“Let the universe go on in exactly the same way it would have if that one critical moment had never occurred. Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.”
— Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, on time-travelLingering effects
So I’ve been sick for about two weeks now, with whatever cold/flu/sinus bug is going around, and most likely I’m getting reinfected whenever I feel well enough to get out of the house and go into public. This is in addition to the problem I’ve been dealing with since June, where a combination of sinuses and “silent heartburn” conspired to wreck my voice.
And, of course, getting sick again made that problem even worse, to the point where I was in a conference call early Thursday morning dealing with the fallout from a power outage, and people could barely understand the frog-like sounds that came from my throat.
Off to the ENT again this afternoon. Hopefully he’ll have something better than “try taking Prilosec for three months”, which helped a little, but not enough.
[Update: …and the word for the day is “endoscopic fundoplication”; something to investigate when I get back from my upcoming vacation]
The truth about Death Knights...
In the new World of Warcraft expansion, Death Knights are a playable class of formerly-dead, formerly-enslaved minions of the Big Bad. Even freed of their loyalty to the evil Lich King, they’re, um, not very nice people, specializing in pestilence, disease, corruption, raising the dead, and assorted other unsavory hobbies.
Naturally, this led 99.94% of the customers who created one to choose a grim, death-y, stupid name. I went a different route. In the previous expansion, the race of draenei were added to the game with “Hollywood Russian” accents, so I created a female draenei with a name that used the accent to project her cheery outlook on after-life: Vanakudl.
The armor available for the first ten levels made me wonder if I shouldn’t have named her HelloSailor, but eventually she acquired a grim, cold-blooded killer look that just wouldn’t do. So I followed Arthur’s advice and made her an herbalist, sending her around the world to gather flowers.
This morning, I was presented with a bit of commisioned fan-art:
Master of Slut-Fu
[Update: I really ought to finish watching all of the DVDs I already own, namely トランプ. I knew I’d seen her hair like that before… (this concert also includes an energetic and lightly-clad performance by Mai Satoda and Ayaka)]
Original, extremely girly version of the song here. Even in this one, Boss Siatou’s curves makes her stand out like, well, the only grownup in a room full of 15-year-olds.
I’ve seen her do the song in concert in the original style, but I hadn’t known about this:
Or this:
Proof I'm not the target market
Spam headline: “This is the solution to all your ED woes”.
J’s first thought: “ED’s are pretty dull; I usually just watch the OP”.
Shameless Pluggery
The Roku set-top box is supposed to be pretty cool. And you may be aware that in addition to their Netflix Watch Instantly support, they’ve just added Amazon’s Video On Demand service. If you hadn’t heard about any of that, then gosh-golly-wow, doesn’t it sound just spiffy?
And doesn’t this sound like a paraphrased press release that includes a sponsored link to buy the product on Amazon? It should, because that’s what it is! I just got email from Amazon this morning letting me know that I should take advantage of the buzz and earn money for every Roku Digital Video Player that I help them sell.
So, you know: $99 bucks; streaming video on your TV set; apparently doesn’t suck. Let me know how it works out for you.
Dear Reuters,
When reporting that a popular scholar has been detained by the Chinese government, it doesn’t sound good to suddenly switch to the past tense in the last two paragraphs:
He was a popular commentator in the Japanese media and appeared at panels and a symposium on Sino-Japanese relations.
Jin was from Yanji, an ethnically Korean area near China's border with North Korea.
I can’t decide if it’s a simple editing mistake, or a sudden outbreak of honest reporting.
Melons in a nutshell
I think the first thirty seconds of this clip perfectly defines the roles of the four members of Melon Kinenbi. I can just see them raiding the wardrobe dungeon together to come up with these outfits: Smoky, Quirky, Psycho, and Bambi.
[…and when you add this clip, it’s clear that Boss Saitou is the true Master Of Slut-Fu.]
Dear LG,
I’m not sure, but I think you’re trying to sell some sort of consumer electronics device in this picture. Power strip? Remote control? What is it?
