Monday: Q365: And another year has come and gone

 

Sunday: I stayed up too late playing video games.

Whoops.

I also got ramen.

And then bought bird eye chilis and pineapple, because I was going to make tacos for dinner, and wanted to make a spicy sweet salsa.  I didn't, because I got lazy.

And Caroll Spinney died, which is super sad.  This is from when I met him, probably close to 15 years ago now.

 I watched the rest of my show backlog, which is good, because the new episodes started today.

The new episode of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Tuesday: Still tired.

Plus, I saw an injured fox on my way home, and that kind of ruined my evening.

I used a lure today.

But none of them were new.

• Great.
• I hope this works out well.
• I think my NAS is on this list.  I'm probably mostly ok since it isn't directly connected to the internet.
• This is why we have unions.
• Caity Weaver is still a wonderful author.

Wednesday: The last night in the Bay Area

For an unknown period of time, that is.  I'll probably be back someday, for some reason, but I definitely won't be coming here as regularly as I have been.  It's a bit sad, to leave the place where you probably should have been on the lease, and maybe should have paid some rent.  Oh well.

I have a hotel room scheduled in Reno for tomorrow night.  It's a bit of a lazy start to the trip, but that's how it goes.  I might push extra hard the next day, but we'll see when that happens.

Another thing that happened today was the release of Utada Hikaru's new album.  I found a site of questionable legality yesterday, as neither Amazon nor Google had it listed.  It popped up on Amazon late last night, so I grabbed it there.  None of the songs jumped out at me, but I had it on quietly, and not in the proper "loud blasting" method I usually use.  We'll see tomorrow.

I saw the moon set this morning.

 And one last time:

KBBQ.

 Is delicious.

Extra fatty brisket is the best.

• Ugh.
• Breaking seems a bit strong.

Thursday: And that's how I got a parking ticket.

Ugh.  Whatever.

Now I have the parking pass, so I can park in the lot.  Which, of course, means that there's only a week left here before I have to start my grand migration.

Pasta.

 Because pasta is good.

My new phone can check my Clipper Card correctly.

Although I'm probably loaning it out next week.  It'll clear out some of that value.

• Koko the gorilla died.
• Today's just not great.

Tuesday: Warm places + quiet/repetitive noise = napzone

Today was the day to go visit those who can no longer visit us.  It was good.

Also super delicious, super unhealthy burgers.  They were good, although I didn't notice the patty melt until too late.  I'll have to find one on the cross country trek.

There are like nine in Omaha.  I need something to make Nebraska not awful.

I discovered a vampire.  I'm on to you, Samuel.

• Microsoft is buying Github?  Huh?
• Inspirations for Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer.
• I remember this glass.  And I think this one too.  They're not found in my grandparents' house, so it's possible they no longer exist.

Sunday: I'll split this when I'm not working with being awake most of the past three days

 An empty apartment.

 Airport sushi.

 Airport miso and sake (ama no to).

 I hope some of this style survives after the renovation.

 A pretzel in Chicago.  I had two.

 But Chicago doesn't plug in their chairs, so whatever the point?

I guess that since the Tumblr app works so well, that have time to add fancy graphics that don't work.

• But this part worked fine.  And I'm so sleep deprived that I keep walking up from dreams happening in the real world, which isn't the best.

Friday: My last night here.

I'm waiting on my dryer to finish, so I can finish packing.  I should have started it earlier.  I should have had dinner earlier, too.  Today's been a lot of procrastinating.  I didn't even check in for my flight until two hours after I could have.  Things will be better tomorrow at this time.  I hope.

I dropped my car off to be shipped today.  It was actually reasonably quick and easy once I got there.  Traffic was a disaster, though, so it took nearly 45 minutes to do that.

And tomorrow the junk people come and take everything, and then I lock up the place and head to the airport.  I'm almost certainly going to be there way early.

• Thanksgiving.  I am looking forward to it again, this year.
• I don't get why this isn't obvious to everyone.
• It feels weird looking back on this, nine years ago.

Sunday: It turns out Safeway deli chicken tandoori samosas are much better than you'd expect.

