no good to get cute and try to hide the “no, I don’t want to blow hobos in an alley” option behind a wall of text. Also, 99% of your ads are being blocked by Pihole anyway, so fuck y’all.

Sadly, actually preserving my privacy exposes me to 10 times as many protect-your-privacy popups. Sigh.

(and how exactly does visiting a store’s site to find their (incorrect) hours create a “legitimate interest” for 518 third parties across a dozen categories?)

(note that blocking ads with a Docker-based Pihole on a Mac now requires manually disabling the kernelForUDP flag in Docker’s settings.json to stop it from screwing up the ability to bind to port 53)

Pastries Considered Decent

Two of my co-workers took me out for a walk around the neighborhood. Y’know, the one where the recent riots kept them away from the office for two weeks. On the way back, we stopped in at a local bakery where Paul was determined to buy me a proper Northern Irish pastry. He chose the Flies’ Graveyard, which wasn’t as sweet as I expected, being basically a currant jam pastry sandwich sprinkled with sugar.

(I’m sure all the walking was good for me, but my left knee was happy when it stopped; even with an aisle seat on the way out and no one next to me on the way back, flying coach forced me into uncomfortable positions)

(I amused myself by thinking of how I’d feed them proper native food in Ohio, which basically comes down to Wendy’s Frosties and Cassano’s pizza; I don’t count Skyline Chili as proper Ohio food, since I’d never heard of it until college)

(it would be amusing to feed them London Bobby Fish & Chips, but that brand’s been basically defunct for decades, and is only available at a few Cassano’s locations)

Dear Harris Campaign Aides,

If Kamala asks you to carry her pager, just say no.

March Of The Useful Idiots

The jew-haters were out in force Saturday, proudly marching down the streets of Belfast carrying professionally-printed signs and custom-made Palistinian-solidarity flags, banging on drums, and shouting slogans comparing Israel’s “occupation and genocide” to historical English oppression of the Irish.

Y’know, morons.

Gift shopping

Since I extended the trip over the weekend, I was able to hit a craft market for presents: St. George’s Market (small, but I met some nice local crafters). I also stopped in at Carrolls Irish Gifts on Thursday, because Thursday. I made one final stop at Carrolls on Monday, to pad out the small gaps in my suitcases, mostly with good wool socks.

Tourist-y things

I reluctantly bought a ticket for a small full-day group tour to Giant’s Causeway, with an assortment of other sites thrown in. I’d have preferred to just go there on my own, but my schedule was tight, and this was the best thing I found that didn’t involve hiring a driver for several hundred Pounds.

I have zero interest in Game of Thrones filming locations, negative interest in anything related to the Titanic (ship or movie), and complete indifference to The Troubles, so this was pretty much my only “tourist” activity.

The coastal drive was quite scenic, which was a significant improvement over the path the Aircoach takes to and from Dublin; you could basically only see the trees lining the highway.

How was it? Giant’s Causeway itself was a lovely rocky coastline with a brisk wind. Fortunately we had un-Irish weather the entire week, so it was sunny and warm enough for a light jacket.

The Dark Hedges did nothing for me (“um, a row of trees?”), the Bushmill Distillery was just for shopping, and the other minor stops are blurred together in my memory.

Connections…

Bushmills Village had a bunch of signs on the streets featuring an assortment of largely American celebrities. Our bus was just driving through, so I couldn’t read the fine print, but Neil Armstrong was one, which didn’t surprise me since I was vaguely aware he had Irish roots. But The Beverly Hillbillies? I’m guessing they were supposed to be descended from Scots-Irish Planters, but I don’t know if that was ever stated in the show or just assumed.

Note to self:

Next time I order British currency, don’t let them give me so many £50 notes; most of the places that’ll take them, I’m spending enough to use a card anyway. I want an even mix of £5, £10, and £20 notes, and a decent amount of £1 and £2 coins; a few £50 notes only if there are new craft markets to visit.

Ten Square

The company put me up at Ten Square Hotel, which was a nice place with only one real flaw: live music on weekends, which I could hear from my third fourth-floor room until at least midnight.

Not well enough to enjoy it, even if it had been pleasant, just enough to annoy me with thumping bass coming up through the walls and vibrating the headboard.

(my room was of course nothing like the suites in their gallery; pretty standard, really, with nothing noteworthy about it)

Fall anime

(which should start premiering around the time I catch up on the last few shows I was watching this season…)

• Shangri-La Frontier 2: Choco! Bunny! Good Good!

• GGO 2: The return of LLENN.

• Loner Life In Another World: the “loner” quickly gets surrounded by hot chicks, and eventually ends up banging two gorgeous gals every night in increasingly depraved ways while occasionally molesting the other hot chicks with his magical tentacles. Downside: he’s somewhere between incomprehensible and batshit crazy. Screenshot material, basically.

Priorities…

As I was coming out of HellCat Maggie’s Sunday afternoon into the first rain I’d seen since arriving in Belfast, I found two college-age men waiting for it to stop. They were friendly, first joking around with an older gentleman who was heading in, then chatting with me. Their primary interest: was cannabis legal where I lived in the States?

(for family reasons, I could not possibly ignore a diner named Maggie’s; TL/DR: decent pie and champ, slightly undercooked chips)

(best chips I had? The Nook at Giant’s Causeway; pity I didn’t have time for a full meal, since the driver highly recommended the place)

Dear xTwitter,

Please stop making me manually choose to sort replies by “latest” every fucking time I click on a tweet. Your opinion of what’s relevant is not interesting to me.

Also, what’s up with scrolling back to the top of the thread every time I mute an ad?