Hrm.

 I wonder if I can integrate this into org-mode, and my noodleSync scripts.

Monday: Fighting pandas. Again.

Ugh.  I would really rather it just stop trying to do all the things, and either do direct array-like access, or do direct SQL-like access.  Ugh.

Also, I have to constantly remember that I'm not fireproof in this game.

• Fish guide.
• Not quite fair.
• This works surprisingly well.  Live tv, streaming, based on what you should be able to get over the air.  Honestly, this should be the default way to get tv.

Thursday: Almost done.

Tumblr...is doing more dumb useless stuff, and letting regular people make the channels.

And I guess this is different than the other one that's like identical?

My first Mamoswine.

Monday: The plan was to get up and do some light work at home.

Instead, I woke up and immediately crashed back to sleep.  It turns out that feeling better and not like my throat is on fire doesn't mean I'm still not sick.  I think I'm not-contagious by tomorrow, so I should be able to return to work and catch up on everything.  And I think I'm presenting on Wednesday, so I should probably figure that out tomorrow as well.

I did get groceries today, so I will have food for this week.  Since I can eat again, I think tacos is going to be the plan.  I have two not-totally-ripe avocados, which will hopefully be good tomorrow.

Also, tumblr is melting down, so that's going to be a fun thing to watch for the rest of the year.  My guess is that they'll back down, because "blowing up a large chunk of daily users" isn't really their main goal.  A quick check shows that all the posts I have that are flagged are paintings and miscellaneous art.  I'm more concerned about the various other people I follow.

• Plus, tumblr just isn't good at anything they try to do.
• I did make a backup, just in case.
• This stuff.
• The Kaupe was on Legends today.

Tuesday: Internet Day!

The best day ever!

Also vacuum day.  Which is cool, and now I know I probably could have taken the vacuum apart in Alameda and saved me $45, but whatever.  I can vacuum my floors now.  I also probably should remember not to answer my door with a box cutter in the future.  I was cleaning up my recycling, which surprisingly, I was able to do in a single trip.  Including all my bin recycling, and the trash.

Having actual internet is great, because I can listen to a youtube video of a song I heard this morning while watching a youtube video I would have watched a long ago if I'd had internet constantly.

The internet hookup went reasonably well, with the install guy having to do only a few tests and things before it was up and running.  I then spent way too much time trying to configure the wifi router to use a static upstream IP address before just giving up and installing a dhcpd server to give it the IP address.  I think I've made the parameters permanent, but I may have to reconfigure wireless if the power goes out again.

Which it did today.

Because it was raining.  A lot.  Like a proper thunderstorm.

While driving, I've set my radio to remember something like four NPR stations.  Also one "other" station that I first thought was the university station, a random techno station, and a 70s funk station.  It turns out to be something of all of those, so here are songs I've heard and had google identify for me.

• Melorman - Inside your dream
• Asha Puthli - Space talk
• A Certain Ratio - Lucinda
• Akira Inoue - Seaside Lovers - Sunset Afternoon

I should maybe find a way to get these albums.

Tuesday: I'm obviously biased

Today we had an hour and a half full department meeting, and when it was over, I checked Twitter to discover that the entire world was freaking out because now some people can make tweets 280 characters long.  Things seemed to divide cleanly into three categories:

1. "Twitter is now even more the hell site."  First up, that's false.  Tumblr is the hell site.  Twitter functions, does not remove functionality, and does not require a third party extension to be usable.  This is the same complaint that happened when Twitter switched to circle icons, and when stars became hearts.  None of these changes matter.
2. "Twitter should fight bots and racists."  Yes, obviously.  And I'm sure they redirected the entire "fight bots and racists" team to make one column of the database twice as big.  That's how companies work.  Everybody works on one thing.
3. "Why even have Twitter if it's not short?"  It's still short, it just means people don't need to edit to make things fit.  I've not made tweets before because I couldn't figure out a way to abbreviate and truncate things enough to make it fit, and a stupid joke or pun isn't worth two tweets.  It sounds like that was a big part of the reasoning for the change.  I do like writing "perfect" 140 character tweets, and that's harder to do with twice the space, but whatever.

And yes, I'm certainly biased because I have a pleasant Twitter experience.  I follow people I find interesting, I block people I find offensive (and wish more people would just ignore assholes instead of retweeting their nonsense), I report as many accounts as I can if I see in a reply something that seems obviously reportable.  Based on a quick scrolling through my phone, I have 24 "we received your report" and 8 "there's an update on an account" notices.  If I understand how this works correctly, that suggests I have a 33% success rate.  Not awful.

