Patrick Phelan
A Light In The Darkness

fantod@verizon.net

A giant pile of pretentious ramblings that will probably prove embarrassing later on.


Democracy dies in darkness, of embarrassment
2018-12-30

Magicians #3: Liking El more, Alice much less.

Fall 2018 Anime Review: Slime, Luminary, ZOMBIE, Rascal, UzaMaid!, SSSS, Goblin, Himote House, Tsurune, Conception, all about as expected, except for Himote, which was surprisingly funny and seemed to be live improv ("it's very hard on the animator's wrists"), and possibly GobSlay, which was not as guro as the first episode. SSSS's ending was also better than your average giant robo.

2018-12-23

Travelers #3: So Canadian (the rough part of town?), but good stuff

I'm trying to transfer a 401-k and they want me to print out things on paper, like some sort of monkey. I think they are just trying to make it as hard as possible to move now that I noticed the $10 monthly fee that I don't think used to be there. They'll give me the whole thing in cash, but not transfer it. They won't do partial transfers under the limit requiring a medallion stamp, nor provide printable statements, because the website is broken. And in order to prove who I am and stamp the previous paper, the bank wants statements from all parties on paper, though they too will give me cash upon request. It will cost me $135 a year to leave it where it was, but $85 and all this hassle to move it.

https://privacy.com/: Generate per-use credit cards.

2018-12-09

Krita: free paint app, nicer than GIMP. Still GTK HIG, but less terrible.

The Lobster: shorter and more nihilist.

Ballad of Buster Scruggs: long and nihilist, but I like the line about how few certainties survive from antiquity, and how ready we are to fashion new ones and bask in their comfort.

http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/why-robot-brains-need-symbols I don't know the specifics of the symbol thing this is pushing, but I do agree with the failings of dnn: you can't put an image into one net and get human level results, because humans have layers upon layers of networks, each specialized in producing something like symbols. So the image processor could produce "trees yellow vehicle top road snow", then something else could connect that to "vehicle top is not aligned with trees or road", "Snow causes crashes", then processed again to produce "a crashed school bus". While I'm typing this, there's news about Waymo taxis. You could trust it to not crash into things (maybe), but it would drive past a crashed school bus or fire truck if that wasn't in the road.

2018-12-02

The Kindergarden Teacher: I'm with Dad on this one. AI will be a better poet, anyway.

Terminator Salvation: meh-ish, though nice enough addition to the timeline(s). I don't know why the other dude didn't just use a fuel pump from a car.

I just found out Dark Matter was canceled last year. Android forever best girl.

2018-11-25

MST3K#2: Still like the Mike Era best, but this is not helped by the number of movies with weird alien nipples.

2018-11-18

https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence I could see that helping, but it still lacks the many biological pre-processors the human brain has. The visual input doesn't touch every other part of the brain. I do see the point about the illness: if the visual bit keeps saying everything is black and feathery, or the next bit up takes any input and outputs crow, that would explain somebody's crow-based murder issue. I don't see as to why you need to define that mathematically as a minimization problem. For example, hate speech filtering: it could start out in a neutral state and then become surprised/rewarded when words relate to negative content. This is just keyword filter scoring without the non-biological pre-processors: what non-offensive words and phrases does it have, and what is their historical and slang use? Can it extract a tone or sentiment from the text? The textual analysis on the mad king's writings would detect the alt-right group-speech phrasing and dog whistling, but not if a comment blames the wildfires on, you know, them, or guess that somebody really angry about the wildfires is possibly angry because of conspiracy theories about directed energy weapons, the railroad, and socialist ISIS deep state agents (really. Look it up, or better, don't.). I believe internet arguments in general prove people are barely sentient, but they can manage at least that much.

VNC: after the success of the Linux VM work, I tried RealVNC to do IE11 testing. Terrible: the redraws were incredibly slow, but nothing seemed to be running: neither cpu, nor the network. Another thing to worry about. TigerVNC connected, but seemed to have problems with the monitor sizes, 4k-ness.

Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan: aka DiPai. Cute. The world-building is extremely weird, but it mostly ignores that and is just cute.

I have figured out the hoverboard, did some mining and fishing, and am coming closer to getting the scanner thing that does faster scanning (which I will use to get the scanner thing that does free scanning, then get the robot that does automatic scanning. Such is the grind.). I am able to solo the lowest level bounties. And just to make sure I don't feel like I mastered anything, got destroyed with a group in a 25-30 mission, while wearing my good gear.

2018-11-11

Warframe 4tuna: the song is nice, but more things I don't understand and are leaving me behind, literally, as I don't have a hoverboard.

The Beyond: possibly excessively long, but nice ideas.

2018-11-04

LAST HOPE: nice enough ideas, but repetitive, and ultimately just ends.

https://newrepublic.com/article/151981/extinction-wilderness-untouched-lands-oceans-disappearing Saying any of the Earth is "untouched wilderness" is to ignore the atmosphere: the rain of toxins, heavy metals, or UV has not spared a millimeter of the planet. It would be better if the land were actively managed with more ecosystem awareness. Just not for profit.

Mac event: the new mini is nice enough, but not anything special. It would be a lot of money to get into the USB-C ecosystem, a real 4k@60Hz monitor, and while it would still be something I could take into the office, it would lose the laptop screen, making it less portable in general. The iPad is a more likely purchase, though while it has USB now, it doesn't necessarily work with USB devices, crushing my hopes of using it to remote-control a VM on a real computer.

2018-10-28

Haiku-OS: more vm fun. After having mentioned that I found modern Ubuntu window management lacking compared to BeOS, I checked out the modern BeOS's recent Beta. It is worse than I recall. There is a webkit browser, but every thing crashes constantly. The Title bars don't do the sliding thing any more. I believe the terminal used to come with more *nix command line stuff, or at least I didn't see how to install things like php via the repos. The desktops window doesn't float, and I forgot the key combos for switching. Everything seems old: the window resolutions cap out at HD, SCSI, clearly not using the GPU for window composition. (Some of that might be the VM environment settings, but is very old.) It was nice opening many windows and watching it smoothly use all 8 cpus. I gave them some money: I still think the windowing environment can be superior to X (talk about old), and if they can nail down the app stability and include a POSIX compatibility layer, it could be a great Unix GUI. There's still a lot of BeOS design I try to put in javascript, as much as it allows. Using event listeners instead of callbacks and metadata are easy ones. Breaking the UI/processing into 2 different threads is tricky, as JS workers can't output to the dom and manually triggered events are not async, but there's things like https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom that try.

I did more real work off the PC, with an Ubuntu VM, not the Linux layer again. I did not install Netbeans, and there was a bit of GUI lag that's probably the VM, but it was nice enough. Although I find Ubuntu Desktop Linux primitive (I used to use e), I could live with a Linux dev environment + the Mac laptop for music, chat, Netflix (Basically all the stuff that lives on the laptop screen now) if I could figure out what happened to all the window/screen management features. Next is see what the remote screen stuff in Virtualbox is like, or I have heard it is now possible to assign video cards to VMs. If I upgrade the 560 now that bitcoin mining has crashed, I could assign it the VM full time.

