November 06, 2020

Also: A person named Jason Demoine Daniel voted in last night's election (In Michigan). He voted Absentee, which, I suppose is fine since, having been born in 1850, he's probably quite frail. He was 11 at the start of the Civil War, he saw the nation transition from agricultural, developing country to industrial powerhouse. What things this person might have seen; Passenger Pigeons, American Locusts, the first cars and planes, Hell, given his proximity to Illinois, he might have witnessed The Great Chicago Fire! There is no telling what knowledge he might be able to impart to us. We should have some historians go interview this amazing human resource.

Unless....his longevity is due to him being a Dracula or something. In that case send monster hunters.

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1 dont know about the others links, but sharpies are actually the preferred method for az machines.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/04/facebook-posts/voting-machines-dont-read-ballots-filled-sharpies-/

Posted by: punchy at Thu Nov 5 06:00:16 2020 (3Ihg2)

2 The sharpie is not the issue, VA ballots use sharpies too and because of Coronachan, they are giving every voter here a sharpie. The issue is that because either the ballot, or the sharpie were not within spec and the sharpie bled through, the ballot was discarded. Again, that is not an issue, it could, in fact be a PEBBABB issue in that she might have pressed too hard on the ballot with the sharpie. The issue is that they discarded the ballot and if the allegations are true they did not allow it to be replaced after being destroyed.
Of all the shenanigans I've heard about, this is either the least consequential, or deeply disturbing. It could be a miscommunication and a voter (not unreasonably IMHO) who's a bit paranoid and as a result unfairly jumped to conclusions, or it could be that the poll worker upon rendering assistance noted that the voter had voted for a particular candidate and decided that "No...this vote doesn't need to be counted". Most of the other shenanigans like stopping the vote count in areas that Trump is over-performing are clearly done by people very high up in the party apparatus who are either politically appointed or in explicitly partisan positions. The rank and file is not implicated. A poll worker would be troubling, but we don't know any details here to any degree of reliability beyond witness testimony.

(Oh right...Problem Exists Between Ballot And Ballot Box)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Nov 5 09:16:25 2020 (5iiQK)

3 I am personally more concerned about the fact that when I submitted my Sharpie(TM) filled ballot (Which at least for the optical readers in my county, was perfectly fine - as confirmed via messages with the local county party establishment.), I was told I could put the ballot into the machine with regardless of which side was facing up - and the poll worker was in a position to see what I had filled out on the ballot. When I saw that, I made sure that my ballot was facing down, because even with bleed through, it can be hard to tell which I filled. That being said, it was hardly a secret in the polling place that I was with the minority party in my municipality (When they were checking my registration, the person announced it - and the whole polling place was one big open area without any dividers.), so who knows.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thu Nov 5 17:46:25 2020 (4i7w0)

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First They Came For The Oppai...Then They Came For The Rogue A.I.

A few months ago we noted that an American V-Tuber with the admittedly spicy name Oppai Pantsu was banned for a TOS violation. The violation was that Twitch retroactively decided that "Oppai" was a banned word on the platform. They had never mentioned this and had not given the girl the opportunity to change it. She had to re-launch her channel under the name Oppapan and lost her Partner status. Her channel has never really recovered its once impressive viewership (no one can search for her under her old name).

Today, Projekt Melody got the same treatment, though there is, as yet, no indication as to why.

No indication at all...Just a pink screen.

What's weird is that despite Projekt Melody's other channel, her Twitch stream was fairly inoffensive (double entendre's notwithstanding). Projekt Melody was an entertaining Twitch streamer. She was no pro-gamer, but she was enthusiastically learning video games and her streams were enjoyable in large part because of her enthusiasm and dry wit. She did a lot to help up-and coming streamers by leveraging her sudden celebrity. Despite her official backstory (She is a rogue A.I. damnit. That is her story and she is sticking to it!) there was a remarkable sense of sincerity and fun in in her show.

This is really bizarre, I'm not sure what Twitch is up to aside from drunkenly swinging the banhammer.

I do note that Melody was one of the few streamers that spoke up in defense of those Holo-Live girls that got temporarily banned last month.

UPDATE:

Hambly can't spell "extortion" which is unfortunate as that is the reason for Melody's absence. A DMCA notice was filed by her character designer, apparently in breach of contract.

UPDATE 2:

As per Wonderduck in the comments, Melody is back.

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Take of the Day

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November 03, 2020

I've Got to go to Work

But this may be a leading indicator.

The Yuan is tanking. Apparently the CCP is suffering some sort of reversal as of 23:21 Tuesday evening.

Via.

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While We Await the Inevitable Chaos...

...let's take a moment to appreciate just how darned gorgeous this MOBILE game is.