I also understand that I have a small, private account, so I have to deal with less direct harassment.  I hope things will get better for everyone, but I suspect automatically suspending accounts would lead to a massive backlash.  I also would argue that asking a company to police the speech of the president of a country is completely missing where the real problem lies.

Again, I'm certainly biased.  I was so stunned, I didn't know what to put in my extra 140 characters.  I was going to add a picture and "look at this tweeter", but the jerk bird I was looking at flew away.

• Oh hey cool!  The drug I used to take is number three, and the one I take now is number one!  Hahaha!  I love how our healthcare system works!  That totally isn't extractive rent seeking by soulless monsters!
• This is kind of the line of thinking I've been trying to switch to.  I'm not going to say I always stick to it, but having a goal seems like a good thing.
• I should finish watch RWBY.
• This strikes me as the same humor as "Yard Sard", but maybe it's just me.
• I should probably be ashamed that I am thinking seriously about buying a $60 shower curtain now.  Perhaps Truth has something to say about that.

Tuesday: One pun is having to do the work of bringing this week up from crap.

To be fair though, it's a good pun.

And tumblr did one of their quarterly "completely break everything to make the site unusable."  So I googled, and Google did the thing.

To be fair, I had to cheat, but it was too perfect of a setup to ignore.

• I'm not saying that I'm relying on people I know to try this out and let me know if this is any good, but I'm actually saying exactly that.
• This will always be the best Batman.
• I did not know that Anna May Wong had a TV show in 1951.
• Republicans are incompetent.

Monday: I should always do theory papers for this seminar.

Because everyone hates theory papers, so no one else reads it, and since it's basically just throwing math at something, it's usually not too hard to get through.

It's hard to see, but about 1/3 of the way from the Moon to Venus is Mars.

• This is kind of cool.  It was also kind of cool when I basically described the exact same thing back in July.
• Wait.  OMG.

They actually made an IMDB entry for it?

I watched it last night, and this is ridiculous.  Ryan had to go home before the game was even close to finished, so Jack stepped in to finish the game, and the IMDB page just lists them both as the same character.  Kat is in there because Jeremy put her on speaker phone when he called home to let her know that he was going to be late getting home, because the damn game of Uno wouldn't end.

• That's a good Jane cosplay.
• Dog.
• Yes to all this.
• I do not like cream cheese, but this story is incredible.
• I am disappointed Evan Narcisse isn't going to be doing comic book commentary anymore, but I look forward to seeing his comic.
• This is intolerable, and the picture of the main asshole's family makes me angry.

Wednesday: I don't feel like drawing more stick figures today.

I also didn't wait around to find this Lickitung.

I automated the tldr Lovecraft stuff over the weekend, so all I have to do is run the script and it dumps out the html for that day.

• Title:  The Quest of Iranon
• Date:  1921
• Summary:  One of Lovecraft's fantasy stories, in which Iranon wanders around talking about his home, where's he's the prince, and how wonderful it is, but no one has ever heard of the place until the end, when Iranon meets someone who knew him when he was a homeless orphan kid making up crazy stories.
• Real Villain:  Being a deluded asshole.  Also bullies, now that I've reread it.
• Last line in italics?  No.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  3/10.
• Read it:  Here.

But having things automatically generated gave me an idea yesterday.  My usual blogging strategy involves:

1. Reading all the internets, largely via my RSS reader.
2. Loading all the interesting items into tabs.
3. Running the script that scans my auto-copied phone images for ones taken today, and then displays them so I can choose which ones to use, at which point they're resized to not use so much space.
4. Opening blogger to type everything in, followed my copy/pasting all the links as appropriate.

This is fine, but it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to automate the boring stuff.  Blogger has an API that supports posting.  I thought it supported images, but I guess Blogger images are shuffled into Picasa (which is deprecated) and now into Google+.  I assume there's an API for that as well, but setting up images is not the hardest part.

Links are the worst part.  If I understand things correctly, it should be possible to extract a list of currently open tabs from chrome's Current Tabs and Current Session files.  I've found this documentation describing the format, and other than the generic "I hate binary files," it doesn't look too hard to pull information out.  I also discovered this fact about the History database:  "its timestamp is formatted as the number of microseconds since January, 1601".  Because that's a sane way to do it.