More VM weirdness: I can't run both the Ryzen Android emulator and Virtualbox at the same time, but I can run Android in Virtualbox. I think I lose some debugging, also it isn't "real" ARM Android, but is also much, much faster than the Intel HAX version. It would be nice to be able to edit the html live, but close enough. Windows 10 may not be able to run the emulator at all (despite having the hypervisor option available) unless you have the Pro version. Somebody pointed out that if you are doing development, you should have the pro version. Fair enough, but for serious development, working on a real developer's OS is better.

Dragon Maiden: the end is insane

One Dark Mode problem: I turned on always show scrollbars because I got sick of the thing where I trigger the scrollbar with the wheel and try and catch the thumb before it disappears. The scrollbars are always white, though. Even on webpages with black backgrounds, every overflow:scroll gets giant white boxes.

CotEditor: is nice. Not as powerful as BBEdit's free mode. Might be nice to have a romanji to katakana transformation, for people without Japanese input but still occasional need for Japanese text. There's always Google Translate, I guess.

Karabiner can replace SteerMouse, if you are willing to put the effort into making complex actions for the mouse buttons. It might be worth doing that to have one less thing running, but Mojave has certainly done nothing to reduce the number of weird processes running, so what's another one. (such as the wonderful "bird".)

Mojave: I updated the mouse driver, which stopped working entirely. So I figured that perhaps it had not been tested with the older OS, so I updated that before panicing. It did fix it. 10.14 seems OK. The Dark in the Dark Mode is nice, but not consistent between apps, and not really black. (I thought the secret plan was to show up the OLED contrast. Maybe this monitor is too bright.) I can see where they might be going with the whole iOS-ification, and it isn't bad. I don't want it, but wouldn't complain. (I would, and just did, complain about iOS design in general, but throwing it on the Mac doesn't make the Mac worse. It's better than Gnome, at least.) I would complain about Apple News: Google News (the website, at least) gives you a link to a site, so you then view the site's ads, thus supporting the site. Apple News app just sucks the content down in the app. While this is perhaps the ideal reading experience, it seems unsupportable. (Also, not dark. They are reformatting the content anyway, yes?) Not sure how News is pooping notifications on me while it isn't running. I just wanted to look at it, not make a lifetime commitment. (There's an iOS feature I don't want: if I quit something, it's because I don't want it, not because I'm switching apps.) The extra line in the dock annoys me, though for no reason. The app store is still a mess, but looks nicer. The Private browsing mode in Dark is not distinct enough. (Chrome is not (yet) dark, so where it matters most for work is the same.) The new finder view is nice, but doesn't replace real browsing tools. (For example, it shows you all the metadata, but searching by it is still manually typing long query strings into the search box.) Also does not work with a mousewheel. I'm not sure as markup is actually a time saver, because it does not work with Message images, my most common use case. The "Continuity Camera" is cool, but I haven't found a place that can use it. The Stocks app just reminds me I should have invested in AMD a year ago, also that I don't want these things and can't get rid of them.

Another Ryzen problem: I can't get VirtualBox to work. It complained about a bios setting that doesn't even seem to be an option in the setup, but it just turned out to be called something completely different, and not visible unless you knew to scroll down in the overclocking section. (I did tweak the fan speeds to turn 2 of them off at min temps. Didn't seem to make a difference to the idle cpu temp. Judging from what the Mac and fanless pcs get up to, I could just never turn them on at all. Such is the advantage of a very open case.) Once it loaded, it complained about things, ran at some weird tiny resolution, then died completely. Thus ends my dream of having a desktop work environment that I could slide to the laptop. And I'm only doing this on the PC because mouse driver update killed the Mac.

https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/hardtouse/ Some of that may be wrong (the health app is in the iOS12 setup?), but a lot also revolves around that fact that Apple has collectively forgotten much of what made the Mac more usable: it put all the available options in the menu bar and had a one button mouse. Everything you could do, you could see, and everything you could see could be clicked on with the one button. (Admittedly, that broke down almost immediately with shift-clicks and option-menus, and you can have my 8 button mouse when you pry it from my even colder dead fingers. There should always be space at the top for expert modes.) You would think that a touch screen would be ideal for this: see it, touch it. But that requires space, and iOS's space saving tricks are all fundamentally undiscoverable, and thus unlearnable, except by accident, or by nerds who seek out and read the manual (not the pamphlet that comes with a phone). When necessary adaptive technologies are buried in the settings, that not expert mode, that's just mean. (Or have Apple apps not respect the large print settings, or break the invert colors by having both white and black screens in the same app.) Siri is worse. There is no manual, and it doesn't even do what it does half the time. (One could point out that Apple has also forgotten the other bit of what made the Mac more usable: that the limited hardware stopped dll hell. It's not that bad, but Peak Dongle is needing dongle chains to connect 2 Apple devices because they have no ports in common.)

Black Panther: Too marvely for me, also sad, for a movie about change that the millions it took to make, and the billion it made, aren't changing anything.

2018-10-21

https://www.instagram.com/sukiicat/ I'll never have travel adventures like that cat, might as well give up now.

I ran the current Torch data compression on the PC for the first time. It was not able to max out the Ryzen (actual cores, not even getting into the hyper-threaded), but did max out the Evo 970. It was done in a couple minutes. All this Mac event hype had better deliver, is all I'm saying. Speaking of which, I tried a Linux desktop in a VM. Moderately annoying that the VM caught the Exposé mouse button. Gnome didn't seem to do much: leaving aside the lack of apps, HaikuOS does a better job with window management and settings. Also did not default to 4K/HiDPI, but I don't think the VM could have handled that. It could work adequately with my Mac Pro concept: when I'm home, sync the VM to the PC, and remote connect to the screen. It does suggest the more obvious solution: get a Linux desktop, Synergy, and sync the home dir into the VM if I need to take the laptop out.

The Apple Music search feature seems unable to pick up on things you can navigate indirectly. I'm looking at it, but searching for the exact title gives me nothing.

The world's most extraordinary homes: so much concrete. The Swiss homes, even the concrete monolith, were generally the nicest.

Anime Fall 2018 first episode review

https://medium.com/s/powertrip/universal-basic-income-is-silicon-valleys-latest-scam-fd3e130b69a0 - true, but big corporations will continue to extract all possible value from the unemployed sheeple, anyway. At least give them enough money for food.

2018-10-14

My ears?
VRoid Studio: Cool tech, though there are a few things I'd like to tweak further beyond the available sliders. Making her smile wider moved out her fangs, which wasn't my intent. I've seen people do animal ears with the hair brush, but I don't know how to get hair to stick out sideways. She needs more hair in the back and more detailed eyes, but that was just my laziness. I also don't have any of the other apps like MMD or VRChat that would work with this.

2018-10-07

100 Days of Solitude: although perhaps literally the ideal #shackLife, not actually #shackLife, mostly do to the guy's complaining, moping about other people. Pine Marten star of the show.

Slow West: #shackLife

2018-09-30

Now, after I re-arraigned my furniture to accomodate the lower monitor, the 4K isn't working either. I think the HDMI port on the laptop is only working sporadically. I can't have nice things. Weirdly the monitor detects that it has been plugged in, but no signal, and MacOS doesn't try to reposition the windows. When it does work, it is HiDPI, but also puts a lot less on the screen (being bigger could also be good for my decaying eyeballs). I really need either a 5K (probably not supported by the laptop), or ultrawide, to get the same space at the new DPI or more just space. 30Hz is noticeably bad. I should get a miniDP->DP cable, in case the HDMI port continues to die. Also I really should not have put the IPS panel next the TN panels the PC was using, as now they look terrible.

