Friday: Fish sandwich is about this early, and twitter works right on tv because I see how the lazy weekend is bizarre conniving prostitutes prostitutes

-Or-

So, let's talk about Markov Chains, I guess.

This news story popped up in the RSS today, which reminded me of the long ago time in which Forum 2000 was a thing (note: Forum 2000 never worked like that.  It was all basically a mechanical turk).

I then remembered that you can download all your tweets from twitter, so blammo, I have the text corpus necessary to hack up something to do this.

So, those Markov Chains.  Here's the simple way to think of it:  starting from initial point A, there's a probability p_B that you'll move to point B, p_C that you'll move to C, etc.  However, there are also probabilities for all those points too, so you can chain things together.  Maybe go look at the wikipedia figure.  This isn't turning out to be that simple of an explanation.

In any case, if you let each "point" be a word in a tweet, then if you have a large sample of tweets from someone, you could imagine that you could construct fake tweets if you knew the probability that a given word follows another.  That's what I did in perl, and that's where the title came from.  I did a simple chain, where w_{i+1} is drawn directly from the probability distribution of words that follow word w_i.  There's a reset condition where if the set of words that follow w_i is empty, I restart the chain from the set of "words that start a tweet".  I've also forced the length of the generated string to be 140 characters, the standard tweet length (and forced everything lowercase, and removed all punctuation, etc, etc, etc).

Here are some more examples:

• i was far the whole dinner but that @wholefoods sushi was aborted because its weird being even fucking clue what hes a cheater :-p theres no
• hey verizon network that too hungry or more not sure that flasks were afraid the sun orbit simulator its now its someplace else too soggy as
• happy birthday @jkru isnt helping anybody know and hes never a 12 16 garbage bags tied directly to work - british accent for being wasted its
• rt @vgc_scott man that quote and cranky tonights dinner oh man its still preparing the oil is actively looking up a workaround to be going to
• first time you dont want a walk an impenetrable island which is like it looks close eyes will always just woke up dry before i not having intermotrons
• @jkru its all the music #fuckedupdream peter potomus cartoons are you your app its official word for liberty tsa approved for my implementation
• dear this is what is terrible monsters outside who like fog and colby isnt even left there to the 100th day yay deposed monarchy ok so hopefully

Those are just nearly not gibberish enough for you to think that they're not computer generated.  The crazy thing about MCs is that they do a wonderful job of constructing sentences that are nearly grammatically correct.  This could probably be improved a lot, such as trying to pick words that have some influence from the second previous word or having it clearly mark where it's restarted the chain with a period or something.  Still, for like ten minutes of work, this isn't too bad.

Finally, an interesting sampling from printing out the chain transition probabilities:
fuck you 0.294392523364486 63 214
fuck it 0.0794392523364486 17 214
fuck fuck 0.0700934579439252 15 214
fuck yeah 0.0700934579439252 15 214
fuck up 0.0327102803738318 7 214

[...]

fuck #sandwichtweets 0.00467289719626168 1 214

fuck shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitfuckshitshitfuck 0.00467289719626168 1 214

[...]

fucking ghost 0.00454545454545455 1 220

[...]

fuckity fuck 1 3 3

This isn't really related to anything, but it kind of looks cool, so that's something.

• Chibird.
• Demogorgon.
• Interesting.  Web-based Cards Against Humanity.  It's entirely text based, but I think that in order to play this, I'd have to get my google hangout stuff fixed.
• Oops.
• Team Rocket.
• Well, that's disappointing.
• I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates Grant Morrison.  Fucking hack.
• I would have talked about this today, but instead I did the MC stuff.  Here's the search for all the times I've discussed hating Grant Morrison.  The fucking hack.

Thursday: Almost healthy -or- Way too much about Pokemon

I had planned on going to work today.  Then I woke up, was beaten up by the sinus infection, and realized that wasn't going to happen.  I then spent ten minutes coughing up everything in existence as my immune system realized that although it'd won the Battle of the Bronchi, it now had to deal with all the dead crap.  Woo.  That was lots of fun.  I got ramen, which is again the perfect food for sick days.  I then did some work, although still not nearly enough for me to count this week as being productive.  Thanks, lungs.

I then worked through my DVR, and that led me to watching the episode that this gif was taken from.  Here's the summary of one of the most cracked out episodes in a long time.  I'm putting it after the break because I have 50 screenshots.

The Light of Floccesy Ranch!

Saturday: Fuck Big Kahuna's Pizza, and fuck the shitty shopping center they're located in.

First, look at the picture, and note that it is not of pizza.  That should be a sign that things didn't go right at Big Kahuna's.

The biggest issue?  It's cash only.  In 2015.  There are farmer's market stalls that take credit cards.  Not taking credit cards is a sign that either the place doesn't trust the gnomes that secretly run the financial system, or they're fudging the books somehow, and don't want the extra paper trail credit cards generate.

