“A multiculturist would bring bring marshmallows to a suttee.”
— Timid1Wow, it really is a Time Machine!
I used tmutil on my laptop to manually trigger a time-machine backup
to my NAS from the command line. When you do this, you get a little
summary at the end of exactly how long it took and how much data it
copied:
Total copied: 2794.81 MB (2930567824 bytes)
Avg speed: 3.15 MB/min (55086 bytes/sec)
430 kilobits/second over gigabit ethernet, now that’s some serious time travel!
Dragon bones and Hanko
Realist Hero, episode 19
I expect a great deal of talking in this show, but this week’s massive infodump by over-cute over-scientist Genia Maxwell, which takes up pretty much the entire episode, had the most annoying delivery of any show I’ve seen for quite a while. I can’t pin the blame on seiyuu Konomi Kohara, because her Chika voice never wore out its welcome. I have to think the director pushed the more annoying button a few too many times.
(fan-art for this show? hah!)
Kuroitsu, episode 5
Wolf-service, ho! Cat-ho, service! This week, Our Monster Development Department survives its greatest challenge yet, only to face The Tsundere Of Black Company. Meanwhile, Our Temp tries vainly to escape the clutches of Part-Time Villainy, taking solace in a brief moment of victory.
(mermaid is unrelated, but there’s always room for duckies)
Dangling threads...
Another bright spot…
A bit of unrelated good news that I didn’t mention in The Cooperfail Chronicles was that on the 31st, I got email from BraidersHand that the kakudai I had put a deposit on back in March of 2021 was shipping eight months early.
I’m not going to have time to do anything with it for a while, since I still need to pack up everything I own and get it to the new house (as soon as I have the new house…), but the news was a calming counter to the Coopers cunctating the closing.
(yeah, I had to really reach for that one)
Thanks, Apple
Woke up my laptop a few days ago, and the fans immediately spun up.
Checked with top, and the single process chewing on the CPU was:
501 3656 1 0 3:07PM ?? 9:31.75 /Library/Apple/System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/com.apple.WebKit.WebContent.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.WebKit.WebContent
Note the parent process, 1 (common with these, which prevents you
from finding out what process they’re actually spawned by; it could be
Mail or anything else capable of displaying HTML), and the start time,
16 hours ago. When I killed it, the fans went quiet, but none of my
browser windows or other applications (which are often just disguised
browser windows these days, although usually they’re unpatched
versions of Chrome) were affected in any way. I could have traced it
to find out what it was spinning on, but it’s a waste of time
debugging a problem for a company that doesn’t do QA and insists that
you upgrade to the latest early-beta release.
“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the QA team in the release process.”
“The QA team did nothing in the release process.”
“That was the curious incident.”
Related,
I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason Apple treats the slightest Time Machine error as a reason to wipe your backup history and start over is it’s the only way they’ve come up with to keep them from bogging down over time into an unusable mess that takes hours or days to complete.
If they complete at all. I left my MacBook Air running overnight because yesterday’s backup hadn’t finished, only to find out this morning that it had silently aborted.
I’m much more confident in my regular SuperDuper! backups, but ever since Apple decided to start creating folders that no non-Apple software is allowed to read the contents of, even as root…
(“and now we must wait for the giant aliens”)
Miller time…
I like the data-manipulation tool
Miller, but it was recently
rewritten in Go for version 6.0, and it’s kind of a mess right now.
--ivar and --evar are broken, and when you try to use them, the
error message suggests you use --usage-separator-options to see the
correct field-separator syntax. That option exists only in the
documentation, not the code.
I’d contribute the fairly trivial patches, but I’d have to set up a Go environment first, so I’ll settle for bug reports.
Urakata: 3.1
Okay, it’s been nearly a year since I last advanced this story, but somehow my adventures with The Wicked Lender Of The West got me back into the groove, and I did some major renovation on this section on the plane, then tidied it up over the past few days.
