Sleepy Princess Is Sleepy

I enjoyed the first eight episodes. Somewhere in #9, I turned it off. The next day, I finished that episode, started watching #10, and at some point turned it off. Then I checked the wiki and discovered that after 17 manga volumes covering several years, nothing much changes, including her apparent age.

Which, by the way, is “at least 16”, despite the lolicon-bait character design.

Last Boonie Kid Town Dungeon Maybe

Wow, they weren’t kidding about the screaming. If it weren’t for her constant ear-splittingly-loud freakouts, the witch would be quite attractive; perhaps if she toned it down to the level of her Darkness performance in Konosuba. My only other impression is that I found myself disappointed that mere moments after Belt Princess strips down to sexy lingerie and checks herself out in the mirror, she changes her hair to a much less flattering cut. And gets dressed again. Hopefully fan-artists will use that scene for reference and make better use of her belts than she does.

I won’t be watching more of it, but surely some Pixiv artists will.

The Hidden Cheat Code Only I Can Ogle

Our Hero receives the +20 Titty-Rub Of Omnipotence from a chained-up supermodel who seems quite happy to stay that way, and proceeds to charge it up by taking advantage of his giant-breasted childhood friend’s crush and his little sister’s bro-con. I’ll just watch the fan-art.

Easy Drider

It didn’t grab me. Some people seem to like it, though, so I’ll try the second episode in hopes that the worst of the setup fluff is done.

(note that much of the fan-art seems to spoil a major plot point)

Not anime, not watched

I noticed that Stargate Origins: Catherine was back on Prime, so I tried to watch it. Tried. Failed.

Even taking into account the fact that it’s based on just the movie and explicitly contradicts the events of SG-1, it’s just not good. Our Heroine is yet another ass-kicking Mistress Of Waif-Fu with 21st century attitudes in 1938, and all the other actors seem to be in slightly different shows.

You can take the boy out of the Soviet…

…but you can’t take the Soviet out of the boy. Ilya Somin offers “helpful” “advice” on making shampeachment 2 “bi-partisan”.

Bi-Partisan: involving two sets of quislings.

On that note, the only constitutional remedies from a successful impeachment are to remove Trump from office (which McConnell has refused to schedule), and/or prevent him from holding office ever again.

If the people involved are even slightly brighter than the rocks from under which they crawled, they know this, and they’re proceeding anyway, after he’s out of office. Which means that they are either legitimately terrified that he could once again be elected to national office, or they are attempting to utterly destroy him as an example, so that never again will they have to face opposition that is Not Our Kind, Dear.

Or both.

With Apologies to T.S. Eliot

Impeachment of Trump’s not a serious matter,
  It’s really just one of those Democrat games.
You may think Pelosi as mad as a hatter,
  Pursuing D. Trump to the END OF HIS DAYS.

Proposition!

“I’ll concede that Biden legitimately won the election if you spend six months mucking out stables with your tongue. That way we’ll both have the taste of horseshit in our mouths.”

Why did you just lock my Apple ID? Can’t handle criticism, or just more of your usual incompetence at running a cloud service?

[Update: given that I had to re-enter my password 12 13 times across four devices after unlocking my account, incompetence is winning the popular vote]

This has been bugging me for years: the Weather app on iPhones doesn’t completely update the display when the day changes.

Screenshots from around 9:45 AM Tuesday morning:

Three hours later, it’s still wrong. The hour-by-hour predictions are updated, but the day and high/low data are still wrong in both places. You have to force-quit the app to make it figure out that today is Tuesday.

🎶 🎶 🎶
“Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?”
🎶 🎶 🎶

I know Tim Cook is more of a political activist than a leader, but surely there’s still someone at Apple that cares about basic functionality of the product line that makes them the richest company in the world.

Impeachment 2, Electric Boogaloo

You know it’s really-extra-special-important to impeach Trump when Nancy Pelosi can’t even wait for new souvenir pens to be delivered.

(why, yes, this person was kicked off of Twitter; it’s a truth-free zone)

Long ago and not so far away, I worked down the street from Netscape. It was the glory years, and many of my co-workers jumped ship with stars in their eyes and dreams of a glorious future that included retiring before age 30. A few of them did so, but most were of course too late to get the kind of juicy stock options that could enable that sort of thing.