The iMac monitor seems to work on the PC, but the PC 4K monitor seems to work on the laptop.

My iMac converted monitor seems to have died. The lights are on, but nobody's home. Geting an ultra-wide will be a tax deductible business expense after all.

The Good Place #2: I think I might be inadvertently learning or something.

The Blacklist #5: lazy writing in spots, and not enough schemes.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw

Anime Summer 2018 Roundup: Chio, Asobi (ED OtY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ88sSjAETU), Cells, With: top tier. ISLAND: ok tier. Ok, but loses some points: Bakabon (excessively meta), Angolmois (the parchment filter). Tsukumogami, Holmes, Angels, Demon Lord ok, but if you are into that sort of thing. I gave up on the sports and shows that just seemed redundant: HANEBADO!, Harukana, Muhyo, Master, Yuuna. Did not watch Tonegawa. I watched The Journey Home, but it is objectively terrible. I don't review the later seasons of a show, but I would like to call out Steins;Gate 0, for removing everything I liked about the original for 90% of the episodes.

2018-09-23

The microphone level on the PC is if anything worse after I redid everything. The next step is apparently reseting Windows, which promises it might save some of my personal files.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life-spanish-city-banned-cars-pontevedra

2018-09-16

The 100 #5: good stuff. Some people looked so much older after the time skip. Seems to bear little relation to the books at this point, which given the books don't have all the SF stuff, I approve of, though makes the "end of book 1" mysterious.

2018-09-09

I was going to buy a new mouse too, but they only had clicky Logitech wheels. They had a mouse with a mini-trackball. That seemed nice for 2D scrolling, if it wasn't wireless and clicky. That's something I am now reaching up for the trackpad to do.

I got the same thing with a brand new USB mic on the pc. While it wasn't as loud as would have liked on the Mac, it did work. Turns out, this is actually an issue with Windows and USB audio. https://www.pcsteps.com/15528-windows-10-driver-causes-low-volume-usb-microphone/ 30dB gain and it is still barely audible unless my nose is up against the mic, or the boom mic on the new headset is inside my mouth. I "fixed" it by suppressing non-voice frequencies and doing 45dB increase on the rest with the app from the link. The mouse is incredibly loud, but at least I'm audible and slightly less nasal. "Windows has come a long way from the janky driver hell of yesteryear"... Worse, the headset works fine on the Mac. Increasing the gain on the PC didn't do anything for that, so the analog audio on the motherboard may not be working at all. I can't have nice things.

Blocking the google tracking(maybe) tracking on crunchyroll killed the new video.

2018-09-02

The mic volume on my headset seems to have died. It still works, but only really softly.

Grand Designs Australia: More than average number of houses I disagree with, but more lovely locations. They do seem to love their concrete slabs and cinder block. Also the last shot as the host walks through the house and the camera flies away at the end: that whole shot was a drone or did I miss the cut?

2018-08-26

Her: nice singularity, nice car-free city design.

http://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/ 1973!

WoW BfA: Not revolutionary, but more of the same good stuff. Having 6 starting zones means there isn't skinning bonanzas, so power-leveling LW is much more expensive. LW is still useless. The 300 level gear gave me a nice bump at 120, but the epic stuff is worse that the titanforged stuff I'm getting doing heroics to get into the mythics to get the mats. Not nearly enough fox people. The AntarticansSnake people got most of the attention in that zone. Still need a weapon for the priest. People are impressed by my giant dinosaur.

2018-08-19

Mouse idea: something that attaches to the hand and works over a mousepad, a trackpad with remote, real buttons. Or: more buttons around the edges of the trackpad.

I bought the extravagant giant dinosaur already.

2018-08-12

Ex Machina: as a nerd, I could point out that nobody would build a strong AI without the capacity for self-improvement. I did like the house. The view and layout would be shack like, though certainly not so much glass and concrete.

Extinction: could have been a twilight zone episode.

2018-08-05

Grand Designs #13, #14: Still nobody really embracing the Shack Life, even the straw(ish) house or the house built on the site of a shack. It seems the planning commission (beware the leopard), or the show, requires the architectural distinctiveness. Maximum Hobbity.

Out of phase anime: Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation: story was touching, but then a lot of recycled animation and shouting. Starlight Promises: scifi angle to feels

2018-07-29

Godzilla2: good stuff. Kind of with the B people on this one. After the twin girls in #2, I wonder which 3-headed monster might appear in #3, hmmmm?

"One of Tesla's biggest anonymous trolls/shorts has been doxxed as an investment manager heavily invested in the oil industry." - you are not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

2018-07-22

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-series/ThinkPad-E585/p/22TP2TEE585 Weird that it doesn't list a larger SATA SSD as an option, and the screen is normal for pc laptops (thus disappointing). The dock is extremely expensive and doesn't even have that many ports. While it has display port, that's also the power port, so it is dock or hdmi video only. Price (~900) is nice, but the build quality is described as cheaper and unpolished compared to higher end Lenovos. I'd buy the r5 if it runs Linux.

Warframe: "FreeToPlay Destiny 2" would be accurate. It is obvious why it is F2P, but also a better implementation of Density's ideals. It gave me more coherent lore in the login screen, but also never explained any of the vast options of the movement system. Do not like being forced into a group of randos to do choice-based missions (not that the choice seemed to matter). Or that there are all sorts of stealth and exploration mechanics, but the group default is always 100% rambo. Don't like that group mechanic frequently removes any sense of agency, as 2 scrubs trail behind some godlike character with glowing armor and a pet that shoots laser beams. Pretty sure Anthem is going to be just this game again. The amount of begging is minimal for a F2P game.

I've noticed there's some sort of performance art going on in my spam box. Dozens of emails pretending be a business contact introducing me to another contact, then responding to each other, following up, Re: Re: Re: messages, "sent from my iphone". It would more effective fraud if I had any human contact, and they weren't spamming 4 accounts in the same inbox.

2018-07-15

Mercury 13: we've gone from not sending women into space to not sending anyone into space. Equality, I guess.

Kill the Irishman: mostly genial, a few car bombs. Nobody thought to hire a car sitter?

Netflix is removing its reviews. All my reviews are safe and secure here. Now all I need to find somebody else's reviews to save me from the bad movies.

Given that the IRS hasn't randomly billed me in ages, NY, a state in which I neither live or work, billed me: Tax Assessed: $0, Interest assessed: $6.82, Penalty assessed: $107.23, Current Balance: $114.05. So I owe interest and fines on the interest and interest on the fines for $0.

Summer 2018 Anime

Masafumi Nagasaki is my new hero.

2018-07-08

2018-07-01

TAU: decent SF short story.

