“It was very difficult to get the Irish girls to expose their breasts.”
— Insightful commentary from John Boorman, director of Zardoz"You! Out of the pool!"
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.
Dear Apple,
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)
Dear Amazon,
I guess the “F” stands for “Freddie”?
Urban poetry
And I thought the Clear Keeps were bad…
Cosplay note
If you’re going to dress up as a samurai stormtrooper at conventions, try not to confuse every Japanese person who reads your banner. The nicest comment you’ll get is “it’s like the [bad] English t-shirts junior-high students wear”.
Nick Holmes on Japan
Maybe Eris' Mom was right...
In book 7, Eris’ slightly-ditzy mother misread her letter home, and got the idea that she was in a serious relationship with both Kio and Aoi. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” and Mom went so far as to reassure Aoi that Catian scientists had plenty of experience helping interspecies gay couples have children together. Cue blushing all around, and stammered explanations of the actual state of affairs.
Except… Aoi really is developing feelings for Eris that she doesn’t understand, and that her emotionless-killer childhood hasn’t prepared her to deal with. It’s a tangled-up mess of friend, comrade, big sister, little sister, rival, and, most recently, as she helps Doctor Dyureru give a feverish Eris a sponge bath, “wow, she’s hot”.
Where’s it going? No idea. At this rate, I think we have to wait for Eris to go into heat again for anything to happen in this relationship. Given that the good doctor grins to herself when she sees Aoi’s reaction, and also listens in approvingly a bit later as Aoi pulls back just before blurting out to Kio that she wants to be his wife, I suspect she won’t be providing any heat-canceling pills next time. And since Captain Kuune is also gleefully shipping this trio, Kio and Aoi will probably find themselves locked in a room with a horny catgirl and a week’s worth of food.
Note that despite my expectations that book 10 will have major plot-advancing action, as of the end of chapter 5 (of 9), Eris’ sponge bath is the most significant event.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Loanword of the day: Rippubaajin
Amazon Japan has a very different image of me as a customer. While I’ve overtrained Amazon US to the point that it uses the most tenuous and obscure connections to come up with recommendations, the Japanese site has no such difficulty. I get the occasional curveball after I’ve used it as a search engine for obscure words, but for the most part, recommendations are plausibly based on things I’ve actually bought.
In this case, because I once tossed a few random light novels (mostly still-unread) into an order, including one called School Succubus Panic (in which the titular succubi are available in maid, catgirl, vampire, meganekko teacher, and other flavors; why, yes, it is porn), Amazon Japan just sent me a recommendation for Imouto no Rippubaajin wa Onii-chan no Mono. I had to click through just to see if I’d parsed it correctly…
