Network

Entry tags:

politics,
writing

Bots, Cracker Barrel, & The Daily Mail

The news could always be worse.

Like there could be no news! The Internet could destruct, whereupon civilization as we know it would fall apart, and we'd all be left like Kuno, the protagonist of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, in his one-room luxury cell: For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

A remarkably prescient story, The Machine Stops.

But lucky us! There is news! The U.S. is preparing military strikes inside Venezuela, Hegseth is summoning every four-star general & admiral to Quantico (To watch them do pushups? Or issue instructions for the upcoming coup? One does wonder!) And every day, more innocent people die in Gaza.

The Machine isn't stopping just yet.

###

Of all the awful news stories vying for my attention right now, the one that actually captured my imagination was a throwaway item in an obscure tech website called Gizmodo: Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say.

Because this story really encapsulates exactly what's going on right now.

Cracker Barrel apparently is some kind of restaurant chain. Faux Southern Comfort. Biscuits and gravy play a prominent role in its menu. I don't think I've ever been inside one.

Anyway, a couple of months ago, they changed their logo.

And if reports were to be believed, this immediately launched a tidal wave of Internet outrage from loyal Cracker Barrel customers whose names (apparently) are legion. Donald Trump Jr. himself weighed in on the controversy: WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!

Then The Daily Mail decided to pick the story up. It was a perfect proxy for the culture war whose charge they are leading.

Now, The Daily Mail is the most disgusting media cesspool imaginable, but I scan its headlines regularly (and yes, occasionally click on stories) because I know no better way to track the imaginations and preoccupations of the average Trump voter.

Loyal Cracker Barrel customers will be boycotting Cracker Barrel until the original—rightful—logo is restored, trumpeted The Daily Mail! The people have spoken!

The Daily Mail must have run 20 stories like that.

One assumes that every Daily Mail-reading moron who ever set foot in a strip mall where a Cracker Barrel planted itself eyed these stories dully & mumbled to themselves, Shit, yeah. I ain't eatin' thar till they bring Uncle Herschel back! So, The Daily Mail's campaign was successful. The backlash was enough to sink Cracker Barrel's stock by $100 million.

The news that the original indignation over the Cracker Barrel logo was actually the product of bot farm manipulations reveals a formula for manipulating hearts & minds:

(1) You plant a rumor on TikTok using a dozen or so humans

(2) You program an army of bots to "like" the original TikTok posting & post follow-up comments: Those assholes! The Libtards are at it again! Etc, etc, etc. If the bot farm is doing its job properly, the phenomenon gathers momentum because TikTok algorithms—indeed, all social media algorithms— are coded by volume. Postings with a lot of responses are far more likely to find themselves in your We think you'd like THIS list.

(3) You get the story picked up by some terrestrial media source that has laid off all of its human fact checkers.

Voila!

The moral of the story? Don't trust a single piece of news unless it's confirmed independently from at least five sources.

And maybe not even then.

###

In other news, the weather has been sunny & bright, so I've been, too.

I was tremendously productive yesterday! Finished an enormous chunk of Remuneration and another 1,000 words on the Work in Progress: Neal & Grazia are now sitting in a downtown plaza on a blustery day watching a Funny Walk Festival. Hopefully, today, they will be exploring the dying farm hub that is Middletown & Grazia will give Neal a backrub and realize they have moved past the juncture where any sexual relationship is possible. And that will be the end of Chapter 2.

Sometimes, while I'm scribbling away at the Work in Progress, I am paralyzed by its irrelevance. Who cares? I think. The world these days is so, so dreadful. And I am so, so inconsequential.

And then, I think, Well, you're entertaining yourself, aren't you?

And that's a good thing, right?

Entry tags:

saturday

Senses. When we were at the movie theater yesterday, or maybe somewhere else, I saw a picture of a profile face with a big eye in the place where the brain would be. That's all I can remember about it but I liked the idea so this is my version. The movie (Eleanor the Great) was good. I'm glad we got to see it on the big screen.

