Another day, another locked Apple ID. Three times in one week is a record, so either there’s a persistent attack on my account (which you think they’d have the courtesy to mention in email to one of the addresses I have on file), or the iCloud infrastructure has gotten even less reliable than it used to be.

Speaking of Apple QA, Mail.app managed to completely lose track of the password for one of my non-Apple email accounts yesterday. Which is a neat trick, since they’re stored in Keychain. Usually it only throws up misleading “your password is wrong” alerts when iCloud itself is rejecting logins; assuming that an auth failure requires a mandatory password change doesn’t usually extend to other services.

Why do I still use this buggy piece of crap that stores data in an unreliable proprietary format, doesn’t even really grasp the concept of plain-text email, and that even removed the ability to adjust column widths in Catalina, so you can’t see entire sender names or subject lines? Because I really like SpamSieve, which reliably catches the small amount of cruft that leaks through all the server-side spam filters.

It does support some other mail clients, but it might be time to start looking for a good Windows anti-spam plug-in, for the day when I’m ready to stop being Switched behind the woodshed.

We’ll always have Paris Accords

Does unconstitutionally seizing the treaty power from Congress count as “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Asking for a friend.

I couldn’t understand why my print-in-place hinges were failing. They worked perfectly in the Squeaky Sunlu PETG, but they were so fused together with the Hatchbox PLA that trying to break them free broke the model instead.

Then I discovered that I’d somehow set the extrusion multiplier to 1.05 for that filament, when the correct (calculated and verified) value was 0.97. Oops.

ObAmazon:

That Slime Show

Rimuru’s greatest power is Create Hot Chicks. Sadly, the animators really dropped the ball on showing the results of these racial upgrades. We only get a few brief shots of the upgraded goblin and lizard girls, and only one named-but-unnamed goblina gets to be in the swimsuit special episode. [ObOglaf (NSFW, of course)]

Crunchyroll has some interesting UI issues. On the good side, the FireTV client was finally upgraded to HD a while back (hadn’t used it in quite a while, because it was awful), and it hasn’t spontaneously logged me out yet the way it used to. On the bad side, it displays five separate “seasons” for this show: S1, S1, S2, S14, S23. The title is so long that you can’t tell that the first item on the list ends in “(German dub)”. The various special episodes are linked in an apparently random sequence, so I don’t actually know if I’ve watched them all yet. Not that it matters, because the swimsuit special is the only one that mattered.

Last Boonies

Watched the OP, which includes a nice look at Belt Princess in lingerie before she cuts her hair, then skipped to the ED, which includes all the girls, including one who wasn’t in the first episode. Looking forward to the fan-art, but not interested in the show.

That Spider Show

Episode 2 didn’t grab me, either.

Wandering Witch

Watched 2.5 episodes, I think. I don’t remember anything about them.

Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon and then never do anything with them?

I watched the first episode of season 3 when it came out, but I already know how things go for N books past this point, and I stopped reading those, too, and haven’t fired up the game in months, either. I’m kinda burned out on the entire franchise, although I did read the Freya Familia spinoff that gives some backstory on her disfunctional crew. Spoiler: meh.

Incel Revenge Porn: The Series

After it came up in the comments and I looked at the wiki, I watched the first episode of Redo of Healer. It appears that starting with episode 2, they are going to faithfully adapt the torture, brainwashing, rape, and murder that defines the source material, which is almost as bad as the commenters who buy into the excuses for it. Not For Me, Thanks.

Actually, you could argue that the torture and brainwashing starts when Whatshisname forcibly overwrites his younger self’s memories and personality, destroying the sanity of an innocent 12-year-old.

Sleep, Princess

Finished episode 10, tried 11. Lost interest again.

Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League: this blurb reeks:

Still mourning the losses of his beloved Penny Priddy and his surrogate father Professor Hikita, Buckaroo Banzai must also contend with the constant threat of attack from his immortal nemesis Hanoi Xan, ruthless leader of the World Crime League. To make matters worse, Planet 10 warrior queen John Emdall has sent her Lectroid legions against Earth with a brutal ultimatum. Or is her true target Buckaroo Banzai? As the apocalyptic threats continue to mount, only Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers stand in the way of global destruction.

The listing also says “568 pages”, which is approximately 567 too many.

So, the only one of my current co-workers that I’ve met in person just left the company for another job. When he announced it in our morning “scrum” (yes, we do a virtual stand-up on Zoom every day; not a fan), I insisted that it’s not my fault.

Unrelated, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Zoom meetings with a co-worker, for the purpose of prepping a major version upgrade. Note that I did not say we were actually working or actually prepping. We have in fact accomplished dick-all in four 90-minute meetings, and I was so frustrated with this after Friday’s session that I stepped away from the keyboard for several hours so I wouldn’t reach through the Internet and smack him. The nice way to put it is that we have fundamentally different approaches to upgrading production services.

So, for the first time since June, here’s some non-animated cheesecake.

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Recommendations

You know what the real difference is between Pixiv and Amazon when it comes to recommendations? No, it’s not that Pixiv does a better job of selecting new things based on things I like, it’s that they don’t show me things I’ve already tagged.

On a good day, when Amazon manages to recommend products that are actually relevant, about a third of them will be things that I’ve already purchased from Amazon. And I don’t just mean consumables like coffee or 3d-printing filament, or things like toaster ovens or watches that theoretically someone could buy 3-4 of every year, or duplicate listings with different SKUs, I mean books and movies that when you click on them, show up as “you purchased this $months_or_years_ago”.

Today is actually one of the rare days when my recommendations consist primarily of consumable items that I’ve bought before and will likely buy again. Never mind that many of them are subscribe-and-save items that I’m already buying again.

File under peculiar the fact that the “Hunting and Fishing Equipment” tile consists of a 4-pack of pointy self-defense keychains in basic black, a 9-pack of the same item in a rainbow of colors, a 3-pack of brand-x pepper-spray, and a 150-pack of fishing hooks.

Three Little, Too Late

MacRumors is reporting that for the next MacBook Pro, Apple is planning to bring back MagSafe, function keys, and a useful array of ports.

There are, however, no rumors that they’ll be bringing back QA.

If you’re going to keep locking my Apple ID, could you at least have the basic decency to notify me via the various email addresses that I have on file?

Now I waste another fifteen minutes logging in again on all of my devices multiple times.