Friday, September 30, 2016

Fine. I'll make my own Drawlloween.

I haven't found a decent Drawlloween list for this year that isn't the same as last year's, or just crap.  So, instead, I'm going to co-opt my "tldr lovecraft" label and draw the real scary thing in a bunch of Lovecraft's stories.  After scrolling through the full list, I think I've chosen the list I'm going to use:

  1. The Call of Cthulhu
  2. Medusa's Coil
  3. In the Vault
  4. Pickman's Model
  5. The Quest of Iranon
  6. The Outsider
  7. The Colour out of Space
  8. The Haunter of the Dark
  9. The Rats in the Walls
  10. The Picture in the House
  11. The Statement of Randolph Carter
  12. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
  13. The Silver Key
  14. Through the Gates of the Silver Key
  15. The Shadow over Innsmouth
  16. Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
  17. The Dunwich Horror
  18. The Thing on the Doorstep
  19. In the Walls of Eryx
  20. At the Mountains of Madness
  21. The Music of Erich Zann
  22. Cool Air
  23. The Nameless City
  24. The Unnamable
  25. The Dreams in the Witch House
  26. The Doom That Came to Sarnath
  27. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
  28. The Terrible Old Man
  29. The Shadow out of Time
  30. The Whisperer in Darkness
  31. The Evil Clergyman
We'll see if this is something I can keep up.

Friday: Pastrami.

Mostly because I saw this news story today.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Thursday: Someone had a birthday today.

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

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

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



Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Wednesday: I saw a cat yesterday.

I took a picture, and remembered it when I went to see if I took any pictures today.  You can probably guess the answer to that.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Tuesday: Just awful.

I would have taken the screenshot of the award screen, but I was ordering lunch.
Which, despite saying "no mayo," ended up with mayo.  Who even likes mayo?  Mayo is just awful.

Agents of SHIELD continues to also be kind of awful, mostly because no one has learned the lesson of "maybe we all sit down and compare notes."  I understand that this is because the writers are bad at coming up with conflict, but this isn't real conflict, it's just people being dumb.  Like,

Red arrows point from someone keeping a secret to the person they're keeping secrets from.  Purple arrows link people who have a joint secret they're keeping from people.  Blue arrows link people who have relationships where they probably shouldn't be keeping secrets.
I have my live notes after the break.

Also, consensus seems to be the new director is this guy.  Sure.  Fine.  Whatever.  He's super strong, and that guy seems to not have any "oh, but secretly a bad guy" bullshit to fuck it up.


  • Pokemon.
  • Not Pokemon.
    • Debate quotes.
    • More debate stuff.  I can't wait for her to be president.
    • Crossover events are bad.
    • Ok, skipping the racism because that's obviously bad, WTF is going on in this picture?
      • I assume this is supposed to be Fu Manchu.  Those are not situation appropriate clothes for "doing evil."
      • And did he steal all the cloth for himself, and that's why he can't get proper clothing for his minion?  I mean, again.  "Doing evil."  You should at least have a shirt and shoes.
      • What is the plan to kill this lady?  Is she supposed to hang?  You can't stab somebody?
      • Besides, I think if that door is open that much, it's probably too late for her.  You don't design gallows so that you have to manually open the door the entire way, with or without comically large levers.
      • Was this all happening after they robbed a pet store and took all their tiny lizards?  Are they supposed to kill her?  What happens when the door opens?  Honestly, this one point is the real reason for this link/rant.  Why tiny lizards?
      • Is the one guy just sitting on the floor?
      • I'm unclear about the other guy, he seems to be leaping from ??? to ???
      • The minion doesn't cast a shadow.
      • Also: super racist.


Monday, September 26, 2016

Monday: Discovering something that's supposed to work doesn't, and that something that should work, also just doesn't.

Today was a super productive day.

And it was rainy.
And everyone else in the world got to watch the debate today, except me, because I had to fight uncooperative things at work.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Sunday: Blah.

Earlier this week I switched my car CD to a burned disk of songs from The Vision of Escaflowne.  For the first time in like 15 years, it suddenly occurred to me how odd the entire premise of the show is.  A school girl from Japan gets transported to a generally medieval parallel world, and she has to help a prince, a different prince, and a catgirl battle the first prince's older brother, the second prince's younger sister, and the actual for realsies Sir Isaac Newton to save their world and ours.  Also giant fighting robots.

And I got sushi today.  They brought my unagi, and then brought my unagi again.  All before getting the miso soup, which I expected to be the first thing to come out, since it's the easiest to make.  In any case, I ate double unagi today, because I'm not going to turn down a second plate, especially when I'm not even really sure what else I wanted.

