Monday: No one will care about this.

This is what my phone home screen usually looks like:

Like this.

 Here's what it looked like at some point today:

WTF?

Leading me to think, "WTF is this Brainiac shit?"  It turns out if you move one app onto another app accidentally, it makes a new folder and attempts to stitch together a new nightmare logo.

And it looks like something unfortunate happened across the street this evening.

• I didn't know today was Roger Dean's birthday.
• Have we discussed this owl and kitten yet?
• Dragons are jerks.
• Ok, those are cool birds.

Sunday: Even with all the procrastination, I think the talk for tomorrow is done.

The biggest problem with the procrastination is that it was all in the morning.  I woke up at 7 for some stupid reason, watched youtube videos until I felt sleepy again, went back to sleep, woke up, watched some more youtube, decided to get out of bed, and suddenly by the time I was ready to go get lunch, it was nearly three.

Oops.

Today's panorama came out pretty well.

That means that I couldn't do the "get lunch, come home and write talk for tomorrow, go get a burger for dinner."  Maybe I'll just get that burger for dinner tomorrow.

• While I was driving to get lunch, I noticed that a bunch of the stop lights were not working.  Luckily, I was on Ala Moana, where the rule appears to be, "fuck everyone else, we're on Ala Moana, so we're not stopping."  Not totally the legal solution (which is four way stops), but I guess it works.  Unless you were planning on going to downtown.  Which was the point that got lost here.  The lights were out because downtown ker-sploded a bit.
• Cat.
• These are all so wonderful.
• If you feel like being angry about politics and economics, here's a big long list of "conservatives are fucking idiots who can't understand when they're wrong."

Saturday: Blah.

Yet another database crash.  It's definitely dying disk hardware.  Which I suspect means I need to do a clean reinstall.  Which is a pain.

In any case, I needed to get notebooks for work.  Since the only place that sells them is B&N, and B&N is only at Ala Moana now, that's where I had to go.

Ala Moana.

They're doing a bunch of construction, so it's even more of a mess than it usually is.  I assumed there'd be no one at their kaiten sushi place.  I was wrong, which is why I had time to take the pictures for that mosaic.

"Beep beep!  Sushi time!"

Genki continues to not be as good as KuruKuru.  They have a larger menu, and a more active belt, and all the new technology, but the food just isn't as good.

See?  Super thin cuts, and the rice was sticking to the plates.

But, it's where I was, and I don't like fighting the always-too-hot-and-humid food court area or the tourists-eating-at-Bubba-Gump fancy food court.

And B&N only had the perforated page notebooks again.  I got two, but I should probably just switch to ordering online.

• Marnie.
• Everyone loves Lottie Grote.
• The internet is lame today, so I only have two links.

Friday: Lunch disaster

I went out to get lunch today, with the idea to stop at the bakery and pick up some random baked goods for lunch.  However, the bakery was out of all the random baked goods that make appropriate lunches, leaving only cookies and doughnuts.  I bought some cookies for later, and then decided to go to the salad place.

At first, I was really happy, because they had the tomato soup that I like.

 I decided to try a sandwich instead of a salad today, because I was wrong.  Very wrong.

Fucking mayo everywhere.

First, mayo is not listed as a standard sandwich ingredient on their menu.  Had it been listed, I could have said, "no fucking gross ass mayo."  Second, what kind of psychopath puts the sauces between the meat and veggies in a sandwich?  Sauces go next to the bread.  That's where they go.  It's like rule one of making a damn sandwich.  Putting the mayo in the middle means that there's no way to eat this sandwich.  It is utterly ruined from the beginning, and after punching it in frustration, I ate the bashed fragments of chips that came with this train wreck of a sandwich.

The moon was up when I got home, but I couldn't get a good picture of it.

• So the original Brock/James voice from Pokemon is a jerk.
• Just because you think someone is pretty, doesn't give you the right to touch them.
• McNuggets.
• This is what should be done everywhere.  Homeless people magically stop being homeless when you give them homes.

Thursday: "Oh no. That would have been a good idea, huh."

Don't do it, bird!  You have so much to live for!

I didn't take the picture, but a minute later, he had his tiny bird toes curled over the edge.

• Buy a calendar, dumbass.  This isn't 1987 anymore.
• I think the important point here is that given an effectively infinite image set, you can match images drawn from a different effectively infinite image set.
• Home schoolers are pretty much insane.
• This is kind of a funny point as well.  Everyone who attempted to ruin their marriages probably couldn't have actually cheated.  
• It's important to read the text underneath for context.
• Batgirl.
• Not Batgirl.  Also, this clearly resets the "DC did something stupid" counter.

Wednesday: Rainy day again.

It got suddenly dark before this started.  It's hard to tell since my camera compensated.