I reverted Skype to a version that can still ring, but it auto-updated itself. The solution is to not leave the usb headphones plugged in. Skype will remember it uses them once plugged in.

https://char.gd/blog/2018/the-surface-book-2-is-everything-the-macbook-pro-should-be-and-then-some Has the air of Microsoft's old FUD team, but at least they are being nice, more positive this time. I would have liked to know more details, like how often the fans turn on (MBP: requires 100% load for an extended period), and how loud (MBP: much quieter than the Ryzen 7 included fan, 1 of the 5 in that case.) Good points: maybe the hinge won't break like the last one, I can appreciate that it dared to be square, the actual dock, and that it can do 1 4K@60Hz, up from my 2012 MBP 3 4K@30Hz, which you might think would be better, but is not. "Windows has come a long way from the janky driver hell of yesteryear, and those that refuse to use it are missing out." Literal FOMO. I am using it, and I have already had to rebuild the audio drivers from scratch because sometimes it would just stop playing at random, or drop the volume/mic level on random apps to 0. The Windows UI is still terrible. (the 4 apps I use most: all of them quit differently) The Linux env has limits. Doesn't mention if it runs actual Linux. I'm assuming no, with the eject button.

http://devonzuegel.com/post/continuous-urbanization-in-japan - I would like to point out the non-skyscraper bit in the middle of the Manhattan picture is not because "hotelling": that was origanally a swamp and landfill. Dropping a skyscraper there would have been challenging for the 1920's. Modern Manhatten skyscrapers could meet that challange, but those are in New Jersey, the bottom of the photo, becase of the land value and "character" of the Village. To answer they question of why, the answer is the train lines: any house near a station is as valuable as an other, but away means an absence the connected services. Also why all the NJ skyscrapers are near the PATH station. "The continuity of urbanism along the 500km shinkansen bullet train track between Osaka and Tokyo was astonishing. Throughout the journey, the buildings almost never thinned out, and at no point did I feel like we were in suburbia, let alone true countryside." I would bet a few kilometers away might be depopulated countryside. My arcology idea is similar: provide livable hyper-density buildings, but of reasonable height. This would run up to the lightly populated countryside and nature preserve areas free from suburban sprawl. New Jerses has been consumed by low density sprawl. There's not a single remaining farm around here. So much for the garden state. Before throwing it out, I started up the old PCs: Windows XP, Winbrowser+NeXTSTART, Eudora, and Anime icons everywhere. (The NeXTSTEP thing was nice: it had links to all my servers, a task list (in addition to the dock at the bottom), a control panel, back when Windows had a comprehensible settings system) Now I have to get it to wipe all the data while also crashing constantly. I don't want to take the drives out because this is the machine with the blood all over the ribbon cables because it is all sheet metal edges in there. The Linux took some time before it booted at all. I remembered the password! Don't remember why I got up some times, but remembered that. 128MB RAM. You could load one web page! Did not play SMAC again, could not figure out how to start X properly.

2018-06-24

LEGO House - Home of the Brick: The box disintigrated at some point, but I still have one of the late 1970's, pre-minifig sets. I built a scale-ish model of my condo with it. I also have the Galaxy Explorer set they were setting up in the basement. I should demo my arcology idea in LEGO.

RiME: Was on sale, got it for the fox, did not get nearly enough fox. Extremly dark, in the Marvel vs DC sense. Not sure how the Bird Level and Woods and Eyebot level fit thematically. (Find a fox, choke a chicken, get wood, ignite your eyebot, level of dark regret and tears?) In short, a game with no words could use better writing. Also that audio did not sound like a fox. Alternate version: take out the levels, have the fox and red guy constently beckoning you up the tower, which contains the bits of the levels in a non-Euclidean space, then you come up out of the water into the cathedral of darkness with the final cut scene, and have a choice. The Red Guy is revealed, but is now beckoning you to stay in that scene (forever, bad end), but the fox is beckoning you in the other direction, up again. With the final jump off the top of the tower, the other scene also gets its resolution of release.

Anime Review; Spring 2018 Review: MEGALOBOX, HINAMATSURI get top honors, all caps titles. Golden Kamuy also very good but loses points for censorship cuts and extremely noticable CGI bears. (Why? Bears are that hard to draw?) Crossing Time, Last Period (bonus points for the Animal Tomodachi commentary), SAOA:GGO (which I wasn't going to watch, but it has a different author, and is much better), Amanchu! all very good. Magical Girl Ore, Grancrest, Umamusume (mostly for the ears), Tiramisu, LohGH:DNT, Dances with Dragons (entirely for the elf girlfriend), Steins;Gate 0, Full Metal Panic! IV, maybe To Be Heroine are OK/good, which is an achievement for TBHine and Haoliners, and a dissapointment for S;G, FMP. (Turns out if you take out everything entertaining from S;G, there's not a lot left.) Kakuriyo orbited around food-based shows, but never landed, and Basilisk continued its downhill slide from the first episodes of the original series, although the last episode wasn't terrible. There were a couple shows I dropped on as inadequate (Caligula), or somebody's very specific fetish material (Frankxx) I still haven't gotten around to Amazon or HiDive.

Caller to NPR about illegal immigrent children: "They are getting food, they are getting water, that's all more than they deserve." Not every Nazi was just following orders.

I finally looked into getting Chrome to understand that not all Shopify sites have the same password. Turns out, it used to do that, but now does not. The multiple bug reports seem to indicate the devs have firm views that this is working as intended.

brackets.io JS based text editor. Uses as much RAM as Atom, and definitely isn't as mature, and installs random crap off github, but the inline css edit thing is super slick, and the live scss and browser preview is nice.

I have discovered that a focus change loop can lock up Chrome to the point it is unable to quit or do anything in the dev tools (but is still running!), and will in no way use this knowledge for evil. It involves an infinite loop, so it isn't good for protecting coin mining, as it will occupy the cpu.

I tried the PC's 4K monitor on the laptop, after yet another day of it turning itself on too soon to sync with the monitor's weirdness. It worked, but gave me very little real estate. It is a small monitor for 4K, and I'm aware the text would be smaller, but I think MacOS counter-balanced that to keep the text the same size at the expense of reducing what can fit on the screen. I could fix that, but the 30Hz is noticable and unfixable. Turn on monitor, wait a second, plug in laptop knowing it will take 2 seconds to wake itself up, thus arriving at the magic number of 3? 4 Is Right Out!

Another Mac Pro concept idea: TB raid. Connect 4 of the iMac's TB ports to the Pro, so a save gets split across channels, assembled then re-RAID-ed to the Pro's SSDs or sent to the optane cache, then eventually backed up to the archival level. So far as Photoshop knows, the file got saved immediately. Real 16x PCI or memory bus Optane would be a point in favor of the Mac Pro as an actual computer and not just an add-on to the Mac you already have. Another: Unless Apple makes an ARM thin client, I'm not wild about that concept, but a second row of spaces in Expose would make a nice way to integrate remote desktops. A combination of Hand-off and iCloud file sync thing would make moving running applications to/from the Pro as easy as dragging between spaces.

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/ I would like to object to "These projects were built on a human scale, just four to five stories high." The height of the building effects the space around the building. What if what the author expected people to doing near the building was actually happening in/on the building, in a space designed to be humanized? Plus, smaller means wider, so given that a project probably does not include mass transit or parking, that means less connectivity.

https://www.mindmeister.com/ very impressive task+idea management, recursive style unfocused task hierarchies. Unfortunate lag on page load.

https://www.svp-team.com/wiki/Main_Page interpolate video up to 60 (or more!) fps. Could convert to 4K@60 or 2K@120. Combine that with Nvidia's slow mo interpolation, instant high res, high speed anime. Speaking of which, entirely coincidentally corresponding with the expiration of net neutrality, I can no longer watch HD video on Crunchyroll, with a 50Mb Verizon fiber connection, because I'm not getting enough data. Middle of the day, too, so it probably isn't either network getting swamped with video.

