Friday: Pastrami.

Pastrami is the best meat.  There is no meat better than pastrami.

If I buy the tickets I'm planning to, next week I'll be eating pastrami on the mainland.  The location doesn't matter much, as all pastrami is better than all other meats.  Ham can get pretty good, but it's still not pastrami level.

• Vampire squirrel is super fluffy.
• I've seen the TV show where the kids have to do something.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.

Wednesday: "Yuck the shit out of that."

That is my new favorite phrase.

Eight years ago I got L&L in California.

I really need to do historical blog posts.  I have a lot of photos from before I started blogging every day (June 19, 2011).  

A lot.

• Bill Finger.
• The level of stunning incompetence surprises me, even using Delong's Law.
• Republicans are garbage.
• Dogs, though.
• Bad dogs, though.
• Team Rocket.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.  Which reminds me:

I looked at Marvel Unlimited today, to see if that would cover my comic book reading needs.  It looks like things aren't released on it until after they've been sold in stores for six months.  Ok, that's not ideal, as I can just pick up the trade at that point.  Then I looked around to see if the comics I want to read have archives on MU.  It looks like the answer is no, so MU totally doesn't work for me.

• Moon Girl?  Not even listed in the damn character list, despite being first billed and the smartest person in the world.
• Devil Dinosaur? Two issues (with Moon Girl), both of which are in the trade I just got.
• Squirrel Girl? Six month delay, incomplete archive.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat?  Six months, incomplete archive, disturbing hellscape of 90's art, nothing from that limited series from like 2005 that I've been meaning to dig out of my closet to read again.
• She-Hulk?  Nothing from the new series yet, also I somehow have a directory of zip files that I have no clue how I got them, so maybe this archive isn't so important.
• Girl Hawkguy?  Nothing new, incomplete archive.
• Howard the Duck?  Wait, did he get cancelled again?

So I guess I stick with trades.

Disturbing Hellscape of 90's Art:

Wednesday: There's a tsunami coming, but not really, because these never really have much impact.

The advisory statement mentions that we could get 0.3-1 meter waves, but that shouldn't be too big of a deal.  This earthquake seems to be about 63 times weaker than the one that caused the tsunami that hit Hilo.  It does mean that I do have a disaster to tie to my late summer vacation for the second year in a row.

Approaching vacation also means I don't care to fix things like this in my work notebook.

• Besides, I live in the safe zone anyway.
• Jake the Brick won.
• That's a cool story.
• Poor hungry bear.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• If I'd planned better, I'd have some Patsy Walker, Hellcat, comics on my tablet for this trip.

Wednesday: But today kept feeling like Thursday. That doesn't make sense.

These tiny cans of vanilla pepsi are good.  I don't know why all sizes can't have sugar, but whatever.

I probably should have cropped this so the white cat is easier to see.  He used the odd strategy of ignoring me until I was walking away, which was when he freaked out and ran into the bushes.

• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.  I guess I'm going to order the trade of this.  When it comes out.  After the comic is actually published.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• I should probably get this too.  That should fill the "things to read on planes" quota for a while.
• Ranald MacDonald.  Really.  That's his name.

Wednesday: Sloppy joe is basically American bao.

I'm sure lots of things qualify as "_____ bao," but still.

• Marnie.
• This is bullshit.  The stupid scanners don't even work correctly, so making people use them is only useful if you don't expect to find anything.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• I didn't know Lalique did graphic art as well as glass work.
• Christmas squirrel.
• Christmas Adam.

Thursday: I finally have my poster largely complete.

So I had a tasty dinner.

Tomorrow I can do the last little edits, and then print it out and be done with work for the year.  I also have to do a bunch of laundry, since I need to pack so many clothes for this trip.

• Ha ha ha good.
• I couldn't get the original link I was going to post to play the video, so I clicked this link on the page to this story about Pikachu.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Machida Squirrel Garden.

Tuesday: that thing where you kind of root for cancer.

It took far longer than I expected to find a the picture I wanted on my blog.

• Dogs are great.
• Oscar the Grouch.
• They just need to write good stories.  They should minimize crossovers, and keep them to "these two/three books crossover for a few issues."  They should stop trying to do huge full-universe events.  They should fire authors who can't come up with a better idea than "this good guy is bad now".  They should have Patsy Walker, Hellcat, play frisbee with the Hulk more.

Sunday: Home again.

Important things first: since the hotel I stayed at last night had a limited selection of channels (and a shitty remote that made changing channels annoying), I spent longer than I should have flipping through.  That's when I discovered Daria.  Apparently MTV has given up showing their new awful stuff, and is reshowing things from back when they were relevant.  Daria was followed by Beavis and Butthead, which was another show I didn't expect to see on actual live TV again.

