Saturday: I have far too many tabs open, which suggests that there will be lots of links. Also: Art-venture!

Today's plan was to go see movies at the Doris Duke Theater at the Museum of Art.  Since I was going to be there for the entire afternoon, I decided it would be good to try their cafe again.  I called to make a reservation, but I probably could have just walked in.  However, since I didn't want to get there and not have anything to eat, and since I'd have to plan to get lunch elsewhere if I couldn't eat there, it seemed like reservations were important.

This was my view for lunch.  I didn't bother to properly align this, as I anticipated that writing today's post was going to take forever anyway.  Maybe tomorrow, if I'm feeling bored.  There's a waterfall, is the main point.

None of the specials sounded that great, so I went with one of their sandwiches:

Chicken sandwich, with maple bacon, fontina, and another whole salad in addition to the side salad with walnuts.

Honestly, I was not expecting that many vegetables on my sandwich.  I was also hoping that the maple bacon would taste better than it did.  There was something slightly off about it.

Also, this bird kept doing this.  Are you hot, waterfall bird?

This was the point where I attempted to tempt fate and see if I could get dessert and the check in the fifteen minutes before the first movie started.

Chocolate pot de creme.  It was chocolatey.

I did, but it was very close, as I sat down with just a few minutes to spare.  The first movie was Marnie.  Again.  Again again.  But this is the first time since reading the book, and all my points on that hold.  It is still the best movie of the year.

The only problem Marnie has is that it's only an hour and forty-three minutes, and the gap between the two movie starts was three hours.  The doors open thirty minutes prior to a movie, so I had something like 45 minutes to kill.  And, since I entered the museum with a "cafe/movie" red sticker, I wasn't allowed to see any art.  Well, any galleries of art.  Incidental courtyard sculpture was fine, and wall-based murals too.  It's hard to block that kind of thing.  But since the cafe closes at two, this left only one place to kill time: the gift shop.

This did give me the chance to take a detailed look at all the books on sale there, with me ending up buying a book on Hokusai.  "Have you finished the book you got last time you went to the museum?"  I'm more than half way done with it.  I do have like three other books I've bought since as well, so I'm not doing this correctly.  Whatever.  I also got this:

It's a book for kids, I guess.

Each page has most of a bear, and you a kid can fill in the rest.

The second movie was The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which is about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  It's the source for this gif set, and was filmed around the time of this blog post, as they reference the same news story.  The main story is watching Miyazaki work on The Wind Rises, with a back story of reports from Isao Takahata's group working on The Tale of Princess Kaguya.  I've linked to those pages as the original plan was to release both of the movies on July 20, 2013.  As you can see, the main part of the Takahata reports was that he was not on schedule to hit that date, and he didn't.  It was an interesting view on how Ghibli films are made, and the discussion of Hideaki Anno doing the voice was funny.  Here are my reviews of the two movies.  Kaguya is the better of the two.

After that, I was hungry again, and decided I wanted fish.

So...

 Nico's is far busier at dinner time.  However, eating alone means you can skip lines if you don't mind eating at the bar.

Seafood pasta.  Pretty much all the seafood with a creamy sauce with vegetable bits.  It was sufficiently good that the fishing boat captain who sat down next to me and was only there for a beer decided to get the chicken version.  "I smell fish all day long, and when I go to bed in my cabin, I can smell them cutting the fish up down below."

 And then taking the long way home to listen through the Marnie soundtrack.

Today's Drawlloween is "alien."  He has pants because he's not some sort of barbarian alien.  They can weave as well as make ray guns.

•  Fun links.
• This is an excellent point.
• A bit of a long read, but worth it for Mr. Sato ruining the day.
• Neanderthal.
• Pika-no.
• Not fun links.
• More guns do not make people safer.
• John Kasich is a bag of shit, and hates people who still have youth in their souls, as his dark calcified soul is just another piece of shit inside the bag that the rest of his shit.
• Ted Cruz is a fascist who wants to be given all the power so he can get back at those he hates.
• The entire "Freedom Caucus" is full of fascists who want to be given all the power so they can get back at those they hate.  Also: claw each other to death because they fundamentally don't want to cooperate.
• Barry Loudermilk shows up in this article, and his quote at the end shows that he too, like the rest of his hate-filled fascist friends, are fascists who want to be given all the power so they can get back at those they hate.  Also, despite spending the requisite five minutes looking through his wikipedia page, his biography from congress, and his about page from his house page, I have no clue what he did for the years between 1992 and 2001.  Eight years in the air force, nine years "shrug", then thirteen years donking around the Georgia legislature doesn't really suggest "this dude should be in charge of anything."
• Martin Shkreli is still a fucking asshole.
• So
• a) this guy is an asshole.
• b) pretty much all of that article.
• c) this guy also isn't sufficiently old enough to push it off as "old people don't understand change."  This is just "an asshole."
• d) I also don't understand people who touch other people.  Who does that?  At all?  People are gross.  Don't touch them, ever.