• This is a good Batgirl comic.
• This is a jerk of a cat.
• Bear + Flowers.
• Bear + Flowers.
• Religion, politics, and economics.
• Pizza oven.

Tuesday: It is rainy this week.

See?

• Don't be a jerk, cat.
• Kansas is basically doomed.

Monday: This week is five days long, and that's terrible.

I didn't think I'd have a picture for today, so I took this one of one of the stray cats near work.

But then there was a cool sunset.  I attempted to use the cage transform tool in gimp to smooth out the obvious break, but because the gimp is written by morons, I gave up.  Why are they morons?  Because after they switched to the "everything default saves to xcf because we want to prevent data loss," the cage tool doesn't prevent the data loss that can occur if you accidentally hit a button that switches the tool.  And it doesn't save the transforms it's calculated.  And it completely recalculates everything when any anchor point is moves.  Which is obviously wrong, as each interpolation introduces additional error into the final image, so you want to do a single resampling of the output pixel from the grid over the input pixel space, not N-resamplings.  It's mathematically wrong, and pushes for a larger input image to reduce the scale of the errors.  This means not only do you have to do N samplings over an X*Y image, which is going to be N*r*r times slower than doing one resampling over a rescaled X/r*Y/r image.  "Because it ruins interactivity." Go fuck yourself, gimp developers.

• Go fuck yourself, H&R Block.
• I assume this will play here, since we do seem to get all the GKIDS releases.
• Also, don't bonds not work that way?  If you buy a bond that matures in thirty years, you don't get to say, "I need this money today, give me my money back."  You have to go find someone else, and say, "I need money today, I'll sell you this bond at somewhat less than face value, because I just told you I need money."  Sure, the Treasury could buy that bond back, but there doesn't appear to be any incentive to do that.  It would I guess put a downward pricing pressure on potential new bonds (because people could buy them secondhand from China), which would lead to an increase in interest rates required to make the new bonds competitive.  But of course that chart.
• Health care.
• Monica Rambeau.  I'm pretty sure this issue was one of the first comic books I had, and she was in it.  That's part of the reason I was glad to see her in Nextwave.

Sunday: Actual Sunday.

I couldn't decide between getting a burger and getting curry for late lunch today.  Since I need to get a replacement battery for my car key, I decided to get a burger at the mall, and stop by Radio Shack, since selling batteries is pretty much all they're good for.

I saw this car on the way.  The sticker on the right tells me that "keiki on board."  The one on the left is giving me the middle finger.  So, I guess those kids are fucking jerks.

The burger place was surprisingly busy at 4pm, so I had to eat at the bar.  

And Radio Shack screwed up their only purpose and didn't have any batteries in the CR-16XX range.  Amazon really only wants to sell me 5+ packs, which is inconvenient for something I have to replace every three years or so.

• Why?
• Sumerians.
• Bear.
• "“Is this Japanese food?” he asked Go.  Go replied “No, it’s Chinese.”  “I think I hate Chinese food now too,” said the driver."

Saturday: Today felt like Sunday a lot, but it was really just second Saturday.

These are the problems of three day weekends.  I did my standard "do absolutely nothing productive until I get super hungry.  I remembered that La Tour has a croque monsieur, and that sounded pretty good.  I was hoping for something like this:

Which, sure, obviously it's not going to be that good, but it's best to dream of perfection.

 So what did I get:

It looks more burnt than it was.  But still, a bit of a disappointment from my high expectations.  It being open-faced also confused me, but after some IMs with Julie, this is apparently an acceptable style.

Afterwards, I was driving down Ala Moana by the sunny shore, and remembered that Alakea turns into the Pali highway, so I took that turn.  Less than ten minutes later, I was at the overlook.

Where it was decidedly not sunny.

I'm tempted to claim that it wasn't technically raining up there.  When you are literally in the cloud, it kind of seems more like you're bumping in the rain before it has a chance to fall.  Also, this is the most Silent Hill picture I think I've ever taken.  There were people here when I arrived, but none of them had umbrellas or were prepared for the weather, so they were quickly leaving.

This chicken gang was not happy about the situation.

Neither was this one.

• Jazz hands.
• Watch out!  He's armed!
• Beauty and the Beast.

Which reminds me of the other story I was going to put in today's post.  I've been playing Disney Tsum Tsum off and on, and finally accumulated enough money to buy a fancy character box, as that seems to be what the strategy guides suggest (although "strategy," because they're often "use this character specifically, even though everything is random, and everything would cost a bajillion dollars if you use the buy-shit method").  I was hoping for someone cool, and ended up with Belle.  Ok, sure.  With my previous characters, my best strategy was to use Dale, and spam the "turn a bunch in the middle into Chips, which you can then clear into a big line" move as much as possible.  With this, I was averaging about 100-130 coins per round.  My first game with Belle?  500 coins.  Her special move is "I'll dance in this pattern with Beast, and everything we touch is immediately collected in chains of like 20+".  So yes, getting a fancy box is certainly better, because they're at least five times more effective, even when they're five levels lower.  Anyway, back to linkstorm.