I had planned to get breakfast this morning, but wasn't in the mood for the limited crap selection I found.  So I went with the best breakfast:

Pastrami and swiss on rye.

Then blah blah long flight home.  Upon getting home, I didn't know what I wanted for lunch/dinner.  I'd spent the last hour or so of the flight listening to Estelle, as I discovered last night that it's available on Amazon Prime.  I decided this was a good enough reason to go to Kailua to get a burrito, as I could keep listening.

Also because I didn't eat a burrito in San Francisco.

I'm generally liking the music, although the conversational tracks and the guest collaborations seem to be worse than the other songs.

Also this WF chicken has a bunch of chicks.

 I also had mail when I got home.

Patsy Walker, Hellcat.

 I should have had this one shipped to Julie's, as it arrived here on Saturday.  I guess that's the problem trying to time travel and kickstarter fulfillment.

Million Dollars, But...

Here are some example scenarios I pulled out at random.

• Not Pokemon Go.
• Intrigue at Disney.
• Magical girl transformations.
• Squirrel.
• Squirrel.
• Pokemon Go.
• Dollar off.
• Team Rocket.
• Cooking.
• You can apparently get Pikachu as a starter.
• Eeveelutions are not random, I guess.
• Yes.
• Rayquaza.

Thursday: Oh, ok.

I had to do the history picture thing again for today.

Today is the day that seven years ago I flew home to Michigan from my first visit to Hawaii, where I flew a week before moving to attend a conference.

It's also the day that four years ago I made this post about pinhole cameras.  It still gets hits when there are eclipses.

• Comic book stuff.
• I finally watched an episode of Legends of Tomorrow, mostly to check that I do get a CW so I'll be able to watch Supergirl next season.  It was mostly a lot of "I have no idea who these people are, and have no emotional investment at all."  Followed by "OK, she's Hawkgirl, and he's Firestorm."  Later there was a "Firestorm blew up Vandal Savage's time machine, right?"  No.  Firestorm did not blow up Vandal Savage's time machine.  Get it together, Firestorm.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat, as drawn by Natasha Allegri.
• Yeah, this is a good fan-cast for a Nextwave movie.  It will never happen, unfortunately, as Boom-Boom is a mutant, so she's in the Fox rights set.
• Political/economics stuff.
• On San Francisco rents.  Figure one is nice, but figure two is amazing.  TL;D[want to look at a great plot]: San Francisco needs to build more units of housing.
• Cool pope continues to be cool (on this subject, at least).
• This is unfortunate, because he's my Congressman.
• And maker of the best oddest commercial.
• So it's bad everywhere, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved.
• Other stuff.
• I have never heard of this.  I don't know how you'd even structure things without a visual analogue in your head.
• Sailor Pluto.
• Seeing eye robot.

Tuesday: It's getting to the point where we need contingencies at work for "alien invasion" and "angry wizards"

And now I want a cookie.

• This is clearly collective punishment.
• I often forget that Harry Potter is the same age as me.
• Bunnies.
• In this post, I mention Patsy Walker, Hellcat.  Here's an ad for her earlier comic.

Wednesday: Checked in and packed.

Except for things like "this laptop" and "the other electronics that need to charge" and "that medicine I left in my work fridge, which needs to stay cold all the time."

This is the Titanic Memorial in Belfast, from when I was there six years ago.

I also discovered a massive security problem at work today.  It turns out that my assessment of a previous programmer as "disturbingly obsessed with putting 'extended attributes' on everything" missed some details.

• Pokemon please don't go!
• Eyes closed challenge.
• Not Pokemon.
• Spoopy and creppy.
• I would enjoy a more realistic Star Wars like this.
• The Vision.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.

Wednesday: Back to work.

Which mostly involved figuring out the status of projects I didn't manage while on vacation and projects I need to get moving again, because they've been idle for too long.

I also caught my first Lickitung on Monday.

• Universities.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Resist.
• Yet again, proof that Republicans lie about everything, and basically only want to increase misery.
• Cat vs. fish.
• Gen 2 is finally coming out.  I still have like 27 missing Pokemon, but I know I can evolve at least two or three of those.

Monday: Self-repeating immortal Franken-ants

A phrase I got to use today at our group meeting as a possible solution to a script that has difficult to trace bug that I can't sort out.  It's the Space Ghost solution.

"But why are they Franken-ants?"

This question makes no sense.  If I say "self-repeating immortal Franken-ants," you probably have a decent idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about, even with no other information.

