April 05, 2020
Meanwhile: in Ecuador (a place not known for its bitter winters)
I don't speak Spanish but this doesn't look good.
A lot of hope is being pinned on Winnie the Flu behaving like the regular flu and going away in the summer. The Ecuador situation does not seem to support that hope. Ecuador is on the actual equator (hence its name) and Guayaquil is the countries main port (not up in the mountains).Costal temperatures are moderated slightly by the Humbolt Current, but average temperature in Guayaquil in March is still 32.2C (about 90 degrees Fahrenheit) .
The above video was posted by a German News Agency on YouTube but seems to have been pulled.
There's another, short, but quite grim video from Guayaquil here and there's a CNNi report on the situation here.
Batten down. This mess is going to go on for a while.
Winnie the Flu
Winnie the Flu
Deadly detritus from the Pol-it-buro
Winnie the Flu
Winnie the Flu
Pest-er-iferous red bug
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April 04, 2020
A Short Sharp Action off Isla Del Tortuga
This is an immensely amusing story. It seems that the German owned, Portuguese flagged cruise ship RCGS Resolute suffered a mechanical casualty off the South American coast, and while drifting in international waters was approached and fired upon by the Venezuelan corvette BVL Naiguatá. The Venezuelan captain ordered the passenger vessel to follow it into harbor, and when the captain refused attempted to ram and board the Resolute.
Unsurprisingly, given that the Resolute was disabled, ramming was achieved.
Alas, as Resolute is an ice strengthened ship designed to cruise off Antarctica she suffered no damage, while BVL Naiguatá suffered sufficient damage that she capsized and sank ignominiously.
Comparison photo via The Week.
French, U.S., Dutch, and Columbian naval forces are all now on the alert for any further shenanigans from the ABV.
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Paitent Zero
Way back in the before time, when one could go out for tacos and toilet paper was not the coin of the realm, Brickmuppet Blog noted with interest evidence linking the Worrisome Woe from Wuhan to the two microbiology research centers in the city which spawned it.
Now there's this:
This fellow used to be very bullish on China until a few years ago, so this is not a partisan hit-job. He thinks he's found patient zero.
National Review has an analysis of his video here.
Regarding the lab's head scientist mentioned in the video, back on February 14th we linked to some articles and videos on the matter and after a bit of our own research reported that:
Zhengli Shi, the administrator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, (one of the two(!) virology labs in Wuhan) was involved in a rather infamous 2015 experiment at the University of North Carolina to create a really virulent and deadly coronavirus. The idea seems to have been to figure out a worst case scenario and how to plan for it. One the one hand, preparedness is good...on the other hand virulent and deadly man-made coronaviruses are bad, m'kay...and on the gripping hand, the U.S. had just passed a law against that area of research because genetically engineered genocidal death plagues are a demographic that suffers from a robustly bi-partisan lack of support in Congress. In any event, Dr. Shi went and filed a patent for genetically engineering coronavirus proteins.
Scientific American did a glowing piece on her as well early last month.
Now to be clear, this facility she heads is a different lab from the Class 4 facility also in Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli Shi appears to have been studying ways to mitigate coronaviruses, examples of which had caused SARS and MERS. There is no real evidence that this is a bioweapon per se. Evidence IS strong however that this outbreak is due to a lab accident. This is in part because that the bats, that are the presumed vectors were not for sale at the infamous wet-market and live nearly a thousand clicks from Wuhan. Everything, including the paper mentioned in the video, points to a lab accident, one that likely claimed the life of a scientist at the lab, Huang Yanling, a graduate student at the virology lab.
From the National Review article linked above.
She has disappeared, had her info removed from the labs personnel page (though her name remains) and, the Chinese government vehemently denies that she's dead, but can't seem to find her to refute the matter.
What sort of lab accident might it have been? Well the now 'memory-holed' report contained the following passage.
In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province 4. The expert in collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019 7,8. He described thathe was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days 7. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturinga bat carrying a live tick.
Additionally, there is this...
Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing 4, 5. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group
of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.
So there is a lot of ways that this could have gotten out, especially given china's track record with these things (SARS for instance).
The referenced report was written and submitted for peer review by Chinese scientists attempting to track down the origins of the virus. It was purged from the internet by the Chinese government in mid to late February. Of course this is the internet so "purged" is relative. A copy has been in the secure magic smoke tubes beneath the Guano mines of Niue since Febuary 16th. Read the whole report. It's short.