I thought about going to get garlic shrimp from the shrimp truck, and stopping to get a Dole whip on the way back.  Unfortunately I got out of bed too late for that to happen.

So I said farewell to Kono's instead.

I also didn't see Deadpool this weekend.  Hrm.

• Wages.
• I was stunned when I finally watched Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer.  At some point I'm going to need to listen to her other stuff as well.
• Stormageddon.

Thursday: There was a bird that had been hit by a car in the road today.

It wasn't dead, but only one wing worked, and it couldn't move.  There was a guy on the side of the road who saw it, and it wasn't there later, so I'm guessing he dealt with it.  Sorry, bird.  That's not fair.

Then this evening I saw that Filbert was level capped.  Not on my watch.  He needs a tree house to be happy.  So I went into the Nintendo reward thing, cashed out everything for 80 cotton.

And upgraded my picnic set twice.

And then upgraded it again.

 And then, it looked like Filbert was sorry he was using up all my cotton and natural essence.

Because he gave me this, even though we'd already talked earlier and I hadn't left the campsite.

And this is why Filbert will always be Best Squirrel.  Marshal is still Tsundere Squirrel, but he's not contributing as much.

Tuesday: A sad day.

But I was able to finally get a refill authorized for my Humira, so I won't be in pain while on vacation.  Speaking of which, I should pack.

I guess I caught this today.

• And they passed this trash tax bill.  Lying assholes.
• Double and, they're cancelling Hawkeye.  The best book they make, and they're killing it.
• Ikea Santa.

Friday: Ugh.

Today I got two pieces of bad news.  One of which is probably just going to annoying (and slightly painful) over vacation, and the other one that is significantly worse.

The number of permutations I need to put here is ridiculous.

• "Oh boy!"
• Pokemon.
• Animal Crossing.

Saturday: Procrastinating.

Specifically, in finishing my talk for Monday.  In any case, the plan for the day was to see a movie.  Specifically the one at 2pm.  So I got up at 12:30, and still was too late.

As shown by the intact ticket and ebi fry.

"Why do they have a 2pm and a 3pm showing?  This movie isn't going to be that popular."  Nope, it isn't.  But the 3pm showing has open captions, for people with hearing problems.  Whatever, I do subtitled movies all the time, this is the same thing, but I can read faster than they can talk.

Anyway, Professor Marston and His Wonder Women.  About William Moulton Marston (who invented Wonder Woman), his wife, and the student that came to live with them and had two of his children.  I hadn't heard much about this, other than its existence, so I went in with no expectations.  It's...complicated.  On the good side, it presents all three of them as progressive and modern, and just wanting to live their lives the way they wanted, without problems.  And also invent a major comic book character to pay the bills.  That's fine, but within the first 15-30 minutes, there's a scene where Elizabeth (the wife) and William agree that they should open the relationship to include Olive (the student).  But that's not how it happens in Jill Lapore's book, where William basically says, "this is happening now.  Get ok with it or leave," to Elizabeth.  

When I got home, I did a quick google search, and it turns out Marston's granddaughter isn't super happy with the movie, because they basically made up a lot of the story.  It's not a terrible story that they made up, but you can't really do that about real people.  Like this review says, they really should have mentioned the stuff-making-up part.

And there were only like 12 people in the theater, with an average age of like 70.

Afterwards, I wasn't quite hungry, and I didn't really have a plan, so I ended up driving the long way to Kailua.

And got tacos.

Then I came home, took out the trash, and vacuumed.  Really wasn't into working on this talk.  I at least have the figures sorted out.

• Olive Byrne has a wikipedia page now.
• Grape the Penguin died.
• Everyone's sad.
• Lies about taxes.
• Expressions in art.
• I was glad to see that this picture has a non-"bunny was eaten" explanation.

Saturday: Kapolei is dead to me now.

I've pretty much only gone there to get burgers at Kua Aina and go to Target.  That was the plan for today, but when I got there, I discovered that Kua Aina is closed.  There's only the one on the North Shore now.  Which I didn't want to drive to, because if I'm driving that far, I should probably go to the shrimp place, or the BBQ place.