In any case, this suggests that I could add a new script to scrape the tab information, format it into appropriate link format, create a new draft post with that information in it (possibly with images already included), and then dump out the link to edit the post with words.  This would probably save me a bunch of time.

• Pokemon.
• This is dumb.
• These are cool.
• All the new evolutions.
• Not Pokemon.
• Get it together, squirrels.
• That's interesting.
• Koala vs. Butterfly.
• People should enjoy what they enjoy.

Based on today's links, it takes about 3 minutes to reread and choose the text blurbs, and another minute to do the linking.

Dear Twitter, I think you need to tune your ad engine better.

I'm putting this below the cut, because it's a lot of images.  I also probably should have cropped them, but I didn't.

For the past two days, I've woken up earlier than expected and browsed Twitter when I couldn't immediately go back to sleep.  During that time, I started to notice that the ads I was getting were not really well targeted to me.  I'm not saying anything bad about the ads themselves, just that I do not think I'm the best person to be showing that ad to.  I also tried to get a fair sampling of ads, although this probably isn't all of them.

I've grouped the screenshots I took of these ads into various categories that made sense to me.

Thursday: Rargle.

Alternate title: Thursday: Effective Friday.
Alternate title 2: Thursday: Holy shit why do I have sixteen tabs open for linking?

Seriously.  The terms for the output X and the output Y dimensions are different.  They're all still there, so it doesn't save space.  It was insane.

And then because Gawker is being shut down, and no one knows if they're going to keep the site up as an archive, I spent a half hour printing all the Best Restaurant In New York posts to pdf.  Their series on Epcot is pretty much the sole reason that I went there in January.  Fun fact: Chrome doesn't know how to not split images across page boundaries.  Second fun fact: Firefox doesn't know how to render things in pdf such that it doesn't shrink the text space on each page until the post is just a column of individual letters.  So now I have 531 pages of internet in a pdf because there's no great way to archive everything.  Also: fuck lazy loading of images.  I hate that on every site I see it on.  And, finally, Peter Thiel is a misogynistic fascist vampire, and wish him only the worst.

• Pokemon.
• I continue to like Pokemon Go Leader fanart.
• Officer Jenny.
• Ok, that's an odd glitch.
• Ash lost the Kalos League.  Still, everyone seems to forget that he won the Orange Islands League.  "That's not in a game!"  Who cares?  He's Ash, not Red.
• Not Pokemon.
• I saw this story yesterday, and had to deal with it when I booked vacation flights.  Why can't companies hire people who actually know what they're doing?
• "“Can you just embed the video in your story? My reaction is that people can watch and decide for themselves,” Keilar said." LOL.
• This is good, but it doesn't necessarily include ICE facilities, as those are run through the DHS.  Still, it's a start.
• Twitter seems to have started something to fix abuse issues.  This is largely my solution (which I should have finished before this came out), without the automatic anomaly detection that would have popped up a "Hey, noticed you're getting a lot of replies suddenly.  Everything ok?" notice like they do the "while you were away" thing.
• I'd forgotten about this, but RSS never forgets, and so I got to see the update.
• Maybe I should pick this up in trade form as well.
• Some people are stupid.

Do people think this looks interesting?

It's a board game.




Here's an example of the live-action version it's based on.  I have not checked that this one is good, but they are consistently pretty decent.


Does that look interesting to people whom I am directing this question towards?  If the answer is "sure, with your money, fine," then I think I'd only get the regular edition.  If the answer is a "that actually looks like a fun game, because we tend to like games that end up really weird, Cards Against Humanity style," then I think I'll get the expanded edition with the extra cards.

The nice thing is that the funding level needed was fulfilled in two minutes, so this was guaranteed before I even read the announcement email.

Wednesday: Sausages.

This all started because of Julie.  I mean, look at this.  I had a salad for lunch, and seeing delicious sausages in the middle of the afternoon was not expected.  That led me to looking on yelp to see what sausage options exist here.  The answer?  Not many.  This is literally the only place that shows up for "German."  The worst part of it is the detail that "The lunch wagon is only in Chinatown on Thursday's, otherwise he is usually parked at Hickam."  So it's usually inaccessible on a military base, or, it's in Chinatown, so it's not really convenient for lunch.  Let's try "Polish."  This place isn't even Polish, it's Russian, and it's also downtown, so again, not really convenient for lunch.

