It's hard to tell, is the better part about giving Misty her medicine that she's too small to be able to argue too much, or that she doesn't have the ability to shove the bottle up my bum like a suppository?

The way furry family works around here

Had shifted to the couch because Willow as getting antsy, and I kind of agree with her about me spending too much time at my desk in the lair. Ended up with three comfy dogs, with Corky sitting on my arm and slobbering it while the other two napped along side.

Work called, so I needed to sort a few things remotely, after extricating my arm for dog slobber. Ended up with one dog next to my foot, and two over on the bed. Willow being sprawled out and comfy while I resolved the work matter.

For the most part: Misty and Corky choose to be where they like and periodically come by if I'm not there. Or in Misty's case, paws my chair wanting to be picked up rather than sitting on the bed next to me. Willow on the other hand will usually follow me. If I change rooms, she'll typically follow once she notices that I've been gone more than a few minutes.

Sometimes, I kind of feel bad for how often Willow ends up walking back and forth when I'm doing something that causes me to shift between rooms; e.g. kitchen, living room, and bedroom. But I do appreciate the company ❤🐕❤

Sometimes I don't want to get up, because the land of dreams is a place of unbound possibility. The waking world is shadowed by and constrained in reality.

Pass the coffee, anyone?

For the human: rice, curry sauce, onions, peppers, beans, and mushrooms. Plus a little chicken.

Plus plenty of leftovers ftw!

And for the hungry minions: a beef and chicken patte topper added to their food.

I can’t help but think, dogs are really smart at being comfortable. Willow must have a Ph.D.

Don’t know how much endurance dogs tend to have compared to humans, but Willow, Misty, and Corky do get plenty of sleep, lol

Settling in and watching Enterprise, S1E3 kind of tickles my nature.

Getting ready to board an obviously damaged, unresponsive vessel: Lt. Reed is inclined to break out the heavy rifles, and Capt. Archer surmises that the phrase pistols are sufficient. Considering the unknown situation aboard the other ship: it would make more sense to have Reed with a rifle, and keep the pistols for the rest: light enough to be non threatening if they encounter survivors, and more punch in case things go sour.

Issuing hand phasers and tricoders to away teams as a precaution is probably one of Star Fleet’s saner SOPs, given the wide range of situations Star Fleet personnel are exposed to. But heavy weapons are actually a pretty rare sight in Star Trek despite the amount of shooting that goes on. I don’t really think there were enough times rifles appeared in TOS to remember the 23rd century phaser rifle more than superficially. In the 24th century, it was largely due to the Borg threat and Dominion war that we really see the Type-IIIs. Actually, it’s kind of comforting that the next iteration made it into Voyager’s armories, lol. Not sure if any real figures were ever given for easier weapons, but the Federation Type-IIs popular in the 24th century probably had more destructive potential than anyone could hope to leverage at the longer distances found planet side.

By contrast the MACO unit attached to Enterprise after the Xindi incident is very abnormal by Star Trek norms. But I suppose even the precursors of the Federation eventually had to go down that route.

Check out “Iron Sky: The Coming Race” on Netflix
https://www.netflix.com/title/81132624?s=i&trkid=14170286

Said what the hell, why not? And was not disappointed. Much like when I watched the original Iron Sky.

Because if moon nazis weren’t enough, let’s throw in aliens, and Hitler riding a T-Rex, motherfickers! The bit with the holy grail and the Steve Jobs cult, and that lucky red shit, oh it was entertaining, lol.

Somehow, I agree with Sasha’s notion that the transport ship was made by Americans, therefore there must be weapons somewhere; and the iPhone / Nokia 3310 jokes. There’s many little nuggets of greatness, not to mention first fighting dinosaurs, and the hilarity with the world leaders.

Watching Doom: Annihilation on Netflix, I think it doesn't suck. You won't rush to theaters for such a film but it beats the last attempt at a DooM movie, hands down. Or should we say, the people at least cared and that tends to make a video game movie that doesn't suck.

In my experience, video game movies tend to be either pretty good, or pretty awful, and make no one happy. The only exception that really come to mind is the first Mortal Kombat film.

Doom: Annihilation at least does a decent job of presenting a band of doomed space marines, stuck on Phobos, and being attacked by zombies. Also other things. Like the '16 video game, it tries to put enough narrative around the concept to make it function. Not a deep, far reaching story; because that doesn't work for Doom. This film on the other hand, ain't a bad try. I especially loved the many nods to the game, and related Id titles; not to mention bits like the possession warning on the doors.

I'd actually like to see another shot, that takes on Doom II's notion of the Earth being overrun. It may also be sad that the only reasons why I remember the name of Mars' moons all related to video games, lol.

Watching the end of Lost in Space season 2, I can’t help but think it’s been a great second season. Given much less subterfuge and mystery than the first season, it has a lot more focus than the first thanks to the characters having been developed, and the family solidified over the first season.

As someone who would like to believe there’s some bit of good in everyone, I rather liked Dr. Smith’s development over the season—and the robot’s choice of word. But perhaps the best, is John’s last words to his daughter Judy, as the season marches to its conclusion: “You’ll figure it out.” Because honestly, that’s how life works.

And bless the engineer who designed the corridors aboard the Resolute big enough for a Charriot to speed through, lol.

Over the years, I've pretty much decided: if you can make me laugh, make me think, or make me care, I'll probably watch or read anything. It's probably easier to entertain me by making me laugh though.

And then there's somethings that are just there for popcorn.

One of my get around to it items has been updating my anime worth remembering list. Something that I've been lax of, since it calls for groking at my viewing history to help remember where I last left off. I think it's been about six months since I refreshed it, sinc ethe last entry was Izetta.

Today's refresh adds:

The Rising of the Shield Hero is worth remembering because Naofumi stuck in a shit world, deeply crapped upon, but still somehow manages to be a decent person. Also a bit twisted when you consider the biting things under his coat, lol. Plus who doesn't like Raphtalia? Yeah, it's been that long since I updated my list.

Overlord was a series that languished on my watchlist, and then I finally watched it and found it simply superb. Seriously, watch it. All three seasons. I hope there's more to come! Probably should be considered essential viewing for isekai and mmorpg lovers alike.

Log Horizon had been on my watchlist forever, and I still need to finish the final season. But it's a great series.

Wizard Barristers was also on my watchlist for ages, and turned out to be quite a nice series. I seriously hope the author knows more about action anime than legal proceedings. But if it lands on the "Hmm, worth watching?" question line, the answer is yes.

WorldEnd: What Do You Do at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us? was a series I had meant to watch, probably since it came out. What I found was a pretty frackin' awesome story and great characters. Action anime will usually bore me if you don't make me laugh, or suck me in with the characters.

My Little Monster was a series I decided to watch and see if it was funny. Stayed because it was funny, and the characters were pretty good. Not to mention antics.

Kyo kara Maoh! had been on my wikipedia list of anime and managa to keep an eye on. So when it showed up in Crunchyroll's back catalog, of course I had to watch. Long, and perhaps a bit twisted and genderbent. You'll either love it or be bored in five minutes. Me, I found it funny, and the screwy characters make me laugh all the more. I also like that Yuri, who is very unlike the typical demon king stereotype, actually becomes a kind of Maoh worthy character when faced with the injustices stabbing Yuri in the eye--because if you have the power, why not?