Fuck.  Now I have to make all the links links. :-/  11:16:27.

Links done. 11:19:31. :-(

Wednesday: I have a telecon tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to it.

I also had a bunch of new things added to my task list at work.  I am not happy about that either.

I didn't have any photos for today, but then I remembered I can create photos of things.

This is the one my camera decided was best.

I kind of liked this one a bit better, but I'm not sure why.

All the links are source pairs today.

• Marnie.
• Marnie.
• Kissing a shark.
• Bad decisions.
• Those snacks sound like shit, United.  This isn't what people are pissed about.
• No, this is dumb.  Do you remember Service Merchandise, Target?  You'd go there to buy things, and you'd fill out a form for everything you wanted to buy, and that'd be sent into the warehouse in back, and they'd collect all your purchases.  It was kind of weird and awkward, and it always seemed to take forever to get your stuff.  This "Wonderland" shit is the same thing with RFID tags.  Last time I was at Target, there were about infinity people shopping.  If each person is buying on average N items, at a rate of r items per minute, then everyone can shop in (N / r) minutes.  See how that infinity cancels out?  Now assume Target has 100 people in the back picking items that are being bought.  This makes the shopping time (infinity / 100) * (N/ r) minutes, and I'm pretty sure Target isn't even open 24 hours a day.

Wednesday: Today was a weird mail day.

I wasn't going to have a picture today, but it rained a bit, so that was enough.

I checked the mail today to see if Amazon was lying when they said I shouldn't expect the copy of Marnie I ordered wouldn't arrive until July 10th.  They were, and now I have a children's book to read.  In addition to that, I had a survey from the Democratic party.  Well, technically it was them asking for money, but they fancied it up under the guise of a survey.  Odd things not on the survey:  Big checkbox for "don't fuck shit up," big checkbox for "which of these things do you think the tea party will fuck up" (because seriously, choose three of seven?  fuck that), any mention of the trade agreement that isn't very popular but is still being pushed irrationally.

I also got a notice to pick up some certified mail.  For someone who isn't me.  I don't think they're likely to give it to me, so I think I'll just let it sit at the post office.

• That's unfortunate.  More cats need to have real jobs.
• Damn it, bear, you're a bear.  And there's a window between you and that cat.  Come on, bear.
• Rich Lowry is a moron.
• Marnie will still be playing this weekend.  I think I may go see it again.

Tuesday: New rule: no playing Stardew until 6am.

Which I wouldn't have had to do if Marnie would have just gone to work one dang day and sold me a stupid chicken.  But nope!  She decided to take two days off, and then go to the Flower Dance, and not sell me anything to put in my stupid empty coop THAT I BUILT LIKE FOUR DAYS AGO, MARNIE.

But yeah, I probably shouldn't play for that long again.

The problem with getting a book delivered is that I now have to decide if I want to read it all right now, or save it for my travel book for when I visit Austin.

• And I finished my Crunchyroll show, and WTF, Bell's grandfather was actually Zeus in disguise? WTAF?
• Ellsworth Kelly stamps.  They didn't have any at the post office when I went there to pick up a package today.
• Some neural nets can be thought of as differential equations, and those can be thought of as classical mechanics.
• Geometry.

Tuesday: Book report.

The fact that it took me so long to finish it kind of says something.  The movie is better.  Part of it is that the movie flows better.  There's an overlap between the "Marnie" section and the "new family at the Marsh House" section.  That's not here in the book, so there's less of a "Marnie is a ghost" feel, leaving just "Anna is only remembering things from her childhood/is crazy."  I also don't understand the family dynamic in the book, either.  Auntie sends Anna to stay with friends on the coast, but when the new family moves into the Marsh House, Auntie gets a "visited and talked and went back home" and the friends get a "here's your toothbrush" bit, and then it's all assumed that Anna will just live with that family now.  WTF?  The movie also slimmed that family down.  There are five children in the book, only two of which have any distinguishing characteristics: the girl who finds the diary, and the baby.  All the other children blur together.  Finally, it's unclear to me why Anna's birth father and mother have to divorce, so her mother can marry someone new before she dies.  It doesn't serve any purpose for her to be married twice, unless this is some 1950s moralizing.  

