No-crunch streaming

Both of the shows I plan to try watching this season (Flatcat & Sword and A-cup Alchemist, er, “Management of Novice Alchemist”) are streaming on HiDive. Crunchyroll has some good shows on their (partial) announcement, but just not ones I plan to watch.

Three Bodies, One Cour

I had lost track of Amazon’s film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and just discovered that the deal fell through and it’s now being done by Netflix, to be released in 2023. They’re throwing a lot of money and talent at a frankly terrible thriller with a thin veneer of technobabble. Seriously, it’s like Battlefield Earth without the SF content. I mean, really bad.

(Expo 2025 mascot is probably unrelated, and better designed)

I broke the scammer!

I just got a scam call offering “supplemental Medicare assistance”. In response to the first question, I said “I am not eligibile for Medicare”. The computer (complete with phony call-center background noise) proceeded to congratulate me for thinking about my health insurance options, then asked if I had thought about supplemental Medicare insurance. I repeated my answer. It then asked how old I was, and I answered “twelve”.

Silence. Two minutes of silence, then it finally hung up.

“Trending” on Twitter

Saw this one in passing: “Roevember is coming”. My immediate response was, “…followed by Dobbsember”. 😁

Achievement unlocked: new house networked!

• 5U vertical rack in basement with PDU & 48-port patch panel
  • 1 coax cable routed from exterior Spectrum Cable box
  • 1 24-port managed gigabit switch
  • 1 vendor-managed cable modem
  • 1 vendor-managed wifi router with wifi disabled (because the cable modem wasn’t bright enough to bridge my static IP block)
  • 1 OpenBSD firewall router (Shuttle DS61)
• 12 drops spread across 8 rooms (each 2x Cat6a, 1x coax)
• 1 8+2-port managed 2.5/10-gig switch (office)
• 3 8-port managed gigabit switches (office, family room, living room)
• Orbi Quad-band Wifi 6E and 2 satellites, claiming “up to 10.8 Gbps”, but has 2.5-gig ports on the back, so they’ll all be moving to the 2.5/10 switch soon (office, family room, living room)

I seem to have lost the rack-mounting ears for the 24-port switch, and the only people selling replacements for that brand are in Australia, so I need to find a simple wire shelf that sits inside the rack, so I can organize the contents and still close the door/lid.

I hadn’t realized until they’d left for the day on Saturday that they ran the cable bundles directly adjacent to the main gas line that runs the length of the house. Not how I’d have done it.

They also ran speaker wire from one side of the living room to the other as requested, but I had to convince the guy that no, I did not want 6 feet of speaker wire just sticking straight out of the wall on both sides of the room. I wanted wallplates with screw/banana terminals, like every other AV install I’ve ever seen or heard of. Baffling.

Related, if I’d known that the rack was a top-opener with the patch panel at the top, I’d have asked for it to be mounted lower on the basement wall, so I didn’t have to use a stepladder to plug in ethernet cables.

(cat-sitting is different in the city)

Japan reopens for tourists on October 11. Our last rescheduling is still in place for November, so we are, as they say, good to go. Some of the events we had on our trip calendar are missing, including a harvest festival about halfway between Kyoto and Osaka, so we’ll probably have to do some improvising, but we like that sort of thing.

And, yes, it’s “three shots or a test right before the flight”; I suppose I’ll finally have to get a booster, to avoid any possible delays caused by testing. No word yet if they’re still going to require tracking apps on your phones.

They’re really, really eager to get tourists back, offering a number of incentives, including some sort of cash-back deal for your first night.

Call Of The Night 12

In which BOOBS! Also, Vampire Hunter D-Cup flirts and teases, in a manner suspiciously similar to how Our Not-Really-The-Hugging-Type Vamp does. In the end, though, It’s A Trap!

Slave Harem Dungeon 12 (fin!)

(you can pretty freely rearrange the title words for this show…)

In the final episode, Our Pimp Daddy just bought and boned all of the other girls during the end credits, without bothering with any of the actual backstories. Like the reason the blonde is being sold to him by her own family, or how she was broken to service by the senior girls. They’d have needed another two seasons to get through the actual story content involved in collecting the whole set, given how much time they spend on acquiring skill stones to upgrade their gear (the official reason for buying Sherry), so they just montaged the hell out of it and ended with a (gang) bang.