But, there are two credit unions in the same shopping center, so this shouldn't be a problem, right?  This is where being in a shitty shopping center makes the problem worse.  Two credit unions, and neither have an outside ATM.  The shopping center by work has like 17 ATMs, with one for each bank in the place.  However, there's a totally not sketchy "24 hour ATM" outside, run by the shopping center.  Which makes the lack of credit union ATMs make sense.  They're probably not allowed to have them in their lease, so the center can skim the fees off their ATM instead.  Because shit like that is a great way to run your business.

Of course, it doesn't fucking matter, because the single shitty ATM was broken.  So, fuck everybody.  

Also, fuck the dude who decided that in the entire completely empty parking lot, he had to pull up right next to me as I'm trying to back up.  Seriously, dude.  You could park in any of the hundreds of other parking spaces that aren't right next to the only car that's moving.

So I went to get ramen instead, because the ramen place never lets me down, and they've been taking credit cards for years.

• I hope Jake the Brick wins.
• Fuck Bill Kristol too.  He's a worthless piece of shit.
• I actually looked this character up yesterday after seeing some game clip and wondering WTF was going on.  This is all true.  Fuck Hideo Kojima too, I guess.
• That cat is going to murder people.

Saturday: So many things trying to be jerks.

I had a nice plan for the day.  It was going to be a great day.  It turned out to be just blah at best.  Here's what happened.

First step of the day: get lunch.  Since the new Five Guys opened in Mililani, I figured that would be a good place.  I also figured that since they've been open for a few weeks, that they wouldn't be super busy at 2pm.

I was wrong.

It was full of people, most of whom were just standing around.  I got in line, and three orders later, had my order in:

Good old number 35.

I got my drink, milled about as is the fashion, and when the big table finally cleared out (including the one lady who decided she wanted the sushi from next door), I sat down to wait.  That's when I heard the guy at the counter calling out an order.  "Eight!"

Yes.  Fucking 8.  So I had lots of time.  Thirty minutes of time.  If I hadn't driven across the island, I wouldn't have stayed.  Also note that the prices are a bit insane, especially given how long it took to get my food.

I also saw a kid with a horrible mohawk.  Kid, you need better parents, or at least parents who have a concept of a straight line.  It's not stylish to have bumps and wiggles.

Anyway, the food arrived.

"Wait, what?  Where's the top bun?"

Oh.  Yeah.

It's in this pile with the gob of mayo, the pale tomatoes, and the crappy looking lettuce.

Despite my burger being the super simple "bacon + mushrooms," they fucked it up by putting all the shit on it.  Since you can't unmayo a bun, I had to just ditch it, and accept that I was eating a badly made burger.  With like two mushrooms, one of which was outside the bun.  There was also a bunch of grilled onions, which, whatever, I like grilled onions, but they were also about 50% on the outside of the burger.  Just a fucking mess of a badly made burger.

Also, I get the "we put extra fries in the bag" idea.  I don't get "we put so many extra fries in the bag that you have to rip it apart to get to the burger we buried at the bottom."  I don't need a pound of fries.  I got a small fries.  I want a small amount of fries.  They're there to space out the bites of burger so you don't just eat it all in one go.  They should ideally not be soggy messes.  I wonder if they thought "a bunch of soggy fries will make up for us taking 30 minutes to fuck up your burger."  No.  And there should have been a quorum of Guys there to make that decision.

I mean, the burger wasn't bad, once I threw out the shit I didn't want.  Some of the fries were crispy, and were salted well.

But, I also had lots of time to ponder the receipt while waiting, so I saw that there was an online survey.

Sorry, but fuck this place.  I can get ok-ish burgers closer, for less money, and without them being all fucked up.

Another reason I had lots of time is that my RSS app on my phone was telling me it couldn't connect to the server at home.  I could ssh to the server, so the obvious solution was "the database got corrupted."  Wonderful.  This hasn't happened in like eight months, so I assumed we were past this fault case.  I really need to rebuild a new server, and make it a cluster for reliability.

But that wasn't something I could fix until I got home, and although I considered driving the long way around the north side of the island, that seemed excessive.

So I took H-3 to Kaneohe and back.  It's greener than last time I went.  There was also not a sky anomaly, I just didn't take all the images I needed of the clouds.  I also didn't want to bother fixing the wave.

Partially because this is the second attempt at the mosaic.  The first one failed when it ate up all 16+ GB of memory on my laptop.  I scaled the inputs by a factor of two to make this one.

After failing to make the mosaic, fixing the RSS database, and discovering that pretty much all of the books I'm reading on a topic are disturbingly vague about syntax (also, "warning: there was one deprecation warning; re-run with -deprecation for details" could be rewritten as "I'm a jerk.  Here I am, being a jerk to you.  Fuck you." and retain the same level of utility), I decided to go on a Pokemon (Go) journey.  This was partly fueled by the fact that I remembered this morning that I have Pokemon album in my amazon music library, and listened to it while driving for lunch.

Also, hey yelp!  This is not my definition of "Pokestop nearby."

Anyway, here's my path:

The odd jag onto Heulu was to get a Pokestop without going into a church parking lot.

How did it go?

My neighborhood is junk.