Welcome to demon school! Iruma-kun! is a recent series that I almost skipped. Then I sat and watched it, and kind of caught up from half way in one night. The series targets a bit of a younger audience, so it generally passes up on the opportunity for fan service and focuses on good humour. Iruma's super power to dodge danger, and how he settles in to life in the demon world is funny. Not to mention that Clara is a bloody awesome screw lose, and I may have busted a gut when the student council president called Iruma into her lair....

Kamen no Maid Guy is a series that's decidedly not for kids, so much as those that like tits. But it's pretty damned hilarious in a sexy / slap stick kind of way. Hard to watch without bellowing "Who the !@#$ is this masked maid guy!?" while rolling on the floor laughing your arse off at the insanity that unravels.

Ninja Nonsense is a delightful screwball comedy. I don't know what drugs the author was on, but I sure hope they had some fun before the end. When the show starts off with a ninja girl on a panty theft mission, you just know it's either going to be sad or funny, and somehow pretty great.

Tenjho Tenge is an action anime I find binge worthy, as it has both good humour galore and a bounty of characters. When a moronic tough guy who never knows when to quit finds himself trying to take over a school, where every badass seems to think they're Son Goku, how can he not end up in deep? Plus the window -> shower incident in the beginning took a very unexpected, hilarious turn. But mostly, it's an action drama with a lot of violence.

Trigun I had always heard of but never stopped to watch. Really wish that I had watched it when it first came to these shores. By the time Vash faces the Nebraska family and deals with the reactor melt down, I decided this was very much my kind of show. Vash is the kind of character that I would inspire to be, if I was awesome. It's available on Hulu, and probably Netflix. At time of writing, I think Vash is the second male character to make my characters worth remembering section.

Phantom in the Twilight I think I had glossed over when it came out, as it sounded like it would either be worth watching or dull. In the end, I would say it's more interesting than most series.

Things that make me sad: how slow Crunchyroll's queue loads in the web page.

Things that make me sadder: when my iPad outruns my desktop at loading that.

Crunchyroll Announces Winter 2020 Anime Lineup!
Sounds like there will at least some series worth checking out. I'm kind of glad to see that Iruma-kun and Fire Force will be continuing.

From the fall season, Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun! has probably entertained me the most. With oresuki taking second place thanks to the humour. But mostly it's been kind of a slow season. Iruma-kun was at least funny, and is binge worthy.

Also reminds me, really, really need to catch up on a back log of Fire Force episodes.

On the flip side, the next OAD episode of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime was a great unexpected treat. The dreamy story of how Butt Sumo became their national sport, was freaking hilarious. I can understand why Rimu's response to the potion was what it was, hahahahaa.

The 10 Best Shojo Anime Couples Of The Decade That Represent True Love

Coincidentally, all of these series are worth watching. Especially if like me, you have a broad taste in anime instead of a hard genre filter.

10, 9, 7, and 1 would probably be good gauges of whether you'll enjoy or throw up, as far as the genre goes as a concept. If you're asleep by the end of 10, or have no care about the characters in 9 by the middle, you'll probably want to tune out the shojo bin altogether. If you enjoyed, there's plenty, and more than a few good laughs to be found.

I remember when I started watching 8, wondering if it would be a waste of my time or worth while. I chuckled often enough to enjoy the series quite a bit. The episode: "Momotarō made mo Meido-sama", especially was fun. Misaki and Usui's antics are usually amusing but that was a bit off the deepend, and very well played IMHO. The entire series kind of reminds me of Shakephere's The Taming of the Shew, and is probably as over the top as the film adaption of that back in the '60s. I for one enjoyed both Maid Sama and The Taming of the Shrew, but I'm strange.

5 and 4 are surprisingly good series. My Little Monster's execution gives it broader appeal than most on the list, and is flibbin' funny. Especially if you've ever known some strange people or cackled at the social interactions of your friends. 4 on the other hand is decidedly a candy series. There's enough to Takeo's story to keep us awake and chuckling, and enough to firmly cement it in such a list. Personally, I like that the series solved the most important issue rapidly, and moved on to what follows, rather than stretching it out across a zillion episodes. Did I mention how much I chuckled at Ore Monogatari? It's also filled with good moments like Takeo's date with the burning building, and him chucking his buddy up a Christmas tree.

3 is like 5 in a broader appeal. In particular it's entertaining if Shirayuki is the kind of character you like, or you'll be well amused by Zen's cohorts. Or have a soft spot for the setting. The first season is a good jumping off point.

2 is a series that should probably be considered essential anime watching. In fact, I am pretty damned sure this rock would be a far better planet if we had more people like Tohru in it. Don't think Fruits Basket is your cup of tea? Watch it. Don't like Shojo series? Watch it anyway.

Kuronuma Sawako is a character that I particularly like, and made the notable characters section of my own anime worth remembering her. Her nature is just kind of awesome, and I freaking love how the animation shifts when she's flustered--that tickles my inner cartoon lover, as well as my funny bone. #1 has plenty that makes it worth watching, and plenty that makes it worth smacking someone with a rubber hose, but by in large can be enjoyed for its characters and the way they comedically frail about as the plot is stretched towards the horizon. You should watch at least as far as the Ayane and Chizuru arc before writing it off, or deciding to watch the rest.

To PowerShell or not to PowerShell

For the most part, I’ve found it very hard to care about PowerShell. But as time goes on, I mostly look at it with the thought, “Wish I had more use for that”.

Things that I do that require some scripting, and that run on more than unix systems, usually resort to creating .cmd or .bat files to handle the Windows systems. There’s mostly two reasons for that: execution policies and portability.

I don’t really like scripting cmd.exe. As an interactive shell, it’s barely livable but gets the job done. The focus on interactive mode, and the nature of DOS, show through in what can be done in cmd.exe. NT’s modern extensions and so on make it a lot better than COMMAND.COM but cmd.exe is not a good scripting environment, nor a great interactive shell: it just sucks less than its predecessors.

PowerShell on the other hand took some good ideas and largely addressed much of the suck. Exposing .NET even offers the opportunity to solve problems that would call for writing a solution in something beyond bash/ksh, or finding dedicated utilities for. It is really neat the amount of shit you can do in a PowerShell script.

But in the end, the default execution policy is what really keeps me away. Open sourcing and cross platformyness stuff in Core 6.x resolved most of my negative feelings for PowerShell, but it doesn’t suit my scripting needs.

By default: client systems reject running PowerShell scripts, and so monkeying with execution policy is needed. Either to unrestrict it for the current  session or my user. Which makes using it for projects less useful than using the older comspec. Because while cmd.exe is very meh, it doesn’t require any extra monkeying after I’ve git cloned my repo. Yet another thing to do when setting up a system, or document about a code base, that I don’t need.

Forgot a all about the ground beef I had planned to make with the sauce, but still had a delicious meal, and probably ate about three people‘a worth going by the brick sitting in my gut.

Willow and company were very interested in this cheesy, ravioli fueled goodness.

Hungry minions also got another round of their Christmas presents, this time the chicken and turkey with gravy packet.

It was almost a shame to make them move, almost.