(the only reason this picture is unrelated is that it isn’t covered in censorship dialog boxes)

Vermeil 12 (fin!)

After repeating the last few minutes of the previous episode, and five minutes of talking, Our Scenery-Chewing Villain insists that it’s time for the climactic battle!

Which lasts about a minute, before the ref calls it on account of time and they just walk away. The rest is padding, because damn did they run out of material. About the only nice thing I can say is that the student council girls beat up Our Loving Hero in the guise of “training” before Our Loving Succubus gets nekkid and delivers the last Buy The Bluray ad.

(unrelated busty demon gal is unrelated, and also, I’m suddenly feeling hot for teacher)

Checking in on Dungeon Slave Harem…

In the next-to-last episode, Our Slavering Hero finally made the call to buy another loli fuckslaveparty member. Her first service will have to wait for the final episode this week, since she spent half the runtime marveling over his worldbreaking awesomeness.

(Roxanne will continue to put on the red light out for Master alongside her new kouhai)

Winter and Spring…

Bofuri 2 for January, Edens Zero 2 for Spring. That’s it, so far.

(picture is unrelated, as per Pixy’s lament)

Dear Amazon,

I love the fact that I frequently get next-day and same-day free delivery now, but could you work on the problem where items are being labeled as in-stock and Prime that ship from amazon.com, but when you get to the checkout they won’t arrive for two weeks?

Dear Atlassian technical support,

Yes, we read knowledgebase articles, too. Usually before opening the ticket, so it’s really not useful to just keep sending new ones to us that aren’t useful or relevant to solving the massive heap spikes that we started seeing after installing your latest security patch, which are giving the garbage collector a real workout.

Definitely not in California, part 4473

Once you have a training certificate in hand (8-hour class, with two hours on the range, including malfunction drills), it takes about a week to get a concealed-carry license in Ohio. In my county, at least, it’s a web form: fill it in, upload photos of the certificate and your ID, pay the fee, pick a day to go in for fingerprints and a photo, and then walk out with your CHL. Good for five years.

You don’t need a license for concealed-carry in Ohio any more, but having one is likely to improve any relevant interactions with police, permitless carry doesn’t work in the 19 states that accept Ohio’s license, and you don’t have to go through the instant-check when purchasing a new gun (which, by the way, means that the reports about how many gun sales Democrats have caused are likely significantly low).

I’m not in the market for another gun at the moment, though. More precisely, the guns I’m in the market for are simply not available, because pretty much anything vaguely concealable in 9mm or .380 is flying off the shelves as fast as it can be made, so manufacturers are reacting appropriately (although they seem a tad optimistic about the market for Coyote Ugly tan-colored handguns).

The training class was interesting. We had five people in it: a school bus driver, a construction worker, two competitive handgun shooters, and me. Everyone was shooting Glocks, their own or rentals; I had toyed with the idea of bringing my 1966 Browning Hi-Power, but I didn’t know how they ran the practical test, and it has terrible sights. Classic, but terrible.

Turned out the range test was trivial for any experienced shooter, although they required you to handle and shoot your gun in a way I’m not used to. I’ve never shot in a “proper” Isosceles stance from a close-body low ready position, nor used their very specific method of clearing malfunctions, so I actually had something to practice while making a large ragged hole in the paper.

(“and now a few words about the secure alarmed cabinet in the securely-locked basement of my alarm-and-security-camera-equipped house…”)

Related…

I was amused to see a particular brand of .45 ACP 230-grain ball ammo being marketed as subsonic. This is like saying “our bleach whitens”.

“Obscene sunny days that I thought would never end…” 😁

Vermeil 11

In Which If Loving You Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right.

Seriously, that’s the entire episode, right there, literally coming out of the mouth of Our Observing Hero. Giant battle against unbeatable foe that was interrupted by exposition and a flashback? No sign of it. Maybe next week, since that’s the final episode.