I did get two Oddish, which I didn't have.  I also battled two gyms, and I either am doing something wrong, or gyms just suck and aren't fun.  I get that you have to tap to make your Pokemon attack, and that getting type advantages is a good thing.  I don't get how the fuck I'm supposed to beat a seemingly never ending stream of enemies with one of my Pokemon (if it's a friendly gym), or how I'm supposed to use six of mine to beat impossibly strong enemies (if it's not).  Was it fun to be level 10 for twenty minutes on the 8th of July, and that's it?  I've been trying to build my Pokemon up (my Pidgeot is nearly CP 600), but when I end up fighting four CP 1200 Flareons followed by at least one CP 1000 Jolteon, what's the fucking point?

Also, fuck your Eeveelutions.

And then the servers crashed so I didn't get ~1/2 km of my journey applied to my eggs.  New server crash screen, though, so I guess that's an improvement?

 Links.

• Not Pokemon.
• Did you know Jill Stein is either a garbage person, or is pandering to idiots in such a way as to impersonate a garbage person?  I'm all for preventing corporations from using power to ensure their own profits, but I'm also for people not dying from preventable diseases because "conspiracy."  Also, the correct response to "what about homeopathy," is "fuck that shit, what are you, some sort of goddamn moron?"
• This comic looks kind of interesting, but it doesn't seem to be completely out.  I should make a tag for things that I should check back on in the future.
• Katy Beary.
• Hilary Clinton.
• Pokemon.
• I believe the answer is "yes."  Everyone should see the same types of Pokemon nearby, but they are not identical instances of those Pokemon.  This is why I was able to catch the Snorlax yesterday after those kids did.  We each play in a separate realization of the global Go world.
• Fuck these guys.
• I didn't know you could tap on them.  I want a Psyduck.
• Meme relevance.
• Everyone is Team Blue.
• Rattata.

Wednesday: I think I figured out a solution to a problem we didn't want to bother with.

I think it's basically this going on.  It's actually not too hard of a thing to solve, but it'll require checking a lot of stuff and writing a quick model.

• Pokemon.
• Cool.  Daily bonuses will make Pokemon Go even more fun.
• I know I mentioned it last week (I think), but we all knew this, right?
• Not Pokemon.
• The Cubs finally won the World Series, so here are some otters.
• Father Jeff Bayhi is a festering pile of shit, and the Diocese of Baton Rouge should be ashamed for pulling this shit.  "[A]ffirms the sanctity of the Sacrament of Reconciliation." GO FUCK YOURSELF.  What the fuck is sacred about not reporting the abuse of the child who is in the damn confessional?  Fuck this shitty coward, fuck his shitty church, and fuck the Supreme Court of Louisiana.
• Best dog.
• The last gif.
• This is an optimistic map.  I hope that at the end of Hillary's presidency, we have a nice permanent Democratic majority.

Sunday: Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

I'm calmly making something for dinner after a day of not doing a damn thing, when I hear a random "beep" from the computer in the living room.  Finish cooking, sit down to eat, and I see a "I/O error" on the terminal logged into that computer.  A series of futzing around later, I discover that the drive seems to have died in exactly the same way as the last one I had: randomly dies, and refuses to allow the computer to reboot while plugged in.

Fuck.  There goes all my DVR data.  Again.  Except this time, I didn't even have the chance to copy a bunch off.  I do have backups of the important stuff (photos and things like that), but if I can't get the data from these disks, I'll be starting my DVR collection over from scratch.  Wonderful.

I think my strategy is going to be to go to best buy tomorrow, and buy two disks, and either set up a proper raid array (somewhat time consuming), or do a quick rsync based A/B system.  Hopefully I can get a drive enclosure as well, and see if I can get the broken drives to respond that way.

I know frog, it could be worse.  My bathroom could be breeding Bolsheviks.

Wait, what?

• This is fucking stupid.  The followup article suggests that this is getting a decent amount of coverage, but the very fact that the state attorney would let the legal system be used to let people attempt to ruin someone's life is disappointing.  Although, it is Florida, which probably should just be sunk into the ocean.
• Tepig!
• I didn't see this the first time I was reading this page, probably because it's two years old.  Somewhat NSFW, since it's a review of a Star Trek porn, but it's worth it just for the phrase "It’s like trying to fuck an onion".

Saturday: All the disappointment.

First up, fuck Dole Cannery.

I had planned to see "When Marnie was There" this weekend.  It's playing at the Hawaii International Film Festival, which runs at Dole Cannery.  I assumed that this would be like all of the other Ghibli films I've seen, with not so many people seeing it.  I checked for tickets online this morning, only to see a "no tickets available online, check at box office" message.  Assuming this wasn't a complete lie, I drove over to see if they had tickets.

They didn't.  Both today's and tomorrow's shows are sold out.  Ok, so I'll have to see it when it comes to Kahala mall in a few months.  Not a massive problem.  I went back to my car.

And took this series of photos of downtown and the harbor.

"$2.50"

"What?"

"Your ticket isn't validated.  Do you have your ticket stub?"

