“I think of it as competing for beer money; this keeps me steady on course. My purpose is to make what I write entertaining enough to compete with beer. Not to be as great as Shakespeare or as immortal as Homer but simply to write well enough to persuade the cash customer to spend money on one of my paperback reprints when he could spend it on beer.”
— Robert HeinleinDear Amazon,
I am in awe of how random and wrong this was:
J: Alexa, play the song “I spent my last ten dollars on birth control and beer”.
A: Here’s Rake and Ramblin’ Man, by Don Williams, on Amazon Music.
J: Alexa, play the song “I spent my last ten dollars” by “Two Nice Girls”.
A: I Spent My Last $10.00 (On Birth Control & Beer), by Two Nice Girls, on Amazon Music.
(to be clear, this was not mis-heard; the voice history in the app shows that every word was clearly understood, and she still ended up with a completely wrong song)
Urakata: 1.1
After three solid days of bump-and-grinding my way through the stasis spell, I had my Hero. To seal the deal, I fed him a story about saving the world from demons and then slid back along his lifeline. I could feel his recent death through our newly-forged connection, so I went back to the night before, fucked him silly to convince him he was the white knight to my dream girl, and then snuck back home to there to steal every bit of hero gear I could get my hands on.
I still don’t know how I missed. I’d never missed before. I could nail a fifty-year-old has-been in a truck-stop men’s room, jump to a sixteenth birthday he’d never forget, and be back in his limo to congratulate him on his amazing string of business successes before he had time to zip up. Sliding up and down a man’s lifeline was as easy for me as, well, you know.
Apparently I was off by three weeks. Even the most satisfied man can figure out that something’s wrong if you give him three weeks to think about it. Worse, when I slid back to our mutual present to pick him up, I couldn’t get through the door.
I was the best in the business, a tough, seasoned pro with hundreds of years of successful “inspirations” under my belt, so I did not hide in a corner and cry my heart out over the unfairness of a universe that kicked me to the curb, held out one last tasty-looking carrot, and then slammed the fucking door in my face.
I dried my eyes and got to work. I needed a Hero, and a mountee always got her man.
Trying out Joplin…
Finally!
Acid Reign
My Pinky FunkoPOP has finally shipped. Y’know, the one I ordered in July that got delayed repeatedly, taking so long that I went ahead and bought the limited-edition version from a marketplace dealer. At least I saved $2.21 by pre-ordering it…
Maybe someday I should catch up on the actual show; I think the last one I watched was the hot springs episode where she was delightfully shameless when the little kid ended up peeking over the wall.
Sync, Sync, Reboot
Or at least “reformat”. I’m still writing in StandardNotes for now, and while my sync bug is still open, it did trigger a code change to the backend sync server to handle conflict resolution better. I don’t know when that will be live on their official service, but they’re working on the problem. I’m tempted to dig into their sync algorithm a bit to see how it works under the hood, but it’s a Rails app, and I’m not a big fan of Ruby (seriously, is it really used for anything but Rails and Puppet?).
If I switch to hosting it myself, I’ll probably take at least a quick peek under the hood, so I have a better understanding of its quirks.
My current protection methods (switch to a different document at the end of an editing session and wait a few seconds before opening that document on another platform) seem to be adequate for now, which makes my #1 annoyance with the iPad app the gratuitous quote-smartening it does. I’m passing everything through BBedit occasionally to clean that up; at least it’s not inserting invisible garbage non-breaking spaces the way Synology’s Notes app does.
(#2 would be the “hide sidebar” button that’s an arrow literally overlapping your text, making it a small target where being slightly off means you pull up the on-screen keyboard instead; #3 is the fact that it uses a proportional font even in the basic text-only editor, without even a choice of size)
Light Noveling
[I stashed this away to use after the epilogue, but it was in one of my other synced-notepad apps, and I just tripped over it]
One of the common characteristics of light novels is that they’re sparse, with dialogue that can go on for pages without a single he-said/she-said, punctuated by shallow-but-clever wordplay and exposition overloaded with prenominal phrases that literally translate into prose so purple it could make Doc Smith blush.
It’s really easy to spot in translations, especially ones done by fans, who often get tripped up trying to convert a lengthy adjectival phrase from “over-there-standing yellow-hat-wearing-not man” to “the man who’s standing over there, not wearing a yellow hat”. Often the verb ends up attached to the wrong noun, mixing up object and subject. Seriously, go read a few translations of the Bump Of Chicken song “Hana no na”, which is absolutely stuffed with prenominal expressions, many of them chained.