Call Of The Night 11

In Which Buffy Wears Glasses And Kicks Vampire Asses. The plot, as they say, thickens, starting with an accidental pick-up line and leading directly to a healthy dose of teen bonding in the traditional late-night school-mystery hunt, which never ends well.

I’m really hoping this gets another cour soon; there are still two more episodes coming (which isn’t enough to do more than dip their toes into this new plot twist), but I haven’t seen any news about a continuation any time soon.

Dear Amazon, Please Stop

Blade Runner 2099, The Series.

Ridley Scott is attaching his name to it, but it’s being written by someone named Silka Luisa whom I’ve never heard of, and whose genre credits include three episodes of a show I’ve never heard of, and an episode of Halo.

Fall Season?

Planning to watch:

• Flatcat And Sword (“reincarnated as a sword”)

  • after Truck-kun sends some random guy into a fantasy world, he ends up with mysterious powers that make monster-fighting a cinch, hooks up with a cute loli slave girl, and begins a life of adventure with her. Where it breaks from the usual formula is that he’s a magic sword and there isn’t even a hint of a harem; it’s just a 12-year-old former slave and her stepdad-sword. September 28th on HiDive.

• Novice Alchemist’s Shop Management (“management of novice alchemist”)

  • after graduating from alchemist school, Our Heroine gets sent off to the boonies to open her own shop, make lots of friends, and beat the living hell out of giant monsters. October 3rd, streaming site not announced yet.

…and that’s it so far.

(picture is unrelated and out of season)

Fun Facts, 1Password Edition

A member of my team has been in India for a while, and went to file a ticket with a vendor. The password she had in 1password (v7) for that account didn’t work, so she reset it and went on with her day. Then the new guy in Prague and I went to open another ticket with that vendor, and the password (again, v7) didn’t work. So we checked with her, and eventually figured out that firewall rules prevented her from connecting to the 1Password servers, and the application never told her that sync had been failing for weeks. No indication whatsoever in the Mac client.

To quote Cole Trickle, “it’s just a little rubbing”. Or something like that…

(a lot of these have been in my archives so long they’ve been deleted from Pixiv, which means I lose track of the artist)

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Vermeil 10

Y’know what this series needed? A massive battle against an unbeatable foe that’s interrupted by several minutes of lengthy exposition, including a brand-new character who shows up to kick off a flashback explaining The Secret History Of Our Gainaxing Succubus (which we’ve been expecting for some time, thanks to the credits). Also Our Determined Hero somehow ends up bleeding in that “Grendel mask” let’s-get-serious way.

Not shown: Vermeil’s panties, in what’s practically a Don’t-Buy-The-Bluray moment during the calm before the storm. Related, random spear-carrying military mages were so focused and intense that they didn’t even notice her barely-contained curves when they walked by to deliver their bit of inept foreshadowing. I disbelieve; I’ve met young soldiers.

By the way, remember that gang of friends who show up occasionally to remind the viewer that they exist but have nothing to do? They show up briefly to remind the viewer that they exist but have nothing to do.

Call Of The Night 10

In this episode of Sukebe Deka, Our Friends With Sucking Benefits go undercover at a maid café to solve The Mystery Of The Missing Upskirts. And it would have worked if it weren’t for that meddling kid.

Home-work

The guys sealing the basement cracks managed to work around the inconveniently-placed pipe, so I’m all set there. And with the electrical work done, I now have Toto Washlets in all three bathrooms. Next week the only thing going on is picking up a comfy chair I ordered for the living room, but the week after that, the structured wiring is going in, complete with a 5U rack mounted to the basement wall to store all the network gear. Once I have the modem(s), router, and 2.5 Gb/s switch in there, I’ll be a lot happier.

I’ve mostly gotten used to relying on wireless in the house with the new Orbi Wifi 6E setup, but the two satellites are currently backhauling to the base AP via wireless, so they’re not delivering full bandwidth. They’ll perform better with a 2.5 Gb/s wired connection, and adding a switch in the living room will make all my streaming video wired as well.

The biggest win will be running a 10 Gb/s connection between the NAS in the basement and the computers in my office, allowing me to manage my photo and video archives better. After the basement is finished, of course; right now I’d need to buy another closed rack for it, to keep the spiders out.

