Also, there was a storm involving one of the remaining servers.

1 It was indeed some sort of attack.  Not the usual sort of amplification attack that uses up 4000% of your bandwidth, but we were getting flooded with requests for invalid URLs from datacenters all over the world.  Had to block thousands of IP addresses to get it to stop.

2 So my week thus far has been:

Main server comes back on line after two weeks of downtime. Run backups and do software updates. All ready to switch back to main server! Main server goes down again.
Place order for new server.
New server arrives! Backup server gets overrun with ants. Main server comes back again. Fend off ants with one hand while moving sites to main server with the other. Profit?

3 My own comment form eats my line breaks.

4 "My own comment form eats my line breaks."

It's been doing that for a long time.  It seems to eat one break--if you put in one more than you want, it works.


test [4 CRs here, 3 above].

5 Yeah, just adding it to the list of of things this week...

6 The breaks tend to disappear on me when I forget to have javascript on while posting.

1 There is somewhat better video available from after all the data got transferred that shows the flight a lot more clearly.

1 All we need is a specific link to MLP: Equestria Girls, and the circle will be complete.

2 Not exactly a triumph for the power of friendship and loyalty. Sigh.

3 Well, if you are watching young kids at anime conventions, you see many more violent MLP, Naruto, and Sesame Street fans than you do violent Hellsing, Kerberos Panzer cop, and Berserk fans.

People who read Curious George, The Littles, and the Bobbsey Twins are more likely to shout, to run, and to shove in inappropriate situations than people who read Tom Kratman, Mickey Spillane, and Shelby Foote.

I would try to put together a more credible attempt to appear to believe that MLP was the root cause, except that this one fanfic author I really like is very active in MLP these days.  I don't want to appear to be sneering at them.

OTOH, if Biden doesn't specifically condemn, in clear language, Hasbro's decision to make a cowboy an Earth Pony, then it must all be Biden's fault.  (Okay, Biden may really be making it more likely that cracked people will act now, but I couldn't resist a final couple of jokes.)

4 Just to be clear. While I'm not a Brony, the implication that MLP was the root cause of this atrocity was me being intentionally silly. Or sarcastic. I haven't decided yet. 

5 That was very clear. Roof was one of the few of these guys that had a plausible case for being right wing, and even he was pretty clearly nuts, and in a way that would've had a bad result no matter what flavor he imprinted on. These folks have a clear prior pattern of problem behavior, often with drug use that isn't making their situations better. There is zero sound reason to think that any Federal policy would have done anything to adjust the frequency of such events. (At least, anything short of shutting down the public school systems. Every other aspect of the problems is much finer than federal policy can change.) The Democrats and the media have, from recent events, pretty clearly been working towards seizing power for decades. Pelosi is obviously deeply invested, and has been in congress for just over thirty years. Moter Voter was clearly laying the ground work, and that has been just under thirty years. Everyone, their childhood imaginary friend of below normal intelligence, and their yellow dog realizes that the handwringing about spree shooters and about alleged right wing causes of spree shooters is mere stagecraft for seizing power. IIRC, Hasbro both owns MLP, and is responsible for the D n D apology for past racism, so they would legitimately deserve to be forced to eat responsibility for this act. It is just that the Bronies don't deserved to be dragged into this shit. OTOH, I'm tempted to find out if I can get banned from fimfiction, etc. this way. Basic issue, I don't think I'd learn anything from the experiment, I don't have a fimfiction account, and if I did I would want to keep it to talk to this one guy about his Eva/Lovecraft fics. Gripping hand, shooterverse seems like an approach that matches or exceeds some of the approaches to fanfic that I personally Do Not Want to read. Much less write. Beyond the obvious, I am not a fan of Yaoi, and the less hideous/in name only implementations of shooterverse might tend towards shipping Dylan Roof and DeWayne Antonio Craddock. Because it is very unlikely that someone who would write shooterverse has the skills to write people getting past race issues without over the top of that sort. I'm young enough that I get excited when I develop an idea that may be genuinely new, but I don't think I'm quite young enough to chase after this one.

6 Argh, I had javascript off, and all of the newlines got eaten.

Not like anyone is missing anything if they ignore it.

1 If you're expecting Pokemon only the MC is collecting cute girls, you won't be disappointed.

2 It's a very comfy story. Less wave pool and water slide and more lazy river.

3 I have been reading the light novels, and an isekai slice of life where the main plot is Azusa (Not to be confused with Azusa from The Idolmaster.) collecting cute monster girls....Would be the long and short of it.