So I got an ok burger instead of the good one I wanted.

• That's kind of a jerk move.
• That's pretty cool.
• I really would like more Misty and Brock.

Thursday: Today was also garbage, but at least I only have a week until vacation.

I am looking forward to it.

I was not looking forward to this.  The bakery by work has been closed for a month, and I assumed that that meant that they were closing for good.  It looks like that's the case, and it's because the head baker had a heart attack.  That's super unfortunate, because they had super good food.

• Figure 3 is really interesting.  Using emoji for sentiment analysis.
• What?
• I support Boeing doing this.
• Squirrels.
• Voltron.

Huh.

I woke up at like seven this morning.

On a Sunday.

That's part of a three day weekend.

This wasn't something I was particularly happy about, doubly so when I realized that turning over and trying to go back to sleep wasn't going to happen.  So I woke up popplio, and decided to spend the morning slogging through some of my youtube backlog.  By time, the largest unfinished watch was this Let's Play of NieR: Automata.  I'd only finished up through part 10, and the unwatched parts total a bit over six hours.  Due to the wonders of double speed, I was able to complete most of that this morning, saving the final two parts to watch just now.

I don't think I've seen a better game in a long time.

The basic story is that there are like four+ other games that happened already, and those are in the past of this game, so unless you played those games, you're starting at a disadvantage.  Helloween is very good at his LPs, though, so he's spliced in a bunch of important details from those games to try and give a more complete story.

The long version (still with a bunch of omissions) is that there are two groups of robots, pretty robots (who are good guys) and ugly robots (who are bad guys).  The pretty robots live in space, and are organized, but there are also Earth pretty robots, and they're on the same side, but they're "The Resistance" and aren't as well organized(???).  Anyway, Pretty Girl Robot is good at beating up things, and Pretty Boy Robot is her hacking backup.  They beat up lots of ugly robots, and in the first ending, kill the fake pretty robots the ugly robot made.  Then you can play through as Pretty Boy Robot, and cover the story from his perspective.

This is where I stopped watching, mostly because I had too many other things to watch, and it's hard to devote large chunks of time unless you wake up four hours earlier than expected.  It's also probably wasn't that great of a plan to binge so much of the story.

Because once you finish the play through as Pretty Boy Robot, the game continues, and I'm still a bit fuzzy on this bit, because I was up early.  In any case, at the end of the second play through (and I assume the first, but it's been awhile), Pretty Girl Robot has to kill Pretty Boy Robot, because he's become infected with a virus designed by the ugly robots.  It's sad, but he's mutating, so she strangles him.

But they're robots, so there's a back up copy of Pretty Boy Robot, so they just stick him in a new body, and everything can continue as it's all super happy.  Until the ugly robot virus infects everybody at the pretty robot space station, and all their friends and support and stuff are killed, and they crash land on Earth.  Pretty Girl Robot makes sure Pretty Boy Robot is safe, but she gets infected with the virus, and slowly falls apart (inside), and meets up with a previous model of Pretty Girl Robot who doesn't really wear real clothes, just underwear.  Pretty Girl Robot (regular) asks Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) to kill her to stop the infection, and Pretty Boy Robot sees this, and he's gets pissed because he loves Pretty Girl Robot.  He kind of goes a bit crazy, and this isn't even the most depressing part, because he then has to fight infected pretty robots, including his contact from the pretty robot space station, and that's kind of messed up.  Also Kind Ugly Robot, who thinks fighting sucks, and everyone should just not be jerks has his town of similarly kind ugly robots gets attacked by bad ugly robots, and that leads to all of his friends getting killed, including the children kind robots, who all commit suicide.

Holy crap, that's messed up.

And they go into some more of the back story, and we learn that the humans didn't all move to the moon, they "moved" to "the moon", which meant that my guess from like episode that "all the humans are dead, aren't they?" was true.  Also the pretty robot organization was just something invented by the (maybe ugly?) robot versions of the personalities of humans so they could test out fighting stuff to see how best to defeat the ugly robots, but maybe they're allied with the ugly robots, and I kind of lost a bit of the track here, but it's pretty clear things are all fucked up, and it's not going to end well for anyone.  Like Devola and Popola, who got to see all the humans die, get blamed for all the humans dying, and then end up dead themselves trying to help Pretty Boy Robot.

