Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

August 29, 2015

It's Been A Long Week

....so here is something pleasant, at least more so than what is below the fold.

Submarine, bridge, cute girl, and cats by ajiyumi.

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School Live Continues

In the latest episode of this season's surprisingly clever slice of life show, Yuki must catch and wash the dog. Hijinks ensue.

The girls discuss their plans (or lack thereof) for after graduation. Miki stops reading her horror books long enough to conclude that the school being equipped as a civil defense location is actually indicative of some sinister purpose. Yuuri organizes an expedition to sneak into the teachers lounge because SHE MUST KNOW. An attempt at a group photograph goes about as well as one would expect. Sakura Sensei practices her penmanship with heartbreaking results.

I am in genuine awe of this show and how it is able to elicit an actual emotional response from me.

I am eager to hear the thoughts of anyone else who is following this show. But PLEASE, use spoiler tags!

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1 Wow. The last few minutes of that reminded me of

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Sat Aug 29 04:57:50 2015 (ohzj1)

2 It looks like this is a single-cour season, so it won't catch up to the manga. I took a very quick look at the scanlations, and the good news is that . I didn't read more than a few pages; I'm generally spoiler-immune, but in this case I just don't want to know too much too soon.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sat Aug 29 11:17:00 2015 (ZlYZd)

3 Not clicking...I'm avoiding scantalation spoilers like the plague on this one.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 29 13:23:20 2015 (ohzj1)

Posted by: ReallyBored at Mon Aug 31 10:02:35 2015 (ulGxe)

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Tonight on GATE: After Sneaking a Thoughtful and Intelligent Show Past Standards and Practices for 2 Months, They're Found Out!

Now boarding at GATE 9 bound for Fan Service with stops in Akihabara, suspiciously opaque hot springs, America bashing, dead G.I.s, a cool old dude, otaku affirmation and normally strong female characters doing the paper doll pander.

Please direct your attention towards the EYES of the EGL at the front of the cabin as she adjusts your belt and attempts to convince you that even if she looks 13, her actual age of 961 means it won't really count as loli.

Well...

After 8 episodes of sublime storytelling and pacing, this heretofore excellent show surprises us in an entirely new way.

Ahem...

Mind you, it actually does move along a rather tendentious subplot and there is some character development so this is not a complete non-sequitur of an episode, which is, perhaps, unfortunate, as is it were, I could advise you to skip it....especially if yo've been watching this show with your kids. It just doesn't at all fit with the tone of the series thus far and that feeling rather increases as the episode progresses.

There is at least one bit that I hope is foreshadowing though...

I predict ARCHERY!

We also do find out offhandedly that Leili's magic does work in this world...which ought to be a big deal.

This series is now 8 stellar to 1 meh so I'm not by any means dropping it as of yet.

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August 27, 2015

One That Bears Watching

This is a wet one. Erika is just a tropical storm now but its massive rains have contributed to at least four deaths on Dominica. The NWS is still talking cat 1 or 2, but as Rand Simberg notes, the gulf stream is hotter right now than it was during Andrew...meaning that depending on wind shear, this beast could get worrisomely impressive.

Everyone south of Cape Charles would be well advised to keep an eye on this one, get their kits in order and keep their tanks topped off.

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August 26, 2015

First Flight of the Bugatti!

Via The Unwanted Blog, comes something truly kewel!

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Well, This Could Be Better

Monster Musume is faithfully following its comic book inspiration into imbecility and squalor, wasting what is admittedly a fairly interesting cast on prurient pandering to the dolorous, disaffected degenerate deviants that make up its target audience.Obviously this is a show I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in admitting to watching...

"Oh..umm...This?...Uhh...Thi...This is a...a cooking show."

This is not to say that the show is without potential. For one thing, a spinoff centered around the Mrs. Smith and her commando team of mythological monster-maiden myrmidons has a considerable likelihood of being quite entertaining.

UPDATE: In fact, as a friend recently pointed out, such a show would probably be the most enjoyable G.I. Joe sequel possible.

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August 25, 2015

Groovy!

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Don't Forget About Lunch UPDATE: Trigger Warning! (May Cause OCD Fits if Viewed Too Closely)

Art by Subaku

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People May Wonder

...why I care about a little commemorative rocket that I can never own and affects me in no way whatsoever.

This is why...

