I need to sort out my "Books Read" list.  Sucks that goodreads succumbed to The Nothing, and is now essentially useless.

I at least need to sort through the Perilous Pile of Publications.  I wanted to build an actual office, with a small attached library this holiday season, but I also didn't want to measure and figure out dimensions and such.  Ugh.

Let's update monthly from now on.

Wednesday: Travel

Travel is never lots of fun.

Airport monte cristo isn't great.

How do you remove all flavor from something that's just sugar + salt + fat?

Arrival tacos helped.

This guy's back?

Huh.  What?

Wednesday: Back to work.

Ugh.  At least my day wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Apple dongles are getting ridiculous.

• This game sounds interesting.  It's on switch, but I should probably finish Goose Game first.
• Good.
• This came to the correct answer.

Thursday: It was in the 50s today.

The weather is just dumb.

Also dumb: me having to park in an even farther lot for work today. :(

New splash screen.

New camera mode to take pictures of Weedles on your desk.

I have no clue what I did that made this end up in my promoted ads.  Those are snazzy boots, though.

• The House should be much larger.
• Lego rules.

Monday: This damn show.

They go back in time to save college-age Barack Obama from Gorilla Grodd, and wrap it up in like three minutes, because Ray just shrinks Grodd down and puts him in a jar.  Then everybody fights and Damien Darhk, who's been the baddie all season comes over to ask if they can team up, because his plan of putting a demon into his daughter so she could bring him back from the dead isn't as cool when he realizes that the demon is going to kill his daughter.  And so Sarah decides she needs an independent view of things, so she goes and explains everything to Obama, and gets his advice.  Then they decide to trick Darhk's daughter by sending Ray to get John Noble, Denethor from LotR, to voice some lines for the demon to say, because he does the voice of the demon on the show.

I mean, what even is this show?

Did the seasonal bunny need to be this terrifying?

• Private equity firms are vampires.
• Everybody got renewed on the CW, so I'll have another bonkers season of Legends to watch next year.
• Mongol envoy visit to the king of England.

Monday: It's like madness designed this thing.

There are two main classes in the script, and they do similar things.  They both encode the model as a series of polynomials.  The first one uses a dict of arrays, and packs the two polynomials is uses as [a0, a1, a2, b0, b1, b2].  Fine.  The second one packs the two polynomials into a dict of array arrays, such that there is [ [a7, a6, a5, a4, a3, a2, a1, a0], [b7, b6, b5, b4, b3, b2, b1, b0] ].  First up, I'm pretty sure that you could constrain this model with a far lower order curve.  Second, why use such different formats?  Third, the second model uses millimeters for the first polynomial, and micrometers for the second.  Why be so difficult?

It was also super rainy this evening, and this is the sky lit up by a lightning bolt out of frame.

• This was a good episode of Supergirl, and I liked Supergirl driving in to the white martian base in a car while doing the Bugs Bunny thing.
• This is kind of a cool thing, and I might steal this implementation (without the shiny interface, because I don't need that).  The syuzhet library it uses for sentiment analysis looks interesting.
• I had the exact same thought watching the first new Star Wars movie.  These are big complicated machines, and even though they're designed for "wars around stars", all the things they have are important parts of those machines.  You can't just have something not work.  If you don't need that thing to work, then it probably isn't going to be in the design.

It was a mistake to start google image searching "Sue Storm" when I was about to go to bed.

This is the Fantastic Four.  Sue Storm is Johnny Storm's sister (he's the Human Torch) and is married to Reed Richards (who is stretchy).  Also, Ben Grimm, the Thing, who doesn't enter into this conversation any more.

Sue is the Invisible Woman (previously the Invisible Girl until she decided that was stupid).  She can turn invisible.  Also, she can create invisible force bubbles, so she can make protective shields, or she can use them to carry things.  She's kind of underutilized, largely because she works with the FF, and Reed is always fucking things up since he's """"""The Smartest Person in the World"""""""""

I had a thought that once upon a time, Sue turned evil, and killed people by putting force bubbles in their brain.  That led to me searching, which led to me discovering enough things that made me want to make a blog post.

First of all, when she turned evil, she had terrible costume choices.

But I couldn't find anything with her killing people.  I thought it was kind of a future thing, where she'd taken over the world.  The best I could find was this:

Where she kind of chokes the Hulk.

But, so many other things jumped out at me.

Like how the solution to Evil Sue Storm was a bit of domestic violence.

I'm sure that's just a one off thing righ

Oh.  God I hate you, Reed Richards.

But at least that's the worst costume Sue ever had, righ

Oh you're fucking kidding me.

But it's fine, because "she designed it herself."  

I don't even want to look up who wrote/designed/drew that.  John Byrne, probably.