This does strongly support what was being reported here and elsewhere back in February, that the outbreak escaped from a lab. The reason that these viruses were being so intensely studied in China (and Canada, and the U.S.A. and elsewhere) is because their terrifying potential had been realized after SARS.
So it does not necessarily follow that this is a bioweapon. For one thing, this would likely be much more lethal if that was the case.
That doesn't mean that such a development is not a concern for the future, as this passage from the "banned report" reminds us.
The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1, 9, 10. This laboratory reported that the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the 2002-3 pandemic 9. The principle investigator participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence 10. A direct speculation was that SARS-CoV or its derivative might leak from the laboratory.
So, both Dr. Zengli Shi and the other, military operated lab, had, in the past, been involved in creating chimeric coronaviruses. Thus, while there is no evidence that this bug is artificial or a bioweapon, the potential is certainly there and the disruption of our society that this pathogen (which seems to kill between 1 and 4 percent of its victims) has wrought should be a warning for us all.
For now though we need to focus on the matter at hand. Where it came from is not as important in the immediate future as how we deal with it. In the longer term though, we need to ensure that we are prepared for such occurrences moving forward and to the greatest extent possible decouple ourselves from the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
Coronachan: The personification of malign Chicom influence.
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April 01, 2020
A Quick Quiz
When you deliver a 15 pound bag of Nishiki Rice, which has been a rare item in and out of stock for months, and when you deliver said item after 7PM, AND it's pouring down rain, you should ask yourself the following multiple choice question:
Dear Amazon delivery driver:
I should....
A: avail myself of the doorbell to let the customer know it is here.
B: avail myself of a driver release bag of some sort so that the parcel does not become a wet gooey mess covered in slugs.
C: Position the parcel so that it will not will trip the unsuspecting customer and make him fall down the front steps in the pouring rain when he leaves for work at 03:50.
D: Neither AB nor C are true, if he breaks his neck I've got one less stop on my route and I can come back and loot his corpse for the pre-softened rice, escargot and the XP bonus that a rare item provides.
E: AB&C are all true.
Take your time...
While you ponder that inscrutable ethical conundrum, here is one of those precious moments that makes the new Animal Crossing what it is.
Watch on Bitchute here.
Video via
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Some Important Perspective
With Corona-Chan doing the bat-soup-happy-dance and many of us under quarantine, now, right now, is really the best time for everyone to go read this.
Discuss....
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March 31, 2020
GranBlue Fantasy (Season 2)
After the first season of GranBlue Fantasy (from 3 years ago) was so much better than expected I was wary of looking at what current year produced.
My trepidation was about half justified.
The first episode is one that could have been from the first season, except that it seems intended to introduce a new character to the crew. About 7 minutes into episode 1 I was like: "So THAT'S where that character is from!"I don't know much about the game this is based on other than it is popular and has several former Square Enix people working on it, but I do note that Alizia, appears to be a real fan favorite, because unlike the previously introduced characters, her fan-art is all over the place.
Probably because she knows Kung-Fu.
Aliza is a Draph, this IPs equivalent to dwarves at 4 and a half feet tall, she's easily underestimated. However, after discovering that she's about the most formidable hand to hand fighter they have ever encountered and after Aliza finds herself being genuinely impressed with the heroes idealism, and courage...and discovering that they have not identical, but overlapping goals and motivations and that the superpowered shortstack only lacks for transportation...they go their separate ways, making the episode essentially a pointless throwaway which doesn't actually advance the plot at all.
The next actual arc starts off dumb, with everybody acting dumb and saying dumb things while forcing the audience to flash back a decade to Katalina's training...which was exactly like a Japanese high school except for the trial by combat part.
However, this weird four episode (!) flashback to high school angst does end up advancing the overall story in spite of itself and it is kind of poignant towards the end.
The episode between 5 and 6 is a Netflix adaptation.
Allow me to explain:
Apparently, in the Gacha game this is based on you can play one of two characters, either Gran or a girl in the same village with a similar backstory named Djeeta (on the left).
Between the two seasons, Djeeta has had 3 episodes dedicated to her reality and apparently she's much better at this than Gran is.
Djeeta possesses fashion sense and commands a larger, hand-picked crew of snappier dressers than Gran does and it can be assumed that she's been waltzing all over the map rolling critical successes because her ship and crew does not have any of the money or maintenance problems that drive much of the decisions made in the main show*. The episode between five and six is a light hearted Halloween episode where Djeeta's crew discover a mystery involving animated dead people and everybody has a good time.
