“a day at the range”.

New Jersey Democrat Bonnie Watson Coleman wants to ban online ammo dealers, and send the feds after anyone who buys by the case. Apparently because she gets off watching “shocking images of unspeakable gun violence”:

"The bill would also require ammunition vendors to report any sales of more than 1,000 rounds within five consecutive days to the U.S. attorney general if the person purchasing ammunition is not a licensed dealer."

More evidence that she has an active fantasy life:

"The bill aims, she said, to help prevent malicious attacks like the July 2012 shooting in the Aurora, Colo. movie theater that left 12 dead and 70 wounded."

Yup, that’d sure stop the next guy who walked into a movie theater with a shotgun, rifle with drum magazine, pistol, and smoke grenades, wearing body armor. He’d never manage to acquire enough ammo for the 76 shots he fired, and would have had to bring the 30 homemade grenades and 10 gallons of gasoline that the cops found in his home. I feel safer already!

Greek and Roman Mythology now too upsetting for students at Columbia, as the “trigger warning” game jumps a dozen flaming sharks.

The next person who attempts the “trigger warning” game in my presence will receive a heaping helping of verbal macroaggressions. Their abuse of psychological jargon had already gone way too far, but they’ve gotten away with it because the rest of us were socialized into Western Civilization. No more for me.

The difference between real triggers and “shutting up anyone you disagree with” is that real triggers are specific, as any therapist will tell you. I know, because for several years after my apartment building burned down in the middle of the night, and I had to run toward the fire to safety, the smell of burning wood sent my heart-rate through the roof. But only at night, only when it was unexpected, only when I was home.

There’s still a faint twitch when it happens, well over 20 years later, so whenever I fire up the smoker, I’m careful to throw the clothes in the washer and take a shower before bedtime. And I always pay attention to the sound of fire trucks and the smell of neighborhood grilling.

But I love to grill and smoke, and I love to watch a fireplace. You can’t trigger me by talking about fire or showing me pictures of a house burning. Or by making me read about Prometheus.

Why does attaching the Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter reset the USB3 bus on my MacBook Pro, unmounting the external drives?

While skimming through previous episodes of DanMachi, I happened to notice an amusing bit of animation in episode 3. At 11:34, Our Hero’s Dream Girl finishes dispatching a monster that’s escaped into the city, and as the crowd cheers, she performs a crisp, precise chiburi-nōtō to put away her sword. Her slim, double-edged rapier.

It’s an overhead crowd shot, and you only see her at a distance, but after flicking the blade clean, she very clearly grasps the mouth of the scabbard with her left hand and slides the full length of the blade along it before guiding it in.

It’s the classic technique for safely sheathing a katana, gliding the thick spine along the web of your thumb until the tip drops neatly into the mouth, so that you know without looking that the blade will go into the scabbard and not, say, your thigh.

This does not work for double-edged blades (or for that other famous anime blade, Rurouni Kenshin’s “reverse katana”). Attempting a standard nōtō will simply slice open your hand.

Amusingly, all of the close-up scenes I found of Aiz sheathing her blade show her just poking the tip into the scabbard; it’s only in this one very public slaying that the animators added the extra dramatic motion.

…and of course the usual ridiculous metallic noises that accompany waving a blade in the air and sliding it into a leather scabbard. After a while you sort of stop noticing that nonsense, unless it’s something as over-the-top absurd as the magical kitchen knife in the pilot episode of Gotham.

Race: prum (halfling).
Height: 100cm.
Age: 15.
Ethics: situational.
Occupation: lifts and separates.
Kemonomimi: at-will.

Episode 6 of DanMachi finishes off the second light novel’s worth of story, focusing on the tiny, cheerful, mendacious Lili, who hides not only her motives, but a smoking-hot body. Sadly, every potential screenshot showing her without her snug-yet-concealing robe involves her being beaten up by large ugly male adventurers (seriously; you get lingering cheesecake shots of her as she’s smacked around, which is Not My Thing). This has somewhat soured her outlook on life, leading to the point of episodes 4-6: what happens when a genuinely nice person pets a whipped puppy.

Since Bell is Our Hero, and this is a harem comedy, it’s no great spoiler to say that things work out in the end, or that the next arc focuses on Bell’s primary fixation, the flat-affect blonde sword princess (who, by the way, apparently has her own spinoff novels now).

A better-than-expected translation of the first two light novels is available on Amazon (1, 2). That is, you can still see the Japanese grammar peeking through, but it’s not filled with the clumsy constructs common to fan translations on Baka-tsuki, etc. It succeeds in telling the story, and fills in a lot of details that make for some puzzling moments in the anime.

One thing of note is that the novels are very light on description, apart from breast size and hairstyles, so Hestia’s famous ribbon was definitely the work of the cover artist. Lili’s figure goes entirely unmentioned, largely because her dog-ear disguise convinced Bell that she was a beastman child rather than a halfling teen. I’m sure this attitude will survive the truth for a while, leading to a future Compromising Position that makes her an official haremette.

Or maybe if she wants him to notice, she’ll have to upgrade her wardrobe to one of the classics:

more...

Here, posted a week ago. The comment includes “see you next week”, but it’s a bit early to get your hopes up…

Our executive admin came by asking if there was anything she could use to convert some photos from color to black-and-white. Assorted people have Photoshop, but she didn’t want to take up anyone else’s time, she just needed something quick to paste into a slide/report/whatever.

Trivial with Preview.app on a Mac (in fact, hard to avoid, since the misnamed app autosaves even accidental changes made to any image or PDF you view…), but she couldn’t find anything in a stock Windows 7 install that would do it. I vaguely remembered having tripped over some image-modifying tools in Microsoft Word, so I pasted a work-safe sample photo into a new document, right-clicked, selected the obvious-looking “Format Picture…” item, and found tools for cropping, resizing, and recoloring. Ten seconds later, I right-clicked the photo again, selected “Save as Picture…”, and we were done.

It was the summer of 1981, and I was hanging out with my dad at a cottage in Bear Lake, Michigan. I was a little bored one afternoon, flipping through the latest issue of Omni magazine, and came across this:

Four pictures, a very small amount of text, and three tennis balls. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been standing at the top of a hill, though…

My first rings were carved from an old oil painting with a jigsaw, by a family friend; they were sort-of round. I think my first clubs were Jugglebug, picked up at a game shop in the Lane Ave Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio. I became a fair 3-ball trick juggler, but never really had the patience to get serious; in college I taught my friend Andrew the basics, and he later ran off to tour with a pro for a while. (this Andrew, I think; we fell out of contact decades ago, but it looks like the right guy. I should ping him)