• They're so happy.
• There's a lot of details and backstory to this, but the short version is: a bunch of jerk-ass racist/sexist/jerk-ass-ist jerk asses flooded the (sci-fi award) Hugo nominations with their own picks because the nomination process is open in a somewhat super-democratic manner.  However, the Hugos have a "just don't give out this award" option for the final votes.  So that's pretty much what happened, and it's kind of funny.

Friday: Today was a holiday.

So I went to a movie:

I did a combo here, with the ticket picture and the sushi picture smooshed together.

More sushi.

Anyway, the movie.  It's

First, I guess, here's the wikipedia quick description of the book it's based on: "The prophet, Almustafa, has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with" a lot of things.  The movie covers eight of those if I'm counting correctly, each done in the unique style of a particular animator/animation group.  Those segments are wonderfully done, and Liam Neeson uses his calm Star Wars voice and not his angry every-other-movie-I've-seen-him-in voice to read the associated bit from the book.

However, the wrap around story of Mustafa (as named in the movie) is kind of a bland cell-shaded 3-D CG thing.  It's well done, but not as unique as the individual segments.  The thing that was kind of annoying was the "single mom and daughter, and the daughter doesn't talk until she's sufficiently moved by the main character" in the wrap around.  It felt tacked on, like they needed a kid to justify animation.  And just now, reading the text of the book (because it's public domain somewhere in the world, so it's public domain on the internet), I see in the eleventh paragraph: "And there came out of the sanctuary a woman whose name was Almitra. And she was a seeress."  Ok.  So Almitra (the kid) isn't a kid.  Is she mute?  "And she hailed him, saying:  Prophet of God, in quest of the uttermost, long have you searched the distances for your ship. And now your ship has come, and you must needs go."  I see.

The wrap around also mentions that Mustafa has been in the laxest jail ever (a cottage guarded by alternate love interest for the mom) for the past seven years, and before he can leave, the government wants him to recant everything he's said in the past.  Or they'll kill him.  Which

"Gibran followed The Prophet with The Garden of The Prophet, which was published posthumously in 1933."

So you're saying Mustafa doesn't die at the end of the book?

"“O Mist, my sister, my sister Mist, 
I am one with you now. 
No longer am I a self. 
The walls have fallen, 
And the chains have broken; 
I rise to you, a mist, 
And together we shall float upon the sea until life’s second day, 
When dawn shall lay you, dewdrops in a garden, 
And me a babe upon the breast of a woman.”"

So I think that's my issue with it.  The direct parts from the book are well done, and the unique animation parts are well done, but there's something jarring in the added material.  As if just making something artistic with a light story wasn't sufficient, and so conflict had to be added in to satisfy someone.

• I think this means that Ellen Page is pretty awesome, and Ted Cruz is a hate-filled wad of clay who can't recognize famous people when they ask him questions.
• Fundamentally, yes, this is pretty much all there is to it.
• Immune System-kun.
• Because the TV has to sleep.
• Birds.  With important bird facts.
• Specifically this holiday.

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.

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.

Tuesday: I don't have a title, but I have a bunch of links.

And some action birds.

• That's unfortunate.
• Ryan North vs. A Hole.
• Oops.
• The Tigress.
• I've seen this before, but just today did I notice the pelican at the end, with what is clearly a, "Holy fuck! Did you just see that guy steal your fish?" look.
• Gazebo.

Monday: Things are probably on schedule to finish when we claimed they would?

Which is it, stupid mobile ads?  Should I google myself or not?  Also I gave Chuck Schumer angry eyebrows and John Kerry a top hat.

• PCA.
• I thought red pandas were doing better.  I am sad that they are not.
• Horse.

Sunday: Ramen day.

And gyoza.

And while I was eating, the tree next to my car gave me a flower.  I think it's a plumeria.

Diamond Head.

I also noticed today that my next door neighbor who parks behind me has crashed his car again.  This is at least the second time.  I would have thought that if he's going to buy a Mercedes, he'd at least be a little bit careful with it.

• Pants-cat.
• Flapper students.
• Pika-rade.

Saturday: Did I forget yesterday?

Oops.

This steak was not as good as the last one.  Neither was the mac and cheese.  Nor the soup.  Basically, this was just marginally acceptable for lunch.