Passing thought: not sure I should be sad about how much I actually use cmd.exe when I'm using a Windows machine, or just glad that %compspec% isn't an antique version of command.com.

Probably should just be glad that most of my relationship with windows these days, is driven by D3D video games far more than anything else.

On the human side: slab of baked tuna, rice, beans, veggies, and much yummy.

Meanwhile the doggos get another round of their food topped with chunky meat and gravy, that Willow was upset about having to wait for, lol.

In the real world: I would call hacking away at stone with a sword, a waste of a sword.

In The Witcher: I'd say going Darth Vader on a golem is damned exhausting. Properly positioned up and buffed, using a mixture of sword strikes and signs took forever to fight The Sentry.

Actually, if I had known the pylons would remain interactible during the battle, I probably would have tried the lightening trick the wiki mentions.

For some reason, parsing Wikipedia's article on CRT shadow masks, I am reminded that by the time old age kills me, more than a few pieces of technology will have changed. When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty damned cool that colour television was everywhere and most folks had VCRs.

Technology changes faster than people does. Or at least, I'd kinda like to not die that soon. It's still my theory that my generation will make either a really interesting, or a really sad bunch at the old folks home, if we live long enough.

Not exactly elegant but effective. Bowl of rice with green onions, black beans, mushrooms, and tuna; plus a thing of frozen dumplings for a side.

Willow’s deepest woe is that I come first in the pecking order. That is to say, she despises having to wait her turn.

This year’s Christmas presents are meet and gravy “Toppers”, because they love that and Wellness CORE mini meals were something like buy 6 get 2 free when I bo7htheir last bag of food.

Needless to say: they enjoyed the head start on yumnums.

TIL: The Three Sisters

In looking up about how much effort goes into growing beans, I came across a reference to something called The Three Sisters: a notion of squash, corn, and beans being grown together. Wikipedia's article on beans, describes it thusly:

In the New World, many tribes would grow beans together with maize (corn), and squash. The corn would not be planted in rows as is done by European agriculture, but in a checkerboard/hex fashion across a field, in separate patches of one to six stalks each.

Beans would be planted around the base of the developing stalks, and would vine their way up as the stalks grew. All American beans at that time were vine plants, "bush beans" having been bred only more recently. The cornstalks would work as a trellis for the beans, and the beans would provide much-needed nitrogen for the corn.

Squash would be planted in the spaces between the patches of corn in the field. They would be provided slight shelter from the sun by the corn, would shade the soil and reduce evaporation, and would deter many animals from attacking the corn and beans because their coarse, hairy vines and broad, stiff leaves are difficult or uncomfortable for animals such as deer and raccoons to walk through, crows to land on, etc.

I can't help but think, that this is both a very clever idea, and rather like communities of people. Clever because while it might not be at the scale of modern industrial agriculture, it's kind of genius to try such an experiment and see if it really works. Like communities of people because we're likely stronger when we grow together  rather than gutting anyone who disagrees.

If I was doing the Bart Simpson writing on a black board thing, I’m pretty sure there would be references to never eating so many beans again without a box fan and a gas mask.

Two helpings of beans and I’m pretty sure the world is in danger of being blown away......lol

Breezey rain

For the most part, Willow doesn't notice when it's raining outside. She is kind of like me: unless the whole building is shaking from the thunderbolt, she's probably not phased. Which is quite a contrast to little Misty, who will start hiding or jump on your head when storms get bad.

Going out for a walk is also essential to Willow's mental health, so this creates a dilemma. Over the years: I've decided it is better to let her see for herself that it's raining too hard for a walk rather than deny her. How that works out is usually like this:

1. Willow sees it's raining at one end of the breeze way.
2. Willow sees it's raining at the other end of the breeze way.
3. Willow looks at me, and then comes back inside.
4. Misty wonders if it's her turn, as she looks at us both.
5. Corky wonders where we went.

I'm kind of glad that Willow is smart enough to admit, inside is better than running back and forth down the breeze way, checking if the rain has stopped, lol.

Not sure who writes release notes for Evernote these days, but I like the cut of your jib.

Release Notes for Version 6.22

Note: Versions 6.22 is supported in Windows OS versions 7 and up.

Windows 6.22

Fixed:

- If you opened a note via your shortcuts or after searching for a tag, any links to other notes in your account would be broken. That defeated the whole purpose of having links so we fixed it.

- Editing shared notes with images inside them would sometimes cause the app to crash. That's now a thing of the past.

- Occasionally the app would crash when you clicked on a note in the note list, which you probably did quite often. But it should be smooth sailing now.

- If you opened an image pasted from Snipping Tools, the app would sometimes freeze, but no longer.

- You can now edit your notes to include hyperlinks with a UNC path (in other words, \\host-name\share-name\file_path).

- Updates to templates

- When you click on a note link in a tagged note, the app will now show you the note you wanted. A big improvement from before.

- We tweaked the text on one screen to make it easier to read.

I'm not sure if spiking one's evening tea with alcohol would be a success, or a failure, but I will admit the thought crossed my mind. Then again my choice of earl grey was based on it being the first teabag I grabbed, so what do I know? :^o.

Of late, most of my time at home has been spent on programming. Today, I think I have a different plan. Called catching up on video games!

Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that if you're going to eat chili out of a can: Wolf chili is as good as you're likely to get. Especially if you prefer chili without beans^, which are usually the kind that ends up more like dog food out of the can. The main reason I'll buy canned chili with beans, is to have something less like dog food. Wolf brand chili  on the other hand, actually passes as an edible chili--despite its storage method.

In Florida: it wasn't really that available as far as I can recall, I can't remember eating it before coming to Georgia. Sometime after we had moved, my mother was thrilled at being able to find it at Wal-Mart, and always bought that when she could afford it. I think my father used to pack away plenty whenever he found himself back in Texas, or have relatives ship some once in a while, but that was all before my time.

In the end, I suppose I ended up a mixture of my parents, but I understand my father's taste for the stuff. Typically, I aim for three kinds of chili.

1. Cheap out of can that's useful for cooking, the kind where it's just going in a quick pan full of chili mac or something like that.
2. Something to have for a snack once in a blue moon.
3. Make fresh chili and try to have plenty of leftovers, instead of a massive gorge.

There's nothing quite like a good freshly made chili. But if you can't spend the day making yummy things, a can of Wolf Brand Chili does the trick. Actually, there's probably two things that come out of a can that I actually have a high opinion of: Wolf chili, and that Ro-Tel stuff with the diced tomatoes and green chilis.

The cheap stuff is what I'll usually keep stocked, since it's useful for mixing into other stuff. Given the price tag attached to the good stuff, I rarely keep Wolf around the pantry, but you can bet sales are noted. And then there's the holy grail: making my own.

I kind of debate whether making my own chili is cost effective. On one hand, batch quantity is quite large. On the other however is the fact that I'll basically eat home made chili until I pass out, lol.


^ Some people wage holy war over the issue of beans and chili. My vote is eat whatever you want 😜.

While I will admit, my main plans for Christmas involved video games, looking at my Steam wishlist sorted by price, the feeling is more like "Fuck me with a snowman, fuck me harder".