I canâ€™t be involved any longer. If it were just meâ€¦ but it isnâ€™t. I have others who need me to stay out of the fight, as much as I hate it. If I keep in the frontlines, I will become a casualty, and I have people who are dependent on me, helpless in the world if something becomes of my good name. And so I must turn away, tears in my eyes, and leave the field of battle. I am sickened, but my duty is clear.

I cannot bay. I have been bound into silence. I bow my head, and exitâ€¦

...Read the whole thing.

You see, it's not REALLY about the dinky little rocket.

more...

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August 24, 2015

8 Months to Go

Old Dominion University starts the week before Labor Day so, since I only have a week to go before school starts, I decided just now to check and see if any of my silly busses were online yet so I could order some of my books and also find out if any classes have homework due the first day of class.

What I discovered is that school starts tomorrow...

Umm...

That's good to know.

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August 23, 2015

Worldcon Was This Weekend

I did not go this year because I've been digging my way out of debt, and.....

"WAIT! You promised you'd put the politics under the fold!

What? No. This post is about World Con, so...

"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Oh...

Drat...

I hate what the world is becoming

more...

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1 It's amusing that Larry's tongue-in-cheek invocation of this Sarah McLachlan PSA, exhorting his readers to help end puppy-related sadness, got twisted around by people who wouldn't be caught dead reading so much as a paragraph of his blog.

I'm even more amused that the opposition ended up earning the label Puppy Kickers, abbreviated PK, which evokes their similarity to the Player Killers of online gaming, whose only fun is actively preventing others from enjoying the game.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 00:57:34 2015 (ZlYZd)

2 The primary observation, I think, is that many recent winners of the Hugo Award are just plain not very good.

I don't know if there was a novel I would have voted for this year. I liked Skin Game well enough, but it's just another solid entry in the Dresden Files, not Hugo material. (Or not Hugo-as-I'd-like-to-think-of-them material.)

Honestly, the last Best Novel I think really earned the title was 2011's Blackout / All Clear, which is / are outstanding (it's one story, but about 1200 pages long, so it was broken into two volumes). Before that, all the way back to 2004's Paladin of Souls.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Aug 24 01:38:11 2015 (PiXy!)

3 I've been going through some of the recent annual Nebula Award collections (which, tellingly, fall out of print fast and are not available as ebooks), and it's surprising how many of the stories can be converted from SF to F by deleting a few lines. In the 2006 collection (which I bought for an as-yet-unreprinted Vinge story), there was one that was 98% "kid growing up in Fifties US" and 2% "found a dead time traveler". (it lost to a story that was "kid growing up in Fifties US meets housekeeper who speaks in exaggerated Black dialect and teaches her voodoo")

Yeah, the difference between Hugo material and Hugo-as-I'd-like-to-think-of-them material is sad. I've still got Brad Templeton's CD containing the 1993 Hugo and Nebula nominees, and there's just no comparison. There are good years and bad years, but there have been an awful lot of bad years lately, and it isn't a coincidence that this is the year people decided that "nothing is good enough for an award". The in-group liked the bad years just fine.

Sadly, Templeton himself was a reflexive Puppy Kicker, so you can't just buff the rocket (not a euphemism) and call it a day; there may be nothing under the rust but more rust.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 11:35:23 2015 (ZlYZd)

4 Bluntly, it's a daft award anyway.

There's plenty of room for an Oscar-type award, where it's voted on by people who are in the industry and understood to be as such. (Nebula, basically.) There's room for a "fan favorite" where everyone gets to vote (Golden Globes basically?)

There's -room- for "favorite of people who attend a certain annual event" too, really. Cannes might be the proper parallel here. However, there's definitely a difference between "they loved it at Cannes", and "it won an Oscar", and "I thought it was pretty good"; these categories are not necessarily mutually overlapping.

Not necessary mutually exclusive either, of course, there's plenty of good stuff that wins a Hugo. But at the end of the day, it's become a fairly poor predictor of things which I might enjoy reading.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Mon Aug 24 13:13:45 2015 (qxzj1)

5 "There's -room- for "favorite of people who attend a certain annual event" too, really."
From what I've been reading, the lefties who have been dominating the Hugos have been insisting that they were not, in fact, this, but actually the Golden Globes equivalent.
Then when the Sad Puppies slate got on the ballot, they started spinning in anticipation of a possible loss and claiming it actually is just the the results of some random con, one of the bigger incoherencies in the "them right-wingers can't be allowed to win" movement.