"No, I didn't see a movie.  It was sold out."

"$2.50"

"This is fucking bullshit."

Because it is.  No grace period at all?  It took me twelve minutes to park, take an elevator down to find they were sold out, take the elevator back up, and drive back down.  Fuck you, Dole Cannery.  Fuck you in your stupid "we're trying to look like we've renovated this place, but we're still in a dirty, run down part of town, and really do nothing to improve that" face.

So, plan for the day destroyed.  Let's go get kotteri ramen!

This is spicy tan tan, not kotteri.

That's because they were out of kotteri.  Fuck.  Also note that that's char siu instead of the spicy ground pork mixture.  I assume that's a similar supply issue.  Double fuck.

• Stupid people come up with poorly thought out stupid arguments.
• I may need to pick up the trade for this new Thor.  I am enjoying these snapshots.
• Alternate comment: "Pfft.  The Odinson should have just sent Squirrel Girl.  Fewer people to track down, 100% success rating."
• Good job systematically fucking yourselves over, Arizona.

Thursday: Apparently my recent posts have been "bad"

That's largely been due to the fact that I've been travelling, and on vacation, and not having consistent internet access such that I can read the internet, filter it down to a select set of links, and compile that into a post.

I now have caught up on the majority of the internets, so I can clear out the backlog of links I've been saving.

Masala Wok.  Why isn't this everywhere?  It's currently only in Texas and Virginia.  That's fucking bullshit.  Tasty Indian food should be omnipresent.

• Pokemon.
• Ash's Mom.
• You're an idiot, Ash.
• I would totally watch this show.  I've added the youtube link to my ever-growing pile of unwatched youtube videos.
• Squirrels.
• Education squirrel.
• Fuck you, cat.  Just straight up fuck you.
• Cartoons and comics.
• Finn and Jake's treehouse as seen by a real estate blog.
• What the fuck, the 60s?  
• DC.  Still fucked up.
• Economics.
• Here's an additional explanation on "a tax deduction is much more valuable to someone who makes a lot of money than someone who makes little".  Looking up the tax table for 2012 (filing singly), and taking two potential taxpayers who make $100k (lot of money) and $20k (little money), a $7500 tax credit (which is an "above the line" kind of thing) cuts the tax on the lot of money case by $2086, compared to $1117 for the little money case.  "But that's still a reduction!" Sure, but if you're assuming that the $7500 number arises because that's how much the insurance costs, this means that the final cost of insurance for the wealthy case is ~$5400 and ~$6400 for the poor case.  How is this supposed to be helping?  Ignore for the moment that this is like 1/3 of the total income for the poor case.
• So, you know, just never go to Papa John's pizza ever again.  If I could bankrupt someone with my mind, he'd be at the top of the list.
• Because fuck you, hungry people.  Maybe if you weren't so damn poor, you could buy giant agricultural subsidies to keep you from going to bed with that dull, endless gnawing in your tummy.  Maybe a little bit of malnutrition will teach you that being poor isn't cool, you hipsters.
• Appropriate historical considerations on libertarianism.
• Christ, what an asshole.  
• Other stuff.
• Degas.  That was what I was expecting up until that point.
• Cushy government jobs.
• Reference for above.
• Advertisements.
• "I'm high as a fucking kite!"
• What the absolute fuck?
• "I will murder you in your sleep.  With vinegar!"
• "I will murder you in your sleep.  Just regular murder."
• "It's made with only the finest cocaine and laudanum!"

I honestly did not expect this post to take so long to put together.

Tuesday: Zero.

That's the number of days since I told the sky to go fuck itself, right to its stupid ugly face.

I have no photo for today.  I started to work on that "famous people dying" problem (calculating, not preventing), but discovered that the census data is basically in "fuck it, just choose a format, and a location, and we'll call it good."  It's not good, census people, because now I have like 94 different csv files in four different formats, and I have to write something to scan them and compile as close to a uniform data set as possible.  I think I'm just going to keep total and male/female splits, and ignore all the race data.  It's just too inconsistent, and that simplifies the calculation.  I also am going to have to interpolate data for 2010-2014, as that data just doesn't exist, I guess.

• This became an issue when I saw "Lynda Carter" trending on twitter.  I was super unhappy until I saw that it was because she's going to be the president on the new season of Supergirl.  Cool.
• Other comic book stuff.
• Spider-Man.
• I may have posted this already, but it's worth it for the gif.
• Whoops.
• Really?  That is an incredibly stupid choice.  I read something else that was talking about how they're going to be fighting over Mother Boxes, and I can't imagine that's not going to be made fun of when the movie comes out.
• I heard the sirens last night, but didn't look outside.
• So, the highlights of the plan it took them YEARS to make are:
• Spend less on Medicaid, which totally isn't going to cause problems for people who rely on Medicaid.
• Make people who get health insurance through work pay more taxes.
• Make Medicare less available to people.
• Remove the pre-existing condition protections.
• Increase cost disparity.
• Alternatively, better regulation would ensure that costs are kept competitive.
• Fuck the music industry.  Specifically fuck the estates of Glenn Frey and Judy Garland for being particularly parasitic.  Generically fuck everyone else on that list.
• No, this link doesn't have any particular reason for being here.  It has no relation to the previous link.  Zero relation.
• Wales.
• Well.  This would certainly be cool.