Over the years, I generally made it a rule to only participate, much, in one of the major steam sales per year. In the past few years, I've mostly tried to avoid them all. But even an ostrich with his head buried in the sand can't avoid them indefinitely...

A snowman makes a good frosty dildo, right?

Resorting to the trap door clearance maneuver might be admitting default in trying to extricate all of your frozen french toast from the toaster. It is however a lot smarter than putting your fingers inside right after toasting something. Because that would be an oh so very stupid way of making a funny home video.


I find that Kroger's frozen french toast sticks make a nice, simple, and cheap breakfast option. But it would be kind of nice if they weren't split into the size of a large biscotti instead of something more like a slice of bread.

US government lists fictional nation Wakanda as trade partner

If you’re going to have a test, you may as well give interesting results? I don’t know what the definition of staff test is in such a context, but I like the results, lol

Passing thought: when you find yourself trying to decide between turning the heat up or putting on pants, it can be hard to determine if the real problem is you or the winter weather.

Working on my notes for tomorrow’s yet-another-meeting, I can’t help but find it curious how things have changed a bit.

Fifteen years ago when I got a laptop: notes were usually a sub directory in $HOME, pointed at removable media. Until the USB stick got bent, and then it was mostly just on my laptop.

Today, I don’t even use removable media much, aside from loading hardware via USB or backing up my laptop to a USB drive. My notes live else where. Most of my files live else where. The concept is still the same: destruction of my computer, the real loss is the hardware, not the data. But the way I interact with that data has evolved.

Also whoever decided to make the share this text selection menu be 90% permanently offscreen when it spans a few pages, can go eat an Apple.

This reminds me, I should put the monthly backup the entire shebang on my task list for the holidays.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/oreilly-classics-oreilly-books

While I can’t speak for the reference books, O’Reilly technical books are usually worth the money. Two on this list that I can vouch for are Programming Perl, as I own a hard copy of a previous edition, and Java in a Nutshell which is a rather good book for getting up to speed on the language.

I remember buying the Camel book for about $56 nearly a decade ago. Came for a means of thinking through the documentation that didn’t require alt+tab, stayed for the wonderful wit, anecdotes, and stories. If you’re serious about Perl, you probably should own a copy or three.

Java in a Nutshell, I had checked out from the public library over a decade ago wanting to brush up on how the language has evolved since my study, and really found its explanations wonderful. Especially if you’ve ever wondered why the answer to Generics in Java is so often no. The only Java  book on my shelf, by contrast was written while JDK had yet to reach a 1.0 release. Needless to say, I had needed updating, lol.

One of the zillion ideas, or perhaps several of, that have been bouncing around my head of late is: "What if you designed a super carrier, that's meant to carry its own battle group?"


This kind of got me to thinking. If you designed a super carrier around the idea of several hanger compartments, big enough to pack in 8 ~ 10 capital ships in destroyer or frigate tier sizes, that's pretty useful. At which point, you may as well design the entire ship around its hangers, engines, and main guns.

We'd be talking about a very large ship. Something in the scale of a Covenant super carrier or an Executor class super stardestroyer--several kilometres of starship. All the more reason to basically build the ship around the guns, the hangers, and the engines, wrap the sucker in all the armour you can muster, and build vital crew services into the ship's spine.

A follow on idea to this is the notion of a modular destroyer to accompany the super carrier. I mean, literally modular. Swapping out modules could adapt the destroyer from being focused on a point defense screen, or fit smaller Gauss cannons, etc. Swap hanger bays for mine dispensing packages. Need anti-ship torpedoes or the mother of all antimissile batteries? Swap a module. All the better if the aforementioned really big freaking super carrier was equipped to deal with that while underway, but outside of combat; because if you're going big, bring some spare parts along.

Such a destroyer would go well with a carrier that is so freaking big that you can land the groups destroyers in the carrier, before making with the super duper space travel hijinks. Not to mention, good excuses to have a whole lotta starfighters, support craft, and probably the deck space to supply a planetary assault force or evacuate a small moon worth of people in a pinch.


Thus arriving at another idea that I've been putting around with for some years: that Gauss rifles and the like would be far more effective than some kind of damned phaser bank. You wanna knock the shit out of an enemy ship? Blast the fricken' thing with a solvo of Gauss rifles. Run out of shit to fire out the Gauss rifle? Go mine an asteroid for something ferromagnetic worth processing into a coilgun slug. I imagine that much as cruise missiles took over the world of terrestrial navel combat, starships will rely principally on comparable missiles, and some really big coilguns for piercing uber thick armour is a requirement. Plus who doesn't like to unleash some kinetic whoop ass?

I kind of picture a long rail of a ship. A quartet of forward firing large calibre Gauss cannons built into the four outer corners of the frame, and a long shaft running several kilometres. The sides of which amount to hanger bay after hanger bay after hanger bay; kind of like the hanger bay death crawls of Covenant ships in the original Halo, where you start wondering whether or not a ship can ever have enough hanger bays or if the engineers ran out of ideas.

Ask Ethan: Could Octonions Unlock How Reality Really Works?
https://flip.it/QSQZt7

I’m not sure what’s bothering me more: how interesting I found this article, or that computer graphics is the primary reason quaternions doesn’t  elicit a blank stare rather than curiosity at the idea of octonions.

Millennium Plus 20: How Photography Has Changed in The Last Two Decades
https://flip.it/rQPO96

One of the things I find amazing: is how phone cameras became everywhere, and then became so good that they’re up to recording our important memories. Computers and networking helped make sharing what we care about easier: but film isn’t so idiot proof at that, or for most people, that cost effective.

Over the past decade the amount of photos I’ve taken at home has risen, as cameras became everywhere plus better. By contrast, most of my childhood is either on photo prints, or still on rolls of 110mm film.

Gundam Fan Paints Breathtaking "Oasis" Scene

Considering the themes that Endless Waltz fluttered about, I kind of like this concept for an oasis.

Not quite as simple grandfather’s method of Christmas shopping for family, but I think my dogs will be very happy with this plan:

My grandfather’s way was to basically buy three bottles, tie three bows, and call it success. That’s actually a great idea in a way when you consider him, my grandmother, and my mother has different tastes, it’s something everyone can share, and will probably be consumed before next year, lol.

Yay, it looks like iPad OS 13.3 fixed the holy-crap-the-packets-are-gone level of lagosity when combining Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Me thinks this will get some use.

And I’ve yet to cry bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere and not a fix in sight as hard as < 13.2.2~13.2.3. As far as I can tell the only knew issue is the mouse wheel scrolling is broken, and that’s hardly a problem compared to can’t effin’ type ‘it.

Well, it has taken a good sweet time but I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

Earlier this year, I replaced Centauri’s system drive. Going from the first small SSD I ever bought, to a shiny 1 TB able to replace its hard drive. Since then, I’ve largely migrated all data over from the hard drive.

My plans for the now redundant storage capacity has been to fix the actual thorn in my storage side. Since repurposing my best portable drive to deal with my laptop’s backups, my xbox has had to make due with an old and extremely slow 300G laptop drive for its external drive. One that sucks so much that it actually makes Deathstar One’s internal 500G look sexy, and the original Xbox Ones are not equipped with sexy drives.