In my prior career, the few children I’d had non-trivial encounters with had been deceptive, manipulative, and deeply suspicious of women like me. With good reason, since I usually ran into them while stealing their daddies. The unfortunate result was that I simply wasn’t prepared for Kit’s brand of total honesty. When she said wicked stepmother, she meant Wicked Stepmother.
Ninety seconds after Aunt Sally said a cheerful hello, we were back in the car, fleeing at high speed. I’m not really sure how we made it to the house. I mean, obviously she drove, but I was too busy wrangling a hysterical Kit to figure out how she’d managed it after being whammied to the eyeballs. You see, the Wicked Stepmother had turned out to be an actual wicked witch.
I got the first clue when I tried to get Kit out of the car. Used to be I could wrestle any man in the universe and end up on top, but getting a hexed and howling little girl into a come-along was not in my professional toolbox. Sally just opened the door, laid a hand on her forehead, and she was out like a light. Interesting.
Once safely behind locked doors, we put Kit to bed in my room, then went into the kitchen. Sally waved me over to the table, and I watched silently as she went through a calming ritual of ridiculously-precise coffee-making. I understood the need; the ground wasn’t quite shifting under my feet, but the story was, as if the Power pulling the strings wasn’t quite sure which way it should go.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one with suspicions. She brought over two double espressos, sliding one in front of me without a word about stunting my growth. She sipped, I gulped, so I got to ask first. “How did you do it, Sally?”
“Me? That witch hit us with a binding that stuffed my head with cotton and convinced me to walk right into that house. If you hadn’t kicked her so hard…”
“Maybe I’m just stubborn. And since when does squeaky-clean Sally Sanders believe in black magic? That’s not the sort of thing adoption agencies approve of when handing out little girls. You did acquire me legally, didn’t you? I wasn’t here at the time, so I wouldn’t know.”
Oops. I really shouldn’t have said that. Bye-bye cover story, hello questions I didn’t have good answers for.
I couldn’t tell which hit her harder, the caffeine or my words. “What do you mean you weren’t there? We talked for hours at the orphanage, and it was like we were made for each other! The old man said you’d been through a tough time and nobody wanted you, but he didn’t think you were a bad kid; you just needed a loving home, and I was determined to give it to you. What kind of game are you playing?”
She looked at me like I was some kind of changeling, which was basically correct. I didn’t have to ask what her “old man” looked like. I knew what he was, and if I ever got within range, he was getting a hard-shoed little-girl kick for that nobody-wanted-you crack.
Oh, well, in for an inch, in for the shaft. “Not me, sister, I just met you this morning. You got played by a Power, but if it’s any consolation, he’s one of the nicer ones, so if he shoved us together it was for our mutual benefit. But you’re dodging my question. What’s your game?”
I’d rather be asking questions than answering them, so I pushed. “You’re too good to be true, Sally. You’re young, sweet, gorgeous, a terrific cook, motherly-but-not-smotherly, and you’ve got a house, a car, and half the men in town sniffing your tail. You’re a catch, honey. How are you single in 1956? What are you up to, playing house with Little Orphan Annie and hiding an industrial-strength sex toy under the bed? Oh yeah, I found it.”
She squirmed a bit at that. “That’s not… okay, maybe sometimes… I… It’s complicated. You’re too young to understand.”
I laughed so hard I fell out of my chair. Dragging myself back upright, I shoved the coffee cup across the table and said, “make me another double, sweetheart, this is gonna be a long night.”
As she turned toward the stove, inspiration struck, and I hit her from behind. Bitch, remember? “Let me guess, you’re a time traveler.”
Good thing linoleum was soft, because that meant the coffee cup didn’t break when she dropped it and whipped her head around to look at me. “And don’t try to spare me the complications, I’m a lot older than you look.”
Her eyes went wide. “Who… what are you?”
“Impatient. Now hurry up with the java and the explanations; I hear little girls get cranky if they stay up past their bedtimes.”
Sally got busy with the giant steam engine (hmmm, were lattes a thing yet?) and started to spill. “Do you know what parallel worlds are?”