He fights the ugly robot/human personality thing, and Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) helps him defeat it.  But he's still a bit crazy and unhappy that Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) killed Pretty Girl Robot (regular), so they fight, and you can choose who to be in the fight (since both are playable characters), and that means you choose who wins.  If Pretty Girl Robot (underwear) wins, she has Pretty Boy Robot saved, and then dies in the convenient bad guy tower collapse.  If Pretty Boy Robot wins, then he dies, with the option to put his memories into the robot (are there even sides at this point?) rocket ship that's being launched into space (¯\_(ツ)_/¯).  Oh, also, one reason Pretty Girl Robot wanted to die is because she's a special execution robot, and she's tired of having to kill Pretty Boy Robot so much.

That's pretty messed up, too.

Then you can fight the credits (really), and if you lose, you can keep trying, and eventually get help from other people who have beaten the game.  However, if you get their credit-fighting-ship blown up, that deletes their saved game.  Yikes.  If you win, you get an ending where the assistant robots (who I've ignored up until now because we already have too many classes of robots to worry about) salvage the memories of all three important pretty robots, and then rebuild bodies for them from robot spare parts.  I have no clue if there are more endings, but I am really looking forward to more parts of this story.

Monday: One last time.

The end of vacations always sucks.  Especially with travel involved, because that constrains things a lot more.  Today was mostly packing, and then doing a quick pass around Magic Island for Pokemon.  I don't think I caught anything good, as I did it all via Plus.  Then lunch.

It turns out that Kono's on Kapahulu isn't hard to park at.  They have parking around back.

And they make a good burrito.

 I think I would have liked to have more sauce, but it's good sauce, and of course I want more.  This is probably going to be my default burrito spot now, partially because it doesn't involve driving to Kailua.

Then to the airport.

Then to run errands, picking up kleenex, getting gas in my car, picking up the prescriptions I ordered last week.

That was when I discovered that a critically important thing had been left behind in the sweep of the car.

• "Who the fuck are you to throw a log in the road of somebody who has a different set of difficulties in life?"
• Coal.
• Ash Ketchum.
• Maui.
• Pizza.
• I'm with you, Spider-Man.
• Flour bags during the Depression.
• A good dog.
• Millennial humor.
• That's pretty good.

Sunday: last day of vacation.

Which is always unfortunate. It's been a long trip, and back around Christmas, it seemed like it would go on forever. But no, after a pre Christmas weekend, the week between holidays, New Year's weekend, a week of remote working, and now a final weekend, I have to get on a plane and go home. 😞

In any case, I need to clean my apartment to get ready for people visiting next month. I should make a list of things that I need to get done. I think there will be a lot of "throw out this stuff I don't need and never use."

Last night we played Drawful. This was "coward".

And it's been super rainy here.

 Today was also a day to try and work through done food. And to make our own breakfast.

Monster face pancakes.

And I caught one of my last reasoning Pokemon. I think I have like two dozen more?

I got a medal for it.

Tuesday: I just don't know.

Today was supposed to be so good.  I mean, I got to sleep in.  Then, when I left, I had a tiny gecko friend on my car:

Tiny gecko friend, you should not be on my car! You could get hurt!

So I scooped him up with a piece of paper, but then he jumped onto my hand, and I panicked and flipped him off, but geckos are resilient, so he seemed ok.  Then I had to stomp around him while saying "boogie-boogie" to make him walk from behind my car to under the truck next to me, which is a safe place, because it's suspended and hasn't driven in years.

There may or may not have been a person who came into the parking garage while I was doing this.

And then I voted:

And I can post this because it's legal to do that in Hawaii.

I then had to go to the doctor, who told me "it's probably not a big deal," but not until after I had to go through the dual horrors of "eyedrops" and "having someone actually tap on your eyes with a thing made for tapping on eyes."  That is one of my biggest fears, and I hated every second of it.  Also: I probably should get new glasses, because they don't put gamma on eye charts.

