The company distributing filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” says it won’t reject an offer of help from Middle East terrorist organization Hezbollah.
— The least surprising news of the year, from WorldNetDaily.comUrakata: 1.3
The Old Man gave me one last job, promising that when it was done, my Graduation would be nothing to fear. A new life, a fresh start, A Whole New World where I wasn’t stuck in a rut, pun intended. I’d still be me, but I’d be free; out of the game, on my own, no obligations to any Powers. I really, really should have gotten the details up front.
I did the job. I very thoroughly inspired an engineer to build a new kind of bridge that would connect two competing civilizations in a way that blah-blah-blah, seriously, who cares? Dull smart guy needed an ego boost and a major push, and nothing builds ego like banging a hottie who’s way out of his league. Pro tip: if you want to make absolutely sure you’re a guy’s type, give him a quick peek when he’s about 11, then come back and nail his 30-year-old-virgin ass to the floor. Never fails.
Like I said, I was made for this job, literally. Head to toe, inside and out, every curve, every gesture, every little freckle, everything went into making me an irresistible, inspiring temptation. I was looking forward to putting it all to good use, post-Graduation.
The son of a bitch gave me a new body.
Dear Synopsys,
It’s been over twenty years since I left the company, but I don’t recall the marketing people being whiny when repeatedly cold-calling (or in this case, emailing) potential customers.
And seriously, if you’re going to contact the wrong guy at a company, don’t include sentences like this in your pitch:
“Are you open for a discussion to learn our innovated technique? It involves instrumentation…”
Urakata: 1.2
He turned me down.
Fuck me, I can barely say it. In the three hours it took me to pull my new Hero out of that hidden world, he’d spent three years bonding with one of the other girls (Annoyingly Clever Little Sister Division). Worse, he’d also somehow gotten his hands on one of the experimental models, a severely fuckable cat-hybrid thingie the Powers had come up with a while back and dumped when she turned feral.
He chose them when he could have had me, and he’d even had me enough to make an informed decision. He hadn’t even popped them yet and still liked them better.
Even worse, he’d learned shit from them; he knew what we were, more or less, and he knew how to unmake us. I was in mid-taunt when he started Naming me, and I could feel it coming at me like a freight train. Names define you, limit you, change you, and he was really pissed off at me. Have I mentioned I’m a bitch? Yeah, keep that fact handy at all times, it’ll come up a lot.
Anyway, I was actually grateful when someone stopped him from turning me into a mouse, metaphorically speaking, until I looked over and saw a Power. One of the major players had tracked me down and caught me with my hand in the nookie jar.
I. Was. Fucked.
StandardNotes sucks, Joplin sucks less, and Emacs sucks too
Ill-tempered glass
One of my JoyJolt borosilicate glass mugs just exploded in my hands while being hand-washed in warm water. Small glass shards flew at least six feet.
Would not recommend.
Update: reminder that glass is really, really sharp, and you should check for bleeding before you complain on your blog…
3D cheesecake: breaking the rules
I recently ranted on what not to do in glamour photography, inspired by a shoot on Big Boobs Japan (NSFW! Javascript off!) where every single picture was shot at a different angle for no good reason.
What I didn’t say was that you can do all of those things, well or poorly, as long as the result is focused on the girl, and not on the photographer’s ego and/or incompetence. So here are some that walked that fine line, and some that gleefully jumped over.
The tricky bit was actually finding some good line-jumpers, since I usually don’t save those at all (and the last thing I need is to go trolling for more pictures). Most of them are NSFW, because I’m a bit more forgiving when titties are involved…
(and, yes, posting 200+ pics in a set helps me make a tiny dent in the backlog; why, if I did that every day, I’d catch up in only nine months!)
Dear 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)