“Sideways time travel, basic multiverse stuff. So, you and your mega-vibe are from another Earth, huh? Similar enough that you can pass for a local, but different enough that you weren’t expecting to run into a witch. And you’ve been here long enough to have convincing paperwork and a fan club.”
Her hands were shaking, but my double espresso was still coming. Y’know, I was actually kind of glad things had gone tits-up tonight, or it might have been months before I found out Sally’s coffee was as good as her cooking.
“I’m a sociologist, and, yes, a witch, but not like that… creature. We don’t do mind-control. It’s not just illegal, it’s wrong, evil. I’ve been here for nearly two years now, helping document the differences between worlds. The prevailing theory is that it’s simple probability divergence, where worlds split off every time non-trivial decisions are made but collapse back into a smaller number as the changes average out over time, leaving behind little inconsistencies that get dismissed as coincidence or déjà vu.”
Huh; not bad for a bunch of mortals, and her academic tone increased my estimate of her intelligence quite a bit. No flies on Aunt Sally. “And it sounds like you’re part of a group that disagrees?”
“Yes. The half-dozen worlds we’ve explored all show signs of deliberate tampering to set them on different paths. Including our own, which could cause some serious social problems if we went public. The truly frightening part is that some of it seems to be retroactive, with real time-travellers tweaking the knobs.”
Damn, these people were good. It couldn’t be an accident that the Old Man had hooked us up. Was this life really my Graduation Present, or was I his latest pawn in a game he was running on the other Powers? I mean, this was some serious shit: the kids were breaking out of the playground, and he was in on it.
“Well, looks like this is your lucky night, Sally. I’m one of those ‘tweakers’. Or at least I used to be.”
Dammit, I really should have waited to say that until after she’d delivered my new coffee.
“If you want something done right...”
“…clearly you need to pay someone to do it for you!”
Realist Hero, episode 18
This week, a courtoom drama with a side order of Deus Ex De Principatibus. Also, trope evaded.
Advice to Our Realist Hero: when your two (known) fiancées show up in your bedroom half-naked to ease your burdens, let them. At least get them stripped the rest of the way to compensate us for all the talking.
(“related fan-art is hard for me, let’s play Pokemon!”)
Kuroitsu, episode 4
This amusement-park episode brought to you by sparkles and speedlines, because the animation budget is just as tight as the monster-development budget. Also, Our Monster-Loving Researcher puts the power of idols to good (evil) use.
(how sad is the fan-art situation for this show? these were the best I could find that weren’t part of a sequence that included badly-drawn hardcore porn)
(…and I really looked!)
Jargonfail
In a wonderful example of the difference between specialized technical jargon and the ordinary meaning of words, the Chinese Pixiv artist 行 之LV uses the word 事前 (same meaning in Chinese and Japanese: “prior; in advance; beforehand”) to tag pictures of scenery with no humans present.
Everyone else on Pixiv uses it to mean before sex, often by mere seconds.
Unrelated,
There is a god. Took him long enough.
Small Favors
The trip to Ohio for the-closing-that-didn’t-happen wasn’t a complete waste. The birthday party was great, the snow was decorative but didn’t interfere with my flights, and I used the points on my Amazon card to buy the remastered Bluray sets for Project A-Ko and Bubblegum Crisis. I skipped the complete Nuku-nuku box set; RightStuf has it priced too high, plus shipping. Ditto the $99 Interspecies Reviewers box, which appears to have finally made it to these shores.
Easiest Alpha Ever
Another thing I did while stuck in my hotel room in Ohio watching the snow was play the new Pokemon Legends: Arceus Switch game. It’s not a true open-world game, between the frequent proximity-triggered cutscenes and the fact that you can’t go directly between regions (you have to teleport back through the hub region, which doubles the loading-screen time), but it’s a fresh take on the formula.
One of the new features is that some of the pokemon populating the world are red-eyed mutant “alphas” who are larger, higher-level, and may possess special powers or a posse. If you’re patient and clever, you can often catch them by sneaking into position and ramming a pokeball where the sun don’t shine, but usually it’s a tough fight that takes out half your party.
Except for the alpha Magikarp, who only knows Splash.
