Inflatable Revenge!

Three men swept out to sea on giant inflatable duck

The only picture shows the rescuers, not the victims of this fowl attack, so I’ll just post a picture of Rena Moriya instead:

Related, my sister was recently in Amsterdam, and sent me a picture without realizing that it would make me a little sad:

How Reddit moderators prevent spoilers

…by shutting down.

Popcorn will be popped

I’m just going to leave this here for later reference:

Not the recommended shot placement, but…

Police in Centerville, Ohio were recently called to an apparent break-in in progress. Before they arrived, the 911 call recorded a single gunshot. They found the intruder face-down on the carpet, dead from a single shot to the head.

They also found an unconscious woman in the front yard, and recently confirmed that she arrived in the same suspicious vehicle that was parked on the street for over an hour before the incident.

No photos of either person have been released after several days. Could it be… aliens?

(pretty sure this airsoft revolver can’t use those magazines…)

On that note,

I’ve never owned a SIG pistol, because for a long time they were all built with right-hand-only thumb safeties, and they were a touch pricey. Now their prices are quite competitive, and if they have manual safeties at all they’re ambi, and I can get 25% off on pretty much their entire line, but I… don’t really have any openings they might fit.

(the P322 has some potential, with its 20 and 25-round magazines, but I like the longer barrel and target trigger on my Browning Buckmark; and I’d only buy an MPX if I had local far-left friends I needed to piss off, and I could do that with just a picture of this thing)

No Nearer To NieR

The much-delayed episodes 9+ of NieR remain in Covid limbo. Fortunately I have the new Zelda game.

(don’t read any forums if you plan to ever play Tears of the Kingdom; most people who got it early and played on emulators at least pretended to mark spoilers, but since the release date, every detail is constantly being spoiled)

Snap Caps that don’t Snap

The common blass&plastic snap-caps (Tipton, etc) have always worked well for me, until I tried to use the .45 ACP variety with moon clips (required to load them into a S&W 25-2 revolver). They don’t fit in the clips, which means they’re simply not dimensionally accurate. The A-zoom metal ones work fine.

(Purah is all grown up again, and people are wondering if she went to band camp…)

Shipped!

I see now why Amazon can’t be more specific about my latest order than “June 7-9”…

Wednesday, June 7  
   3:17 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.
   2:22 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   2:00 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:33 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  12:24 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  12:00 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
Tuesday, June 6  
  11:45 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  11:43 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   8:07 PM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:02 PM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  10:42 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
  10:13 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   7:40 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   6:30 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   5:45 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   2:29 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
   2:08 AM  Package left the carrier facility.  
  12:39 AM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
Monday, June 5  
  11:24 PM  Package arrived at a carrier facility.  
   2:56 PM  Carrier received the package.  
Sunday, June 4  
  Carrier picked up the package.  

(Riju has graduated from Queen Jailbait to Queen Barely Legal, and is the most useful of your companions, but whoever thought it was a good idea to have to chase your AoE attacker into melee to activate her power was… almost as dumb as the person who made the “activate companion power” button the same as the “pick up object” button)

(you’ll know what I mean the first time Tulin runs through while you’re picking up loot. Pro tip: once you get the fifth companion, use it for mining and looting, because then the A button won’t activate the other companions)

My house came with a flagpole mount by the front door, and filling it seemed like an obvious thing to do for Memorial Day. Except that the kit sold at Sam’s Club had a 1.25-inch pole and I had a 1-inch mount, so I had to take the old one off and install theirs.

Then I went to Home Depot, and discovered that every flag they sell comes with a 1-inch pole, so if this one ever wears out (and despite being “Made in the USA”, it’s built like Chinese junk), I may have to switch back.

(specifically, the plastic hooks that attach the flag to the pole don’t stay shut, and required a quick application of gaffer tape to keep my flag from ending up several blocks away; I’ll likely end up replacing them with wire)

Long pepper, extra organic

A cookbook I bought my mom recently touted the virtues of long pepper, so I bought some on Amazon, five-star rating, Prime shipping.