...and what a good editor Kuro Ailfa is.

I am highly tempted to start playing this, but...you know...gacha.

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1 Not only, or even primarily, a mobile game! I'm playing on my big gaming PC, which makes combat a lot easier. The mobile client is useful for party maintenance and some daily quests, and I did a lot of the early story quests on it, but the controls are a bit awkward. You can switch between clients at any time.

And I've spent exactly $4.99 on the game so far. And my latest free gacha pull included one of these... (which is really handy, because I needed someone with fast Geo attacks to unlock a few chests)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tue Nov 3 14:09:42 2020 (ZlYZd)

2 Honestly, it's a really good game up until the content runs out; if your gaming calendar isn't already thoroughly booked, go ahead and try it out. The actual gameplay is quite fun!

Once you HAVE finished the story that's there, it's not that great of a gacha game - very time-throttled as a way to keep you from maxing things out and discovering there's nothing left to do BUT to max things out. It also has a fairly nasty treadmill aspect in that the world will get stronger as you grind - so it's entirely possible that you can get a great character in the gacha and just bench them because the commitment to getting them leveled up to match your current characters is just too much.

So in a very real sense, it's not a bad idea to try it out, finish the current story content, and put it back down to wait for more areas to be developed (supposedly there's a new one coming in December).

I haven't spent any money, mostly because I get the feeling that it wouldn't really make any difference - what you run into isn't a wall to scale and get beyond, it's just a cliff, and even if you get higher up the cliff, you're still climbin' the cliff. It also helps that I kind of enjoy just doing the "hey, here's some free rolls" and working with what I get from that, rather than thinking "my life isn't complete unless I draw this one character at astronomically low rates!"

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Nov 3 14:29:09 2020 (v29Tn)

3 I have to say...I am intrigued by the game. But so far, the only gacha game I have played at all is Fate/Grand Order (Hi, Wonderduck! I see another person who has max leveled Rider Medusa!). I have Fire Emblem Heroes and Valkyrie Anatomia...But the latter was made by a Chinese studio, and I loathe touching anything from the PRC than I have to, and the former is at the 'dead man walking' stage, given Nintendo's discovery that mobile games that is not named Pokemon GO are not worth the cost.

Posted by: cxt217 at Tue Nov 3 20:00:36 2020 (4i7w0)

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Someday...

...a woman named Arianna will comment on my blog, expressing praise for my hot take on some subject. She'll find my humor engaging, and want to get to know me better. She will be my soul mate.

And I'll delete her comment because I'll assume she's that damned bot.

"The tragic life of a blogger is tragic."

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Golly

Aside from two or three midterm elections and a similar number of primaries, I have missed zero elections since 1988. I don't think I've EVER seen a line quite as long as the one I stood in this morning, except possibly 2008.

The fellow behind me had had to leave and get additional clothing earlier in the morning (It was quite cold and windy) He noted that the line earlier had been longer still and gone completely around the school.

The line was so long that it extended far enough out that city council and school board candidates could legally pitch themselves to voters in line, which they did with much verve and enthusiasm. I found this welcome since it is terribly hard to find out anything about city council or school board candidates who are, by law, not allowed to express a political affiliation. This is he first time in years that I've voted for local offices and not felt that I was just throwing darts.

The line, for all its length moved quite fast and I was out in just over an hour.

In stark contrast to the acrimony we see on the news, everyone was civil, pleasant, and supportive of everyone else doing their civic duty, and it was a very diverse crowd, with people of all ethnicities in outfits ranging from suits to coveralls.

Now.....we wait.

(And wait and wait and wait, since, according to the radio just now, Governor Moloch McBlackface has said that the state will count ballots that come in by....Friday*. )

*A quick web search turned up nothing corroborating that, but it may be breaking as I type this.

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November 02, 2020

Why are MY Comments

...and not Arianna the Enterprising Salesbot being blocked as spam?

As opposed to the good kind of SPAM as rendered here by OmeNo

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One More Day

more...

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1 Vehicles topped off with gas and a week's food at home in case "supply chain difficulties" start tomorrow night?

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Mon Nov 2 10:35:25 2020 (ug1Mc)

2 Shops in DC aren't boarding up their windows because they think Biden will win.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Nov 2 10:46:06 2020 (PiXy!)

3 What Pixy said. Voting with your mouth is one thing; at the polls another. With your time and money? Not at all coincidentally the MSM changed their tune when the boards started going up.