Tuesday: Holy fuck

I'm delaying the story of absolute fuckery until tomorrow.  This allows me to compose the story with 80% fewer incantations of "fuck," and will allow me to determine what course of action the fuckers' bosses decide to take.

In other news, I saw this post today on the vintage ads page, which contained this image:

which led me to say out loud, "holy fuck, I actually have that!"

Seriously.  Didn't even need to get off the couch to pull it from the shelf.  So not only do I have it, I have its location in my library-partment memorized.

Huh.  Holy fuck for the whole day, then.

Here's a pile of things to click on and read.

• Sadness.
• You are very patient, tiny bunny.
• Cursive is dumb, and isn't really necessary anymore.  "The origin of the cursive method is associated with practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill." Since I use a mechanical pencil for 99% of all writing I do, compact printing is far easier to write and read.
• Medicine and health care.
• So he gets complaints that he broke this promise, but the article clearly states that Congress has explicitly forbidden the things he wanted to do?
• I missed this. Arizona is apparently run by fucking morons.
• "'I Still Can't Believe The President, Vice President, Speaker Of The House, President Pro Tem, Sec. Of State, Sec. Of The Treasury, Sec. Of Defense, And Attorney General Were All In That Hot-Air Balloon,' Says New President Sally Jewell"
• The short version of why this bill is a bad idea: If you work overtime, you usually get time-and-a-half, so 150% regular pay.  If you instead take a comptime deal, you work overtime now, and then don't work at some point in the future.  Therefore, you get paid 100% of your regular pay under this plan.  You can see why Republicans and businesses like the idea, right?

Saturday: Fiasco

I didn't feel like getting sushi today, so I was stumped as to what to get for lunch.  Julie IM'ed the suggestion of "Indian."  Here's the problem with Indian food in Hawaii:

All the Indian restaurants on this half of the island.

I didn't want to drive to the other side of the island in the rain (since traffic would be even dumber than usual).  Flag A would have been my preferred choice, except the secret laws of Hawaii insist that no Indian restaurant can have sufficient parking for anyone to actually eat there.

See?  Cafe Maharani.

This led to the decision to try a new place, Cafe Taj Mahal.  It also has the "No Parking" problem, as it shares that lot with three other restaurants.  I assumed that since they don't open for dinner until 5, if I got there around then, there'd be a spot.  Plus, there's that lot across the street that looks like it's public parking, so that could help solve the problem.

How can this go wrong?

The problem is, once you turn right onto Waialae, you're fucked.  There is no way to turn around and get to that public lot.  Instead, you're sucked into this shit-storm of roads:

How does that even happen?

And, with traffic, you have effectively zero chance to get over to switch over to Waialae (yes.  You have to turn to stay on the same road.  Because that's sane), or King (which at least isn't that bad, although you can see how King eventually turns into Harding.  Because reasons).  This means you're on Kapiolani.

Fucking Kapiolani.  You're going Ewa-bound on Kapiolani.  Here's the interesting thing about this: You can never turn left. Never.  So you have to find a right turn that's helpful, but there's intermittent street parking, so you can't trust that being in the right lane won't fuck you over.  I got to Date, and figured that would work, but I didn't realize that the intersection of Kapiolani and Date is actually the intersection of Kapiolani, Date, and Kamoku:

Because fuck organized streets.

And all of that is marked "no turn on red.  Except left, which you can't fucking ever do, because you're on Kapiolani."  You wait for the Date traffic to turn left (onto either direction of Kapiolani), and then wait for it to go straight, then you wait for Kamoku to turn left (onto whatever they want), and then for them to go straight.  Finally, the light changes, and you have to wait for that fucking Mini in front of you to watch the guy walking in the crosswalk.  The Mini can only move at a speed proportional to the distance between it and the pedestrian, which looks to the outside observer like they forgot how to turn, then that they want to murder the guy, and then they need to block the crosswalk in case the guy changes his mind.

Then I got on University, because I thought of trying that Mexican place on Beretania.

You can guess the problem that I had there.

 So the next idea was to go get a burger at the Counter at the mall, and then get a book at Barnes & Nobles.

Wait.  You're fucking kidding me.

Yep.   Even though I park here nearly every week, I hadn't noticed that they closed the B&N.  Fuck.

Ok, but I can get a burger at the Counter, right?

That cup doesn't suggest that I can.

Even though they had tables open, since I was alone, I had to wait for a seat at the bar.  I hate sitting at the bar.  And fuck you, hostess.  I'll go someplace else, someplace that doesn't discriminate against people who eat alone.

Someplace with some fucking parking.

Thursday: The stupidest fucking thing I've seen in a long time.