I don't even know what to say about this one.  It somehow seems less practical than the old blue one?  I'm also wondering if the stripes are callbacks to that terrible 80s outfit. 

Comics, I guess.

Tuesday: So I guess everybody was out today?

I was a bit surprised by that.

Why is my phone keyboard the "Bavarian (Austria)" one?  What?

I caught this photo just before he nyoomed away.

• The fact that this article is so long, and doesn't once mention Sergei Magnitsky is something.  Maybe offering important background details as to why the relationship is so bad would be helpful?
• TIL that the Grimm brothers were terrible assholes.
• This is the best kind of Spider-Man.

Sunday: My last full day here was super busy.

After waking up later than I've been waking up this trip, but still earlier than is usual for a Sunday, we went to the coffee place to do some coding and brainstorming on stuff for SciPy.  I think this is my first actual mention of it, even though I've spent a lot of this trip working on code for it.  "Are you going to the conference?" No, almost certainly not.  I don't think I could swing a second conference through work.  "Also, don't you hate Snek?"  Yes, I am still not a fan of Snek.  Snek has lots of problems that apparently most users find appealing.  I do not understand this.  Also, my professed dislike of Snek makes it unlikely that I can get my boss to pay money.

Still, Snek is just a tool, so it's not like things can't be done with it.  I would appreciate more helpful documentation, but whatever.  I'll just curse at the pathological implementation of unicode.

Then I got some essential groceries for the dinner party that showed up on the schedule for today.

So pretty much a standard "make a whole bunch of food" kind of event.

Unrelated, but I have no idea what is going on in this ad.  Is the lady explaining how this rack of computers is helpful in returning products?  Is the guy returning the tablet, and she's showing him the new machine overlords?  I am just confused.

 And there was a bit of drawful.

A man on roller skates riding a bike.

Saturday: I totally didn't forget about this post.

Delicious Monte Cristo for brunch was delicious.

Niantic needs to fix their shit.  After the mess that is this raid, my game stopped accepting inputs, forcing me to reset.  This meant that I wasn't able to even try to attempt to catch this Lapras, making the entire raid pointless.  Since the update, my game has stopped accepting input about a dozen times.  Super great QA on basic functionality.

I'm still surprised I ate all of this meatball sub.  Sticker dinosaur is equally surprised.

Then Target, for only the second time this trip:

This crib is not messing around.

Tuesday: Damn it.

I didn't get my talk all finished today, I was going to pack tonight and didn't do that, and I have to get up stupid early tomorrow for a doctor appointment.  What did I do instead?

I did sentiment analysis of my archive of tweets, and then learned about the aggregate function to break it up into monthly averages.

Wait, not only are my tweets generally positive, it's been getting increasingly positive?  What?  That doesn't seem right.

I liked how the moon looked this evening.

• It's all the fault of this blog post.  And for R for being reasonably easy to impulse install packages.
• I've had this happen before.
• Secret birb.
• What?
• That's good.

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.

Tuesday: Those both can't be true, Google.

Traffic can't be light and "faster than usual" if it's going to take "4 mins more than usual".

• This episode was ok, because they actually did stuff.  It wasn't boring crap like the rest of the season.  In any case, they should switch to monster-of-the-week.  This giant storylines are dumb, because it's perpetual "Shield is strong" followed by "Ohs noes! Shield is weak!".
• "Boo!"
• A set of good pictures, although one does contain a bug.
• Fax machine story.
• I'm glad I'm remembering to watch Brooklyn 99 more.

Tuesday: back to work.

Or 

"You're the one who always makes me cry. To death."

Sure.  OK.  I'm not sure that's how that works. Anyway.

It's been a week. Time for a more different Firehouse subs for lunch.

 Then Google had questions.

What? No. Why are you even?

 Also I fixed two things for work, and did some paper editing. Tomorrow is likely more of the same.

This story is garbage, and I hadn't read/listened/watched it in a long time. Garbage. You suck, 1959. 

 And I played a board game against a four year old.

It is a bit challenging to make sure you don't win in a distasteful way.

Wednesday: Come on, Amazon.

I noticed something about Amazon today.  I went to check when my order would be delivered, and I saw this:

Not the Squirrel Girl book I pre-ordered four months ago.

It's the "2 other shipments in this order" part in the lower left.  I have though already, Amazon, and I've already read the book entirely.  It's not just this one order that isn't complete yet due to the pre-order.

This already arrived, so it's not "Arriving today."

Ditto with this one.

What's up, Amazon?