In stark contrast the actual episode 6 involves Gran and his smaller, fashion challenged crew stumbling upon a mystery involving animated dead people and it is a genuinely scary and fast moving three episode arc in which they come very, very close to dying while dealing with some very grim things, with nothing but their wits.
Despite being rather dark, it's in this second arc that the show actually regains its footing and from that point on GranBlue Fantasy is back up to its old standards.
This is a very atypical pattern nowadays with the first half of the series being an incoherent dumpster fire and the two arcs of the second half being quite solid.
The characters remain likable and the show's production values remain high. In fact, here's no noticeable change in look aside from a slight increase in quality despite switching studious from A-1 to MAPPA. That may account for the rough start in the scripting though.
CyGames has their own animation studio now (Which also did Manaria Friends, set in the GranBlue universe) and they've been very fastidious about the quality of their animation adaptations. I wonder if the sharp increase in script quality midway through was due to an intervention.
In any event, while I can't fully recommend the series given its rough start, I can say it gets better, and left me still interested in the story and hoping for a sequel.
* Though it is possible that the expense of her crew's solid gem and bronze armor caused them to skimp on the abdominal plates.
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March 30, 2020
A Reading Analysis
Darkness creeps back into the forests of the world. Rumor grows of a great and terrible power in the East, whispers of a nameless fear stalk the very language itself, and a plague descends upon the land. In these troubling times, we all need a laugh at The Guardian's expense.
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March 27, 2020
Pixiv Fanbox is Moving
For those of you who support artists via patronage services, Pixiv Fanbox, (which is Pixiv's rough equivalent of Patreon and SubscribeStar) is moving from pixiv.net/fanbox/ to Fanbox.cc. The creator's individual sites will also change url's for some reason.
Back in November, Pixiv forked off their microblogging site Pawoo. This might lead to some speculation that dreadfulness is afoot, but Pixiv is saying that this is to facilitate marketing for the artists by simplifying the URLs and making them more artist centric. Anyone who has tried to use the Deviant Art shop might find this argument compelling.
However, the artists are responsible for submitting their own URLs by the end of April so I predict some confusion.
Anyway, shorter version:
In about a month some people who follow artists on Pixiv Fanbox are going to have to update their bookmarks to new urls, which are yet to be determined.
CopyPasta of the message to users is below the fold, and the surprisingly good Giggle Translate of said missive is below that.
more...
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A short tale of supply shortages, work regulations as well as black markets and their proper utilization in the age of COVID-19.
Art by AT-2
more...
Art by AT-2
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More Surprises in 2020
Ka92 sums up the astonishment felt by many in the gaming community upon learning that the new Animal Crossing not only has giant spiders in it, but that they can totally kill you.
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March 26, 2020
Meanwhile in That Happy, Joyfull, Fun Place That We Are Most Emphatically Assured Had Nothing to Do With That Bug Which Must Not Be Named*
...this happened today.
Ostensibly this is to keep us hairy barbarians from bringing in this virus, which they are now claiming is of U.S. origin.
*...and if named certainly must not ever be called Kung-Flu, Corona-Chan, Wuhan Virus, Winnie the Flu, Chinese-Bat-Soup-Death-Plague, or Whu-Ping Cough,
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Well THIS is an Odd Story
There is a report that the source code for the Microsoft X-Box graphics has been hacked and is being held for ransom.
Ummm...
Hacking as I understand it is generally copy and paste, not cut and paste, and even in the latter case, there would be backups and X-Box test beds so Microsoft ought to still have their code. Presumably this a threat to release it to competitors, but I can't imagine that the X-Box is that far in advance of other consoles in the graphics department that 100 million would be warranted.
IT people please explain this to me, because it looks like a Hollywood screenwriter's idea of a pitch for some mid-budget thriller.
UPDATE:See also here, here, here, and here... So it's AMD And X-Box graphics card schematics then? That makes more sense.
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March 25, 2020
A Note About Priorities
In theory, in order to free up shipping capacity for Hospitals, triage areas and such, Amazon and other online shops are prioritizing deliveries of food, and necessary household products like the few remaining cleaning supplies.
As an hourly employee at UPS allow me to suggest that 149 pound trampolines, 130 pound gaming recliner-chairs, and 144 pound barbecue grills do not, in fact, meet those criteria.
They do, however, seem to be being shipped in greater numbers that we saw even over Christmas.
I don't have any idea if my center is an outlier in this matter, but I know that a few of these things will fill up a package car.