I also looked up various sausages this evening, while still wondering what to do.  I remembered these sausages from the German butcher we went to every year in high school.  This led to me discovering that amazon actually sells those.  Because of course amazon sells twelve packs of delicious sausages that you can order at any time.

They're in my cart, because I'm not entirely sure I want to buy sausage online.

Also, I turned around today to discover that it was raining.

Also my twitter did a thing and I should have taken the screenshot then, because a lot of twitter happens in ten hours.

Today's links do not include that damn owl on the stupid toy horse because I saw that like seventeen times today.

• Squirrel Girl.
• I didn't care about this new Godzilla movie until I saw that Hideaki Anno is directing.
• This looks delicious, and, of course, is only downtown.
• A better title would probably be "designers angry they weren't asked, give opinion anyway."  Fuck off.  "He said he preferred Sano’s spiked logo to the four new ones."  Oh, the one that the stole?  Fuck off.  Option D is clearly better, anyway.

It's like I'm a detective, but a detective that takes on cases no one cares about.

My twitter account is set to private, so in order to subscribe, I have to approve it.  I almost never get a request, because my tweets aren't really that interesting.

See?

And I reblog stuff, but I also make my own tweets.

Because fuck big bang theory for being such a shitty stupid show.

So it was odd to reload twitter and see I had a request pending.

Ok, I have no idea who this is.

The obvious thing is to click and see what she tweets about.

Ok, I can be onboard with a pro-panda baby tweeter.  I like pandas.

But pretty much everything is a retweet.  That seems a bit odd.  Scroll some more and I see this:

That's some shitty art, huh?

And here's where I go from "wtf cares" to "detective cap on."  See, the added information I didn't tell you is that "Jennifer" isn't the first person to request to follow me today.  I didn't accept them because they had a bunch of reblogs about stupid shit I didn't care about, including a lot of retweets of a particularly shitty artist.

Derp tiger to reaffirm how shitty this art is.

Two people try to follow me, both of which are posting lots of retweets from a super shitty artist?

I hate you, Leonid Afremov.  I hate your stupid art too.

It's possible that there just happen to be two people who really like this shitty artist.  A lot of people have crappy taste.  Just to be safe, let's google image search her picture:

Ok, only found on a dozen or so pages, most of which are in Cyrillic.  LOOKS LEGIT TO ME.

I'm going to let "two people with shitty taste tried to follow me today" be option 1, and say that's not super likely.  Option 2 is that Leonid Afremov bought a bunch of fake bot twitter followers to reblog his shitty art at random people on the internet.

I think this is the "objection" pose, though.

How about Detective Conan?  I always liked that show.

Wait, they made a Detective Conan/Lupin the Third crossover?  Why am I learning this from a google image search?

Here's Detective Pikachu, because that works too.

Saturday: I probably should have worked on my talk today. Instead I things on the internet and TV. Simultaneously. Because multitasking.

And had cheesy tots.

• This is old, but I saw it again while eating my burger, and it made me laugh.  Apple juice hater.
• I linked to this yesterday, but I also saw it while eating my burger, and I laughed again.  Clap clap clap clap.
• Balto.
• I don't understand why this isn't obvious to everyone.

Friday: Today is not Thursday, so it's good I caught that before posting.

This is why most news sources suck.  They're not actually interested in informing you about anything.

• Hm.  So I could go see Marnie again.
• Angry bird.
• Sad bunny.
• Woefully underrated film.
• My best was 34.
• Twitter makes change.  I immediately search to find a way to turn off the stupid change.
• And this just sounds awful.  I like twitter because it is an infinite, never ending stream of information.

Friday: Three day weekend!

How many tenders do you see here?  Did you count four?  That's what I ordered.  Four.  "But there are six there."  That's where you're wrong.  There are seven, with one hiding below the top three.  I really can't tell if the wing/burrito place run by the Mexican place by work just weighs out some amount, or if they like me because I have lunch there fairly regularly.

And then I looked up shoes for part of the evening, because I refuse to believe that products are only sold in one place.  They're not, but there's clearly some sort of region based control system in place on certain brands.  Still, this is the future, and there are places that sell online with shipping anywhere in the world.  This should be the standard.  I have money, you have a product, we have an extensive logistics system connecting us.  There shouldn't be anything standing in the way.

Also I'm not entirely sure google shopping correctly understands the departments.