• So Kansas is basically run by tyrants who have no concept of "constitutional."
• Dogs...just no, dogs.  Stop it.
• I can see no way that this won't be a complete and utter disaster of a show.
• I would go see a big Marvel movie that was just a direct adaption of this educational comic.  Important features that must be retained:
• Thanos flying around in his Thanos-copter.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat (because fuck you, wikipedia, that is not Tigra).  It's kind of funny that they had to call her "Cat" due to the young target age group.
• Spider-Man basically doing nothing except tying his shoe and getting smacked down by MJ.
• Easy to read sentences.
• Thanos being arrested by the police.

Thursday: It was rainy today.

See?

And then I discovered that the code I'd based that talk on last week had a massive error, which I didn't notice because even though it was a massive error, it didn't actually have that bad of an effect on the fits it made.  However, on porting the algorithm to the slightly more complicated fit model, it blew up such that the fits diverged.  Scanning through the code revealed that I had had r = t * p0 + p1, instead of r = t * p1 + p0.  Oops.

Now I'm waiting for the thirteen minutes left before I can check in for my flight and try to get good seats.  Travel shouldn't be this stressful.

What also shouldn't be so stressful is getting a letter from my apartment management.  It turns out that they're raising my rent $25.  This after the owner did that appraisal thing because he was refinancing.  I guess it's marginally close to the inflation rate.

• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Backstory for a gif.
• Things like this are why I have a "culinary aminal" label.

Wednesday: Ugh.

It's annoying trying to debug something when the program doesn't even get to the place you're trying to debug.

And I don't have an image for today.

• This isn't a surprise.
• Kaiten sushi.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.

Wednesday: Let's talk about comics

So when I got to work today, I saw that Julie had sent me this tweet over IM.  My first thought was "what has DC fucked up this time?"  A quick search pointed me to this, and this (links from the same place because point two is more important, and they linked to their story on the first one).

First point: "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"?  Ok, that's a shitty title.  A large fraction of the internet pointed out that a team up of B&S already has a title: "World's Finest."  You already have a title for this, DC.  Why phrase it like that?  Oh, because you're going to have them fight, obviously.  And out of that fight, magically Justice will rise from the eastern sky, and everyone will go get some doughnuts?  I'm also pretty sure that you're going to fuck up including Wonder Woman in that movie too.  Do you know why?

Second point: it's being written by that asshole.  Or co-written, or whatever.  Let's start with the "maybe don't shit on your own companies products," aspect.  "Goyer asked, “How many people in the audience have heard of Martian Manhunter?” After hearing some light applause and cheers, he added, “How many people that raised their hands have ever been laid?”"  Dude, did you completely miss the Justice League cartoon that was on TV for five years?  MM was one of the main characters, so a pretty big chunk of the people who would be interested probably know who he is.

Next part: "So it’s like if I’m going to be this geek who becomes the Hulk then let’s create a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck."  Skipping the "they're cousins, you dickbag" point that everyone else mentioned, it's clear that he hasn't read a She-Hulk comic.  Probably ever.  I linked to this sample before, and I'm doing it again.  The point of this volume of SH and what I remember of the previous one is that SH is perpetually trying her best to be a normal person and do normal-ish lawyer things, and that often requires smashing something the way only she can.  Plus, in this series, she's hanging out with Patsy Walker, Hellcat, and I simply can't go into how wonderfully insane that is.  Here's the important point if you skip that link, "She premiered as the star of a teen romantic-comedy series and was later integrated into Marvel superhero franchises such as the Avengers and the Defenders."

Here's the conclusion to this whole thing.  When I was a kid, I read Marvel comics pretty much exclusively.  No big clue why, but that's what I always got.  Then, once the Batman: TAS cartoon and the rest of the Bruce Timm led cartoons came on (and admittedly, like a decade or so of not buying comics passed), I started buying DC comics, because of those shows.  I even stuck with them through Infinite Crisis, Superboy reality changing punches and all.  However, they let shit writers like Grant Morrison take over things, and that was it.  They've squandered their best chances, and they seem determined to constantly do the wrong thing.

And because of that, I really hope this new movie fails.

• Cat.
• Andy Serkis is a jerk, and I hope his new movie fails too.
• I really hope this gets collected when it's done.  Pen Ward is not a jerk.

Friday: I don't have a good title, so this is the title I'm going with.

I also don't have great pictures today.

I recently realized you can get colorful hair ties.

Not these though.  These are garbage that are designed to rip out all your hair.