TldrL:

• Title:  The Colour out of Space
• Date:  1927
• Summary:  A meteorite falls onto a farmer's farm, and dissolves after being struck by lightning multiple times.  The farm becomes corrupted, with all the produce growing huge and bitter.  It kills his animals too, making them crumble to dust before they die.  It's really bad, is the point here.  Eventually the farmer and his family die too, in equally bad fashion, but not before a neighbor visits and is told about the "colour" that lives in the well that's feeding on them.  The neighbor brings the authorities, who plan their trip great so they arrive at sunset.  They escape the colour, which shoots off into space, dropping a small part of itself back down.  The valley is about to become a reservoir for Arkham, which is A Great Idea.
• Real Villain:  Colors.
• Last line in italics?  No.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  8/10.
• Read it:  Here.

asdfasdf

• Pokemon.
• That's...a bit violent.
• Not Pokemon.
• A long article about Brexit.
• Some good art.
• Chicago.
• I know where Alameda is.
• Huh.  Yeah, I guess so.
• Because fact checking is such a difficult thing.

Sunday: FINE, GOOGLE. WE'LL DO IT YOUR WAY. WHATEVER.

I woke up crazy early for no reason today, read most of my internet stuff, and then went back to sleep.  When I woke up again, I got this.

I DON'T GO EVERY WEEK, GOOGLE.  JUST, EVERY SO OFTEN.

AND IT'S NOT LIKE YOU JUST SAYING THAT IS GOING TO INFLUENCE MY DECISIONS AT ALL, GOOGLE.  JUST STOP IT.

Although, to be fair, it did sound really yummy.

I got the spicy umakara, and it was spicier than usual.  I almost never have the "stop eating because something caught in my throat, and now my head feels like it's going to explode while my nose drips off" reaction, but that hit me like four times today.

And the sign is totally correct.  "So hot, but you can't stop."  It's really yummy.

Today's tldr Lovecraft/Drawlloween is here at the beginning to get a big issue out of the way.

• Title:  Medusa's Coil (with Zealia Bishop)
• Date:  1930
• Summary:  I'm not bothering with rereading it, because it's a garbage story of some generic guy finding some old house, and the old man who lives there tells how he's cursed forever because his son married someone, but she was super horrible, and had demon monster hair, and then the twist ending is that she fooled everyone into thinking she was white, when she wasn't.  Yeah.  The casual racism is pretty bad in a lot of Lovecraft, so I wanted to get the worst example I remember out of the way early.
• Real Villain:  Racism.
• Last line in italics?  No.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  0/10.
• Don't read it:  Here. 

The real villain.

• Pokemon.
• Another sad Pokemon cartoon about Phantump.
• Nice going, Steve.
• Not Pokemon.
• They are pretty much the best.
• Yeah, that makes sense.
• I just liked this bit of art.
• This is a good idea.
• Today I learned that the pre Civil War south was concerned the government building roads was a problem.  

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.
• The other reason to have double unagi is that it's moderately likely that unagi won't be available to eat in the not-too-distant future.
• Squirrel.
• Well that's a cool not-lego thing.
• Another famous person died, and I really should sit down and sort that statistics thing out.
• 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."

How have I never heard of this?

What?

How does that even work?

"The sauce is then spray-dried into a powder that can be used in applications where a liquid sauce won't work."

What?

So this is new, right?

"2014/07/28"!

This has been around for at least two years?!

I'm...I'm done with today.

(22:13:05) Julie: I am trying to figure out what to put it on
(22:13:11) me: everything?

Um. Ok?

I'm sitting at home, eating dinner.  A drug commercial comes on, and I'm thoroughly confused.  This isn't the exact same commercial as the one I saw (my old guy had two granddaughters, not the single grandson in this one), but it's sufficiently close for me to take screen shots of the animated side story.

The Big Bad Wolf is harassing the three pigs again.

But he's old now.

And can't get up enough breath to blow their house down, presumably so he can murder and eat them, as-you-do.

Nope.  Not working.

Guess it's time to go home instead.

"Yay!  No destruction of property and murder for us today!  Thank you, COPD!"

"Yeah, Doc, I don't know.  I just can't blow houses down anymore.  That's like 70% of my job!"

"That's because you have COPD, an obstructive lung disease that makes it difficult for your lungs to function properly."

"Symbicort can help!"

And it does help.

Those candles didn't stand a chance.

And then everyone has cake, because the wolves have a vibrant modern society in which they can purchase cakes and celebrate both birthdays and the wonders of pharmaceuticals.

What happens the next day?

An idea!

"Look at those smug motherfucking pigs."

"I think it's time for some ham sandwiches!"

I'm not saying that AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceutical corporation, is really suggesting that the strong should pillage and murder the weak, but that's kind of the vibe I get from this commercial.  Or, I guess we can go with the youtube uploader's comment:

That's an option.