Character descriptions are often thrown into the middle of the dialogue this way, in a way that maps poorly into the standard, “…he said excitedly” form. It comes out more like, “The still-trapped-in-the-intersection Koutarou shouted.”
Your life is racist, my racism is life
I don’t know who this obnoxious transdouchebag is, but he’s clearly less self-aware than Joe Biden on a good day. He just demoted every woman of color in the world who dates a white man to “minority sex servant” and property. And he thinks he’s being anti-racist. More evidence that the anti- in anti-racist and anti-fascist is like the in- in inflammable.
(via Ace)
Urakata: Prologue
Okay, I admit it: I fucked the wrong guy. Do you hear me up there? I’m sorry I fucked your Hero, okay? Can I have my life back now?
I mean, it was my job to fuck Wrong Guys, wagging my amazing tail at them across years or decades of their lives until I turned them into Right Guys. I was designed to be a Grade-A Free-Range All-Natural Organic Fuck Bunny, and I had centuries of practice at turning boys into men and wrapping them around my little finger.
But when I came home from a tough job expecting praise and instead found replacements, I lost my shit and ran away to a hidden place I thought nobody else knew about.
Finding a good-looking naked guy playing Sleeping Beauty in my secret refuge felt like a birthday party, Christmas morning, and Easter Sunday all rolled up together. I knew a Hero when I saw one, and this one didn’t even need much breaking in. If I was going on the run to avoid finding out what happens when the Powers ditch you for a younger model, a Hero was exactly what I needed. So, yeah, I fucked him.
Unless you’re Anne Rice, you probably think Sleeping Beauties should be woken with a kiss. Not a chance. Stasis spells are a bitch, and this one was freshly cast by or at least for a major Power. I needed to wrap him around a lot more than my finger before I could wrap him around my finger.
Related…
What to do next?
Variant Nespresso sleeve-holder grid
Once I’d filled up three of my 3x5 sleeve holders, I realized that since they’re slightly narrower than they are tall, I had just enough room to do 6 columns of 3 rows on the 3D45; the extra 6mm hadn’t left much room for the skirt around the perimeter, so I’d cut it to 5 and gone vertical. New version.
The only change I’d consider making is adding some screw-holes on one side, so you could connect two of them front-to-back to support the sleeves at two points without printing something much taller. They’re plenty stable horizontally, so I wouldn’t screw them down or in parallel. I could also double the height, but they work fine now, and the fully-loaded 3x5 version is easy to just pick up and move around with one hand.
Or I could just stop buying coffee until I use some of these up… 😁
Cake or Death?
No, wait, I meant “cheesecake or succubus?”. I’d say that the first ~3,300 words of Virginia’s story is solid enough to start posting, which is 14 snippets. I’ll likely limit them to 1/day while I see where it’s going, because I’ve had to go back and tinker with some of the early bits, and I’m considering them done once they hit the blog.
Or is it time to bring back more cheesecake, especially the 3D kind? My chock-full-o-chicks folder is getting really, really big, to the tune of 52,000 images taking up 10 gigabytes.
The themed ones take a while to do, while the champloos are mostly just picking out a decent mix of relatively-safe and not-so-safe images, then running a script.
I am resisting the temptation to start a third story in this universe right now based on something the Old Man said. I am intrigued by the concept of a Chooser Of The Slain whose selection criteria for heroes involves love, sacrifice, and parenting skills. I’m thinking she’s a bit of an oddball.
Drip, drip, drip
When I started spiking my liquid pie with a shot of espresso and foamed milk, I finally got around to printing this replacement drip tray for the Essenza Mini. Even my tallest 21-ounce mug fits under it, and the coffee just manages to land inside with all of them.
The one flaw it has is that the top is just an array of small holes, without a larger one to place directly under the spot that gets the most drips (and also to hook your finger into to pull it off for cleaning). Rather than modify that STL file, I redid it from scratch in OpenSCAD, and here it is.