Quid-pro Ho
The free Covid tests that the Brandon regime is shipping out via the US Postal Service were purchased from China. How long did they spend on container ships stuck off the coast, or were they all shipped by air at a premium?
Oh, and they require temperature-controlled storage, so shipping to anywhere that’s, say, cold in the winter renders them unreliable. Specifically, prone to false negatives.
🎶Loan, loan of my own...🎶
“If you see something this big with eight legs coming your way, let me know. I have to kill it before it develops language skills.”
– Londo Mollari, home inspector
Note: I would be lying if I said I never shouted and swore during the events that follow, but I managed not to swear during the phone calls, and merely “increased the intensity of my voice” when relating certain key pieces of information to the lender’s representatives. Feel free to imagine the rage-fueled ranting in my hotel room that frequently occurred before and after each contact.
Banality, as some might say, after the cut…
(demi-chans are unrelated)
(Insert Primal Scream Here)
Realist Hero, episode 17
We begin with an animated discussion of a dangling thread from last season. Or perhaps I should say “emotive”, since there’s very little animation-animation involved. This is another bit that is necessary for setting up future events, but lasts far too long.
With the traitors and the “traitors” disposed of, it’s time to reward the allies, mostly by giving them engagement rings. There might have been some non-fiancée rewards, but they’re not important. Our Prime Minister then spends some quality time with His Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada, then finds out from His Ninja that The Secret Plan is going too well, as if someone else were up to something.
At which point we finally bring Our Other Princess back on-screen to reveal that she’s severely ADHD and actively fantasizing about Her Future Husband, whose identity shouldn’t suprise anybody who watches the credits. Post-credits, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to show a cackling cabal from central casting, conveniently gathered in one place for easy disposal.
Wife count: 2 public, 1 secret, 1 plotting
(waifu candidates are unrelated)
Kuroitsu episode 3
Cut off a plot thread, and two more shall take its place. Hail Hydra (chan)! The first half airdrops a new monster into the show in the first few seconds so they can focus on post-field-test revisions. Most of the cast gets sidelined for this part, as Our Part Time Hero and Our Professionally Villainous Heroine interact in both their civilian and professional identities without ever suspecting a thing. Seriously, dude, did hero school not cover the concept of clark-kent glasses?
Then Our Big Bird and Our Hydra-Chan get into trouble with Our Pretty Cure, revealing that both are capable of far more as monsters than they managed to pull off during their official hero-fights. Maybe just walking up to him in an alley isn’t a good strategy?
(monster-girl bartender is completely unrelated)
🎶 Just a gigolo… 🎶
Jacob Sullum, writing for the formerly-libertarian rag Reason, has helpfully provided clear evidence that he’s just another batshit-crazy left-wing loon.
Accidentally true words were spoken
Quoted by jwz:
“The reality is, we as musicians are not qualified to be making these decisions.”
Closing time?
I wish I could say that I was getting the keys to my new house Monday, as scheduled. Instead, I have to decide if I want to approach tomorrow morning’s delay-of-game phone call with cold anger or with vicious swearing. Neither would be particularly productive, but the practice sessions help work off a bit of my frustration.
(picture is not related. yet)
“I have no Kuroitsu and I must scream”
Since they delayed the release of episode 3 of Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, I watched the second one again. The folks making this really do love the genre.
Realist Hero, episode 16
It’s really, really hard to make an interesting episode that’s nothing but wrapping up the diplomatic negotiations that started last week. It’s necessary to develop Julius, Jeanne, and Maria for later events, and set up the long-promised reveal of the loophole Our Realist spotted in the big treaty, but that doesn’t make it fun.
Worse, it doesn’t adequately signal that fun is on her way, ready to turn his plans upside down. While people often criticize adaptations for bringing haremettes into the story early, I think this one would have benefited from a few more scenes with her. Just having Julius ask about her once isn’t enough to really remind people that she showed up briefly last season. You’re left with “oh, look, it’s that other girl from the opening credits!”.
(picture of incoming fun is unrelated)