2018-06-17

After my Mac hardware rant, I went looking at PC laptops. Cheap prices, but crappy parts. No retina display, no NVMe, no ports (like the notch, why would you copy that), no more than 8GB RAM (often less!). Or like the Mac Pro, excessive parts and matching price. Would be easier to find a 2015 MBP and put Linux on that. I could live with the 4:3 HD monitor, but a lot of them don't seem to support more than one 4K monitors, or even any. The Year of Linux on the Desktop is postponed again. There is the Serval-chan, which is great specs but I'm guessing from the giant twin fans isn't so quiet. Galago isn't bad, either. More MBP-like. Compromise: GTX 1050, slightly slower cpu?

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2018/06/14/on-the-sad-state-of-macintosh-hardware/ - It's not so much that the product hasn't updated, as up until the Vega APU there hasn't really been any brand new tech. (120Hz displays are nice, but kind of niche) More that the baseline wasn't up-to-date 3 years ago, either, and changes have been largely negative: my MBP has a 2xPCI SSD, but iMacs and minis don't necessarily have even SATA SSDs, the mini's last upgrade was a major downgrade, the Pro is a disaster area. I still think Apple could fix all this by making 1 decent laptop, docks at various power levels (perhaps Apple doesn't make one so many 3rd parties could make many different docks. Turns out, there's one, and you'll only find it you already know it exists.), and adding in cloud style assets for any user who needs more than the laptop, such as an e-GPU, or an entire PC(s) as VM hosts, compute nodes. Or at the very least, stop fighting Hackinshoses: make a Darwin style reduced MacOS. Is it a bother to get Handoff running on non-Apple hardware? Take it out. (I don't want it anyway!) I could live without iMessages on the work machine. I might need to write my own podcast app to sync with the iPhone 3 I use an iPod, but I could live without iTunes as well. I use a lot of the Apple apps, but they have alternatives. Nothing I use for the job is Mac native. Maybe this will be the year of Linux on the Desktop! (I should also point out that for a great many market segments, Macs remain really great, fast enough, quiet and surprisingly cost-effective-ish. If I didn't need so much screen real-estate, and have issues with the external monitor, and didn't notice the difference in the retina and regular display sitting next to each other, I wouldn't have any hardware complaints about the late 2013 MBP. It would be nice to have NAS access to my media library, but there's so much new stuff to watch. I do periodically need large CPU resources, but not so often it is worth getting a massively hotter cpu. I just wish things didn't suck in ways that are so obviously fixable.) My easy fix: usb-c everywhere (including the phones), sell the 2013 MBP and an Air with a dock as an expected accessory, the old Mini with 2 disk drives plus Vega APU, and the Pro as the guts of the iMac Pro, but not as an all-in-1 (Or better, the non-Xeon equivalents, as upgradeable parts (even if it means taking the cooling off a gpu to use a custom cooling solution! Or a very long riser cable to put it sideways in the CPU's air duct. As long as it is a normal PCI card.)) (or better still, threadripper & pci raid ssd, though I still think clustering/cloud compute models are the place to put your "big iron").

iZombie #4: mighty contrived at the end.

So after Safari stopped being able to play Netflix, I tried FF, but that can't seem to play more than one episode at a time.

2018-06-10

RabbitMQ 3.6.1 is the last one in which the Mac Standalone version will run alone. Use the homebrew version, or stick with 3.6.1: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-server/releases/tag/rabbitmq_v3_6_1 Bonus: the closed bug for this notes "Didn't you read the patch notes from 3.6.2?" Not while downloading 3.7, no, I did not.

Safari can't play Netflix full screen without occasional black frames.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90174752/this-visionary-car-design-from-the-1980s-still-feels-fresh I do like the angular cars

Holy Name Radiology had an order for a CAT scan, tried to call once, got the answering machine but did not leave a message (they have in the past), then forgot about it for so long that the insurance authorization expired. Worse, now my mother is gloating that her incessant wussing has successfully stopped me from falling through the cracks.

2018-06-03

https://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/results/28883-yet-another-unsounded-quiz 15-15! I knew knowing Sette's favorite pie would come in handy.

webcamoid: seemed to live up to the promise of using movies and filtered video as virtual webcams on a Mac, except it crashes a lot.

Cargo: very Duane and Sette

2018-05-27

https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20170110_1000-macOS-bloatWare.html

Anon: why is everyone whispering?

monday.com: colorful, but the "pulses" don't seem to have the ability to add any additional data beyond small text fields. It has an inbox, but no way to link items to messages. It doesn't even show the contact info per task for backchannel communication. So the management dashboard is nice, but that's all there is. It's the anti-JIRA.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/05/today-mac-os-x-is-as-old-as-the-classic-mac-os/ I'm so old

3% #2: still some good concepts, terrible dubbing, which just makes the monologing even worse. The acting is marginally better, sometimes.

The Rolling Girls: very weird

2018-05-20

In a move that may surprise no one, Google News' recent upgrade has made the service unusable, though I liked the fact-checking sidebar the last update added. It removed the ability to drop unwanted sections, and the For You is now an endlessly scrolling collection of random items, interspersed with the aforementioned unwanted sections again. While I would encourage reading news from more sources (except the NYTimes), I don't want sports, don't know who any of the entertainment people are, and the health news section was largely terrible. A lot of the sources in the science news section were extremely questionable as well, but at least I get enough of that elsewhere.

Sunny The Fox's Instagram page is gone. I lack closure.

As the proud owner of this site, I'm probably the last person who can complain about website design and usablitity, but Google's Merchant Center Help and it's related Material design is awful. Every document is some paragraphs of text, with headers, links in the next, right side bar that is also visually part of the header, and a footer attempting to link it all together, except the font is nearly all the same size and weight. Sometimes there are actual prev/next buttons, but under the header, not the footer, which is mystifying. It took me a while to notice this: the text is long enough to require scrolling all the real navigation off the screen. The links that remain are not the narrative's next page. They are a distraction designed to hide the truth. This page is a literal blue pill.

http://micro.blog/ Obviously this site is too user-hostile to join, but that is a nice concept for the post-facebook world.

The laptop spontenously crashed this morning. The dawn of a new era of suck.

IQ2US: bitcoin: One did mention traveller's checks, but I'm dissapointed nobody mentioned the Leaf, or given that nobody has heard of the Leaf, any non-hash-based electronic currency. They solve the problems with Bitcoin, and has the advantages Bitcoin claims to have but does not. As pointed out, Facebook eclipsed MySpace, and something will eclipse Bitcoin, but that something is specifically bank-based non-national currencies or value-stores. It has nothing to do with blockchain or rooms full of GPUs. Also the tech bro is incredibly annoying.

2018-05-13

Lost in Space (netflix): not sure if a soy boy cuck fantasy or not. Episodes probably should have been 30-45 minutes.

2018-05-06

This year's orphan photo
Here's where we defeated some dude who stabbed the planet. In the background, A Series of Bats.