The code’s a bit of a mess at the moment, because this kind of hole
distribution takes a bit of work in OpenSCAD. Rectangular or hex grids
of an object are an easy one-liner with
BOSL’s grid2d() module, but
while there’s a whole bunch of math-dinking on the subject of
efficiently packing circles inside circles, there doesn’t seem to be
much on radially distributing them with even spacing. I settled for
calculating the number of concentric circles of circles that would
fill the space and using zring() to space them out. Not perfect, but
good enough for coffee work, and I took advantage of the slight
irregularity in the pattern to carve out room for the hole that was
the point of the exercise, so it ends up looking almost deliberate.
(shhhhh! don’t tell!)
Perhaps I’ll revisit that sometime and do the math for a completely
consistent, symmetric hole distribution. I should just need to
calculate the right parameters to feed into zring(), including the
offset angle between adjacent rings.
Great Red Spot update
Speaking of liquid pie, it’s now a Mocha Latte/Red-eye/Chocolate Macchiato (with Peet’s Nerissimo as this morning’s espresso add-in). Adding 3 grams of cocoa powder to the 60ml of milk in the foam-as-a-service device is 6 calories of decadence.
SRC update
I’m still using ESR’s whimsical SRC source-control system for single-directory collections of config files. I think I’m responsible for about a third of all the bugs filed against it, and one of them was just fixed this week. It was one of those annoying little corner cases where he’d done the right thing in every single instance except one.
Iosevka Termanal update time!
I need to remake my custom version of Iosevka sometime soon. It’s up to version 5.0.6, and I last built my variant at 3.4.6, all the way back in August. Hopefully the build system hasn’t changed too much, and I can reapply my changes fairly quickly.
Want.
I would buy an entire album of Amelia Watson rapping Doctor Seuss. Also ringtones. I’ve been listening to them both on repeat on my rare outings to stores.
Anime fatigue
In last week’s episode of The Amazing Spiderspider, the B Ark hit warp 9 to precisely define the duelling timelines and try to make us feel angst over the fate of Some Guy. This came at the expense of reducing the coherence of Adventures In Spiderville.
As a result, I haven’t watched this week’s episode yet.
For bespoke noodles…
…artisanal ramen broth. From Yamasa USA, who sells this stuff in 80-ounce plastic jugs. At least they didn’t call it small-batch-craft-brewed-hand-pressed or some such nonsense, but no matter how much descriptive linguists wave their hands, either words have meanings or up is down and we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Makes me want to call them all serial killers sometimes, if usage defines meaning.
Things you never want to see in Production…
I happened to follow a link to Tassimo’s US site. No, I’m not interested in Yet Another Coffee System, even though Amazon is once again unable to deliver my monthly liquid-pie supply (good thing I’ve got 70 k-cups left…). This is what I found:
Oopsie. Wonder how long it’s been that way?
Isekai: Epilogue
(based on the feedback, I’ve touched up the first paragraph to anchor it better)
Where do you hide a world? In a room full of doors full of rooms full of… you get the idea. I was being sent back, but at least this time I’d been given a pair of pants. And a whole lot more. I resisted the urge to look in the backpack again; bigger on the inside gave me a headache.
“So there are people there now?”
The old man/god/whatever-he-was chuckled. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons, Demon Lords?”
“That last one’s a bit comic-book for my tastes, but it could happen; you spent a few years looking for one, after all, thanks to her interference. Unfinished worlds are shaped by desire and expectation, which is why I’d left you in stasis. Mortal desire can change even finished worlds, though few ever try, and as the only one there, waking, sleeping, expecting, you shaped this one quite a bit.”
“Are we, then? Mortal, I mean, the three of us.”
“They weren’t, until you named them. They didn’t age because they weren’t finished yet, and you didn’t age because your world wasn’t; you were all missing pieces. It was your mutual desire for completion that reshaped the door to let them in and lock her out.”
“So you’re saying that deep down, I just wanted a loli and a catgirl?”
His eyes twinkled, and I mean that literally. “Is that really what you got?”
He finished making changes to the door, and it opened to reveal a familiar rock, with two even more familiar shapes curled up together on top of it, stirring softly.
“Go home, son, they’re waiting for you. You won’t need to wake them with a kiss, but I recommend it.”
There were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask, for Angel and Ariel as well as for me, but I knew he wouldn’t give me the answers, at least not today. A new one popped into my head as I stepped through the door, though.
“Hey, how did I end up on that rock in the first place?”
“You were run over by a truck.”
(second story, from her point of view…)
All done!