When I shook some out into my hand, a live insect was included in the mix. Despite shipping directly from Amazon, this product could not be returned, replaced, or refunded. And Amazon deleted my one-star review for including the “no return/replacement/refund” line.

(…then I ordered from The Spice House, which has never included live bugs in any order…)

Things that make me twitch…

I was at a public indoor pistol range the day before Memorial Day, and there was a grizzled old Marine vet precisely and accurately putting holes in paper with a pistol-caliber carbine. He was in (unofficial) camo covered with USMC and related patches, and he was in the lane to my left. Every once in a while he’d switch guns and fill the center of the target with a single ragged hole with his .22. The range officer was standing a few yards behind him, and the two were discussing their service records as he shot.

That’s the setup. The twitch came when I went to throw away an empty ammo box, and saw his carbine swinging freely from the sling, alternately pointing at his own thigh and the RO’s foot. The RO who was too busy chatting up a fellow vet to do his fucking job.

Usually I’d have made a loud-but-polite request to inform the fool and get the attention of the RO, who’s often at the other end of the range when this sort of thing happens, but given the specific holiday and the fact that the RO was right there, I just casually pointed out the two-for-one deal he had on offer. The carbine was quickly unslung and set down, muzzle downrange.

A spam comment? Here?

Someone spammed the previous post with a sentence that read like it was generated with one of the recent AI chatbots, in order to appear related. But it couldn’t disguise the “career coaching” web site it wanted to send people to…

Nothing says sexy like a woman packing a pair of 44’s… and a gun.

Summer anime

Holding at two shows to watch: Ryza and Vending Machine.

(amusingly, the official abbreviation of the typically ridiculously long isekai title is jihanki)

Unrelated, I have my differences with the NRA, but…

…I am now a certified Range Safety Officer.

Gun-service time!

Surprisingly SFW set; I guess the folks on Pixiv have trouble tagging guns when there are nipples on display.

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Heat wave!

“The reason your 10-month-old air conditioner stopped working is that the condenser fan crapped out, and it’s too late in the day for me to call the warehouse, so we probably won’t be able to install a new one until Monday Tuesday.”

So I spent a few days hiding in the cool, dry basement, with the 4 screened windows open at night to cool the place down. I have more than 4 windows, but to install the rest of the screens that have been sitting in boxes in the basement for 23 years, the blinds have to be taken down, and I was planning to replace them, until the Bidenhandler regime doubled down on destroying the country.

The repair was free under warranty, at least.

(speaking of warranties, I hope this “SF-like gun” comes with one…)

Best Airpods Pro earpads (so far)

I have a set of first-generation Airpods Pro. The Apple-supplied earpads were (like many Apple products, including the Airpod cases) slippery and prone to falling out, so I bought third-party replacements, which lasted for quite a while before breaking off with half of it left in my ear.

I grabbed another set at Target, and they didn’t stay on the pods, didn’t fit my ears well, and of course didn’t have very good sound. So I threw these into my latest order, and the M size fits firmly and gives terrific sound and noise isolation.

Perhaps by no coincidence, they’re not made in China like most of the competition; they’re made in South Korea for the Japanese market.

Don’t buy ammo from guns.com…

…no matter how attractive the price. Why? Because this is bait-and-switch. The SKU is 53880 (cleanfire), and the description matches that product, but what they actually send out is SKU 53652 (indoor target). It took over a month to get them to resolve the problem with a refund, after weeks of back-and-forth in which they alternately claimed that they’d sent the correct stuff and promised to find it in their warehouse.