1 You could also edit the date...

2 Well, it was a date specific post, and the date is 5 days past, so...

1 We can only assume that some generations ago, one of your ancestors violated the tomb of a vengeful ancient god, urinated in the sacrificial bowl, and then threw it through a mirror. That might possibly explain your luck.
May your boxes be light and easily moved, your stones likewise small and easily passed, and your wrist free of pain as soon as possible!

2

A Tornado paid a visit Friday, but was kind enough to only leave limbs in the yard.

As long as your own limbs are still attached, that's probably the best outcome.

3 Arghhhhhhhh.
Hope you are feeling better soon.

1 Certainly effective.

Neither is this...

1 Spoiler tags are [*spoiler*] Darth Vader is Luke's father! (gasp!) [*/spoiler] but without the asreixes and no spaces in the tags. 

2 Kinda lost track of the show this season because nobody could agree on episode numbering....

3 "They may be infinite, but that doesn't mean there's no upper limit"
Without context, that's actually true.
There are an infinite number of Real numbers between zero and one, so that's an infinite set with an upper limit.
In fact, there are more Real numbers between zero and one, than there are Natural numbers between zero and infinity. The former is an uncountably infinite set, and the latter is a countably infinite set, so the former is larger even though they're both infinite. Math is weird.

Of course, she's probably talking about something countable, which would make her statement as silly as it seems to be.

4 Yes..she's discussing a set of tangible things.

5 I started reading ahead in the manga, but I think the anime is now ahead of the manga, so time to watch it.  When I run out of Hololive Minecraft streams...

6 Sometimes I felt it was too talky, but not every dramatic change or confrontation is part of shonen combat.  The part that surprised me this season was Suburu actually developing magical powers.  But if he isn't going to be dying every other episode, he needed some kind of power-up.
On the other hand, it's high time he ditched that track-suit. It ought to be in shreds by now.  I hope the look he sported during the knighting ceremony will be his new one in S3.
And on that note, at least one reader on Crunchy claimed to have read that White Fox (the studio) is doing preliminary work on S3; not quite full pre-production yet.  Not a terribly authoritative rumor at this point.

7 Season 3, he wakes up in the alley again.....

1 Reddit is... really being bad, lately. They have some kind of super-admins that keep banning people on the Catholicism and Catholic Memes subreddits for discussing Catholic doctrine. Apparently this finally got embarrassing enough for them to stop, but not to reply to the actual admins' query about what was even acceptable or bad to post.
Oh, and Malicious Compliance went private, apparently for similar reasons.

2 That statement is conspicuously missing such phrases as "abject apology" and  "we royally screwed the pooch".  A heck of a lot of sheep giving them awards for it, regardless.

3 It does have gobbledygook like "actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name", though.  It's a masterwork of garbage Newspeak.

4 Apparently the going private of various popular groups was a protest of this very thing, lasting a day and making a fair amount of traffic trouble.
Also apparently this Aimee Challenor person was clandestinely inviting young persons on Reddit, who were interested in "transitioning", to come to her house to receive hormones without their parents' knowledge. Since this person's husband is apparently a p*do fan and this person's dad is a p*do criminal, Reddit suddenly realized that they should feel concern.

5 Whoops. The Reddit admin person inviting kids home to take prescription hormones is _another_ Reddit admin.

6 That particular crazy seems to just be a moderator, not an admin.  Any lunatic can be a moderator.

1 The press have pivoted now to making excuses for him, saying he was mentally ill and bullied by White racists.

2 ISIS operating in Blue cities and giving the residents thereof exactly what they voted for is quite schadenfreudalicious. We should ship all the illegals streaming into Texas up there as well.

1 I'm rather fond of L. Neil Smith's first few novels, which showcase a Libertarian paradise that's held together by a cadre of people who constantly violate its fundamental principles for good reasons.

-j

2 Never been a libertarian, let alone the capital 'L' variety.  Occasionally having libertarian impulses on a subject every once in a long while, yes, but I have never been a libertarian even when I was young and dumb, and definitely not a(n) (American) liberal - and believe me, I had more people than I can count who tossed the "When your young and you aren't a liberal means you don't have a heart" line me back then.