Port-a-pod-y
Pod-stacking
It’s a good thing Nespresso’s marketing plan doesn’t involve selling their branded coffee pods on retail shelves, because the sleeves are just plain annoying. They don’t stand upright without custom supports, they don’t stand out on a shelf if they’re stored flat, and even if you do store them flat, they’re slippery little suckers that will not stay neatly stacked.
There’s also the problem that there are far too many varieties to stock for all but the most determined specialty store; even without trying hard, I have 21 different varieties, most in multiples. Peet’s and Illy each only sell 5 (with one of them a decaf), both in the same excellently-designed retail packaging by a company called JDE, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, who also makes the L’OR brand of pods.
Most of the commercial and 3D-printable holders either showcase the distinctive sleeves or the unsleeved, jewel-like pods. I just wanted to be able to store the damn things without them sliding off each other, so I made this 3x5 grid, designed to print at 0.3mm layer height and 0.4mm line width, without infill or supports. It fits on my Dremel 3D45 with room to spare, and prints in exactly 2.5 hours.
It’s just snug enough to store them vertically or horizontally while still allowing them to slide freely in and out, which also means that you need to dial in your Z-height pretty well or apply appropriate elephant’s-foot compensation.
OpenSCAD source:
// Nespresso Original sleeve storage grid
include <BOSL/constants.scad>
use <BOSL/shapes.scad>
use <BOSL/transforms.scad>
/* [Basic Parameters] */
columns = 3;
rows = 5;
height = 12;
divider = 1.2;
border = 2.4;
/* [Sleeve Size] */
sleeve_h = 39;
sleeve_w = 38;
/* [Curve Rendering] */
$fs = 0.5; $fa = 0.5;
w = sleeve_w * columns + divider * (columns - 1) + 2 * border;
h = sleeve_h * rows + divider * (rows - 1) + 2 * border;
grid=[sleeve_w + divider, sleeve_h + divider];
difference() {
cuboid([w, h, height], fillet=divider, edges=EDGES_Z_ALL, align=V_TOP);
down(0.01)
grid2d(cols=columns, rows=rows, spacing=grid)
cuboid([sleeve_w, sleeve_h, height+0.02], align=V_TOP);
}
Once, there was an Outback
Now, there’s nothing left but a Bag O’ Crab. Seriously, that’s what replaced the Outback Steakhouse in Salinas.
Seems kinda cheesy to me.
Amazon Prime Choices
I just can’t make up my mind here…
Adventures in Gaslighting
Courtesy of Ace of Spades, two examples of the ever-encroaching arrogance of a fraction of a percent of the privileged 1%, gaslighting the bejeezus out of the entire world. If the trans community wants to know what’s keeping people from accepting them, this is it:
(that’s “Not Safe For SuperStraights”, because these assclowns have redefined straight to mean “straight men willing to suck dick”, perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of “Bi Erasure” in the modern LBTQROFLMAOWTFBBQ community; see also SuperLesbian, for “lesbians unwilling to suck dick”)
Nobody hates them as much as they hate themselves.
Unrelated,
Something I left out in yesterday’s glamour photography rant: do not use wide-angle lenses at close range. I don’t care how flat a Japanese girl’s ass is, perspective distortion gives her monstrous thighs, calves, and feet. Just cram the underwear into her crack like everyone else does if you need to pretend she’s got back.
Isekai: 3.10
The cranky old martial-arts instructor who’d lived upstairs, who’d taught me more than I’d understood, strode in through the half-open door, swinging his cane like the prop I’d never known it was. “It’s not her name until you say it to her face; it will change her, and I can’t allow that, not yet. We need her just the way she is for a little while longer, warts and all.”
I’d expected that line to draw an angry remark from her, but a quick glance showed she was more stunned than I was. Apparently the game was four-dimensional Twister.
He misinterpreted my look. “Not physical warts, boy, character flaws. Ones that we’ve carefully nurtured for centuries.”
I didn’t know what he was, but I thought about all the pain and loneliness Angel and Ariel had gone through before I met them. He’d nurtured them, too.
My hands curled into fists. “And what were you nurturing me to be?”
“A hero, like your father before you.”
“My dad was a bank teller.”
“…who gave up his dreams to love a woman he knew would die young, and raised their child to be a protector, once he found something worth protecting. We do have something like valkyries, son, and they’re never wrong about heroes. I liked him, so I picked up where he left off.”
“Time for you to get back to it, I think. Don’t worry about this one; I’ve got one last job for her before Graduation, and I guarantee it will keep her out of your hair.”