Hauling Centauri out was mostly leg work rather than effort. The only real pain in the arse is that the gigabit cable doesn’t have enough extra length for me to “Pull” the tower out, rather I need to connect/disconnect the cable before moving the tower more than an inch or so from final resting place next to the wall. Yeah, bollocks to that.

Of course plugging the drive into one of my spare enclosures is as easy peasy as pulling out the screw driver set; it helps that I kept one spare within quick reach and my second spare in deep storage, last time I redid /dev/closet.

Now the real irksome ribbon was the Xbox. It decided to disavow all knowledge of how to format the sucker. Because Microsoft in all their glory, eventually decided there should be a ~200M magic partition ahead of the NTFS volume. And Xbox, no likely. Enter Linux powered laptop, GNU parted, and cursing at HDMI cables finally falling out the back of Deathstar One (>_<).

In theory, by morning most of the data should now be transferred over to it. Allowing me to decommission the 300G laptop drive to virtually anything but video game storage, and it’ll be nice not running 97+++++ percent full all the frickin’ time.

Even my lazy ass can get around to juggling parts around if you piss me off enough.

With MechWarrior 5 finally launching, I find myself torn.

On one hand: a decent MechWarrior game basically guarantees that I’ll pry open my wallet and fork over the cash. And there’s few enough games in the past twenty years that fit that definition for me.

But on the other hand: my policy towards Epic exclusives tend to be No Steam Version Equals No Purchase. Of course, someone had to go and test this resolve by launching the kinda game I’ve been waiting eons for..... bastards.

37 Gifts For People Who Spend All Day At Their Desks
https://flip.it/HMf31L

I’m not going to lie, more than a few of these tempt me. Both for home and for office use, lol

The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo

I’d really like to imagine that the banker must have shit himself when Bergsten bro he’s the topic of the 10,000 units. But I reckon things turned out pretty well for everyone in the end, lol.

Things that are probably kind of sad, in their own way.

Ended up watching Red vs Blue, which I rather skipped when it was young.

Thinking back to the days when graphics looked like that Blood Gulch.

Legendary was fun, but no chance in hell I'm doing that with an Xbox controller.

Remembering that I still have my Halo: CE disc.

Thinking that buying the Master Chief Collection again on PC, would be a good way to play Halo 3 and 4 with a mouse.

Thinking that for $40, I'd rather buy my iPad a keyboard case or add to my anime collection.

If I actually got to play games more often, I'd probably just Game Pass.

Did I mention, I originally bought Halo Combat Evolved because I thought the Assault Rifle looked cool? Yeah, I was probably a nitwit when I was that young.


Post Script: Huh? The storage requirement for MCC on Steam is marked 20 GB? I could swear that my Xbox dedicates several times that much to it.

While my back isn’t overly happy with a day spent camped in front of Deathstar One, I at least enjoyed binge playing Halo: Reach.

For the most part, the story is a sad one given the fate of Noble Team but the result makes a rather great Halo game. Spartans might not be killed in action, officially, but there are no survivors of Noble team by the end.

Noble Six is a rather interesting one. He exhibits many of the same qualities as the Master Chief, but perhaps lacks his luck. His fate isn’t the saddest though, that probably goes to Daisy-023. Aside from that, Noble team is full of far more developed characters than other fireteams in Halo games. Kat, may very well be the most intriguing Spartan I’ve seen.

The Spartan II on the team reminded me of Dr. Halsey’s rather unique relationship to the older Spartans. I’ve always found it curious that Halsey is portrayed as a more motherly figure, despite being far from compassionate. Cold and pragmatic might be a better description of the doctor. Actually, I’d like to think that she has a special place in hell, for what she did to them—what was done to those children was pretty damned wrong, and definitely overkill from the pre-Covenant war problems.

On the flip side: her children did go on to significant success during the Human-Covenant war. Jorge-052 being far from the least of them. As far as I know, only a dozen or two of that generation survived the Human-Covenant war, in contrast to ONI’s later efforts to mass produce Spartan III and IV warriors, which are pretty plentiful by Halo’s second trilogy.

Noble team’s effort certainly makes for a surprising amount of success, compared to the S.O.L. it leads into with The Pillar of Autumn’s flight from Covenant forces. I suppose when you have a fire team full of Spartans instead of a bunch of hopelessly screwed, you’re likely to see thousands of Covenant go down long before the Spartans breath their last breath.

I have to admit, when I had bought Texas toast for making Ruben sandwiches , it was just as a work around to avoid going to two stores. But I think it may become my standard bread, lol.

It’s proven ideal for making a sandwich full enough to be worth eating, without becoming as hard on the economics and storage  space as going to hoggy rolls and the like. You can stuff a pair of slices in the toaster and load up a sandwich like my momma used to make, and the bread is something like $1.35 a loaf.

Another win is that one slice of Texas toast is enough for breakfast. Usually I would make two slices of toast is on the menu. Combined with trying to use up some old eggs, and sausages to share, let’s just say that Willow and company only care about their share, lol.

Pretty much the only reason I buy the breakfast sausage when they’re on sale, is I know three plump partridges starving doggies who would like some.

https://youtu.be/HAaEwR3NZSs

I remember reading about the bento box design of the ThinkPad some years ago, and not really seeing it. Because most of the devices I had seen were from the stack-of-notebooks era of design, and then one day I came across what these old as !@#$ models looked like. And then I thought to myself, yeah, I can see that now.

This video is one of those kind of ThinkPad.

10 Best Tsundere Characters In Anime, Ranked

Not a bad list, IMHO, and mostly from series worth watching.

Most of the characters also have particularly strong relationships and interactions with others, rather than just being your typical tsundere fodder.

Kirisaki Chitoge and Alaska Tiga in characters that I’ll probably remember well beyond how long I remember their respective series, lol.

Chitoge and Raku’s largely antagonistic relationship is what really makes Nisekoi worth watching, and cackling at. Meanwhile the plot stretched over two seasons might be reason to smack people upside the head. Incidents such as the locket search early in the series, and the great mother problem towards the end, are very telling of the characters’ respective natures. I find it kinda awesome how much those moments really tell about them, despite the hilarious antagonism, lol. Combined with her personality, which is pretty awesome. One of the few characters that got a footnote in my anime worth remembering, as being a character quite worth the remembering.

While I’m not a big fan of drama, Toradora! is kind of hard to forget. Taiga and Ryuji both have a few screws loose, and their undeniable partnership is pretty fricken amazing. As oddballs, more than a few good jokes are also generated along the way. I doubt that most people actually have someone in their life with a relationship like Ryuji and Taiga’s, and those that do are probably better off. Give or take if either of them are tsunderes. Compared to most anime, they also become very well developed characters by the end of the story.

On the flip side, I identify with the Toradora character, Ryuji, far more than most anime characters. So I consider the series even more worth watching than most, lol.

10 best skateboard stickers for defiling your new 16-inch MacBook Pro

While I’ve always felt covering laptop lids in stickers was kind of tacky, I’ve got to admit: I’d so put that Bones Brigade Ripper on a laptop. And probably can blame this article for my sudden urge to play Contra 3.

Full disclosure: I’m tacky enough to have finally done the sticker thing when I got my old Latitude. Had a Hulkbuster decal laying around, and it struck me as the kind of laptop Tony Stark may have been issued and tossed in a desk drawer somewhere. Thus the host name and lid sticker begging Iron Man references.