I've been going with the standard assumption that no country is that stupid, and then the United Kingdom decided no one can tell them they're not idiots, and voted themselves out of the EU.  Let's go to the image shamelessly stolen from twitter:

I mean, if Bill Kristol says you're doing something right, stop and reassess.  Even if he says something like, "Cookies are yummy."  Put the cookie down and back away slowly.

This is a new brand of stupid that I didn't think could actually exist.  Especially given that if they actually go through with this stupid thing (they have to pass legislation to do so, and I would hope the immediate cratering of the currency would make someone be a grown up), that means that Scotland is breaking off.  That's not even really a question at this point.  The interesting thing that I didn't think about is Northern Ireland looking to be part of Ireland.  If that happens, then they become the United Kingdom of England and Wales.  Good job.

Here are the pictures I was going to use before this shit storm happened:

Did you know Izze comes in cans?

I ate one of the bananas I bought to eat at snacktime in the office, but I wasn't super happy about it.

 Then everything went stupid, so on the way home, I got a slice of cake.

It's triple layer princess cake, because red velvet cake is disgusting.

My princess cake was white/orange/pink, and the orange had some sort of orange flavor.  There was coconut on the outside, and it was delicious.

• Congratulations, David Cameron!  You're now the worst politician to ever fuck up a country!
• And I'm just now seeing that the fucker is resigning.  That's a start, fuck face.
• No link yet, because it's just twitter news flashes.
• The pound is only down 8.5% right now, up from the low of nearly 12%.  Why is this important?
• Here's the UK balance of trade.  It's negative, meaning they import more than they export.  With the pound down ~10%, that means it's immediately 10% more expensive to import things.
• It also drives up other currencies, as assuming currency holdings are constant, the pound dropping means you want to buy other currencies that hold their value better.  So dollars, most likely.  But also yen, which means the yen gets stronger.  That makes Japan's export based economy harder to recover.
• So not only do they fuck their own economy, they fuck the world economy.
• And although we still have a bunch of corrupt racists fucking over the legislative branch, we do have the best president ever.
• Best style.
• Animals.

Monday: Further adventures in fuck fuck fuckity fuck

1. Everyone in existence decided to get gas after work today.  It's like someone had claimed a tsunami was coming again.  My car was just regular out-of-gas.  The guy in front of me decided he needed to put fancy gas into his crappy jeep.  Given that I paid $4.259/gallon for the regular stuff, that seems somewhat wasteful.
2. Bought two new nice 2TB hard drives, and then went elsewhere to buy an external HD enclosure.  
1. Since when do hard drives not contain any cables?  I now need to go out and buy SATA cables tomorrow to make this thing work again.
2. Hard drive A (the one that died a year-ish ago) is elaborately wedged in place, and will require a lot of disassembly to extract from the case.
3. Hard drive B (the one that died yesterday) slid out nicely, slid into the enclosure without too much trouble, but refuses to respond.  Based on the sounds, it seems this is the click-of-death problem, which is effectively an irreparable hardware issue.  That of course means that all those shows I hadn't watched on the DVR are gone. As is the other miscellaneous data on that drive that I hadn't gotten backed up.
3. All the grapes at the store were either brown and mushed to fuck and back, or were moldy.  Proper moldy.  WTF?
4. Some crazy old man riding his bike decided that he needed to stop in the middle of my apartment building's driveway.  Not to one side, not on the large loading dock apron area, not in the grass or on the sidewalk.  Right on top of the yellow line that denotes the lanes.  He then stared at me as I slowly eased my car around him, trying not to hit him, the building, or anything else.  Reasons this crazy old man was crazy:
1. black socks pulled up to his knees with shorts.
2. and sandals.
3. and a giant (18+ inches) floppy pseudo-fedora hat.
4. his blinking lights on his bike that were still going despite him being stopped.
5. and it still being light out.
5. I'm simultaneously hungry, and not hungry for any food I can think of.  I think I have cookies, so that might be my best option.

You have got to be fucking shitting me.  Really?  A fictional character makes actual history more real to you.  I'm...I'm just going to go lie in bed for awhile, and hope for the entire universe to go away in a false vacuum collapse.  

I didn't post this one already, right?  If I did, I'm sure this is a new caption.  "Whoa...those bricks look a bit slippery.  I'm just going to walk slowly with you under this umbrella until we get home, ok?"

• Really, Waco?  Just...wow.  Because the bible says the moon shines it's own light, it must do so.  Even when it's a new moon, and not actually bright?  I vow, that if I ever become president, I will force through legislation allowing Bill Nye to just straight up shoot people who are that dumb.  Not kill them.  Just like in the knee or something.
• I had a gif of this bear eating the camera, but it's pixelated, and a bit gross, so here's the youtube video so you can watch gross bear mouth in high quality.
• I'm torn between this being an interesting idea, and it being incredibly depressing.
• Bianca, with important facts for kids.
• So you defund higher education at the state level, and then veto their ability to raise tuition to cover expenses.
• 
• That sucks.
• Is the logic here that the government should have a tax repatriation holiday because otherwise corporations are just going to pretend they didn't earn that money and effectively evade?  As above, but Bill Nye is also able to nationalize companies for any reason he sees fit.

