The County called my home phone number this morning, instructing me to stay indoors with my windows closed. I can’t imagine why.

The closest point is a good 20 miles from my house, but part of what keeps Salinas cool and damp in the summer is the wind coming in from the ocean, so while the fire won’t come anywhere near me, the particulate matter will.

It doesn’t look like they’ve caught the person whose illegal campfire started it.

Last year, the little-known idol group Tsuri Bit got a lot of attention at a live appearance where 14-year-old member Sakura Ando demonstrated that she was not only lovely and lively, but also stacked.

They were surprisingly subtle with this year’s summer-bikini song (pretty much every idol group does one of these now…). Rather than giving her jumping jacks and other obvious titty-action moves (like Erika Yazawa in pretty much every Idoling!! video), they simply put the rest of the group in bikini tops that masked their relative development.

If you’re over a certain age, this picture is sure to be triggering. You’ve been warned!

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1. Create gmail account.
2. Use it to sign into Pokemon Go.
3. Power-level using a GPS-spoofer to constantly "visit" areas densely populated with pokestops.
4. Sell account.
5. Profit!

It looks like the folks at Niantic didn’t have anyone onboard with experience at handling the inevitable issues with running an MMO. Besides just trying to reliably run a 24x7 online service for the biggest mobile game launch ever, there’s “my friends started at launch, and if I want to train at gyms and take them over for my team, I need a well-stocked high-level character”. People foolish enough to start playing the game now cannot compete (you get nothing if you can’t win a fight, and you can’t beat critters with 10x your combat points), which means the only portion of the game open to them is the basic “gotta catch ’em all”. Which they made more difficult in the latest release, rapidly using up your precious supply of pokeballs, primarily acquired through microtransactions (2.76-5 cents per ball).

If you’re near an area with a lot of pokestops (or spoof GPS to visit them…), you can pick up balls and other goodies for free, but there’s nothing even vaguely fair about their distribution around the world. It more or less comes down to how many people in your area tagged locations in Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. In my neighborhood, that means a handful of badly-painted transformer boxes, fountains (one of which is allegedly in the changing room at Marshalls), entrance signs for public parks, a sandwich shop, and some benches at a golf course. In downtown Palo Alto, it means “at least three pokestops per block”.

The team has promised that Real Soon Now they’ll be introducing inter-player trading, which means even more opportunities for professional farmers running on hacked platforms. Hopefully before that gets too far out of hand, Niantic will hire a few clued-in MMO veterans with the estimated $10,000,000/day they’re grossing.

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Korean pop group Oh My Girl might not have watermelons, but at least they have watermelon.

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Also, instead of cat ears…

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Categorization hits and misses:

(and, yes, the Monster Musume manga is still turning up in “self-help books”)

Ask your friend about trigger discipline.