And I stopped to look at the ocean.  Looks like the horizon is a bit wonky in this panorama.

The clouds over the mountains were cool too.

• Everyone should watch this video.
• Kitten.
• Science Sleuths of History.
• "Who wants pancakes that man is a werewolf."

Friday: This is totally on Friday.

• The end of World War II.

Thursday: At least it's Thursday, I guess.

Sure.  Why not.

• I'm pretty sure that when I saw this news today, I was concerned that I had gone crazy and was just making things up.
• Also, if they're cutting the show from an hour to thirty minutes, then the 35 episode season is still half an hour less than the 18 episodes this season.
• And the economic analysis of the educational benefits of Sesame Street.
• This is just crazy.
• Bunny.

Wednesday: And that's why you don't ask me how I'm doing.

"How are you doing?"

"Meh."

"You could just say fine!"

"I wish I could ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the planet."

Also I looked at posters and found one from North Korea.

• Elephant.
• Bear.
• Train-station-cats.

Tuesday: I sorted out a bunch of stuff at work, but that stuff is still stupid slow.

What the fuck does that even mean?

• Snoopy and Batman.
• Adventure Time and Mad Max.
• Kitten and Lizard.
• Very Specific and Video Game Joke.

Monday: Another week of too many things and too many deadlines.

You know what, Koala?  I don't think you're properly trained on how to use that camera.

• Cat devil.
• Sugar tax.
• Jill Trent.
• Adventure Time.
• Realistic game.
• Evangelion.

Sunday: Whatever.

I couldn't decide on lunch, and it eventually became me not deciding on dinner, so I went with sushi.

You'll notice this isn't sushi.

Unfortunately, everyone else in the world decided sushi as well, giving it a 30+ minute wait.  Since no one ever eats at Chilis, I went there, was immediately seated, and had food fairly quickly.  The chicken was rubbery, and the steak was cooked to death and tough.  It was simultaneously disappointing and not-that-bad.  Whatever.

Then I came home and spent the entire evening working on my poster for next week, and I'm still not terribly happy with what I stopped with, but given that no one bothered looking at posters last week, it's probably not a problem.  Whatever.

And I don't have a third link.  Whatever.

• I haven't seen all of those, but no, that list is garbage.  Kaguya is probably a good number three, but the rest of that is nonsense.  I'll think up a list when I'm not super behind on everything.
• Ducks.

Saturday: I could have done stuff today, but instead I chose not to.

First I got lunch at Nico's.  They were playing the blues.

Obligatory panorama.

 Then I started driving.  Then this happened:

I was going to drive around the north side, but traffic was horrible, so I turned back.  Then traffic was horrible on H-1, so skipped the exit to go home and kept going.  The detour in Kailua was to pick up some groceries at Foodland.  Then a standard Pali return.

And then I had dinner, because I had to pick up more gum, and the only place that sells it is the Japanese market next to the pancake place.  So.  Pancakes.

• I think this is the beginning of the split between the psychotic part of the Republican party and the merely malicious part.
• Good girl.
• Marnie.
• Bear.

Friday: These are horrible chairs.

Because there isn't a good way to sit in them that doesn't have that top metal bar digging into your spine.

• Duh.
• Popty ping.
• Just in case it wasn't clear why the Republican party has problems with women.
• Coloring book.
• Red panda, just...no, red panda.  That's not how you do anything.

Thursday: Thursday is not Friday.

You are silly, animals.

• Blimp.
• Today was the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
• Today was the last episode of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
• Today was the final installment of "The Best Restaurant in New York Is..." because Caity Weaver left Gawker.

Wednesday: Cloth printed posters seem to not work as well as paper ones.

Because they tend to stretch and sag in weird ways.

Bear attack.

• That would have been a good title.
• Dog vs. cat.
• Facebook sucks.

Tuesday: I came up with a title earlier, but I forgot what it was.

Probably because it's stupid hot and humid because this stupid tropical storm is donking up the weather.

Here's Mechagodzilla and Godzilla with the news.

• Did I link to this Godzilla Mother thing?  If not here it is.
• Here's a thing about British politics, because I needed more than one link, and this was the only remaining tab open.

Monday: Today I forgot the word "pushpin."

I had to put it together as "tiny stabby things for posters."

It's similar to this.

• Brilliant.
• Aminals.
• Kitten.
• Today I was reminded of Sithrak, and had to hunt down this comic in the archives.  This comic is SFW, but associated ads and links are unlikely to be.

Sunday: After fighting printers at work for two hours, I wanted mac and cheese.

And given how garbage the preview of this mosaic was, I'm stunned the final product looks this good.  It even got the cup logo in there, instead of the unreadable rotated version from two of the input images.

• Swords.
• Cats are jerks.
• Bunny.