IQ2US: Net neutrality: I found a lot of the arguments hard to follow and lacking in real-world cases, from both sides. The cereal question, for example, was a failure to point out American supermarkets are not cereal-nuetral but are highly contracted. What cereal ends up on what shelf is not the whim of some stock boy. Money changed hands for that. It is impossible to find certain products in certain stores precisely because of the synergy between corporate overloads. I thought they stopped making Welsh's Grape Soda until I found an unopened can in the park while biking. (Yes, I drank it, after washing it.) If you try to sell a local product in a local supermarket, there might not be a square inch in the store that is not already sold to multinational corporations. You, the local artisanal cereal maker, are priced out of the marketplace. Your product could be free, but you can not afford to put it in front of customers. They mentioned but moved on from deep packet inspection: Verizon said that the only reason Netflix was so slow was Netflix didn't pay to upgrade Verizon's side of the peer exchange. However, my company's servers are on the same ISP as Netflix, so I could download a 1MB .zip file through the same "overloaded" connection much faster than 1MB of video, and by routing Netflix through the server's vpn, get the same full download speed. Verizon was absolutely throttling Netflix's traffic, until they got money and the problem went away. How is that not extortion? If you have telemedicine and games, or better, OS updates, because really, games don't generate that much traffic (but does allow you to sneer at the youth), and both the remote doctor and hospital have a 50Mbit FIOS connection, as another FIOS customer, nothing I do should change their Verizon speed, up to the point where I clog Verizon's network entirely, in which case Verizon certainly has the right to ensure quality of service for the maximum number of customers by throttling either everyone, or ideally only the heaviest users first. That has nothing to do with Verizon deciding to throttle the competitions's content until it gets its beak wet.

I was looking at the console log again to see what was stopping the laptop from going to sleep. A firehose of crap, too fast to even read. Even the errors and warnings view was a lot of stuff. There was some sort of security update, so I still technically have not had to reboot OS X for stability issues, but it was close. We haven't quite gotten to the level of Windows, but it is clearly going that way. Do I really need billions (not kidding, 600MB) of error messages from wirelessproxd with the WiFi off? Handoff has been the source of a lot of crap, and I don't even have it set up. It's been years, and it is still logging "Unknown key for integer: _DirtyJetsamMemoryLimit". This: "(com.apple.preference.displays.MirrorDisplays): Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds." is clogging the system log, and I can't even disable it without shutting off the SIP, which is only a good idea is the System has any Integrity to start with. https://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-AppleCoreRot.html That was 2013, so 5 years can pass without fixing any of this and Mac sales haven't collapsed any more than the desktop market in general (mostly because the increased the price of MacPro made up for the decreased volume). I'm more willing to put up with iTunes' podcast channels sometimes losing track of podcasts because I could always use another podcast player, or an RSS feed. (That it syncs with my ipod is still a reason to put up with it.) If the OS is actively decaying for years, and I already got 1 PC to make up for the Mac's failings, and almost everything I run works the same on Ubuntu, and I'm actively complaining about the new features like Handoff, what future does MacOS have? Maybe iOSX won't be so bad.

2018-04-28

Tale of Tales: there's 2 hours I'll never get back.

Discovered Raspberry Pi has a real Linux environment. I thought it was more an electronics kit. Some seem to be sold that way, but ARM cellphone chips have produced a glut of decent low-power chips. It would also make a low end NAS. Downside: might need a powered dock or some sort of drive array because it is so low-powered, and a cheap, on-sale NAS is $100 and includes the drive array and mostly the same software.

TextWrangler is 32-bit. Time for a trip to the farm upstate. Now I don't know what to write this mess in. I have Atom open for the theme work, Netbeans for everything else. I should probably just pay for BBEdit. I need something to make more complicated svgs, and a reliable mouse. Should get mentally prepared for a spending spree in 6 months. Kind of want a Hades Canyon NUC, too, nominally as media server.

Speaking of redis, https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/foundationdb-is-open-source/ another solution in search of a problem.

2018-04-21

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seattle-struggles-with-growth-and-transit-while-vancouver-b-c-figured-it-out-years-ago/?utm_source=news.google.com&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=rss_editors_picks_feed_homepage&google_editors_picks=true Closer to my urban dream, but still lacking the vital step of integrating the buildings into transit. (though I note the walkway over the traffic, a good start.) It doesn't need trains, or elevation: perhaps a sunken bus road that runs under the cross streets. Just separate transit, pedestrians, and private cars.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90168094/apples-new-design-ethos-making-gadgets-easy-to-sell-hard-to-use?partner=feedburner&utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feedburner+fastcodesign&utm_content=feedburner Shout out for the 5's.

After all that ranting about Mac Pro Hardware, I think it is more important to convince large app developers to write multi-node capable software, because then people could assemble their own compute nodes. Just add a message queue! http://queues.io/ It's not as aware as GCD, but certainly easier to run on a wide variety of software, hardware. I looked at https://www.rabbitmq.com/ (largest size, the erlang dependency made the many errors incomprehensible, the many, many errors stopped it from actually working), http://gearman.org/ (c-client only in php, undocumented build dependency kills Mac make). Homebrew probably would have fixed those issues, but the others didn't have a problem. (I object to Homebrew's security model, or lack thereof.) Redis.io has pubsub, but isn't itself a message queue. https://github.com/kr/beanstalkd Seemed best in that it actually worked, lightweight but persistent, and native php client. I do like that gearman can launch any command line. Also is apparently built in to Laravel. That polls, though, or at least its timed jobs does.) (Totally out of scope for that particular project, but I also really like 0MQ's socket weirdness. If I ever need to take my Nginx reverse proxy weirdness to a next level, I'll keep it in mind.) Remember, no matter how fast one machine is, 10 of them are faster. Maybe not 10 times faster, but faster. Also, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpb78/diy-computing-cluster-esp32-raspberry-pi