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Aug 24 13:41:30 2015 (FvJAK)

About 30 years ago I fell in with a group of SMOFs and spent a few years embedded in fan culture, including attending several WorldCons.

You wouldn't believe how seriously they take the Hugo voting. It's like they're saving the world. My group sometimes would debate certain choices to try to decide which one they should vote for.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Aug 24 14:46:42 2015 (+rSRq)

7 The Nebulas are even more clannish than the Hugos, which became obvious to outsiders when it became the Women's Award last year, to the loud cheers of activists deceived into thinking that SF was "anti-woman" until Just Now (and again this year, with a gratuitous swipe at SP3's imaginary "misogyny").

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 17:02:52 2015 (ZlYZd)

8 To be fair, though, the Really-Old Guard seems to be against all this crap, even when they are leftist as the dawn is east. It's the Middle-Aged-to-Early-Old Guard that is doing the SJW crap.

I hate to say it, but I'm glad so many of First Fandom had died before they had to see this happen to what they made for us.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Mon Aug 24 20:10:10 2015 (ZJVQ5)

9 Makes sense; you've got the parents who created the wealth, the children who followed their example and expanded it, and the grandchildren who grew up spoiled and pissed it all away.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Aug 24 21:43:23 2015 (ZlYZd)

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One Could Spend Years...

...researching the genre of video games known as fantasy RPGs.

Or one could endure this for this four minutes and ten seconds.

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A Non Sequiter Brought on By a Mysterious Banhammer

I've been banned by Facebook for some time, and while this seems to be an error that can be corrected, I've decided that having more than one blog is simply more than I can rationalize the time for. If I had a product I was marketing or a fan-base I was interacting with, then a second blog and/or Facebook page would, in all probability, pass a cost benefit analysis. However, to apply that much duplication and added effort to a hobby does not. Thus, for my part, I direct any questions about topics and format to the category tags.

I mention that, in part because, in addition to Facebook, I am banned from commenting at Wonderduck's place.

Now, I had assumed that this was a technical issue with the web service that we share, but I've recently discovered that I cannot opine on Subrban Banshee's site either.

I've ruled out a browser issue.

Thus, I can only suspect that they both found out about that time in '79 when I allegedly precipitated the destruction of a certain old manuscript during a violent altercation with a group of hipster filkers that, in turn, inadvertently resulted in the replacement of Marty McNeely by Svengoulie after I strolled into that Chinese Restaurant to try their Peking Duck.

Let me just say that I am denying here and now that any of that in the previous paragraph ever happened. With that in mind, I have just one more, completely unrelated thing to say....

more...

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August 22, 2015

Oh This Just Keeps Getting Better and Better

Tales of teh tech-weasel's telescreen tyranny.

It seems that Windows "10" will have the ability to shut down any programs it considers unauthorized or illegitimate.

Thus, it seems likely that game you got from DL Site that you stripped the DRM out of because it was incompatible with anything after XP is just toast.

But wait...

I am 45 years old. Not counting my old TI-99, I got my first real computer out of a dumpster in 1999. As it and its subsequent replacements have all been Macs, I've never learned code and the magical slabs of seeing are all black box technology to me.

So...Keeping in mind the Gell-Mann effect and the fact that I don't really understand the matter beyond the broadest basics, can anyone opine on the veracity/feasibility of this ?

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1 I've been following this, and the analysis seems to be that Microsoft needs to fire the lawyers writing their EULAs. Basically, Windows 10 provides integration with all of Microsoft's online services and with Xbox, but all the rules for everything you could possibly do with Windows 10 and any linked Microsoft products and services have been shoved into the one 12,000-word document.

In this case, the rules apply to Xbox Live - if you download a pirated game onto your Xbox, Microsoft can remove it and/or cancel your Xbox Live account. But that has always been the case with Xbox.

I'm still a bit leery of Windows 10 and waiting for at least the first update, but you need to remember that Microsoft are looking to upgrade about a billion business users to this new release, and they will get no traction at all if businesses are worried that Micosoft can reach into their computers.

But then, Amazon deleted unauthorised copies of, of all things, 1984 from users' Kindles, so I wouldn't be surprised if they pull a dumb stunt at some point, got their fingers burnt, and had to re-think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Aug 22 20:59:40 2015 (PiXy!)