Monday: So many people to call a bag of shit today.

I'm going to start with the fuck face at my local PBS that decided that instead of showing "Secrets of Scotland Yard" ("British detectives employ trailblazing techniques to unmask perpetrators. (TV-14, CC, Stereo, Rerun)") right now (admittedly, that only looks barely interesting), they'd rather see "MAGIC MOMENTS: THE BEST OF 50S POP" ("Performers include Mel Carter, the Four Aces, the Chordettes, the Four Lads, Patti Page, Don Cherry and the Crew Cuts. Hosts: Pat Boone, Phyllis McGuire, Mary Lou Metzker, Patti Page and Debbie Reynolds. Length: 120 | Original Airdate 9/1/16").  Who wants to watch that shit?  This entire month PBS has been showing "All The Best Shitty Music For Old People."  Show better shows.

Also: do you know why I can call the PBS programmer a fuck face?  Because my blog has less reach than a television station, so I have very little worry that I'm going to cause a massive incident where people read this and bully that bad TV programmer.  I would think that this would be obvious, but then again, I'm not a bag of shit.

You know who else sucks?  The random number generator that decided to spawn five Pokemon, and then made them a Caterpie, a Weedle, a Rattata, a Zubat, and another fucking Pidgey.  Fuck you, RNG.

• Pokemon.
• Pokemon.
• Eh.  Close enough.
• I support you, Squirtle.  Just be the best Squirtle you can be.
• Not Pokemon.
• This blew up today, and I'm linking to this instead of the original stuff, because fuck that guy.
• Hey!  Do you know who was apparently a bag of shit?  Isaac Asimov!  Guess I can be happy never reading his books!
• This is a good story.
• That entire family is basically a mess, though.

And then I had to edit the post after the fact because I forgot to mention that Gene Wilder died today, and that's awful.  All the stories seem to indicate he was most definitely not a jerk.

Wednesday: It's official. I hate computer programmers.

Mostly because "this is a problem" rarely gets the point across.  For a couple of months now, my window manager decides it can't render a title bar, and that causes the entire thing to call abort.  This is caught, and the window manager relaunched, leading (90% of the time) to an endless cycle of abort/crash/restarts until I get fed up and logout.  Why does this happen?  No clue.  All I can see in the output files is that it's having trouble with a free.  Great.  Wonderful.  So let's google this and see if someone else is having this issue.

As far as I can tell, no.  Why?  Who knows.  Maybe no one else is using this window manager, or didn't update something in some way that the system thinks is fine, but somehow isn't.  I had similar abort issues with gnuplot, but I can't reproduce that right now.

The other fun thing is that the window manager people are equally unhelpful.  "Enlightenment and EFL Debian official packages are outdated. [T]he installation for Debian is done from sources". Oh go fuck yourself.  Why don't you supply packages?  Or, help the maintainers make the packages?  Do you know why packages are helpful?  Because then I don't have to fuck around for an hour compiling shit, and then everyone knows if there's a bug in version X.  It's not an endless search for revisions and shit like that.

In looking at this, I'm also wondering if the fact that closing my laptop has been putting the computer into suspend mode is related to me checking to see if the window manager thing was due to a configuration issue.  Why?  Because (as is the sane way to do things) the window manager has a power management interface that I might not have disabled.  Because obviously that's a thing it should be doing.

And that's the main problem.  "I think this should handle power management."  "I think this should replace simple text logs with an internal binary log instead."  "I think that this should not let you close the windows if you don't save in our own format because I'm an asshole who wants everything to work my way, even though that way is fucking stupid."  "I'm going to package a thing with name blah and xblah, and even though there are decades of precident, blah is not actually going to contain a command line version of blah, but rather a different X11 version of blah."

Because that's super reasonable.

And, specifically, blah is sane, the scanner interface, and kind of the source of tonight's entire rant.  Yesterday I saw a scanner sitting in the free pile at work, and after checking that it worked on my work computer, figured that it might be cool to have.  It's somewhat old, and limited to a max resolution of 1200dpi, but that's far more that I really need for most uses.  My main goal for it will be to take actual physical photos, and digitize them so I can fold them into my photo archive.  I also was wondering if it would help my Drawlloween pictures.

So, as a test, here are two old cell phone versions:

And new clean scanned versions:

So it takes far longer to scan than to just take a picture, but it's generally a better picture.  There's a few spots where I probably need to clean the glass, and scanning from my notebook means there's page curl toward the spine, but still, not bad for something that was free.

One other thing: when I thinking about it last night, I assumed that it wouldn't be difficult to write something for images that would be able to identify multiple photos on the scanner screen, and split them into separate image files automatically.  It turns out that I don't need to think too hard about it, because someone already wrote a thing for imagemagick that does that.