• Punching bag.
• When birds walk.
• I noticed this Monday, but couldn't find any information about it.  I don't see how not displaying background images is going to make twitter more money.

Friday: Today was a good day.

Well, except for this.  The drinking fountain I use like three times a day to fill up my water bottle is broken, so I had to go hunt down a different drinking fountain.

But the salad place had tomato basil soup.  Mmmm!  I have the thought that when they have that, to go get a grilled cheese at the other place, get a big thing of soup, and do grilled cheese/tomato soup for lunch.  I hope they wouldn't mind.

And then for dinner I had movie theater hot dog!

 Which means:

I went to see Marnie again.  I decided that if it's really my Best Movie of the Year, I should see it multiple times.  It is still wonderful.

• Also, the Supreme Court decided to have a second day where they do the right thing, so now everyone can get married.  As it should be.  And that caused my RSS to blow up, so I'm putting up the like 1/2 of what was there that I liked.
• Because sometimes you have to bend rules.
• Because even if things still aren't perfect, a victory is a victory.
• Because that's-not-the-Canada-you're-looking-for.
• Because despite everything, he has worked to make things better.
• Because I thought it was funny.
• Because it's not like that.
• Because it is like that.
• Because even if it's fake, yes.
• Because thanks, Obama.
• Because Clarence Thomas wouldn't understand dignity if it hit him in the face.
• Because this is how the government works.
• Because hedgehog.
• Because it is so ordered.
• Because there will be next steps.
• Because the internet.
• Because Brother Cadfael and Gandalf the White.
• Because the truth.
• Because the Onion knew, two years ago.
• Because capitalism, I guess.
• Because Vox made the best gif.
• And yes.  Despite having to fight Congress like he was trying to burn down the entire world, he's gotten a lot of very good things done.
• Marnie.

I am never doing that many links ever again.

Tuesday: Still super sleepy.

Today was election day, so I picked up lunch on the way to the office.

And caught this guy.

 Which meant I could evolve it to

This guy.

 Which completed a quest objection.  Plus I got lucky and was able to repeat my throws so I could complete

Another quest objective.

 Leading to

Some annoyingly difficult "catch a bunch of rare types" things.

• Gawker was murdered.
• I'm annoyed to find cool art only after it's sold out.
• Looks like all my votes won.
• That's kind of cool.  More general snek regression tools like in R.
• I had  no idea that this song existed outside of Marnie.

Thursday: Tomorrow is a holiday.

Squirrel.

• Squirrel Girl.
• If you don't get to "Squirrel Earl" and think that this isn't the greatest thing ever, then you're dead inside.
• I'm tempted to get one at this price.  I have an old Castlevania DS game that I never played because my DS broke.
• I'd want to see Bee and Puppycat win.  RWBY is good, and has excellent music, but I've never been able to get through the whole thing.
• And it looks like this is playing here this weekend.  Unlikely to unseat Marnie as my best movie of the year, but it looks interesting.
• I now want to eat all the prosciutto.
• Huh.  This is a bit of history I was not aware of.
• Oh fuck you, the sky.  Just straight up stop being such a jackass.  Jerk.

Friday: Really hate writing.

Meh.  I don't understand how their pizza can go cold so quickly, and why the crust is like styrofoam.

Words.  It's nonstop fucking words all the time with writing.  Well, between trying to figure out why we prune and then grow a rejection mask.  I guess I just have to describe what we did, not completely justify eight years of decisions.

Also I discovered this evening that program API T is fairly easy to work with, and appears to support subsection processing.  Combining that with API I and some in between math probably would solve that problem completely.

• Ok, so you know why I'm not going to go see this movie?  Batman has a fucking gun.  Batman doesn't use fucking guns, because his parents were killed with a gun.  Remember when Batman fought Darkseid without a gun?  Also: Best Luthor.  Also also: the Superman "world made of cardboard" speech.
• This was interesting.
• Marnie and mushrooms.
• Turnip.
• Rick.
• Tigers.
• If this is true, then there's a non-zero chance that I was in a coma at some point.

Friday: Ugh I hate being sick.