• Pokemon.
• Wooper.
• Fat Pikachu.
• Did I link this already?  It was still in my RSS stuff, and I needed a third PKMN link.  It's Ginny Di's Pokemon Go cosplay tutorial.
• Serious stuff.
• This is an interesting Twitter thread about the economic improvements that have happened over the last ~eight years.
• An interesting paper on a new type of splines.
• Terry Jones is one of my favorites.
• Hrm.  I want Twitter to do well for a number of reasons.
• Apparently the new Mac OS has issues dealing with multiple computers connected to the same cloud backup thingy.
• BART is loud.
• Not serious stuff.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• I like how the first three steps are so deliberate and exact, followed by the unnumbered step four "bash that jerk in his stupid head."
• Just...do the morons who write these stupid stories not realize that they're exactly like the people being made fun of in these "Hark, a Vagrant" comics?  It's the exact same thing, just separated by a century.

Thursday: Someone had a birthday today.

It was Kate Leth.  Here's a substitute link to the fanart in that tweet because it'll be deleted in a month or so.  Because Patsy Walker, Hellcat.

I couldn't figure out why the program was running so slowly when I was stitching this mosaic together.  It turns out I was running it on my "bedroom youtube laptop" over ssh, and with my bad wifi, it was lagging badly.

And yes, that's what I had for dinner that one day last week, but I really felt like mac & cheese today.  It was annoyingly busy.

• Pokemon.
• What?
• That is pretty cool looking.
• Not Pokemon.
• Bees?
• A second link containing bees.  And I'm sorry, I like bees too, and sure, fairies are magical creatures with a fondness and affinity for nature, but I would be seriously creeped out playing with a bee the size of a dog.
• This is brilliant.
• Yes, basically.
• Dog.  No.  No, dog.  No.
• Helpful bear.
• I heard about this today, and assumed there'd be a nice summary in my rss feeds.  Tl;dr: Deutsche Bank is having bad news, but it's probably not as bad as people are claiming.
• Adventure Time is going to end.

Tuesday: "If you ever squander a Tuesday, at midnight proclaim ‘Second Tuesday!’ to delay Wednesday by a day."

"Demon tiger?  Why, that's preposterous.  I'm clearly just a normal everyday tiger.  What?  Tigers don't talk?  Um...."

• Important Ben Franklin sayings.
• Patsy Walker, Hellcat.
• Cats being cats in nontraditional ways.

Friday: Draw a Dinosaur Day

This is going to be year four for DaDD, and I went digital.  That was probably a mistake, but I couldn't find my crayons, and I could find my tablet.

It's a very chubby ankylosaurus.  With wonky eyes.  Tablet drawing is hard, and doing eyes is the hardest part.

• Super Bowl Sunday should really be "all animals get a bowl" day.
• Pretty much all of these.
• This is an interesting idea.  Since I work with a cluster of computers that has to deal with things falling apart all the time, it would have been useful to hear about this years ago.
• I even more want to go to the Pokemon Cafe.
• I have mentioned how much I love the insanity of Patsy Walker, Hellcat, before, so this is just more a note for myself.
• Ok, fine, but

The biggest problem is that after Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC squished all their different universes together into one, and made everyone live in the same world.  This made some sense, as they owned a bunch of comic universes, and it's probably easier to publish a Batman comic with occasional visits from Blue Beetle who lives a town over than to publish Batman and Blue Beetle, which are just going to directly compete with each other (rich industrialist who dresses up as something and uses technology to fight crime?  Wait, isn't that Mr. Terrific?).  

So, ok, great, everyone lives in the same world.  Except DC keeps making everything super serious and grimdark, so nothing can be fun anymore.  Because that's not grown up or some bullshit.  That's fine for Batman, who does nothing but punch bad guys until they stop being bad.  Superman comes off kind of lame, which leads to shit like him walking across the country instead of fighting crime because I don't even fucking know, he was sad or something.  That's also why they had to murder Blue Beetle, who became known after CoIE for doing shit like this (I couldn't find a single page that had all the important images, so click in order to piece together the story).  He was too funny and silly to fit in to the shitty vision DC was going with.

Now back to Captain Marvel.  His backstory is that he's an orphan who gets magic powers when he shouts his magic word, "Shazam," (basically calling the wizard named that to get the power).  That might seem like it could be grim, but he was originally written years ago, which is why he has a team that contains a useless fat old man, a super obvious ripoff of Bugs Bunny, and Mary Marvel, who got fucked over in the grimdark reboot because she wasn't allowed to just be a good person who tried to use her powers to help anymore.  Oh, and the Marvels were friends with Tawky Tawny, a goddamn tiger who wears clothes and walks around like a person.  And talks.  As you might guess.

And who did three children, an old guy, and two cartoon characters fight back in the past?  A tiny worm from Venus, a stereotypical evil scientist, and a guy named Captain Nazi.  These are simple enemies of the past, who are perfect villains for a kid who can become invincible by magic.  Captain Marvel isn't designed to live in a world where his best friend is gunned down.  He's designed to decide he doesn't like the Nazis, so he's going to fly to Europe and punch their captain until the war is over.