Then I went to get lunch, and it was all fine:

Happy cute little frogs!

And yummy ramen!

And by the time I got home, everything fell apart and has been descending into chaos ever since.  I have no idea what's going to happen, because my default model of the world has "active racists" at like max 10%, and it now seems like the true number is something like 50%.  As far as I can tell, the end of civilization goes like this:

1. George Bush fails to win a second term in 1992 because he's not super popular, and a third party candidate eats up enough votes to knock him out.
2. This causes the Republican party to freak out, and decided they were cheated out of their rightful presidency, allowing lunatics to take over the party.
3. To the point where they attempt to impeach the usurper for having an affair, despite the fact that the Speaker of the House was actively having an affair, the Speaker who replaced him was having an affair, and the Speaker who replaced him molested students.  Children.  The guy being the morality police molested children.  Let that sink in for a moment.
4. Somehow this meant that Democrats had bad morals.
5. A bad president is then elected, largely due to the alleged "lack of difference" between the candidates.  He proceeds to ruin the economy, start a bunch of unpaid wars, and pass unneeded tax cuts for the wealthy.
6. Everyone loses a lot of money.
7. We elect Obama, and part of the country decides that despite common sense, he's going to try and destroy the country and kill them.  He instead makes it easier for people to get medical care.
8. That part of the country elects a useless Congress that opposes everything, on the principle that if nothing gets better, people will blame the President.
9. He gets elected again, and continues to not kill people or destroy the country.
10. People become increasingly terrified of an undistinguished "other," which eventually coalesces around "people who aren't white," who they feel are getting free things while they are being held back.
11. Gay people are allowed to exist, and after confirming that trans people do not spontaneously erupt into swarms of death bees, they are allowed to exist as well.
12. This sets the racists off even more, because they have to let people live without shame.  This cannot be allowed.
13. A terrible old man dies, but Congress refuses to let a perfectly qualified person replace him, because they can't stand the idea that gay people can exist.
14. Britain decides they'll try racism out as well, because why bother actually working on problems.
15. A sufficiently well distributed almost 50% of the country votes for a sexist moron who doesn't have any position other than "let the hate flow through you."
16. Because Hillary was cheated on?  Or was a lawyer?  Or had opinions?  I refuse to attempt to understand this level of sexism.

So now to speculate:

1. Nothing is done about climate change, and this is really the most major point, because at least we've doomed ourselves to die, so it's nice that there's punishment built in, even if the people who did this will probably die of natural causes first.
2. People decide it's perfectly ok to discriminate, and without a proper Supreme Court, there's nothing to stop this.
3. I am terrified of the number of people I follow on the internet that may not be alive because of this in the next 1/2/4/10 years.

And the worst part, is that nothing is going to get better for those racists anyway, because they reasons they're upset (gay people exist, black people are allowed to be president, women aren't property, jobs that once existed went away so the things those jobs once made can actually be affordable) aren't things that you can fix.

I'm torn about my trip to SFO later this month.  On the plus side, I get to see people I love, and be in a wonderfully diverse city.  On the negative side, I have to figure out some way to apologize for the hell world my generation and those before me are leaving to a wonderful little four year old.

There will be no more Pokemon links, because joy has fled, and only anguish awaits.

• So I got "Neutrois," which is fine, no problem, but I really had my heart set on "Taco".
• Fuck you, Glen Beck.  You were feeding those people lies to enrich yourself.
• I'm so sorry.
• This is why I've started trying to stand at a distance to people on elevators and things.  I know I might look scary, and I try to be as non-threatening as I can.  Do I sometimes make beep-boop sounds when I push elevator buttons?  Sometimes.  Usually only when I'm alone.
• I'm so sorry.
• So sorry.
• So very sorry.
• Fucking scum.
• Facts, but I guess that has never mattered anyway.
• Here are some dogs, because at least dogs are still wonderful.  I'm sorry, dogs.  We let you down, and you deserved better.  I mean, you've been with us since we started this civilization idea, and I know you'll stick with us to the end.

That sucks.

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

Which sucks.  :(