  • Not Pokemon because I want this link to be first.
  • Pokemon.
    • Sure, why not?
    • Ghost Pokemon.
    • There is no third link because the thing that was potentially going to be the third link wasn't "that's bad pikachu cosplay."  It was "oh, that's just an awful porn that spent like zero dollars on their costume."

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Saturday: It's helpful to have an internet to tell me what to do.

Today I didn't know what I wanted to get for lunch.  I kind of wanted something "barbecue-y", but wasn't sure what that involved.  Then I started reading twitter, and Ko Takeuchi was doing more of his interactive twitter game.  A lot of the answers had a running theme:
So that helped me decide.
Curry!  With a pork cutlet!  And spicy!  And a ghost because spooky ghosts!
It wasn't as good as it usually is.  The pork was both over cooked (see the left edge) and under cooked (see the goopy fat deposits that are actually kind of hard to see here).  Still, curry is pretty much always good, even when it's not super good.

And there's a Pokestop I only spun once, partially because I was super into my curry.  



Friday, September 23, 2016

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

I also don't have great pictures today.
I recently realized you can get colorful hair ties.

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

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Thursday: Blah.

I didn't notice this at the sushi place by work until today.
Then, later in the day, when I spun around in frustration because one of the things I've been working on seems to be broken by network issues beyond my control:
I discovered a rainbow on my pants.
 It was an optical rainbow, so it's ok.

And Doc Martens sent me the boy version of the ad I got earlier in the week.
Eh.  Not sold on these.  This one is also cropped because I wasn't going to stitch a too-tall ad back together.



Wednesday, September 21, 2016

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.
  • 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.  

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Tuesday: The dumbest person in the world.

Was the person who decided that the "one way" sign didn't really apply to them, and that it was perfectly fine to drive down Piikoi the wrong way.  I was so surprised that I only had time to move out of my lane (to, you know, not fucking crash), honk my horn (to illustrate that they are a fucking moron), and give them the finger (because I can't cause people to explode with my mind).  The other thing that makes it even worse is that the street this idiot turned off of only connects to one other road, and that goes the other way.  Plus, there's another street, slightly further down that can be used to cross back over, removing all need to drive the wrong way like an idiot.

And I finally leveled up today.

After catching a wild Wartortle!
Also, I think someone needs to work on their email marketing.
I mean, sure, those are nice shoes, and I like them, but I don't really think they're my style.

Also, Agents of Shield is back on TV.  I still have fifteen minutes left in the episode, but I'm glad to see that after last season's problems with not telling people the truth, and hiding things from your friends and allies, that they've solved that problem by not telling people the truth and hiding things from their friends and allies.  "I made a robot lady, even though I'm not allowed to do science without supervision, since I was technically a bad guy."  "I'm going to go against orders because I don't really like orders that I don't give."  "I'm going to alienate my friends in order to try and gain some control over this new stupid system that's in charge now."  "I'm going to run away and be dumb, and try to fight Ghost Rider."  "I'm going to be Ghost Rider."  Tony's not the only one who makes bad decisions.



Monday, September 19, 2016

That sucks.

I think this means that the little squirrel thingy in the sidebar is going to disappear.
Which sucks.  :(

Monday: This is your fault, the sky.

I was just sitting at my desk, thinking about how much I kind of wanted mac and cheese.  Then, when I was leaving work, it immediately started raining.  I even looked outside before leaving my office to make sure it was dry out.  So yeah, fuck you, the sky.  You and your stupid convenient rain.

And then I went to the other La Tour Cafe to get mac and cheese. 
Because I'm not going to let the stupid jerk sky ruin my day.  Plus, when I was checking that no place else really has m&c and is close by, I discovered that the other LTC has a "Nashville hot chicken" sandwich.

I didn't get the mayo, pickles, or slaw.  I just wanted a spicy chicken sandwich to eat with my m&c.

It's pretty good.  The brioche bun is a bit over sweet, and the chicken could be a lot more spicy, but whatever.  It was a good dinner.

And I discovered that the big table that was at the Aina Haina one is now here.  It looks like they cut it in half, which is kind of unfortunate.



Sunday, September 18, 2016

Sunday: I balanced out yesterday by being as unproductive as possible today.

I was going to scan another shelf or two of books.  I may still get around to that.

I did get ramen, though.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Saturday: Getting up for lunch at lunch time made today rather productive.

But since the Koa Cafe place I talked about on Thursday closes at 2, I couldn't do my usual "get lunch around three" strategy.
I probably shouldn't have gotten the $9 bottle of juice.  It was pretty good, but not $9 good.
That wasn't what I was there for, of course.  I didn't wait in parking lot gridlock (before simply driving into an open space that no one bothered with) for expensive juice.