Ten days ago, they sent me an RMA label to return the wrong stuff (pro tip: do not take ammo to “The UPS Store”; they’re not UPS). On Monday, they swore the warehouse had found the 53880 and would ship it out that day. On Wednesday they finally gave up and refunded my money, but the incorrect listing is still up and “in-stock”. At no point in this process did they ever reach out to contact me; I always had to call and spend 15 minutes listening to really terrible hold music.

(now I have to figure out which credit card it got refunded to, because neither their site nor their emails include even a partial number…)

(update: ah, the only place your credit-card info appears is on the "billing information" page, and only for the most recent transaction, so if you bought something else after the refund was processed, it would disappear)

I think I’m getting better at whittling down the archives. Or at least quicker…

Where have you been?

I just received a package that Amazon sent to me in January (and quickly declared lost and replaced). Via USPS, of course.

(it had a note scrawled on the side “6.15 postage due”; I don’t know who they expect to collect that from)

Anker Man

Anker, maker of devices that transform AC current into USB charging, released a… Transformers tie-in model. Five months ago, but Amazon didn’t recommend it to me until today. Not that I’m in the market for one.

Custom kydex that isn’t

I’m not going to name-and-shame the vendor, yet, but I went looking for a good OWB mag carrier for a Ruger LCP Max, found a company in Texas that had a nice-looking product and advertised compatibility, and received something that was not only not left-handed, but that was so oversized that you could drop the mag in and rattle it around.

Turns out they didn’t have a sample in stock to form the kydex around, and guessed that it must be about the size of a Sig P365. But they didn’t have a sample for the .380 version of the P365, so they used the 9mm mag. And just in case it was a little too big, they included a replacement washer to narrow it down.

Closest thing I’ve got that fits in it is a .40 CZ-75B mag. I sent pictures off to the vendor, talked to them on the phone, and they said they’d stop at the nearby Cabelas, pick up the right mag, and make a replacement (properly left-handed). Even if the new one is correct, I definitely won’t order from them again, because if I wanted something generic that might kinda fit if you tweak it, I wouldn’t have ordered model-specific custom kydex.

(Tanya is not amused, and you know what that leads to…)

Cheesecake variety pack

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All dried up?

The glass-block window that had sprung multiple leaks during heavy rain has now been replaced, which when combined with the drainage work the landscapers did should keep my basement nice and dry and ready for finishing.

Except that the company stock dropped from 31 to 22 while I was waiting, so I really don’t want to start any big new house projects right now. Once they finish the landscaping and send the final bill, that’s going to be it for a while.

(we never got to see the hero’s reward in BotW, but one of the few minor spoilers I’ve read about Tears of the Kingdom is that five years later, the house that Link renovated is now referred to as “Zelda’s house”…)

Slow Fire TV, Fast Replacement

Just under five years ago, I purchased the Amazon Fire TV Cube, with 4K streaming support. About two years ago, it started getting sluggish. Saturday at 5:45 PM, it collapsed under the weight of their UI updates, so I gave up and ordered a replacement, trading in my first-generation Fire TV to get 20% off. (seriously, it still streams 4K HDR video without a hitch, but it can’t keep up with the crufted-up user interface, and force-restarts every app when you switch between them)

They promised delivery between 4 AM and 8 AM Sunday.

It arrived at 7:20 PM Saturday. The faster CPU and increased RAM allows it to run the UI and stream video.

(unrelated angel-waifu Tia delivers)

Please Don’t Tell My Fans I Released A New Book

Or, “how not to use social media to promote your work”. Richard Roberts, author of the fun “Please Don’t Tell My Parents”/Pennyverse novels, abandoned his Twitter account when Elon Musk bought the place, and he’d already abandoned his blog, so you have to follow the link to his non-book-related Tumblr and then follow the link to his book-related Tumblr.

Which you can’t read without a Tumblr account, because they very aggressively pester you for a login now after showing minimal content.

You know, like Twitter did before Elon Musk bought it…

Anyway, Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Giant Monster came out a month ago.

(yes, NieR is still in limbo, kind of like Roberts’ internet presence)