Willow: “I am a furry hobbit, therefore I deserve three times this many treats.”

Corky: “Does human shower in gravy? I must find out!”

Misty: “You should have food in hand when rounding the corner.”

Also the suggestion that dog food be eaten instead of yet another treat may be considered very insulting...

:find - where have you been all my life?

Over the last fourteen years of using vim, the rate at which I discover features and commands probably slowed a lot after the first six to eight years. As knowledge of awesomeness expanded, and business reasons limit my lurking in #vim irc, the the intake has been kinda slow. It didn't really take long to learn enough vi to be highly editing effective, and some years of using vim all the fricken time, will probably teach anyone most of the important stuff.

Today, I discovered a new-old thing. Or had one of those "Where have you been all my life?" moments.

I often find myself copying a path; usually done via tmux's copy/paste features, as I'm a keyboard whore, and not every terminal I rely on lets you use a mouse so readily for that. And then pasting it into a vim command to open a file, be it :e[dit], :tabe[dit], :sp[lit], or :vsp[lit], or even just to go do `vim somefile'.

Today, I was doing a fair bit of find commands to go look up a file, because when you have a solid state drive and some people like dozens of folders in nesting, sometimes that's faster than remembering enough for tab completion.

Then I had a thought, "Hey, isn't there a :find for looking up files? There's gotta be a way to open those results in a buffer." And of course there is!

Much to my disappointment, :find foo doesn't really search many places. The default path on *nix is something like ., /usr/include, and the heck a trailing coma means (path=.,/usr/include,,). Which is great for something like :find sysexits.h but not so much for crawling a directory structure. But there's a solution!

    :set path+=**
    :find foo
    -> suddenly qux/ham/spam/eggs/and/yippee/ki/yay/foo opens in the current buffer.

There's a fair number of vim things that I've learned over the years, and don't often need. On an occasion they teach me good things when I am smart enough to go look for them again.

I’d like to think that two of these should be enough to fill most people up for dinner. Eat all four and you’d need a nap.

While I don’t usually make tacos like this, I can’t help but think if I had made a large batch of rice, I could have  basically packed three large lunch containers with rice, beans, and a folded taco on top and call that dinner for the week. And then ate the rest, lol. As it is, I still have leftovers but not at that scale.

But those containers are already full of beans and macaroni, and not available. The other containers aren’t big enough to include the taco on top, so they’d end up needing separate packing for the fridge.

Willow just wishes tacos were for doggies.

Smart doggos:

Willow's comfy in the foreground, Corky has claimed my pillow, and I'm not even sure if Misty's snoot sticking out from the blankets in the middle can be seen in the photo, lol.

Some random numbers

If I run a split screen on my 23” at a usable font size, I arrive at approx 119x52 characters of display.

Comparably, if I SSH into my machine with a font size easy on the peepers for the 11” screen, the results are a very respectable 109x32 characters display. Which is probably the Shelly app’s default, or a notch or two above.

Running iVim locally, with a default font that’s hard on the peepers unless using the external monitor: 149x47 characters.

Generally, I aim for about 80x35~45 characters as a terminal. Going around 160 is when I start consider :vsplit windows viable instead of relying on regular :split windows. Maybe I’m weird but I tend to like having a source file | header file combo in my vim session, when I’m afforded a big ass editing surface.

Thinking about these numbers, I kind of hope that Apple fixes the brokeness for keyboard/mouse support. I can use my keyboard, or I can use my mouse, but the moment that both are connected, iPadOS 13.2.3 decides that keyboard I/O should become like packet flow over a smoke signals modem. Which makes me less thrilled to dock my iPad until OS 13.2.4 or 13.3 happens, and cross my fingers that I won’t be stuck waiting until iPadOS 14.

I suppose that I could try pairing another Bluetooth mouse to see if for some reason, it simply hates my Logitech mouse, but I don’t imagine that I’d be that lucky with how much of a buggy mess iOS 13 has been.

RETRO TECH: OFFICIAL TRAILER

Not sure how I should feel, when I find myself thinking that much of my childhood will probably end up in a museum before I die from advanced age, but this series might be worth watching.

10 Must-Watch Anime Turning 10 In 2020

Not sure if the ratio between on my watch later list for years versus yeah, I’d say watch that; is a good or bad ratio.

Also, this reminds me that I never watched the finale of Maid-sama. That was a surprisingly good comedy.

Captain's log, stardate 2019.334

Misc thoughts from the holiday.

Despite how depressing my life might appear to some outsiders, I'm actually pretty happy. Thankful for the good things in my life, and hopeful that they stay that way. As the old prayer goes, "Grant me dexterity for things I cannot kill, Crit for things I can, And enough points in wisdom to know the difference"

Making reuben sandwiches reminded me just how damned delicious a good sandwich is. Didn't find any cuban or rye bread when I went shopping, so I grabbed a loaf of Texas Toast in the hopes that it would at least hold up to the frying. Experiments in eating leftovers make me think, getting this again might be a good plan. It's thick enough that I can actually pack a sandwich well, the kind my momma would make; without being as cost and space ineffective as a hoggy roll.

I might be a terrible human being if I'm inclined to share my sandwich with the doggos, and then threaten them with hugs as the price of giving me a "Hey, where's the follow up treats?". Or just a weirdo.  Yeah, I'm going with that last one.

Willow and Misty are definitely smarter than me when it comes to being comfortable.

Revising one of my old projects, I've come to two conclusions, well three but that's another paragraph. First is when I do stuff at home: the working conditions are kind of brutal. A positive side of working on work stuff at work, is there is more encouragement to take micro breaks. You know, like drinking a cup of coffee or taking a piss. It's very draining to code at home, and I'm not a seventeen year old kid no more.

The suffering of CMake while reviving one of my own projects, finally crossed the "Just live with it" point, and I spent my day making a really good start on a simple json -> build.ninja generator. It probably helps that C++ and I are long time companions, and that I've a high tendency of hand writing build.ninja files rather than using a tool to generate them.

And whoever the hell decided to wake the neighborhood up at 0400, better knock that shit off. My first thought was neighbor taking the family on a their own Vacation '83, my second thought was wondering if they're skipping town before rent's due. In any case Corky and I didn't enjoy the sleep disruption.

In spending the past week abusing myself with CMake, I think two things are fundamentally true and unlikely to ever change:

1. CMake 3.16 beats the crap(!) out of 2.x.
2. I will never, ever love CMake. Period.

On the positive side, in the years since it last pissed me off, they've added support for generating the build for Ninja—a tool which I do love very much. So at least, I get to solve my problem, and I don't have to deal with MSBuild, NMake Makefiles, or Unix Makefiles. Although, I might have gained a few new grey hairs along the way. I very much would prefer the generated build did more actions in ninja than in cmake, for a multitude of reasons.

My hate for CMake 2.x mostly stems from its tendency to complicate my cross platform efforts rather than aid them. Quotes I've made over the years about autotools, often stem from dealing with either CMake or SCons.

My hate for CMake 3.x mostly stems from the nature of what it is: configure, generate, build shit; and consistency issues that follow that. Actually, it makes me remember the compile versus runtime stuff in Perl 5, and recall the times I've muttered: "Yeah, please just don't !@#$ with that, pal."