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Mon Nov 2 11:41:19 2020 (ug1Mc)

4 @Pixy, well that's the thing. If Biden wins, things are bad for a whole host of policy reasons.
If Trump wins there's at least some hope that we can stave off the deluge....but there is likely to be massive violence. I live in a Blue area that has already seen some unrest so It is very possible I'll have to leave.
The flip side of this is that having the leadership of the left and their cadre of extremist myrmidons so openly drop the mask as they have this year will certainly lead to some self reflection by quite a few people. The pain, if it comes to pass will, in the long term probably help the nation to heal, but lancing boils, like making omelets is a euphemism for dreadful suffering that ought not to happen.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Nov 2 12:43:15 2020 (5iiQK)

5 Yeah. Watching it from far afield, it looks like Trump will win (though I can't really speak about the congressional races) and the left's reaction will make 2016 look like a Mormon mathematics teacher's union annual picnic.

And I don't think they'll learn their lesson, and it will happen again at least in 2024.

Stay safe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Nov 2 18:03:41 2020 (PiXy!)

6 I always miss Steve, but I really miss having him now, to talk about the 2020 elections.

Personal observations, and right off the bat, I have to be a bit vague about my descriptions because otherwise the info will pinpoint exactly where I am.

I have no idea who will win tomorrow, but I can tell you that, living in a very blue area (The bluest part of the state outside actual cities.), I have seen the usual lots and lots of Biden signs, and very few Trumps. But, I have also seen a few more Trump signs just in the last few days on my drives, right in the middle of neighborhoods festooned with Democrat signs...As well as a sizable number of signs for the GOP challenger taking on the Democrat incumbent in Congress. I have not noticed a lot of houses with the Stars and Stripes, but I can say there are a surprising number of houses with no signs in neighborhoods and streets otherwise lined with every Democrat signs under the sun (And you get the feeling that maybe the Democrats might have wanted to spend less money on signs and web ads than on, say, phone banks. The number and variety of signs for Biden-Harris on the average property is startling, to say the least.). I find it interesting.

The one thing I am willing to venture is that Biden probably will not do as well as Hillary did among the people in the blue county, due to the unpleasantness that occurred when spring was turning to summer.

Posted by: cxt217 at Mon Nov 2 20:28:11 2020 (4i7w0)

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November 01, 2020

When the Crash WAS Your Fault

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October 31, 2020

Everyone be Careful Driving this Evening

Because it's that day that ghosts, goblins, zombies, and vampires are most likely to be non-compliant with quarantines and lockdowns....for they HUNGER.

Also:

No matter how scary they may be, if they come to your door, don't do this...

Instead, take the opportunity to do safety checks on your equipment.

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October 30, 2020

As Part of The General Compliance With the Standards and Practices of Current Year

APPLE has bought the Peanuts Holiday specials.

They will be aired on APPLE TV only and not shown on TV until after the holidays.

Brickmuppet Blog has, therefore, taken it upon ourselves to partially fill the void in Peanuts spoopy content.

Art by Steve Jenks

It's important to note that this travesty was committed by APPLE and not some completely different company that might or might not be mentioned in the comments. .

Also:

One more thing. (Scarcely worth mentioning.)

more...

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October 29, 2020

The Plot Thickens...Thins, and Thickens Again.

When TuCa revealed last night that a shipment of documents containing damaging information to Biden had gone missing in transit, he went through the procedures that the company took. Having been a clerk in the shipping industry some years ago, I was pretty sure what company it was from the procedures described. Sure enough, it was, in fact U.P.S. and they announced today that they had found the documents.

I suspect, (with no evidence whatsoever) that they did what we did when someone informed us that they had lost something that looked very much like trash, they locked out the trash compactor and had their facility's equivalent of the Brickmuppet sift through it piece by piece.

Years ago some smooth-brain decided that he could ship a panel of reinforced impact resistant glass with no other packing material than an address label taped to the bare glass. The problem was, that those windows were laminated glass and even the slightest "thwack" on the SIDE would cause it to delaminate and shatter.

Eventually the window made it all the way from Utah to Virginia without incident until someone dinged it on the edge while putting it on the shelf of the truck for delivery.

When it delaminated (quite spectacularly IIRC) it destroyed the label. I wrote it up as a panel of bullet-proof glass with the label destroyed and discarded it.

The next day I was called from unloading trucks back to the clerk station which was covered in account executives and engineers. Turns out, it was one of the space shuttle windows for the cargo bay and NASA was furious that we had somehow lost their indestructible window. I explained that yes, I had processed a damage that fit that description, and it had had no packing whatsoever and had struck on its edge when being loaded on the truck and...I'd put it in the dumpster as of no salvageable value.

