A bathroom painted to look like the inside of a septic tank:

On the bright side, the toilet wasn’t painted to match.

No link to the house listing; I’m trying to get it out of my mind.

…by putting it in yours. 😁

Sure, it will likely suck, but…

In Virgin Road, the people of a fantasy world are so sick of overpowered Japanese expats showing up with ridiculous powers and zero self-control that they have a full-time exterminator for them, Our Hero.

I approve of this message. Also the yuri elements.

(…and leave the witch of the highlands alone!)

Live School Live!

I kind of stopped watching the live version of School Live a bit over halfway through. It does a decent job of streamlining the core story, but loses a lot of the charm of the original by making Our Survivors into pretty ordinary-looking schoolgirls.

Question in Slack

Co-worker: Why is the Netflix virtual fireplace video only an hour long?

J: They had to rotate the logs.

Legal question

The obviously-coordinated gangs of looters hitting high-end California stores recently are clearly organized crime, so if they scheduled their events on social media, does that open Facebook up to RICO charges? Asking for a friend.

Moron Update: Professor Firestarter

The asshat who was found suspiciously close to the start of one of the arson-caused wildfires in California this summer has now been charged with starting four of them. They suspect he’s responsible for more fires, but can’t prove it. And he wasn’t the only (Leftist) arsonist working the wildfire season. Apparently, just like hate crimes, the demand for climate-change consequences exceeds the supply.

Sour cheesecake

Pixiv has recently recommended some pictures to me that I won’t be adding to my collection or sharing here, tagged with 催眠 (“hypnosis”) and 洗脳 (“brainwashing”). Not every picture with those tags is “vigorously non-consensual sex with anatomically distorted girls who are canonically way underage”, but most of them are. Pokégirls hardest hit.

(practice safe cheesecake!)

Double-checking, I did post one picture (#121) that was tagged “hypnosis”, but it was one of the rare exceptions: the girl in the manga reflects on the results of hypnotizing her girlfriends at school. And that isn’t even in the panel I selected; she’s just cute and naked.

I heard a tuba.

At 12:30 AM this morning.

I thought I could just yell out the window at whatever neighbor’s kid was doing something really stupid and annoying, but no.

It was several blocks away.

After a few minutes, the rest of the live band joined in, for an extremely loud hour of mexican polka music.

I eventually got to sleep, then came downstairs this morning, and as I started to make coffee, was greeted by the continuous sound of power tools being used in someone’s back yard.

At 8:30 AM on a Saturday.

At least a block away.

I may have to triple my previous “no part of the house within 20 feet of the property line” rule. Fortunately, three of my top five still-not-sold-yet houses easily clear that bar, and the other two are well-buffered with trees and hedges. A lot of the problem here is that all the two-story houses placed with minimum set-backs from the property line create a canyon that channels sound; the neighborhoods I’m looking at around Dayton aren’t as packed, and most are broken up occasionally by densely-packed trees.

I did add a new house to the #3 slot this week, but it’s already gotten an offer, so I’m down to:

• 4 great choices,

• 1 “would be great if I could change the street name”,

• 1 “kind of far and needs a lot of privacy landscaping”,

• 1 “great location, gas range but cramped kitchen with useless island, old-house layout issues, need for privacy landscaping, and several rooms that need repainting, but also $100K cheaper than the others”.

Hopefully my new manager’s manager will be sufficiently recovered from reorg hell in the upcoming short week to give me a thumb’s-up on the move idea. I said “4 great choices”, but #1 has been far out in front since I started looking, and I’m simultaneously cheered and concerned that it’s still on the market after 50+ days while others are being snapped up within 3. The price has dropped slightly twice since I found it, but I’d have paid the original price and considered it a great deal.

Something is scaring people off. Maybe it smells like cat piss or cigarette smoke, or there’s something about the neighborhood, or some maintenance issue that would cost a bundle, but there’s only one thing I can see in the pictures that might turn people off, and I hope that it’s the reason, because it’s something I want.

It’s also possible the Zillow listing is simply wrong about some things; I’ve seen significant discrepancies before, and not just in the claimed square-footage. After all, I remember when my neighbor’s place went on the market at the peak of a previous boom and was advertised as having “off-street RV parking”, with a picture that carefully disguised the fact that it would have required tearing down his fence and paving my front yard.

Update:

...and Saturday night begins with a really loud party in the house behind me. Which, thanks to minimum set-backs, is about twenty feet away from my kitchen table.

Although I'd be able to hear the music from five times that distance.

“Ah-ha!” moment

I think I've figured out why the house I like so much hasn't sold yet, and if true, might stay on the market long enough for me to get my full-time remote approval and buy it: two of the bedrooms have sucky windows.

Until today, there were no pictures that showed all five bedrooms. The three that were shown are large and well laid out, and they just kind of skipped over the two that are smaller, located directly above the garage, and look like this:

But I don't need five good bedrooms, while I do need a nice private office and a crafting room. And a private dojo with enough room to swing a sword, which this place also has room for.