The difference there, is perl and I are old friends. CMake and I are old enemies. That, and I suppose these days the number of people that like the former outweigh the latter.

Musing from an E6430S

The things I'd actually change about my Latitude:

1. Not weigh 3~4 lbs.
2. Have more than 16GB of RAM.
3. Have USB-C where the USB2 + ESATA is.
4. Swap the rear USB3 and side VGA cables.
5. Have internal Bluetooth instead of dongle in my rear USB3 port.

Notice, these are pretty much in the order of impossible, lol.

Newer machines offer faster processors and better capabilities for USB-C than Stark does, but not by much. I think the hardest to solve is the weight problem. The closest thing to a lightweight laptop in Stark's formfactor is the X1 Carbon, and I say that's lightweight relative to its peers rather than my tastes.

And there in lays why when I reach for my laptop at home, it usually has more to do with an x-terminal than a keyboard. Because my tablet's weight is < 0.5 kg and my laptop's weight is < 4 kg.

On the flipside, one of these days I should probably dig up one of the old E-series docks and see how well that works with Linux. I seem to recall the D-series docks worked pretty good with FreeBSD if you followed polite undocking procedures, and I don't think Linux gives as many farts about the hotplugging.

Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether the room I’m in is defined by what I’m trying to do, or by the comfort of dogs.

Willow’s well versed in finding the most comfortable spot she can, and in where the food eating happens.  Mostly she chooses her spot based around where I’ve chosen mine: but she doesn’t hesitate to influence this ad the requirements for comfort and such change.

The amount of times I end up changing between living room and bedroom to suit Willow’s preference, is probably balanced by how often my drifting around doing stuff causes her to follow me around and wonder if I’ve lost my mind or started sleep walking.

Have I ever mentioned that Willow is a lot smarter than I am?

And far more comfortable, lol.

How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?

I still remember the first time that I played Wolfenstein 3D. It was on a contemporary hardware, as a minigame in a far more recent Wolfenstein game. My first thought was how rudimentary simple it was; my second was "Holy crap, you could do this on a 286?".

By modern definitions, I don't think anyone would be thrilled by the limitations Id's early engines had for map geometry. But I think for their times, it was a small price to pay given the hardware. And to be fair, as a kid, when I first played DooM '93 on a Sega 32X^, I certainly didn't notice. Years later when I would play it on a PC, I didn't care—because it was still fun. All these years later, I still find DooM '93 to be a lot of fun. That's the real success of a video game, I'd say :P.

For the time, even the console ports were pretty impressive games. I mean, most of the games we had looked like this:

Meanwhile if you popped in DooM, this was what you got:

That just didn't happen, lol.

Many times that I've read about porting PC games to the Super Nintendo, and other consoles, they've usually been stories that I would describe as "Lossy" or "Brutal" depending on the complexity gap. Such as when an arcade machine was far more powerful than a console, or a PC simply had more oompth than a console.

Id's games were kind of revolutionary: both in their visual technology, and in their portability. Wolf 3D, DooM, and Quake were pretty widely ported during their era of commercial viability. Post open sourcing of their code, they have come to run on virtually everything, and anything. As technology has advanced, we've probably reached the point where it is no longer a surprise if your wrist watch is more powerful than many of the things DooM '93 was ported to in the '90s.

Today, I think that DooM's use of BSP is somewhat novel. You should think of that today, or your hardware is probably so powerful compared to your goal: that you just don't care. Given a decent computer science education, the concept isn't the leap into rocket science. Today though, I imagine most people aren't tasked with solving such a problem, because they live in the world John Carmack helped create: one where we have this thing called a Game Engine.

When Carmack programmed these games, I don't think it was so obvious a technique. People were still struggling to make PCs do this kind of thing at all. Resources for learning these things have also changed a lot over time. Many of us have the advantage of knowledge built on the minds of geniuses, if we have any education at all—and the code.

Two of my favourite engines to read: are modern source ports of the Quake III: Arena and DooM engines. By releasing the code into the wild, I think it helped all of us learn better how to solve these problems. Both the things you can go off and learn, and the code you can get ahold of have evolved since these games were written. But thanks to games like DooM: it's easier for us to do that today. Because technology is built upon what came before, by extending the ideas of others in new directions and taking advantage of improved hardware.


Genius isn't in using a rock to smash something, it is in realizing you can smash things with a rock far better than your thick head.

―

^ Being around 25 years later, my brain cells are foggy. But DooM was one of my brother's games, so the first thing we had that played that would probably have been the Sega Genesis, which AFAIK means 32X release. We also had the PlayStation versions of DooM, Final DooM, and Quake II but those were later in our childhood.

Damn it, fruit co!

Reasons to look forward to a knew iPadOS version: if I connect my keyboard or my mouse individually, they work excellently. If I have both connected: the keyboard lags at a rate of 5+ seconds per character with frequent drops and repretitions.

So basically, Apple seems to have broken the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse at the same time in 13.2.3. Nevermind that that mouse support and productivity are cornerstone goals for iPad OS 13 \o/.

On the positive side, disconnecting the mouse fixes the keyboard distruption about as instant as the connection terminates. And restores it as fast as the mouse reconnects.  So unlike most issues I’ve experienced with iOS 13 bugs, reboots aren’t required.

I find this less amusing when you take both the fact that I am more inclined to use my tablets with mouse/monitor/keyboard than most people, and that the touchscreen keyboard vs the physical keyboard is a delta of about 40~50 words per minute in my typing speed. And Apple’s floatly keyboard with the pen input is one of the buggist mother fuckers ever shipped.

Random LOL

In porting an old multi-headed hydra, I found myself cackling.

Somewhere down in the beast's HAL, is an utility function that returns the device name. This is what I found:

if (access("normal device", F_OK) == 0) {

    strcpy(devName, "normal device");

} else if (access("device not used in many years", F_OK) == 0) {

    strcpy("devName", "device not used in many years");

}

And in realizing why the stack trace was in such a simple function, I bust a gut when I noticed the quotes in the lower string copy. Ahh, the joys we inherit ^_^.

Watching the episode 4 - 6 arc of Love and Peace / Hard Puncher / Lost July, may have permanently endeared Vash the Stampede to me. Because if the humorous antics and ease going nature didn’t, that sure did.

The arc begins with Vash eating at a diner before a bunch of gunmen rush in wanting to lay claim to the $$60 billion bounty on his head, runs past The Nebraska Family, and into a revenge plot over the first city to experience his typhoon problem.

It’s a damned great story. Actually, that makes me wonder if there are Blu-rays available and decently priced.

Pour one out for the Steam Controller, now on closeout sale for just $5 plus shipping

I’ll admit that my thoughts for another controller run towards an XBox controller new enough to support Bluetooth, but for $5 I don’t think I can resist this.

Yep, it’s official. Trigun is freaking awesome and if I was smart: I’d have started watching this twenty years ago.

That’s the conclusion I’ve reached be episode 4: love & peace.

Firing up Trigun on Hulu, I think I’m going to like this show, as well as put a ding in my bucket list.

It’s idiots to the left; idiots to the right; and bullets everywhere. I suspect Vash will snipe my funny bone in a similar vector to Deadpool.