Gochujang chicken and waffle.
It was good.  Not the infinite good I had imagined it would be in my head, but realistically good.  The syrup is spicy too, so I think there's just the one gochujang/syrup mix used on both.  The waffle is good, and holds up against the chicken better than my last C&W experience.  I could have done with a bit more chicken, but that's probably always true.  I think this is a good place.  Parking is a bit tricky, but it's not impossible.

Then I came home, and indexed booked with that app I found.  I've covered all the books in my bedroom bookshelf (except three old books without ISBNs, that I will index when I get to the rest of that same series), half the pile of books in front of my main bookshelf (now far better sorted by size and standing upright instead of, you know, "pile"), and the top shelf of that main bookshelf (which was two rows of mostly paperbacks, which I've now converted into two rows of mostly paperback with an added half shelf on top of some of those paperbacks where they're all identical in height).  This covers 226 books, and somewhere between a third and a half of all my books.  I don't know exactly, which is part of the reason for this whole exercise.

One interesting feature of having all my books in a database is being able to look at trends:
Like when the books in this sample of my library were published.
This is kind of interesting to me.  Other than two glitches (I have one book published in 1994, and zero from 2012), I have had a roughly linear fraction of books from 1988 onwards, gaining about 7 books a year (or, scaled to the full collection, something like 14-21 books a year).  This kind of makes sense, as I have almost none of my "kids books" here, which would probably fill the early 80s section better (and increase the tail on the left, as I know a lot of those books were classic kids books).

One more library related note:  I'm very happy that the I in ISBN is international.  This means all the books I have from Japan and Germany that have proper bar codes just work.  No futzing around typing in numbers manually (I'm looking at you, crappy paperbacks with shitty bar codes), no searching for a plausibly consistent edition based off of a title (old books), no giving up and just accepting the first acceptable result (Thucydides).  I also learned that a book that's only "kind of old" may have a SBN, which can be converted by prefixing it with a zero.

And then I got dinner (although some of the indexing happened after dinner):

I decided to try their duck dip.  Braised duck, onion, apple, gouda(?), aioli, kewpie mayo (I didn't get that, although kewpie is better than regular mayo), cilantro (is garbage), and arugula (which got lost somewhere).  I then ordered french onion soup, which was dumb, because the dip is basically a soup itself.  The dip claims to be a Tan Tan, but it had odd flavors that reminded me more of a curry.  I wasn't sure of either by themselves, but together, the sandwich and dip worked well.
And I saw a really fuzzy dog:
I may have taken lots of pictures.
 And there was a good sunset.
See?
And since there were four Pokestops, I walked around the shopping center collecting things.  Plus three Ekans.  Aina Haina is an Ekans nest.

And then I bought some macarons, and took another picture of the sunset.



Friday, September 16, 2016

Friday: This was the plan all week long.

After work, I was going to go get a burrito.
It is very hard to make the unicorn horn look normal.
There are three Pokestops near the burrito place, but only two of them can be hit all the time.  The third one depends on where the game places your trainer.
On the other hand, Target (the actual destination) only has one Pokestop, and it's only available by the entrance to the store.
The Target trip was mostly to get a few things that are easier to get at Target.  Also, I had to go back and get the check out lady to fix my total, because she scanned the $20 toilet paper cube twice.  I also decided to get a new shower curtain, because my current one is kind of old.  They didn't have the same "generic calm leaves" pattern, so I got a "stylized three-tone grey cityscape scene."  

"I should get new shower hooks to go with this new curtain."

Except no.
I have wonderful frog shaped hooks, and I was hoping to get either new frogs, or some similar "small animal" or "silly thing" theme.  But the kids shower curtain area (where I got the frogs) doesn't have hooks, and the hook section only has boring ass grown up ones.  Also: tacky ass hooks with giant fake gems.  Why do you hate fun, Target?

And the moon is full, and was out above the store, but I couldn't get my phone to set the exposure correct.

But this shot I took from home came out pretty decent.
I should level up tomorrow, I think.
I also spent fifteen minutes last night looking at book library apps again.  I found one that seems to work well, and has a good scanning and export capability.  I'm hoping to work through all my books this weekend, so I can finally have a proper catalog of what I have.  This was partially prompted by not knowing where one book is, and that led to a desire to organize things, and that to the idea of making the catalog and, pending shelf space I don't have magically appearing, organizing everything by Library of Congress call numbers.

The only problem with this is that the app doesn't do LoC numbers, and there doesn't seem to be a clean online mapper.  The actual LoC catalog returns the full call number for a given ISBN, but it doesn't seem to be complete (it didn't find my Yotsuba book).  This one seems to be more complete (it looks to be based on a survey of actual libraries), but doesn't supply a full call number, just the first component.  I think the solution is to use the app to make the catalog, and then write something that scrapes both of those pages when I convert the CSV export into an sqlite database.