Torching the Doctor

I just finished watching seasons three and four of Torchwood (which I’d only seen bits of before), which taken together make a good reason to worry about Russell T Davies’ return as the showrunner for Doctor Who.

Many of the flaws in season four can be blamed on the co-production by Starz, which put most of the action in the US with a really weird mix of good actors, bad actors, and otherwise-good actors in bad roles (Bill Pullman is almost unwatchable for the first two-thirds of this turkey), but the primary culprit is Davies, because he created the overall story arc, which is frankly terrible message fic (as was the arc for season three).

It seemed odd that they narrowed Captain Jack’s original omnisexuality to make him almost exclusively gay, to the point that they made homosexuality essential to the plot. Literally: the root cause of the crisis in season four was Jack being stabbed by a deeply religious closeted gay man that he picked up on Ellis Island in the early Twentieth Century.

(picture is unrelated)

Guess the book…

Amazon says that “products related to this item” are (in order):

• The Storm Glass (The Glass Sky Series Book 1)
• The Better World Shopping Guide: 7th Edition
• Cocktails, Mocktails, And Garnishes From The Garden
• Coin: Have You Ever Wished You Could Uninvent Something? (RightMind Book 1)
• Made Of Steel
• Constable In The Shrubbery
• The Dartmoor Girl
• The Evil Than Men Do
• Made Of Steel: The Complete Series
• Real World Gunfight Training
• Resistance Training
• The Perfect Athlete
• How To Fence
• Temptation (The Hunted Series Book 1)
• Constable Around The Park
• City Of Men
• The Case Of The Missing Morris Dancer

(picture is about as related as most of Amazon’s recommendations…)

In the definitely-not-in-California-any-more department, I’m looking at 5 days of thunderstorms. Also a 5-for-$55 deal on MagPul 30-round AR-15 magazines at the local range. They’re also offering a bundle with a S&W M&P-15 Sport II, extra mags, and a rifle case, which they said was selling quite well, but I took a look at the case, and it’s the wackiest collection of tacti-cool straps, buckles, zippers, pouches, bungies, and velcro that I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, you could make a gimp suit out of this bag and have hardware left over.

No gimp suits were harmed in the collection of this cheesecake.

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That’s “clear and present danger”, a heavily loaded term that suggests that the president’s speechwriters watch too many movies. I suppose we’ll all need to buy new hats now.

Cry, Uncle

The series has been suspended indefinitely because sweatshop anime production spreads Covid.

You know it’s bad when…

…your CFO jumps out of a skyscraper to his death.

“To dodging bullets”

Fun fact: while most electric ranges require 220 power, most dual-fuel ones come with a 110 cable. I learned this when the installer pulled out my old range and asked me if we were going to plug the new one in on top of the counter for now (!).

Fortunately, when his suffering partner finished pulling it uphill, we discovered that the Kitchenaid dual-fuel doesn’t ship with a power cord, and removing the back panel revealed that they could hook up a 220 cord, which they had in the back of the truck.

I’ll need to get a trim kit for it; there are small gaps on both sides, and a big one in back. The official one is out of stock, but hopefully they can hook me up with something that’ll work.

Speaking of bullets…

On my last trip to the range, I ended up next to a man who was teaching his kids to shoot. I thought the gold-star-for-attendance constant encouragement was annoying and a bit silly, but since they were actually shooting recognizable groups, I let it pass.

However, when I walked to the trash can to throw away an empty ammo box and saw him casually pointing a gun into the room as he explained its operation to his son, I politely-but-firmly intervened.

J: “Downrange, please!”

X: mrrr?

J: “Please point your weapon downrange!”

X: mrrr?

J: (louder, pointing firmly) “Sir, please keep your gun pointed that way!”

I deliberately raised my voice to attract the attention of the range officer… who was amiably chatting with someone at the other end of the room. Sigh.

Recycling Princess Bride lines…

In his thousand-year-trike speech, Brandon once again used one of his well-worn trust-me phrases, with precisely the effect you might have expected:

“I could give you my word as a Biden!”

    “No good, I’ve known too many Bidens”.

Reminder: when you hate half the people in the country, you’re the bigot.