2018-04-15

Mac Pro: I mentioned this on the Incomparable Slack, but I'm still thinking about it, and would like to rant further. I had previously mentioned that I thought the Mac Mini, in an effort to boost desktop sales, could be marketed as a "local cloud", providing cloud-like services to any i-device in wifi range, or an e-gpu to laptops, etc. Similarly, a Mac Pro could be an actual cloud, able to consume parts Serial Experiments Lain-style. Add an iPad, and it becomes an IO device. Add a disk, and it gets added to the unified storage network. Add an entire PC, and it becomes another compute node and its technological distinctiveness gets added to the collective. The Pro itself is just a hypervisor moving your main VM to which ever compute node is fastest and managing the traffic between nodes. Except for games, my current power requirements are pretty minimal, and this silent laptop is more than enough for almost everything I regularly do. Almost, but not entirely. Batch image sizing and optimization, scientific data compression, and, if I still had to do these things, testing with assorted VMs and app compilation, would be better done by a system with more cores. (Or at least cores that aren't also running the rest of what I'm doing while that is going on.) All that is command-line based, except for some the VM stuff which was eyeballing things in IE. I have Ubuntu for Windows, and instead of starting the command in the Mac's terminal, I start the same command via the Mac's terminal. Or VNC if I need to eyeball things. This vision of the Mac Pro would require either apps to be able to do their work via sub-processes, not threads, or a version of Grand Central Dispatch capable of starting threads on other machines. (Ideally, that would also require a new kind of thread, to minimize/control memory access. Like JS's Service Workers.) All my tasks are moving data between files or the network. They don't need inter-process memory communication, so they can easily be run on different machines. Final Cut Pro, for example, could put the UI's timeline thumbnails on a laptop (small-ish monitor, low power) and have one or more nodes applying effects, generating those thumbnails, and displaying 4k video on a big display. The laptop never touches the videos. It just issues commands and gets the stream of thumbnails back. Setting one video to render and starting work on another just wakes up another node or set of nodes, switches the video connection to the big display. Eventually the first node finishes and goes back to sleep. You could edit 8K video off an iPad-class frontend, because it isn't doing the real work. Another example: X2VNC and related allow you to control more than one computer from one keyboard and mouse. The Mac Pro would do the same, but add in the Virtual Machine layer: start 2 VMs, assign 1 to each compute node, assign the GPU output to monitor 1, 2. It could go a step further: start 5 VMs, and move the 2-5 to which ever node the least busy, or pause them if they weren't doing anything. Cloud servers do this all the time, but I had start and stop them in sequence manually for the tests. All these things are just a small step ahead of current technology, if that, and while they only appeal to a limited number of users, those would be the pro users the Pro would be aimed at. More ideas: the Pro VM can be assigned to a laptop, carried around, then plugged back in. You'd lose direct access to the hardware, but would still have your identity, home dir, and could still issue the same commands to remote nodes. *More than one Pro on a network can form a Pro-of-Pros, able to share selected resources, or log in into a different Pro, transparently access your Pro's local resources, again because it is all just simple commands across the network. *HTTP2-Fusion drive: part of what makes this seamless to the user is blending together file systems, some of them local to the node, local to the Pro, and remote. Reduce lag by combining all the work done with making the web faster with fusion drive tech. *ARM: Ease developers into an ARM Mac by making A11 compute nodes. Possibly put them in a drive sized form (already much larger than an iPhone), run Gbit/s Power Over Ethernet instead of SATA3. There's plenty of cases and cooling technology for managing huge numbers of drives. *Serially chained GPUs: The first spends all its memory on a massive scene, but no textures, and produces only the visible scene, optimized polygons. The next takes the smaller scene and textures, shades it, produces a frame. The third might apply additional video effects (background, overlays, 2D UI). One of the Vega innovations was a more seamless use of the main memory, but still, a tight focused loop is fastest. Maybe not the Serial GPU thing, but all this is currently possible for nerds or companies with real IT departments, just not convenient with manually setting kvm switches, SANs & mounting remote file systems, dealing with keeping multiple machines per human set up and up-to-date, or is not optimal with certain applications because those devs didn't get the necessary easy api and hand-holding. The Mac Pro's job would not be revolutionary hardware, just the IO-switching base station and evolutionary software, and also lots and lots of off-the-shelf hardware. (Which Apple could also sell for a modest markup. If it is modest enough, this kills the pro Hackintosh market, which is far larger that Apple knows about or perhaps is willing to admit.) It is unlikely that single core performance will get substantially faster unless something fundamental changes about CPUs. The future is parallelism.

https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11320386/turbotax-boycott-lobbying-tax-filing-season-tax-day-april-15 - I used them once, but never again. This would also be a market for modern super-banks: we already know everything about you if you use all our services, so let us do your taxes.

Revolt: cheese, though I just got the pun in the title.

https://lithub.com/barbara-ehrenreich-why-im-giving-up-on-preventative-care/

https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/more-we-evolve-less-we-need-god Seemed to me Deepak and Anoop were arguing that consciousness was the processing of the universe, and that the idea of God was just more consciousness than usual. The first is a valid concept, but seemed to be off the point. (and not what any of these words mean to most people, but are Hindu concepts.) The second is [Hammond]'s Scientific Proof of God, and somebody is going to get stabbed. Perhaps a more focused debate would have been "the more we evolve, the less we need sentience". There's an excellent SF series the name of which escapes me involving an ancient alien device that would only talk to sufficiently advanced intelligences, much to the irritation of another ancient alien race that had evolved past the need for consciousness (normal definition) but had more than enough processing (Deepak definition) to be God-like to the Humans. Another debate could have been progressive (? modern? forward-looking?) society doesn't need religion. Even I would argue against that, though: society doesn't need bad religion, certainly, but religion either as the opiate of the masses or as positive inspiration is good. (See also: Babylon 5) Hindu nationalists attacking people is bad, but as above the viewpoint that you and everything is just the universe thinking might encourage less strident self-assuredness.

Javascript feature request: setTimeout(function, 'whenever'); Like giving a task to a lowest priority background thread, it will run, but whenever.

2018-04-08

I would like to bring up The Leaf again, the crypto-currency from The First Bank of Spiderplants. In light of articles showing young people or Japan or people who really should know better "investing" in various coins, I should point out that many are useless or outright scams. The Leaf doesn't deliver the hacker ideals of a global anonymous transaction network free from The Man, but in no way does Bitcoin. (Maybe a public ledger isn't the best place to log your drug transactions, or using the power of a small city to pay for a cup of coffee.) The Leaf does come far closer: while it does require a bank/greenhouse, that bank doesn't have to retain records of the transactions, and it could be a global network if it has as much hardware as the existing global credit card network. It just wouldn't necessarily take 3% from every transaction like a credit card does. It would provide the cost and speed advantages of ACH with the security of disposable credit card numbers, and actually provide the possibility of a global anonymous cash network.

Spring 2018 Anime

Into the Badlands #2: Wesley Crusher annoyed me, and the writing in the last episode is terrible.

2018-04-01

I got a voice mail in Chinese. I get a lot of spam in Chinese, but this is a first.

Anime Winter 2018 Review: Many of the mid-tier shows turned out terribly (Basilisk, Ito, citrus, maybe Grancrest), but some of the Girl's Club shows (Camp, Universe, Takagi, also Ramens) were brilliant. CCS:CC was expected to be and is god-tier. Aside from the update to the phones (and that you can't film sports day events!), it is a second season to a show that aired 20 years ago. If the Star Wars prequels had managed this, George Lucas would be hailed as the king of film (and as not somebody who had a team edit out his worst impulses until he became too important to criticize). Even the treatment of characters whose actors have died is brilliant. Episode 9 had better handle Carrie Fisher at least as well, speaking of Star Wars.

Because I couldn't find out if Burnout Paradise Remastered is playable on a PC (apparently not), I downloaded Asphalt 8. The racing itself is nice (far more controllable with a keyboard than the forza demo) but the unceasing begging for micro-payments is a revelation. I have lived a sheltered life or something.

2018-03-25

In this Corner of the World: slice of life, girls WWII club. By making the point of view character a privileged air-head, they manage to gloss over quite a lot. Lin is a goodly part of the movie's impact, and is shown mostly in the closing credits.

Steel Rain: more of the fun Best Korea. Though they showed a statue of the Paramount General without showing the face. Forbidden!

Given: nice looking, but that's quite a carbon footprint for hippies.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/21/the-jumpsuit-that-will-replace-all-clothes-forever/

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World: stuff, not particularly in-depth or opinionated, except for the bit about malevolent dwarf druids, which is 100% fact.

I've been working as a programmer longer than 95% of other programmers, according to SO. So very tired.

Children of the Whales: possibly too much unexplained Dilandau. D. was a formidable if unstable military commander, who went crazy. This one is regarded as a clown (literally) by his own commanders and is insane from the get-go.

2018-03-18

I noticed Swift's assignment operator returns nothing, to prohibit "if a = b" errors, but "if let a = b?" seems to be the primary way dealing with things that might be nil.

