“An academic creates a scholarly journal which only publishes boring research. As the journal’s focus is economics, this doesn’t materially restrict its coverage.”
— Webshit Weekly summarizes tech news, so you don't have toDangling 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)
Apple design: threat or menace?
Turn-offs
This time, I remembered to switch Mobile Safari back to semi-private mode immediately after upgrading to iOS 15. And to scrub through the preferences for all the other invasive and useless bullshit Apple opts you into by default.
(why? because there have been a number of security issues that will not be patched in iOS 14.x, because fuck the 25% of users who have chosen not to upgrade yet)
Also: “Dear Apple, not only is contrast a thing, but so are right-aligned numbers.”
(and I’m still trying to figure out the point of the weird-ass temperature-range bars; I understand what information they’re trying to convey, but not why anyone thought this was a sensible or attractive way to present it)
Kuroitsu episode 3 delayed until January 29
Because it didn’t air last week on all but one of the channels that’s running it in Japan. So, while we got episode 2 on the 16th, most people in Japan won’t get to see it until the 22nd. Legally, that is.
(trick-or-treat oni-girl is unrelated)
Hairpin Double airs February 4
There’s finally some information about this one:
The battle action anime centers on a group of five transforming heroines whose mission is to protect a racing circuit. A mysterious man and several monsters suddenly appear at the Okayama International Circuit, and their goal is to get their hands on an unknown energy that sleeps deep beneath the racing circuit.
It’s part of the track’s 30th anniversary event. One-shot rather than a series?
(slime-witch is unrelated)
“Alexa, stop offering me ‘helpful’ advice that degrades your core functionality”
J: “Alexa, 30-minute timer”
A: “30 minutes, starting now. Would you like to begin your day with a positive affirmation from the My Daily Mindset skill?”
J: “Fuck no.”
(fantasy waitress is unrelated, and provides better service)
404 yummies not found
Hideki no Okazu
大盛りあがり グラビア館 has gone offline. Hopefully it’s just moving (again) or suffering from a brief billing issue.
Tactical Cat Harness
I’m not sure what bothers me more, that this exists, or that Amazon recommended it to me…
Fools and their money…
A DAO bought a book at auction for about 100x its expected value, apparently under the mistaken assumption that they were buying the rights to the content.
What’s a DAO, you might ask? “decentralized autonomous organization”, aka “Bureaucracy As Code”, where a bunch of cryptoweenies try to manage some group activity with rules enforced by hopefully-debugged code that sits on a blockchain. The trope-namer lasted about two months before bugs in their code cost them a third of the money invested in it, which was recovered by calling backsies on the concept of blockchains. If all of this sounds like a terrible idea, that’s because it’s a terrible idea.
Dear Amazon,
TL/DR: out of 210 recommended products, I bought 0.
Your current recommendation system is complete garbage. As compared to the previous version that was only mostly garbage. The first 40-tile section is labeled “Top picks”; 15 of them are things I already buy regularly (so why highlight them?), 2 are books I’ve already read through Kindle Unlimited, 1 is the unreleased next book in a series I’ve read, and 2 are the first book of a series I haven’t read and likely won’t. The other 20 are book N in series that I haven’t read book one of. That means only 3 of 40 are things that I might want, which is the exact opposite of what both of us want to see when I go to spend money on your site.
The second set of 40 tiles is “Buy it again”, which seems redundant when more than a third of the first group was also things you want me to buy again. By a generous definition, 37 of these are consumables that I would likely buy again, but in most cases not weekly or monthly (such as 100-packs of trash bags, 24-packs of kitchen scrubbers, 24-packs of zip-top pill holders, 12-packs of microfiber towels, 4-packs of airtags, 2 quarts of tallow, etc).
The third set of 40 tiles is “New releases”, and since the first two sets are dynamically loaded, it can be a challenge to scroll down and see these. 39 of these are Kindle books; most of them will not be available for weeks, and in some cases, not until the end of summer. 1 is a Bluray that was theoretically released a week ago, but has in fact been delayed indefinitely (supply-chain woes?). Of the 39 books, 4 are from series where I’m likely to buy the next volume when it comes out; none of the others are book one in their series.
The fourth set of 40 tiles is “Kindle ebooks”, which seems pretty redundant given that 64 of the previous three sets were also Kindle books. Still, I have to give them credit for including a full 7 that are book one of a series I haven’t read (for a total of 9 potential sales out of 160 tiles).
At the very bottom of the (dynamically loaded) page are two scrolling sections, titled “Explore more from across the store” and “Explore more from across the store”, respectively. The first consists of 25 anime Bluray discs, while the second is 25 more Kindle books, 7 of which are book one in their series.
(Zelda is not amused)