I also know that every bit of me hurts.
Ow.
Adding to the overall happiness level is the fact that one is not only man-handling these boxes, but everyone who has sneezed on these boxes in the last 2 days.
On the other hand, If this was pleasant, I'd have to pay admission.
Instead, I'm getting paid overtime to work out with free weights so all the people who are PAYING for those 130 pound Nordic-Tracs are saps!
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March 22, 2020
90 Minutes
I spent 90 minutes today trying to figure out how to completely, once and for all end my AOL account that I've had for 21 years. (I got it on a disc!)
I finally regained access to my old Blogger Blog, which was really the last hurdle holding me back from canceling AOL. Most everything else has either been closed out or switched over, or is utterly irrelevant.
After an hour and a half of trying to figure out how to do this task, I finally called customer support to be informed that the accounts termination office was closed due to COVID-19.
I kid you not.
I finally got a person though and after about 5 additional minutes I did manage to get the account removed only to discover that I still have an AOL account. A free one for long time customers.
AOL is, on paper, a fine service with a lot of bells and whistles, but I pay one third as much for both Earthlink & Proton combined and we live in a digital age so paper performance is irrelevant. and the 6,000 emails I got since the first of the years will not be missed.
I am now officially living in the 21st century.
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This Weekend has Seen A Considerable Amount of Heated Debate
In these trying times we should all embrace the healing power of "and".
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March 21, 2020
Bit of Banality
We're getting hours at work approaching what we normally get in late October, early November at the start of the Christmas rush.
As usual, the banality is below the fold.
This means that today's compensatory illustration is tangentially topical.
more...
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March 20, 2020
Tess Ti FAYH
This is a short video that gives voice to what most of us were thinking about "product as service". I wasn't going to link to it as my embedded video to actual content ratio is all out of whack right now. But, there are a couple of things mentioned as asides that really got my goat. First, I had no idea until this brief mention of it just how malignant Google Stadia is. It really is the worst of every awful trend in video games concentrated and wrapped in maliciousness. Likewise the PS-5 looks like it is going to be, well, evil. I had seriously thought about a Tesla pickup in the future though not so much after this. However, the thing that got me so mad that I got up walked out and left the room and had to come back after cooling down was the "letter of concern" at 15:06. Which indicates that whatever firm the individual is working for (probably a bank or investment firm) has a corporate culture that makes them unfit stewards of other people's money. It also speaks how important superficial fashion is becoming in our society and how perniciously powerful it is for enforcing conformity. With the mean girls in high-school one could avoid them or ultimately matriculate. Now that our corporate class are overwhelmingly foppish aristocrats, there is no escape.
One thing that SFO only lightly touches on in the above disquisition is that this isn't just a terrible idea from a consumer standpoint. This blog mentioned how bad this could potentially get when discussing the Patreon situation back in mid-December of 2018, and SFO did a really good, source heavy and long deep dive into the antics of the payment processor about two weeks after that.
About 18 months ago the Chinese social credit system was very topical. "Product as Service" makes that sort of tyranny far worse and much easier to implement.
This is nothing new, but implications of this are terrifying.
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March 18, 2020
Exhausted
more...
Banality is below the fold;
Here's Coronachan and...Stewy.
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Meanwhile: In New York City
Things are possible now that ordinarily aren't.
Watch on Bitchute. Clip originally from here I think.
It may be that only those of us in driving distance of New York or at least a "Chinese Bus" stop fully appreciate the implications of this video.
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March 17, 2020
At The Intersection of Vigilanteism, Consumer Advocacy, and Internet Videography
In a world that is enmeshed in stupid regulation those who expose the corrupt can find themselves breaking the law.
Then there's these two loons from the current arc of My Hero Academia.
"While we wait for the cops to respond, let's read the super-chats."
Gentleman Criminal and LaBrava are two obnoxious LARPers who stream their petty (Ever. SO. Petty.) crimes in pursuit of clicks. Being supervillains, their campy videos keep getting deplatformed, which is playing havoc with their income stream. Given that monstrous propoganda videos by actual psychopaths continue to stay up (and get more clicks than the silly antics of these two) it seems that their targeting by content providers stems mainly from the fact that they keep embarrassing bad actors who have a lot of clout.
I'm 3 episodes behind, but this subplot now looks to be rather more consequential than it first appeared. This show, an ode to American comic books, has had some villains that are both well realized and truly terrifying, so I find myself both surprised and amused that this world actually has some 'silver age' villains running around.
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