Komi, interrupted, episode 5

The sinister specter of chuunibyou appears, in past and present. Our Heroine is baffled, but takes one small step for Komi-kind. Then Agari gets a chance to show off a non-doggy skill, as Komi takes yet another step forward. Also, casting You-Know-Who as Komi’s mom allowed them to slip in a “forever 17” reference. Still liking this.

Restaurant To Another World, 2.8

This one was very delayed on all the Crunchyroll apps. It was only showing up on the desktop version of the web site all day long, and even in the evening I had to start rewatching episode 7 and manually select “next episode” to get it to show up.

Some nice subtle shots of Kuro figuring out the truth about vampires, and a cute scene of her handling the brawling cheesecake cheesecake brawlers. The latter segment did include a bigger crowd, but managed to keep up the quality pretty well.

(supply-chain constraints have interfered with my ability to provide Aletta/Kuro fan-art; let go, Brandon!)

School Live! (live) live on HiDive

The’re now streaming the movie, in addition to the prequel mini-series they’ve had up for a while. I think I’ll try to watch it Saturday night.

GTA dead, dead, dead on PC

The definitive, mod-free, only-version-you-can-buy-now release of the Grand Theft Auto series has turned out to be a definitive dumpster-fire that is not only worse than all previous versions, but includes music tracks they no longer have licenses for and parts of the infamous “hot coffee” unreleased feature that got them into very hot water back in the day. All this wrapped in layers of DRM and crapware that even made it a challenge to pull the release while they scraped off the worst of the spittle.

Had they done a proper cleanup release that supported mods, I might have picked it up on Steam, but it sounds like they’ve lost all credibility. I guess Apple isn’t the only company that doesn’t know what “QA” means.

How To Spot A Shitshow

The Ars Technica preview of Amazon’s Wheel of Time series includes the following praise:

“I really appreciate a lot of what the show is doing to add nuance to the books’ dated and rigid gender roles.”

Why say that? Because Moiraine grabs all of Our Future Heroes just in case Nynaeve or Egwene might be The Dragon Reborn in a gender-swapped reincarnation.

Thanks for letting me know I can skip this one.

“Alexa, shut your whore mouth.”

When Amazon asks me why I won’t be installing any voice-activated devices in my new house (yada-yada-still-not-confirmed), my answer will be “by the way, did you know that you can alienate customers by responding to their simple commands with lengthy uninterruptible promotions for features that they’ve heard about a dozen times already and firmly rejected multiple times?”

(army of sharks is hopefully related…)

I’m in love with a working girl, episode 7

(sometime I should look up how Japanese fans are shortening the ridiculous title for “banished from the hero’s party…”)

Drugs are bad, but putting in a hard day’s work tracking down the dealers is a great reason to jump into your roommate’s lap for a relationship-advancing cuddle. Detective Rit is on the case, and also on Red like white on rice. The plots continue to thicken, with Ruti’s story being advanced by killer loli Tisse (have I mentioned Tisse yet? she’s the adorable little assassin brought into Ruti’s party for support), and the axe-crazy druggies inciting a possible coup that would interfere with Our Couple’s Slow Life.

They’re on target to get through the first four novels, which form a pretty complete arc while leaving the future open for more stories. (there are currently 8 light novels)

(classical reference)

Dear Apple,

Okay, I finally drank the koolaid and switched on your not-really-two-factor authentication, to stop you from constantly disabling my AppleID and forcing me to log back in 10+ times across all my devices. So how am I rewarded? With iTunes (excuse me, “Music”) demanding that I log back in after an update, and then rejecting my correct password twice (pasted directly from my password manager) before finally letting me in so I can use the application.

Not, I shit you

This is the full text for this month’s second-breakfast-patch-tuesday Adobe update for InDesign, an application dedicated to presenting prose professionally:

This Max we bring you adjustable UI size to suit your resolution the best and the power of Adobe Capture through a new Capture panel extension within InDesign. We have replaced non-inclusive terminology to support core Adobe values of diversity and inclusion and also updated to include bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Thanks, Adobe, for letting us know that copy-editing is white supremacy, and must be destroyed for the sake of equity.

(graphic designer is unrelated, and blissfully unaware that her profession is inherently racist)

Maskholio

Okay, on October 29, Monterey County passed their new mask-up regulation, scheduled to go in effect 7 days after certain conditions were met. Communication of this has been typically inept, and it apparently went live on November 5 but not everyone knows it (I will not “out” the unmasked clerk who served my unmasked self over the weekend and then again today), and while signs went up at some stores, they came back down a few days later. There are instructions on how to report offenders, but there seems to be no critical mass of volunteer Stasi eager to do their dirty work.

The regulation does not, to no great surprise, contain a matching set of conditions under which the mask mandate will be relaxed or expire. The county website doesn’t even have a little banner to tell you what the current status is. Just comply, you filthy peasant.

Unrelated,

I’d like to file a complaint with the editors of Weekly Playboy for following zettai with muteki rather than ryouiki. Stockings would look better on Minami Yasui than that katana does. Although, if she’s got a Red Sonja thing going on, I’d be happy to defeat her and claim valuable prizes.