The final benefit of this is that I'll be far better at not buying duplicates.  I know I have two or three clear duplicates, and I've stopped buying Adventure Time trades because I can't remember which ones I have.  Even more surprising was when I was looking for that book last night and discovered that I have a book of Kafka.  When did I buy that?  What else did I buy at the same time that I read instead of that?  I have no idea.



Thursday, September 15, 2016

Thursday: If you pay for something with a $100 bill, you're an asshole.

Doubly so if the thing you're buying is less than $20.  You actively went to the bank, went to a teller, had them give you money in stupid denominations, and then went to a store, and used your stupid change grab bill to make everyone sit and wait while you pretended you're some rich fuckface.  No one wants to waste all this time making your stupid fragile ego feel better.  Either use a reasonable value of cash, or be like everyone normal, and use a damn card.

I caught a near perfect Pinsir today.
After I dumped by old "best Pinsir," I had a moment of panic.  "Wait, Pinsir doesn't evolve into anything, right?"  Nope.  Pinsir is sterile, and doesn't do anything.
And I evolved an Abra into this Kadabra, because it's also pretty good.

  • Pokemon.
  • Not Pokemon.
    • Thing I wasn't aware of: Eritrea is a horrible dictatorship, and not just the generic low GDP African country I had thought.  I should probably do a pass through wikipedia/CIA factbook to make sure I'm not confused about other things.
    • "Please help."
    • Puppers.
      • No link here, but that reminded me of something.  I saw a story earlier talking about roofers, and I had just been reading a bunch of "smol pupper" stuff, and my brain immediately thought, "I wonder what kind of pupper that is," and then the other part of my brain that was paying attention responded with, "like people who fix actual fucking roofs."
    • I wonder if I can access this through the library at work.
    • Soy sauce on ice cream.  Huh.
    • I'm glad I follow the local magazine on Twitter, or else I might have missed this restaurant.  I'm curious about a number of things, but I think their gochujang chicken and waffle is at the top of my list.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Wednesday: Chadar cheese.

It was rainy today.

Very rainy.
And then it mostly stopped, so I could go get lunch, which I chose to get at Safeway's sandwich thing, because I needed to get a few grocery things, so that seemed a good way to plan things.  I don't understand why Safeway is so super slow about everything.

I also don't understand why they have like three different mayos, but no bbq sauce.  So I bought some for my office while I was there, because roast beef sandwiches work best with bbq sauce.
At least the guy making my sandwich stuffed it with a lot of stuff.  Also didn't charge me for the bacon.  Also doubled the cheese.  Which autocorrect didn't like.



Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Tuesday: I had a good title at some point.

Just like I'm sure I had a good caption when I took this picture.

I finally got the buddy update for Pokemon Go:
"Hmm...I never see any ghost Pokemon around, so maybe improving my Haunter would be a good idea." Click.  "HOLY CRAP, HAUNTER IS GIANT!"  It turns out that 1.4m is people sized, but people aren't basically spheres, and they don't hover above the ground.  It also doesn't help that I was expecting it to look something like Sabrina's Haunter.

But imagine how cool it would be to walk around town with a giant purple ghost following behind you.

Today was also the day that KIKU showed the 2013 Murder Team Five special.  It was as ridiculous as all the other ones, and everyone died except the Murder Team.  The best part of the episode was when Murder Guy was about to do his heart-stabby finishing move, and the music was all building up, and then it all stopped as the guy about to get heart stabbed revealed he was the Murder Tailor.  You're a fuckup, MT.  Also, checking my last special (which I never finished captioning), the comic cop guy is now expecting his eleventh child, so he's adding about one a year.



Monday, September 12, 2016

Monday: Back to work.

I was able to figure out that the reason I couldn't figure out my problem last week while on vacation is that a) the build system doesn't rebuild the thing I was working on the same was it does other things; and b) gdb doesn't respect the current environment and loads all the configuration files itself.  Sorting this out means I could fix the bug that was causing problems.

Being back from vacation means I also have to drive myself everywhere, which significantly cuts down on the number of Pokestops I can get.  I suspect this is why I didn't gain many levels between July and now.  Julie brought this up last night, which led me to looking to see what the level XP requirements actually are.  Serebii had the information, so I made a few plots of that:

XP requirements to go from level to level.

Total experience needed to reach that level.
So I understand why Julie sees it getting worse beyond level 20.  There's a clear jump in the level-to-level requirement.  I guess it doesn't really matter much to me.  I'm kind of playing the game in a "Professor Oak" style: I just want to fill out my Pokedex, and I'm not too concerned with optimizing everything.

It was rainy today.
 And I checked my work mail today.
Ok, that's a bit early.  Who is it from?

Oh.  Thanks Kaiser.