• Pokemon.
• Giovanni.
• Bulbasaur.
• Ditto and Mimikyu.
• Comic book stuff.
• This is fucking stupid.  "Sure, they're the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Earth is in the galaxy!  So they can stay here!  BRILLIANT!"  No.  It's not. Fuck you Brian Michael Bendis.
• This is fucking stupid, too, and I bet after that last link, you can guess who wrote it.  "Let's make all the characters do stupid stuff to make a big angsty story about who the fuck knows, because this is all style with no actual decent substance!"
• I was so angry I sat and googled to find something good.  People should write more comics like Kate Leth.  Here's one panel.  I like everything about this one panel more than everything in those last two links.  It's fun, it's funny, it's not being overdramatic to try and make a point.
• Other stuff.
• Squirrels.
• Damn it, Tuxedo Mask.
• Totally not Elsa.
• I haven't read this, but it was linked in a big twitter chain about interactions between Roman Britain and China and Japan that was super interesting, and tl;dr, I'm now following a new archaeologist blog and twitter.
• Why is this even an issue?  Honestly, are people so fucking stupid that they think taking a lunch away from a kid is a good idea?
• I think this is likely to be my next phone, if I have to get a new phone anytime soon.  It might not be, as my current phone is pretty great still.  Still, this is the next iteration of my phone, but in the "not stupid" version that still has a headphone jack.  I'm a bit disappointed that the color customization stuff got dropped, and that they're spending so much effort on the attachments.  

Sunday: Well I guess I'm watching Frozen again.

So here are some Frozen thoughts.

1) Is the royal family of Arendelle also in charge of the trolls?  I assume the trolls lived there before the humans, since they're made out of rock and all.  So did the humans invade, and do a "this is all our land now" thing?  Or did they show up and were just "oh, hey, trolls.  Can we live over here by the water?" and the trolls were fine with it?  They seem to be on good terms, even if the king has to go get the big book of trolls, so I guess it's the second one, but the trolls seem a bit overly-deferential.

2) Who runs the kingdom during the interregnum?  Why isn't that person in charge again when Anna runs after Elsa?  Who put that council of people from other countries together?

3) I've always assumed that since this scene:

Where Elsa creates Olaf.

is followed by this scene:

Where Elsa lets the wind blow her cape away.

that just off camera, Olaf is doing his "I'm Olaf, and I like warm hugs!" bit, following along with Elsa, commenting on the song going on, and then when the cape flies away, says something like, "Oh!  You dropped your cape!  I'll go get it!" and that's why Anna and Kristoff find him way down the mountain.  He's there looking for the cape.

4) Why are those wolves such jerks?  They can't be suddenly hungry, it's been summer all summer, and the snow just fell like the day before.

5) Does Kristoff not know that that was Elsa and Anna when they first saw the trolls?  That's how he met the trolls.  They clearly announce that he's the king.  He totally looks like a king.  He says he saw them "fix it" before.  I think the only conclusion here is that Kristoff is painfully stupid.

6) I just realized that the second gif up there has the wrong lyrics.  I guess that's what I get for just searching giphy to find things.

7) Fixer-upper is a bad song.  They should have done a thing where they're going to start singing, only to have Old Grandpa Troll roll in and shut it all down.  "Don't you recognize Anna from the beginning of the movie?  We don't have time for a dumb song!"

8) I can't imagine that Hans would actually have been able to take over the kingdom.  Some jerk rolls in, both members of the royal family die, and that jerk runs things?  Fuck that shit.

9) I also would say that Elsa, being Queen, totally has the authority to fuck up everyone with ice powers when they invade her ice castle.  Who the fuck visits a country, declares their Queen a monster, and tries to kill her?  Jerks.  Jerks who deserve to get fucked up by ice powers.

10) Elsa probably should have gone to talk with the trolls too, even though OGT's advice at the beginning of the movie was basically garbage.  "Hey, you need to have really bad anxiety and isolate yourself from everyone."  You are bad at not-magic shit, OGT.

11) Hans is actually pretty lucky that Anna froze fully at that moment, because if he'd told Elsa that she was dead, and she wasn't, and then he killed her right in front of her, I'm pretty sure she would killed him in the most painful way should could have.

12) Those boats are fucked.

13) I kind of want to work out the thermodynamics of Olaf's flurry.  Not today, but at some point.

14) Arendelle is kind of a super power a the end.  I suspect that won't be covered in the sequel.

15) This TV cut moved the end credits scene with Marshmallow to before the credits.  Huh.

I also got cheesy tots for late lunch:

The burgers at Teddy's continue to be not the best.  Still, I wanted cheesy tots, and I know of only one place that makes cheesy tots.

And I got a free little bit of milkshake, because they made too much of three of them, and just randomly gave them out to people in the restaurant.

• Good advice.
• Good work, mushroom!
• Representation matters.
• I agree with the tags.  Fuck off, Superman.
• I also want to read this book.
• I know I covered the main issue about this yesterday, but WTF is going on with that rope?  That is not how you lead an elephant.  That's stupid.  And why would you walk around with your knife out if you have a tiger with you?
• I had to track down the other two stories from other blogs when I discovered that I hadn't saved them from the ones I do read.  Humans and alien interactions.
• A bunch of things.
• "Take a human."
• Space roomba with a knife.