I then got a stern talking down to by some civil servant explaining that the window was supposed to be indestructible and that astronauts lives were at risk and this was beyond my pay grade, so I went out to the trash compactor, had the plant engineer lock it out and recovered the very heavy slabs of broken glass and as much of the plastic and dust as I could recover. During this time the government employee expressed his absolute astonishment that an uncredentialed individual such as myself (which he referred to by various non-complementary slang terms for southern white folks) was allowed to even go near something as important as this piece of kit. After recovering the space shuttle window I explained to one of the NASA employees who was not HickHater that laminated glass cannot take blows to the side and if there had been so much as a bit of cardboard along the edge, the window would have been fine, and that if a meteor entered the window from the side, it was passing through the bulkhead perpendicular to the axis of the shuttle and that there would be greater concerns than the integrity of the window. He laughed and agreed that basic packing was needed (he was an engineer, not a...whatever effete hysteric the other guy was) and they took their window crumbs and left.

I've been in dumpsters to get academic papers, spreadsheets and all manner of things, because U.P.S. does actually give a damn.

Well, that was a digression....

Hopefully there was no foul play with these Biden papers, and it was just something like a poorly sealed envelope. We should find out what horrors reside within them tonight or tomorrow.

Also: Tucker, SEND COPIES not originals. "The dog ate my homework" is never a valid excuse.

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1 This is another example of one of the things that infuriates me. UPS, a private corporation of enormous scale, is able to track this down within hours, the documents are found and we know the name of who lost them. It won't be long before we know how they got lost. But our state and federal bureaucracies are complete black holes for any kind of accountability. Fast and Furious and Crossfire Hurricane are two obvious examples, where Congress should be able to ask for, and receive in hours or days, complete lists of who met with whom and who gave the permissions, but in fact we'll never, ever, get all that information. It's deliberately made to be impossible to track down.

Posted by: David at Thu Oct 29 20:07:02 2020 (jdGUg)

2 They did keep and send copies. Just also the original, or alleged original.
Interestingly, the Daily Mail says they found it in a dumpster... at a department store. So somebody had sticky fingers of some sort.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Oct 30 09:35:08 2020 (cHUaN)

3 Tucker asserts the envelope was "securely sealed" and UPS officials repeatedly refused to answer the question of how the flash drive could've gotten out of it.

"The envelope was securely sealed. We know that. Two witnesses saw our producer seal it and UPSdoes not dispute that.

Was the package torn open accidentally by a machine? That seems unlikely. UPS says that almost never happens."

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-missing-ups-biden-family-documents-hunter-biden

Posted by: Rick C at Fri Oct 30 13:10:40 2020 (eqaFC)

4 Of course this is the Tucker Carlson that won his court case by arguing that no one would believe the stuff he makes up.

"US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox's premise, adding that the network "persuasively argues" that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes.""
https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case-tucker-carlson-2020-9

Posted by: punchy at Mon Nov 2 13:46:23 2020 (3Ihg2)

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Oh.

You can get it on Amazon.

The last time I tried to get a Japanese beverage off Amazon it was 212 dollars a bottle.

I demurred.

Relevant art is by Huwari. Support him on Fanbox.

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Finally, 2 Months Early, We Get to Discuss Something that is NOT a 2020 Headline

Asteroid Apophis Could Still Hit Earth in 2068, New Measurements Suggest

2068 is gonna be lit!

We've discussed Apophis before, but not recently...we were still on Blogspot back then. Basically Apophis is an Earth crossing asteroid that someone decided to tempt fate by naming after an Egyptian god of destruction. In late 2005 there was some speculation that it would impact the Earth in 2036, but subsequent calculations indicated that was not actually the case.

Computer model of Apophis from Wikipedia

Now, in 2020, astronomers looked at the space rock's most recent pass and amended their amendment to their calculations with the result that they think this dollop of deep-space detritus has a 0.00067% chance of impacting the earth with the force of 1.2 gigatons of TNT in 2068.

This is not a high probability event, but if it comes to pass it is a very consequential, as a blast yield of 1200 megatons is a, shall we say, impactful, event no matter where on Earth it happens. Furthermore, this asteroid tends to have close calls frequently, meaning that in the long term, an eventual impact is almost certain.

The good news is that we've got plenty of time to mitigate this and try, fail, and try again to deflect the object and still have time to reflect upon and learn from mistakes made and lessons learned.

The Brickmuppet's Crack team of Science Babes begin training to take care of business.

For instance: The next time one discovers an Earth crossing asteroid, name it Fluttershy or Snorlax rather than after some ancient Egyptian god of chaos and death.

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October 28, 2020

I Predict Rain Tomorrow

At least this is only a cat 2. New Orleans doesn't need any more abuse this season.

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Meanwhile: In the World of Game Development

Perhaps, but how about you just say that you missed a comma or a period in the last tweet?

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Ghaaaaah! This explains EVERYTHING!

From his testimony today.

Jack Dorsey has been possessed by the ghost of Rasputin!

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