A recurrent theme among the Ex-Scapees, with JWZ perhaps the most prominent, is “Microsoft killed our company”. Some go for a softer form, “Microsoft stunted Internet innovation”; when I once asked for an example, the speaker pointed to VRML. Since he was a friend, I didn’t laugh, just stared open-mouthed in shock.

But the strong claim, that Microsoft’s entry into the web market killed Netscape, has never made sense to me. Because I’ve never understood how Netscape planned to make money in the first place.

I mean, I was there, a not-quite-literal stone’s throw down the street from their headquarters, watching them burn through insane amounts of money to produce only 2.5 products: a free browser, a rudimentary mail/calendar suite that was free to anyone who had an account with pretty much any ISP, and a very specialized item that was already facing competition, Commerce Server.

Everyone was already using free alternatives to Commerce Server for everything but their main secure-ordering site, and those alternatives existed before Microsoft released IS and IIS, and were getting better with every release.

So what was the plan? How was Netscape ever going to make enough money to offset their massive burn rate? What were they going to sell that someone else couldn’t create a competitor for? If Microsoft could kill them so quickly and so easily, with a product that was utter crap, how did they ever expect to succeed?

3D Printing, Reconsidered

Connnnnnnnnnnnnn!

Dear Amazon, why is it so easy for “marketplace” “dealers” to auto-generate frauds like this?

1. Indie publisher puts up pre-orders for Kindle edition of a brand-new book.

2. Scammers put up phony listings for new and used hardcover and paperback editions of this as-yet-unpublished book, at insane prices.

3. Amazon profits.

My kind of Minion

I didn’t even know I had this fetish…

Dear Reddit,

Pedo much? Do you really think that a 3D printer forum is the right place for this kind of thing?

NSFW

“Why does it hurt when I pee?”

New at CES, for people who’ve been frightened into submission, the touchless doorbell. Because nothing spreads viruses like hard plastic exposed to fresh air and sunlight that gets touched maybe twice a week.

If you want to print stackable boxes…

…this is a well-designed set, with free samplers. The only real limitation (besides the time and cost of 3d-printing boxes in the first place) is that stacking only works one way. For instance, you can stack 3 1x1 boxes/lids on a 3x1, but not the other way around. They’ll be almost stable, but not quite.

I’m going to reverse-engineer the design into a parametric OpenSCAD program. Not to undermine his sales, but to alter the basic layout (multiples of 60mm X/Y and 20mm Z) to better suit my needs. If I ever get to drive to a kumihimo conference again, I could do with some better organization for supplies. The incredibly cheap stackable pencil and crayon boxes at Michaels were the sensible choice for my large collection of tama of different weights and sizes, but there’s a bunch of fussy little stuff that still ends up in ziploc baggies and makeshift toolboxes.

I could also do something like the box inserts people are creating for board games (one of the refreshing non-printer-parts categories of object being posted), but I like the flexibility of the grid design.

+1 Bed Of Adhesion

The Dremel 3D45 has a removable glass print bed. I have two of them, so I can pull out a finished print and immediately start another one, allowing the first bed to cool and release the print.

Occasionally, objects with large flat bottom surfaces show a diagonal wave pattern that indicates the nozzle is too close to the bed, something I thought I’d sorted out weeks ago. It wasn’t until I tried printing various samples from the above box set back-to-back on freshly-cleaned beds that I caught on: my two beds have slightly different heights. I’ve now labeled the one that requires an extra +0.1mm Z offset.

(I really miss the tool-height sensor on my Nomad CNC; a lot of 3D printers have automatic bed-leveling systems, but you pretty much have to go to industrial models to get one that can verify the exact Z position of the nozzle tip(s))

Microfiber and a binder clip

I went with the simplest filament filter and loaded up the Sunlu PETG again. Much better, with only the expected minor defects of a filament I haven’t gotten the parameters quite right for. The only poor result came from printing something large enough that the skirt ran all the way to the edge of the bed, and lost adhesion in a few small spots. It didn’t harm the print at all, since the head never even passed over the skirt once it got the first layer down. Either I didn’t have enough hairspray at the edge of the bed, or it was just enough cooler at the edge to pull up the corners a bit; both are fixable, since I was at the low end of the temperature range and I have lots of hairspray.

Remember when The Volokh conspiracy was vaguely libertarian? Ilya Somin doesn’t. Pro tip: when you find yourself arguing against due process, and claiming that the facts are so clear and indisputable that you don’t even need a show trial, you are an enemy of Western Civilization.