• I'm curious to try this recipe.
• A new burrito place?  I think I'm taking a trip to Kailua this weekend.
• Bird sweaters.
• Winnie the Pooh.
• This is part of the reason I don't play Pokemon.  If I were to play, I'd want to use Pokemon I like or think are cute.  So that means I'm going to have Jigglypuff and Snorlax.
• So I can do things like this.  This is possible in the games, right?

"Hey, I could probably automate that in perl, and make it a game."

cat kitten sword robot space pink white bumblebee bee helmet

Code under the cut.  Rules for the game:  player one chooses an image, and the other players need to come up with descriptive words for what's on it.  Then, you run the command on the best set of words (maybe you don't want to use all of them because you end up with legos.  Maybe you get points if you only use like 1 word, but if you use 9 or more, but get legos, you lose points).  If the image itself, or the character, or an obviously "these images are related somehow" match happens, then the seekers get the point.  If not, then the player who chose the original image gets a point.  So under these rules, the Bee and Puppycat image gets a point, and I lose two points because I didn't find B&PC, and I ended up with legos when I used 10 words.

Japan

They're setting the world record for the longest chain of Pocky/Pretz passes.

Thursday: A bunch of things, apparently.

Part 1: Import/Export.

Yes, this is one of those "drugs/money/guns" shots.  Except this is coffee/salt/nuts.

I think I have everything I need for this.  I'm mailing out packages tomorrow since I think my options are either 1) Mail a bunch of this ahead of time; 2) Not bring clothes in my suitcase.  So, easy decision.

Part 2: Music in Movies.

I guess there are a bunch of shitty action-y movies coming out?  Or on DVD?  Whatever.  The point is, that when I watch actual TV instead of DVR TV, they're advertising all the time.  However, all of these movies use the same kind of loud stinger soundtracks, kind of like Inception and Star Trek 2(a) did.  This is dumb.

This link goes to Bach's Air.  There's a bunch of dead time at the beginning for some reason.  Now, here's a bit from End of Evangelion.  I don't think that's the actual movie sound, as I thought there were words.  Still, it shows the Asuka vs the production evas fight, which I know was set to the Air.  You don't need a constant pounding soundtrack shouting at you "THIS IS ACTION!  THERE IS A FIGHT GOING ON NOW, AND THINGS ARE HAPPENING!  BOOM BOOM BOOM!"  You can see the action, you can see the rage in Asuka's face, you can see the destruction and gore of the battle.  This isn't some stupid shooty-shooty-bang-bang fight.  She slices off that's one's arm, and when it doesn't stop, she twists its fucking head to kill it.  The music complements the video.  It doesn't just tell you the exact same thing.

If you can tell the story in pictures, you don't need to shout at people to get your point across.

Part 3: Goats.

This commercial plays a lot too.

So:

Totes my goats.

Part 4: Another Let's Make Up Stories.

I did this before.  Here's the original picture.

 Then I make up stories.

Even in the 60s, liberals were fighting their unholy war on Christmas.

"Oh yes, this child you picked up will work perfectly.  Great Cthulhu will be pleased."

"Wait, why the fuck did I just buy a christmas tree at a grocery store?  I'm going to have to take this on the bus to get home.  I'm going to be that guy. On the bus.  With a fucking tree."

"I SAID, THE COMMUNISTS ARE STEALING OUR FREEDOM!  I'LL STAND OUT HERE WHILE YOU SHOP TO PROTECT YOU!"  Also, look at the right side of the image.  You could get grocery concierges in the 1960s.  They'd advise you as to which canned processed food product was the best.

"What the fuck did I buy that would fit in this box?"

"Freedom!"

Part 5: Links.

• Source for that image.
• I'm increasingly happy that I no longer live in Michigan.
• I saw this in the RSS today, and it made me realize that I don't think I've watched food network in a very long time.  Maybe like a year or so?  Now, if I want to watch cooking shows, the internet gives me far better options.
• Food wishes.  Yes, he puts cayenne in everything.  Almost everything he makes looks good, and almost nothing he makes seems like you have to have years of cooking experience to do it.
• Sorted food.  Not quite as consistently good recipes, but they cover the humor/social interaction side of a cooking show better than anyone on food tv.
• The handle it part of epic meal time.  Obviously over the top, but their once weekly handle it thing presents an actual recipe that could reasonably be made.
• Nicko's kitchen.  Not something I always watch, but that's partially because he's themed by day, and not every theme works all the time.