It's just awful.  I'm still in the "gross head" phase of things, and I'm not looking forward to the "coughing so hard I pull muscles" phase.  I had originally planned to get sudafed at Safeway, and get a sandwich for lunch, but I put this plan together while sick, and conflated at least two Safeways together.  The one by work doesn't do pharmacy stuff.  This annoyed me, and I became further annoyed when they had ONE FUCKING PERSON working the entire deli/hot bar/sandwich bar, and I wasn't even the first person in line at the sandwich bar, and the person working decided that the mob of people who wanted fried chicken had to be served first, even though they got there later than the people at the sandwich bar, and she would have known that if she had told that jackass with the bluetooth headset to go fucking pay at the front LIKE EVERYONE ELSE instead of letting him check out at the hot bar.

So, it only took about a minute before I pulled my grocery bag from my basket, winged the basket across the floor to stop next to the rotisserie chickens, and declared, "FUCK THIS SHIT" and left.

I then went to Longs, where the pharmacist was helpful in getting me some sudafed ("which one?" "the one that works? IDK."), and I was able to buy some more kleenex, and then go to the bakery and get a sandwich, which even though they fucked up and put mayo on it, was still pretty ok.

I'm not kidding about this Tim Tams thing.

And I caught a lot more new Pokemon.  The Misdreavus was an egg hatch.  I'm not totally sure, but I think using the Go Plus makes it so I get egg distance more reliably.  I know it was just a 2km egg, but I just put it in to incubate yesterday.

When I woke up this morning, I knew I was sick and that I wanted soup, so I decided I would go get soup for dinner.  Soup isn't really totally filling, so I figured adding a side of mac and cheese would make it a complete meal.  Then I realized that just ordering sides might be weird.

I was assured it was "0" weird, so that's what I did.

This also gave me a chance to finish the Party City quest, and now I have plates to go with the napkins and cups and bright green plastic ware.  I have the minimum requirements for a theme party established.  Probably should plan out drinks and things, but I honestly don't know what we're doing yet.  There's more than a week, so it should work out ok.

• I had this comic as a kid.  It's...probably not for six-nine year olds.
• I don't know.  One of the comments makes a point I like:  Jar Jar isn't really capable of taking on the responsibilities they give him.  People can hate the character, but punishing him for not being smarter than the people being established as smarter doesn't seem right.
• Ok, Ghibli food gifs, but without the egg from Marnie?  I don't even like eggs, and that's an amazing scene.
• Taco Bell.
• Pokemon stuff.
• Mazel the "dog."
• I should really find a Let's Play of this game.
• Yeah.
• Bees.

Saturday: Adventures!

A week and a half ago, I did the eye test and chose new glasses, and was told that it would take three weeks to get them in.  That was a lie, as they called me yesterday to tell me that they were in.  They're only open until noon on Saturdays, so I had to get up early.

They're clearly better at the "things glasses are supposed to do," but I haven't completely gotten used to them, so things often look weird.  This is especially true at the far periphery, as they're slightly wider, so there's more not-fuzzy area than before.  I'm also thinking that next time I should get the more expensive thinner lens material.  These are a bit thicker than I was expecting.

And the case is this weird triangle prism thing that magnets shut.  Also I went to the movies.

Mr. Holmes opened here this weekend, so I wanted to go see that.  It's not a bad movie, and does avoid many of the "modern Holmes story tropes" that plague many of these kind of things.  There are a few issues that didn't make sense, but it holds together pretty well.

And then I thought about getting stuff at WF, but decided not to.  I started driving home, decided that I wasn't quite hungry enough to get a late lunch, and then decided that I probably should have gotten something at WF for dinner.  So I went to WF.  In Kailua.  Because I wanted to drive over the mountains again, I guess.  I took the Likelike, but then couldn't get over into the lane I needed to get on to Kamehameha.  While driving I saw Mokulele Drive, and I know that that connects.  It is also the street that has one of the best views of the Koolaus:

Stolen from street view because there was too much traffic to try taking my own image.  Which is unfortunate, because street view doesn't have a sunny sky.  The mountain on the left has a nice flatter area halfway down that you can kind of see.  That was super bright.  The range on the right has a bunch of ridges (that you can again kind of see), that were alternating with shadows today.

These are older links, but they check out.

• Bunnies.
• Kumamon.
• Marnie.  Still best movie of the year.

Tuesday: Grump.

Today was crappy.  I had to wake up early due to the building shutting water off for some repair.  I spent all day pounding against poorly designed code.  I had to restore my DVR/RSS database from backups.  Again.  Grump.

It was new candy day at work.

New candies.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but kind of assumed it was grape/orange/cherry fruit candies.  Looking it up, it's apparently grape/orange/cola "pop" candy.  It has a fizzy pop-rocks thing happening.

The bright point of the day was pastrami based.