3 I'm still astonished that they deleted the comment at IP, and more astonished that it was getting upvoted. 

4 I'm not sure why you're astonished that it was upvoted at IP.  I'd probably have done so had I seen it.  Not sure why it would've gotten deleted--usually the only thing that causes that is swear words.  Now, the PJ Media site itself, yeah, they're a lot more nuke-happy, and they really hate, for example, being called cucks, so that's a word that will get your comment deleted toot suite.

5 Libertarians are not simply the autists. At least one autist was able to see through the libertarian arguments to come to a conclusion of conservatism. Libertarianism is mostly an information operation. The folks who are not in on the scam are ones who are tribal, who haven't done a full analysis yet, or who just didn't bring the right flavor of contrarian obnoxiousness to some of the sub-problems. Any close critical analysis of conservative media recently shows how heavily riddled with information operations it is. It is more information operation scammers than forthright, careful men. (In fairness, many of them are lawyers, and lawyers in particular have their nuts in a vice.) Conservatism has been for a long time weakened by having the official information channels within it so thoroughly suborned. From this perspective, it is unsurprising that a space that could be third way/half way is filled by something that is almost entirely information operation.

1 a) Had the whole of congress been strung up, it would have merely been bringing them to vigilante justice.

b) There was never much chance of such a impromptu force being able to actually make it through congressional security forces.

c) The whole of January 6 stinks of Pelosi stage managing things.

d) The thing about the 'BLM' riots that is most disturbing is the clear evidence of official/Democrat involvement in the stage management.  Political organizations which do this stuff do not suddenly come to their senses and knock it off.

e)  Which is more likely?   That nominal conservatives got off their asses, and finally decided on and implemented fighting fire with fire?  Or that Bowser/Pelosi just did what so many Democrat mayors and governors have been doing for years, and especially most of last year?  Me?  I conclude Democrats, and that the other attribution is a frame job.

f) If those that oppose the Democrats are fighting fire with fire, we will not only see the one incident.  If this technique has been implemented outside of Democrat control, we will see it used again.  The Democrats hunkering down in their bunker with their dear leader in DC are far from the only Democrat targets.  Most of these Democrat targets remain quite unsecured.

g) I predict that fire will be fought with some other strategy.

h) Destroying the police, and denying recourse to courts will naturally increase vigilantism. 

i) I don't think QAnon was true, and do not think it was ever the center of gravity to opposition to the Democrats.  I did think that some of the early pushback was interesting, because it invoked the pedophile and the satanist theories to discredit Q. 

This looked really weird, because those elements, on their own, are credible.  i) Pedophilia is plausible if one has had any contact with a public school sex ed curriculum in the last 20-30 years.  ii) As for satanism, we can be sure that communism is a heresy of Christianity.  Much of the left are clearly religious communists in behavior.  If we define a satanism by defensible criteria, the charge of satanism is objectively true. 

The whole 'bureaucratic insider' framing is something people would want to believe, but which does not stand up to serious examination. So, the early anti QAnon stuff was an information operation.  I think the theory plausible that QAnon was an information operation done with the intention of being discredited.  The recent anti-QAnon stuff also sounds like an information operation, the new regime needing an Emmanuel Goldstein.

j) The regime will be brought down by its own insanity and illegitimacy.  It is premature to talk of it already being brought down.  In theory, it could stay in power if it was capable of restraining itself in its torment of Americans.  Xi's senile pedophile jiangshi is completely incapable of providing that restraint.  Policy now is set by a Gu jar of evil madness that will precipitate something, whether by in fighting or some other route.  Kam Harris will not fix the situation should she take over, because she has no ability to refrain from abusing someone under her power. 

k) Elections are pointless without first being able to i) control voter lists ii) avoid electronic voting machines iii) force the courts to decide disputes fairly. 

l) Nobody with a law degree can be trusted.  Paul Caron, taxprof dot typepad dot com, a law school dean, posted a letter dated january 12, 2021, bragging about being signatory to it.  It is signed by a number of law school deans, I understand over 150.  I have not learned of any of these recanting it, or being removed from their positions.  Note, Glenn Reynolds is at a school whose acting head signed the thing, and that person is still acting head. 

m) Before you can justly talk about fixing things with elections, you need to either restore the trustworthiness of the courts, or you need to have an alternate means of resolving disputes to the formal legal system, one that does not include people with law degrees. 

1 Given how people with power are actively destroying everything American in the US (HR.1 and allowing boys participation in girls' athletics, to name two.), why would anyone be surprised by this?

1 Memphis

2 I love the way everyone's going along with Twitter pretending that was a "bug" rather than a peek behind the curtain.

-j