2 Ah. I had missed that this was an X-Box thing...that puts a different spin on it. Thanks!
Still...
Hmmm...Your mention of the AMAZON kindle fiasco reminds me of the AMAZON RWBY kerfuffel, which as trivial as it was, struck me as much more worrisome in its implications.
I'm old, I don't get these newfangled gadjitz...so my view of this are not through the lens of someone who is tech savvy and it is probably being tainted by crumudgeonism.
But the ability to go in and rewrite libraries or break ones tools from afar if they have forbidden knowledge or associate with the wrong person...that's the stuff of evil sorcerers; a totalitarians wet dream...
Alas, such worries are for superstitious children of course...and crumudgeons who just don't get it.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 22 21:21:54 2015 (ohzj1)

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Tonights Recitations From Kipling Will be Performed by Rory Mercury

From episode 8 of GATE which continues to be highly intelligent and entertaining. This is despite having a girl in a Gothic Lolita outfit adorned with fake wolf ears speaking before the Japanese Diet...or perhaps because of it.

The last episode indicated that our heroes would be returning to Japan from fantasy Middle Earth Land to be debriefed, and the civilians representatives from the other world would be interviewed. This was pretty much what happened. Of course coming out of Middle Earth into Shibuya rather IMPRESSES the visitors. In short order, Itami, Leili (acting as translator)Tuka and (God help us all) Rory Mercury all are asked to testify before the Parliament...

Now. Pick out the person from the above lineup most likely to cause the whole thing to go to worms...

We also learn that Mercury's Halbard/Pike/Tuning Fork weighs several hundred pounds.

There's no combat or other action whatsoever in this episode aside from an attempted mugging and a collateral hernia but a ton of stuff happened that moved the show forward including a bit of suspense involving intrigues facing our heroes in Japan, both foreign and domestic.

This show remains awesome.

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August 20, 2015

Well...I've Got Nothing....

...so here is something by Patricia Rosemarie MÃ¼ller.

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Blogging on the Edge

Suburban Banshee, not content to limit herself to publishing scholarly translations of medieval texts, has decided to blog dangerously. Specifically, she's stumbled upon and posted about forbidden knowledge. Knowledge so forbidden that the Times Literary Society has removed it from its website.

In stark contrast to those cowardly quislings, Suburban Banshee defies the dread Dervishes of decapitation by keeping the intriguing apostasy up on her blog.

In short, certain Quranic texts have recently been dated too early... possibly before Mohammed started hearing voices from Gabriel.

Suburban Banshee has an extensive overview of the matter.

The manuscript in question appears to be the one discussed here (which is a fascinating find in any event as it predates the 3rd Caliph's destruction of all versions of the Quran not his own).

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August 19, 2015

When The Commute IS the Workout

Glute conscious cityscaping by Izumi Sai

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I Say. This Perry Fellow Bears Watching

This is a work in progress,...

...but do take a look at Perry Park's Pixiv...for some context, and also click here, here, here, here, here and here to see a few WEBM versions of the animations.

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News of the 21st Century

This Iran deal just gets better and better...I knew they weren't allowing the U.S.A. to do inspections of the Iranian nuclear sites, but if this AP story is correct then the agreement is not merely dreadful...it's clinically insane.

VIENNA (AP) â€” Iran, in an unusual arrangement, will be allowed to use its own experts to inspect a site it allegedly used to develop nuclear arms under a secret agreement with the U.N. agency that normally carries out such work, according to a document seen by The Associated Press.

"Unusual arrangement"...well that is not an inaccurate assessment.

Read the whole thing. This is not somer obscure site, but rather Parchin, where Iran is perfecting explosive lenses.

This is so batscat bonkers that I'm a tad skeptical. However, it would fit with a certain school of thought that the issue on our end is neither fecklessness nor naiveté, but rather motivation.

******

Russia has imprisoned (for 15 years) an Estonian they abducted.

******

The Russian economy may be much worse than thought...which could have either calming or incendiary effects upon that states behavior.

******

China is not retiring the old DF-5 ICBMs. Rather, they are upgrading the series of liquid propellant missiles. The new models increase their range to be able to hit targets anywhere on earth, with multiple warheads. This is similar to the arrangement that Russia has, with a few dozen heavyweight missiles complementing their road mobile ICBMs.

******

Oh. Look...

******

Finally..the kind of story that would not be out of place in an 80's film SET in the 21st century....

Third Louisiana Public Water Supply Site Tests Positive for Brain-Eating Amoeba

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