And today's Drawlloween theme was "skull."  I didn't want to sort out a bunch of anatomy, so I remembered a post, and went with the "Usagi being electrocuted" anime-style skull.

I'm also even more like I was last week about Agents of Shield than I was last week.  This episode spent too much time showing how the special agency in charge of stopping alien invasions and mutant revolutions tracked down a shitty criminal, and then fucked that up because getting rid of the stupid villain would mean having to write stories that used bigger budget villains.

• The important detail left out of this "explanation" is that Raven from Teen Titans/Teen Titans Go is voiced by Tara Strong, who is also the voice of Twilight Sparkle on My Little Pony.  It's not as random as this makes it seem.
• Marnie + mushrooms.
• Cheating.
• That candy.

Friday: Well. So that's my best movie for 2015, then.

When Marnie Was There.

Completely worth having theater hot dog for dinner and not getting through my RSS stuff tonight.

• A lot of the reviews I found were either about Ghibli's future or had crap about how they didn't like the story.  So here's this one instead.
• Chipmunk.
• Pikachu.
• Best Batman will always be the best.

Wednesday: Database table corruption is a nightmare I didn't want to deal with tonight.

I have backups, so it's just a matter of re-ingesting the dump, and re-reading all of my RSS items.  More of a hassle than a disaster, but still annoying.

This doesn't have much to do with the point, but it segues to my phone.

Which is, of course, the best phone ever created, ever.  Yesterday, the Motorola Moto app seemed to have forgotten where I work, so it had stopped putting itself to silent mode when I got to the office.  I fixed that, and discovered that they'd updated the "you're driving" component.  Now, it can start playing music automatically when it determines you're driving and it's either tethered via bluetooth (which my car doesn't do), or it's plugged into the headphone jack (which my car does have).  This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for last weekend when I was driving around.  Get in the car, plug in phone, start driving, music starts automatically.

• Red panda.
• Cheetah.
• Squirrel Girl.
• Marnie.
• Yvonne Craig.
• I want to know who made brilliant Batman: TAS Batman and Catwoman balloons.

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.

Sunday: There are like three things I could be doing instead of saying I'm bored.

I'll probably get them done this evening anyway, so it's not that big of a deal.

Spicy umakara ramen today since I have two weekends that I won't be having ramen.

• Bop.
• Marnie.
• Norse gods.
• I thought this scene was well done.

Sunday: It's pretty good chicken.

Maui Mike's.  The Kailua one is still in the "Grand Opening" phase, with signs up saying that and the people still being trained.  In any case, pretty good chicken.

I'll probably try a sandwich next time.

This was my card.

Chicken.

Chicken.

The quarter chicken is a bit small, but they have really tasty fries.  It doesn't hurt that the fries become chicken soaked.

I also saw living chickens when I went to WF, but I didn't take any pictures this time.

• Animals eating.
• Bunnies.
• Bird house.
• Dogs.
• Marnie.

Friday: And now I'm hungry again.

I probably should have had more than this today.

Clicking on this item from my RSS (side note, the correct answer is yaki-gyoza, obviously) started me thinking about the following problem.  Given a poll, what's the best way to estimate the minimum number of poll responses necessary to create the observed result distribution?  My initial thought is that you take the minimum response separation.  When I clicked, this poll had yaki: 70.79%; omnomnom: 14.85%; wrong: 14.36%.  The minimum separation is 0.49%.  Assume this is one person.  Then the results have [144.469    30.306    29.306].  Hrm.  Big fractional residuals.  Two people? [288.939    60.612    58.612].  Still pretty bad.  Three?  [433.408    90.918    87.918].  And then I wrote a perl script, and it looks like dN = 20 is the lowest solution, although the residual is still pretty large (0.63).  dN=7 has lower residual, but doesn't round to the right solution.  This seems to suggest that the residual isn't the best metric here.  There's a periodicity in the residual, so that should limit the number of points that need to be checked, but it still seems like there's no great algorithm other than "check a bunch of possibilities."

• Dog.
• Cat and owl.
• Beep beep!  Space shuttle coming through!
• At least Pikachu is trying.
• Marnie isn't playing here anymore.

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.

Saturday: You can't turn left there.

Mostly I just wanted soup today.

The turkey and brie panini isn't as good as the turkey and sun dried tomato panini.  Part of the problem is that there was just too much brie on the sandwich, and the whole thing cooled off into a glumpy mess.  Not really bad, just not as good as the girl at the counter led me to believe.  

• Amphibious.
• This looks interesting.
• Fish vs cat vs inflatable shark.
• Marnie.