(via Everia.Club; NSFW! Javascript off!)

Been a while since I’ve done one of these, but all that house-hunting has me thinking about stealing Porch Cat Prime to go with me (in the spring; it would be downright cruel to move an outdoor cat from California to Ohio in the winter). And about setting up maid service at the new place (if and when…). Cats and maids go together quite nicely, but to my surprise, the NSFW section ended up a bit light, with most of the candidates keeping their uniforms on, so I just padded it out with other naughty catgirls.

(I’m hoping to get a thumbs-up on the move idea this week from my manager’s manager’s manager who apparently just became my manager’s manager; then I can send my house-elves out with a realtor to inspect the places on my list)

more...

Er, that’s “waitresses eating shaved ice”. 😁

Restaurant To Another World, 2.7

Keeping out most of the regulars improved the character art again, allowing for some particularly adorable closeups of Aletta and Kuro, beating out the food for quality. First, two regulars that Aletta (and by extension, the audience) has never seen before show up to argue about everything and then eat okonomiyaki together, and then a naive and sheltered high elf gets his first exposure to the world outside his floating island, featuring green-tea shaved ice.

This season’s catgirl showed up in the background, but only as a still; they’re making up for that by having her return next episode with her friends. Also, the vampire lovers will encounter more of their kind, while still somehow managing to overlook the presence of their (inadvertent) creator.

(it’s a bit frustrating that two of the shows I like this season get so little fan-art, and most of it inept porn)

Dear HP,

Would it kill you to update the text occasionally in your driver installers?

🎶 Her name is Rio…

…she don’t seem to understand. 🎶

From the look on her face, Rio Yoshida (吉田莉桜) wasn’t expecting the photographer to drop his pants and follow her into the bath.

(via Everia.Club; NSFW! disable Javascript!)

Land Tax

Between anticipating the need to report my Magic card sales to the IRS (you can’t really argue against the 28% tax on collectible sales when you have multiple payments from a major collectibles dealer) and trying to speed up the process of selling off the dregs of my collection, I’ve started pulling everything into a spreadsheet. Their CSV uploader only works with Firefox and Chrome-based browsers, but logging in on a second browser is a small price to pay for saving twenty minutes of manually scrolling through the lists and clicking on quantities.

I initially scraped the list of card names from the Apple default webarchive save format, but couldn’t extract the prices; plain HTML works better, since you can just grab input fields with field names “name” and “price”, and then strip up to the first colon from the name to get rid of the set title.

(picture is unrelated, but about as thematically consistent as a typical MtG expansion)

Bashful Pharmacist And Bikini Princess, episode 6

With my Internet connection restored, I can catch up on Banished From The Long Title…. TL/DR: drugs are bad, bikinis are good, and blessings suck. The plot advances more than Our Couple’s relationship, with a bonus L’il Ruti flashback, but their lips actually touch. Finally.

(tanuki child-bride is mostly unrelated, but this episode does have some head-in-lap action)

4-Komi Komi 4: Taming The Yandere

Red & Rit aren’t the only ones dealing with axe-crazy weirdos this week, as someone decides to move in on the coveted Friend Number One slot.

Baby steps, Komi. You may give your voice actress a workout yet.

We have reservations…

…but we’re going anyway.

We’re now engaged in an email back-and-forth about the duplicate hotel charges after modifying our Japan reservations to a date when we can hopefully actually enter the country. The hotel manager in Kyoto understood exactly what I was saying, but when he worked his way up the chain, it came back down as “confirm that they have paid reservations”. Sigh. Round two, away!

Fun with Comcast

The best part about Monday’s VMware outage was that just as we were starting to bring things back up, everyone lost their Internet connections, because we were all on Comcast. Even after basic connectivity was restored, I couldn’t reach any google-hosted services for several more hours. This included the Philips Hue remote access for controlling my lights, both from the app and from Amazon Echo devices. Fortunately I have a small Perl script that speaks directly to the Hue hub.

For more fun, Thursday morning, as I was hosting our daily ticket triage meeting, Comcast dropped off again (locally, not for all of San Jose), and it took a good eight hours for service to be restored. I actually got a half-decent connection through my phone, good enough for Zoom-without-video or vpn-and-ssh, but not both at the same time.

For a few dollars more…

While I was connected through my phone, I put in another sell order at Card Kingdom. This involved 11 cards from the Legends set, all commons, worth between $0.70 and $10 each. Being commons, I had a lot, and for most of the cards, they were willing to take them all. The star performer was 43 copies of Chain Lightning at $8.50 each. Next up was Darkness, which they only wanted 12 of, but at $10 a pop.

Their inventory changes quite rapidly, so I might be able to sell off the rest of these in a few weeks, along with some of the others they didn’t want out of my last two batches. Then there’s a bunch of Legends uncommons that were listed around $1/card; worth it because I have maybe 300 of them.

Shipping update

Dropped off the box of cards at UPS, and found the clerk working through a big stack of boxes from yesterday, because he had Comcast, too.