I have no idea what’s going on in book 11. That is, I understand the individual scenes, but have absolutely no idea where the story is going.

The latest bafflement is Jack showing up at Kio’s door and introducing herself (apparently for the first time) as a new neighbor, wearing her trademark barely-there cowgirl outfit and giving a completely different name that nonetheless has the initials JACK. This is minor compared to the literal catfight between two previously-unmentioned culture professors on a Catian space station, over who gets to go to Earth as part of the exchange program. And then there’s the teenage goth-loli MI6 agent who collects assistoroid plushies and just moved into the house formerly occupied by 6-chan’s friend Mahiro.

All of which seem positively normal when compared to Kuune holding a reception on board the ship (currently parked offshore from the new embassy) for a collection of Earth’s kami.

Saw a “news” article yesterday where someone attempted to prove his moral cleverness by showing the lack of a significant national response on the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and that what was written about Japan at the time was largely concerned with building up our peaceful relationship. Apparently he not only doesn’t understand the difference between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, he’s managed to overlook all the ways that we still, to this day, remember World War 2.

Turn down the volume, unless you reallyreallyreally like autotune, and try not to have a seizure from the frantic edits. Your reward will be 4 minutes of playful Korean catgirls.

[Update: finished, and while it doesn’t resolve the 30-day challenge, it does wrap up a lot of dangling plot threads, with a surprise at the end suitable for ending a season (should there ever be one…). Some of the threads don’t make a lot of sense, though, and I don’t think it’s incomplete understanding on my part; they just were never adequately explained.]

With two chapters to go, things are finally heating up. If they ever make a second season of the anime, it looks like book 10 can be the climax, and the reason is that Kio “gets a grip”. A very senior, and very scary, Catian official pushes him hard to defend humanity, and when he stands up to her, issues a challenge; if he fails, they’ll leave Earth forever and never come back. He has 30 days, and, fortunately, the help of some very talented women.

(actually, this was in the first half of the book, so technically the sponge bath wasn’t the most significant thing that happened, but I didn’t want to change the subject…)

Meanwhile, the opposition is planning a decisive strike, and for reasons of their own, two Dog deserters want to stop it. The gang is stunned when they show up and tell their story, and when Kio reports it all to Captain Kuune and asks if they should be trusted, she forces him to make the call. With a wink and a grin, she puts her faith in him. If it’s a trick, the lives of all her crew could be lost, so, y’know, no pressure. All he has to do is…

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Or, in this case, “Pool! Out of the loop!”, which explained how someone’s straightforward Python-based service had managed to open 350 simultaneous connections to the MySQL server in a matter of minutes, under very light load. Another one of those “glad we caught it in QA” moments.

Thank you for finally fixing the bug in Safari that disabled Javascript mouseover events if you right-clicked on a link.

(before 5.1, you had to left-click somewhere else on the page to get them back; this also affected the automatic cursor changes as you moused around, which is probably why it got fixed)

I guess the “F” stands for “Freddie”?

And I thought the Clear Keeps were bad…