Signs that you're a tablet whore:

1. When you get to work and realize your tablet is still sitting on your desk.
2. You wonder if forgetting your laptop would bother you less than forgetting your tablet.
3. You're pretty sure forgetting your tablet is worse.
4. When you get home, you snuggle your tablet after hugging the dogs.

Ninja Nonsense - s01e01 - Ninja Trainee Shinobu

Not what I was searching for on Crunchyroll, but this is some kind of cracked crock full of nonsensical laughs for sure. Like a kunoichi assigned a panty theft mission meets a kick in the balls.

I’m not sure what perverted comedic drugs the author and animated was, but as a comedy it kind of works.

An expensive but delicious smorgasbord.

Probably a 1/3 can of garbanzo beans (69¢), a bag of frozen peppers/onions ($1~$1.29) that had a seasoned date with a skillet, rice with furikake and soy sauce, and a baked yellowfin tuna fillet (usually $6.99 for 3 frozen fillets). I think the fish was on “Please, someone just buy it” or near BOGO level sale pricing last time I bought fish.

Willow was somewhat less thrilled when permission to taste the tuna fillet was denied, but got her own meat and veggie gravy yummy dog food after dinner. Followed by a regular dog treat, lol. Ditto for Misty and Corky, accept they didn’t try and put their snoot on my foot.

There’s two things that Willow has a high likelihood of attempting theft: fish and chicken. Other than that, she tends to be pretty good about not trying to steal off my plate.

Supplemental to my post about HDMI extension and switching time: how the !@#$ didn't I think of this years ago?

Seriously it makes changing the HDMI cable on my monitor so much easier!

Marvel just told us how it decided which heroes to kill in 'Avengers: Endgame'

Nobody becomes a superhero because they’re really well adjusted; they do it because they’re screwed up on some level. [By the end of Endgame] everybody is kind of fixed, or dead.

And that pretty much sums it up. Also, I think the Thor in the normal-person suit worked really well, IMHO.

One thing that I actually do like about using an iPad with a mouse is the spell check.

PC’s typically follow the model of right click → menu → suggestions or right click → suggestions on top of the context menu. Where the particulars of everything are application specific and very non portable, usually.

My iPad? Click the word → just give the suggestions and make you click again for the menu. Subsequent clicks toggle between spell check suggestions and the menu. Android usually just opens a context menu when you click the word, and keeps text selection different from spell checking. +/- some OEMs like to disable that by default (and Samsung used to remove the feature, way back when), iOS and Android mostly make it the OS’s job for text input things.

HDMI extension and switching time

Well, it’s taken about six years, but I think I’ve finally found something the first generation Chromecast is good at, aside from demonstrating the meaning of choking hazard. They came with these little extension cables, so that you could put a bit of distance between your display’s HDMI port and the device itself versus shoving the Chromecast G1 into your TV.

Simply put, my old Asus monitor only has two real problems. One is the speakers are utterly and completely crap—that audio should never and under no circumstances have audio routed through them. Thankfully, Asus put a 3.5 mm port that let’s me hook up external speakers to handle the HDMI audio input. The other problem that is less easily solved: is there is only one HDMI port. It’s from an era where even a nice monitor only had one if any. Thus with my conversion to HDMI all the things around 2013~2014 thereabouts, It has been the real sticking point.

To swap cables: I’ve got to either blind man finger for the port until the HDMI goes in, or flip the monitor forward so I can get a visual on the port. Yeah, my top request for HDMI 3.0 is going to be a reversible connector like USB-C.

Today I did a bit of experiment. I connected my old HDMI switch, so I could check if my 780GTX or iPad took offense to it. At least under Linux, I’ve not been able to use Skylake or Braswell graphics with the switch, so it’s mostly been underutilized since my Xbox and Fire TV went to different displays. Much to my happiness, the GTX doesn’t care about the switch and my iPad Pro 11 -> HooToo adapter setup doesn’t seem to mind; although I didn’t test HDCP on either, I doubt that’s an issue here.

As a follow up, I decided to test if doing a hotplug from the iPad end would be smart enough to trigger the switches input auto switch behavior and it is not. Since the Chromecast G1 extension cable makes it easier to swap cables on my Asus monitor, I think what I will do is just toggle cables and spare myself wiring up yet another thing with an idiot light.

10 Anime That Turn Out To Be Nothing Like What They First Seem

I’m just going to say, most of these are worth watching and more than a few are great ^_^.

How to know it's time to take a break:

1. You've cleared out a post apocalyptic city full of daemons.
2. You've defeated the villain's pet three headed, fire breathing dog.
3. You've defeated the villain's Astral ally, with some help from your own.
4. The game crashes before the post battle auto checkpoint save.

Yep.

Watching Christmas Vacation for the first time in some years, I think the real problem is less that Griswold’s luck is like a suburban dad version of Ashley Williams, and has more to do with his foolishness. But there in lays the rub.

In a way, Clark Griswold kind of represents the foolishness in us all, parodied to National Lampoon levels. He’s pretty much hopeless, and nothing he tries to do for his family goes according to plan, but they love him just the same. Somehow.

Most people can probably identify with how that works out, and be glad that most of us space out our foolishness enough not to have a reserved spot on the other side of the nut house, or encounter SWAT teams that often in our happy endings. Oddly, the characters work really well, lol.

Final signs that the tablet has won:

1. Posting from my desk usually means my tablet is between my keyboard, and monitor, and the keyboard is paired to the monitor.
2. If it doesn’t involve video playback, Direct3D games, or compling code, I’m probably going to use my tablet when I’m at my desk more than my desktop.
3. The urge to hook up my HDMI switch again, so that I can share the monitor with my tablet.

Yes, I’m weird.

Breffo Spiderpodiums as an Xbox controller caddy and headphone stand

The Breffo Spiderpodium was originally made with holding an iPhone in mind, but I have to admit that it works pretty good as an Xbox controller caddy.

Two middle legs are folded to create stand, two back legs to lip over the controller, and two front legs are folded to make a sort of rest by the accessory port. So I can pretty much tilt the controller about ten degrees downward, slide it into place, and relax.

The larger model originally designed for the iPad, also works pretty neatly as a headphones holder. Hehe.

Plus whatever Breffo’s definition of British steel or whatever the interior is made out of, I’ve never actually managed to break one of these things. The most damage I’ve ever done is melting the plastic a bit by hanging one out of my car’s air vents for a lustrum or more.

Check out what I'm watching on Crunchyroll! http://www.crunchyroll.com/oresuki-are-you-the-only-one-who-loves-me/episode-7-i-discover-an-unexpected-side-790234

This episode especially made me laugh, in a pretty steady symmetrical fashion. Perhaps helps that the jokes with Sun-Chan just made me cackle louder. Their trip to the pool is just filled with reasons to laugh, while somehow maintaining the pseudo-serious tone of the series; it really worked for my funny bone.

Oresuki is probably worth watching for the twisted-characters and wise cracks about rom-coms, but this episode is just worth watching, period.

Not sure why I’m so ridiculously tired tonight.

But I’m tempted to either blame the comfy goons, or tell them to move over.

Mastery of the comfy nap award of the day, goes to Willow.