The Force: aimless, in that there is no conclusion or change it can point to.

Naga: (not the fish monsters) I could see that as a lifestyle, except for the arm-holding-up ones.

2018-03-11

A.I.C.O: very nice. Sciencey, yet not a thing to complain about. Pulsing mounds of flesh, but not entirely stomach turning. Also has an ending. Probably should not have binged the whole thing, though.

I think the problem with "Junji Ito Collection" is timing: the print version could present a highly detailed grotesque, forcing you to stop and stare at it, trapping you on the that page. The animation just blows past it at TV resolution, spending most of its time on cheap animation.

B: The Beginning: sort of a Japanese Batman + Italian House, MD? The particular mystery seemed extremely petty. The framing mystery is not explained. (It is just The Beginning, I guess.)

I was trying to diagnose why a VPN wasn't sending data, and looked at the console. Remember the last time I said the dozens of log messages a second was a symptom of poor software? Now there's hundreds. Giant blocks from the kernel every second, something from wirelessproxd every half second. It isn't doing the 3 line iTunes thing, but is instead doing a 6 line coreaudiod thing. There's actual errors once every 6 seconds. It's a 40Kbps rain of crap. I'm in favor of having all these daemons, even if a lot of them are mysterious, but turning them off when not in use would be a big gain. I don't need wireless doing anything when I have the wifi and bluetooth shut off.

An apparently legit Verizon email said my auto-pay "has been canceled". It said my account was locked again, but at least this time was willing to send me a temporary password. (to the email address controlled by the locked account, because certainly nobody would change such a thing) Once I get in, it says the auto-pay is not canceled.

The Flanders next door have an Alexa, and it is reading the Bible. They are up into the begats. It has a particularly booming quality I hope my NPR at low volume doesn't have.

2018-03-04

Shin Gojira: I liked that a lot of things Godzilla usually brushes aside (trains, buildings) were used as weapons. Revenge! I really like the evolution and hard(ish) SF aspect. The Engrish was pretty bad.

Full Metal Netflix: decent enough, includes Nina, but leaves enough for a full sequel. Weird that the armor always seemed CGI, yet still with a person inside it.

The Final Master: super dense, then abruptly ends. Some really funny character moments, then a long historical grind. I'm assuming I'm not Chinese enough to know the actual ending.

Infinity Chamber: also nice SF, slow-ish.

Dark: nice SF, but incredibly slow, rainy. I do like the 80's cars, though later 80's are best.

2018-02-25

Mute: Poor timing after Altered Carbon. Better looking, but also not great, structural issues.

Kung Fu Yoga: has some nice moments. Also I have received great awareness of Belt and Road initiative.

Warcraft: I never actually played the RTS. (Myth was my RTS, also I'm bad at them.) As such, it was nice seeing Stormwind at max draw distance, and spotting things like the Doomhammer, before it turned blue and grew spikes, and Atiesh the Raven Staff (prevents saddle sores). The story didn't do much for me.

Devilman Crybaby: nice and weird. The middle drags a bit, but the end is extreme.

2018-02-18

Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi: HiDive doesn't have a free version of current shows, but it does have this. I rewatched it while waiting on laundry. Giant X weirdness, loads of single frame animator gags, plot that eventually means something (but doesn't actually grow up, which now, kind of irritated me).

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/hawaiis-last-outlaw-hippies/ - I'd like that lifestyle, but not the murderous crazy people or dodging rangers. Buying enough property would solve both, but then there's the cost and racial issues of rich white people buying Hawaii. Solution: train the hippies to live a native lifestyle, make them an exhibit for hikers willing to go in that far.

I kind of want to spend $5 on HiDive to watch Colors, but I could spend twice as much on Amazon and get more than twice as many shows. Support an anime focused streaming site, or crush it to stop streaming fragmentation? Or buy both and stop being cheap.

"Connecting a Windows 10 computer to a Mac is more complex than you'd imagine." no kidding. Not only do I not have the version of Windows that does stuff, the stuff it does seems designed to be irritating, presumably to get you to upgrade.

your name: I liked it, nicely paced, very Japanese.

"Thanks for being a loyal Verizon customer." - ha

2018-02-11

I got the Horde Vicious Fox. I will play the Priest more, but she doesn't have all the pvp talents yet, and pretty bad gear, and nobody likes disc now. I think it is best to get the talents now then wait for the next expac when everybody is in greens.

Altered Carbon (Netflix): I liked it. Some characters seemed a tad insane, though I guess that was part of the point.

https://www.wired.com/story/scott-weiner-california-housing-bill-cities/?mbid=synd_digg

2018-02-04

I installed the Kemono Friends Pavilion app off the American App Store (search for Bushiroad), but now it has stopped working, with a button that demands the Japanese App Store. At least I got all the foxes, though I didn't get the video game for Red. #NoTatsukiNoTanoshi

2018-01-28

There's somebody on the Intelligence Squared debate "Unresolved: America's Economic Outlook" who appears to be insane. America "can't survive" on a consistent 1% growth rate? The war on business is over? (bet that guy doesn't own a business.) "The most positive deregulation is net neutrality." Coal is booming again? Obviously, he helped write the Trump tax cut. He is literally arguing for the 1920's economy, energy, racism.

2018-01-21

Ash vs Evil Dead #1: Groovy

The rise in people working from home means that some jobs could be decoupled from location altogether, making commuting obsolete. Soon it'll even be possible to get a good internet connection in the remotest parts of Alaska-so if you wanted to work as, say, a web developer in a place like Point Hope, which is above the Arctic Circle, you could (in theory) do the job as easily as if you were living in San Francisco.
from https://www.topic.com/planes-trains-and-anything-but-automobiles I would like to point out while my current career goal is to live in a shack in the woods, this https://www.fastcodesign.com/90156937/this-map-shows-commuting-times-across-the-entire-planet points out a lot of rural space is impoverished not because of the lack of jobs, but the lack of everything else. I could do my job with a cell connection and solar panel for the laptop, but my current need for periodic cat scans would limit where I can live. While I personally can afford the time off to spend days traveling, the hypothetical Point Hope web developer might not.

ID-0: the last half is adequate. Not Outlaw Star.

Godzilla Netflix Series: I liked it. My one nitpick: the spacesuits in the escape were the same well-used model.

2018-01-14

Winter 2018 anime

2018-01-07

A joke combining Binchou-tan with a bit from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
This modern world has driven me to despair, but Binchou-tan is always genki

Project Binchou-stan continued in a holding pattern. It might just be because it is currently -10C and I have a hot water bottle under my blanket and my hands are still freezing, but I would consider moving to a warmer climate. I don't have so much money that I could move or equip a new household and buy a shack in Hawaii or someplace on a whim, and not enough willpower to actually move. Still only working part time, though I think that mostly means I just don't get paid a lot, but I also really can't work more than 2 8-hour days in a row.

A pre-post-apocalyptic theme that I am shamelessly stealing from Susumu Hirasawa. It continues the trend of making the text increasingly hard to read. Not sure as I can top this one. (If you were wondering: I generally don't read my own site. I grep the source files for titles so I can remember if I saw/read it. I was pretty sure nobody else is reading it either, but here you are.)

2017 Drivel

My sole remaining career goal is to live in a shack in the woods. No more resumes!

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-- 
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w____\\W//___w       Te Hupenui
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