Today is my last full day here. Kathy's daughters Laurie and Tracy are coming over for a last visit. I didn't sleep well last night. I was awake more than asleep. I'm wondering how I'll get through the day. I might not be in top form.

Entry tags:

books received

Books Received, September 20 — September 26

Six works new to me: four fantasy, one mystery, one non-fiction (from an unexpected source)... unless you count the fantasy-mystery as mystery, in which case it's three fantasy and two mysteries. At least two are series. I don't know why publishers are so averse to labelling series.

Books Received, September 20 — September 26

Poll #33662 Books Received, September 20 — September 26

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

View Respondents

Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

An Ordinary Sort of Evil by Kelley Armstrong
3 (50.0%)

Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst (July 2026)
2 (33.3%)

Following My Nose by Alexei Panshin (December 2024)
3 (50.0%)

The Fake Divination Offense by Sara Raasch (May 2026)
2 (33.3%)

The Harvey Girl by Dana Stabenow (February 2026)
1 (16.7%)

Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (September 2025)
3 (50.0%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
6 (100.0%)

The current war on science, and who’s behind it

Posted by Diana Gitig

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/who-should-we-blame-for-the-current-war-on-science/

We’re about a quarter of the way through the 21st century.

Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named storms, exactly as predicted by Exxon scientists back in the 1970s. The United States secretary of health and human services advocates against using the most effective tool we have to fight the infectious diseases that have ravaged humanity for millennia. People are eagerly lapping up the misinformation spewed and disseminated by AI chatbots, which are only just getting started.

It is against this backdrop that a climate scientist and a vaccine developer teamed up to write Science Under Siege. It is about as grim as you’d expect.

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/who-should-we-blame-for-the-current-war-on-science/

Why LA Comic Con thought making an AI-powered Stan Lee hologram was a good idea

Posted by Kyle Orland

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/why-la-comic-con-thought-making-an-ai-powered-stan-lee-hologram-was-a-good-idea/

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an "AI Stan Lee hologram" that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea "demonic" and said we need to "kill it with fire before it’s too late." The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see "the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!" Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it "incredibly disrespectful" and "in bad taste" to "ghoulish" and "so fucked up," with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. "We're not afraid of people seeing it and we're not afraid of criticism," he told Ars. "I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what's been out there so far has not really been informed."

Read full article

Comments

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/why-la-comic-con-thought-making-an-ai-powered-stan-lee-hologram-was-a-good-idea/

Remember to Be Sea Otter Savvy!

Posted by Daily Otter

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/27/remember-to-be-sea-otter-savvy

Today is the last day of Sea Otter Awareness Week 2025 and if you’ve been here for previous SOAWs, you know we have to include this video at some point - enjoy!

https://dailyotter.org/posts/2025/9/27/remember-to-be-sea-otter-savvy

Entry tags:

dark souls,
games

"Don't get vored"

For fans of body horror and/or excellent boss design, please enjoy the Gaping Dragon:

Watch on YouTube

Look, I just love its whole vagina dentata/Venus fly trap/ribcage/entire-body-as-maw/spine-snapping-backbends thing, okay? And it’s a fun fight, despite its absurd number of hitpoints and ability to kill you if it bumps you with a leg while it’s charging.

For anyone curious about how the process of figuring out a Dark Souls boss fight can go, some samples:

https://youtu.be/nnZP6WkKRpg?si=M3abOUFachMgs6cP&t=1143
https://youtu.be/u2U5mlfI6zM?si=Scx5xCM_Z7lB4bbX&t=5560 (after getting Capra on the second try, Mapocolops enters the Montage Of Despair zone)

Important context for some of what’s happening: Dark Souls has no animation cancelling, so if you press the “light attack” button twice, your character will swing twice, and if you press the “heal” button they will start the (slow) flask-drinking animation, even if you’ve subsequently realized this was a terrible idea and are now frantically pressing the buttons to dodge and screaming at your character to move. This is part of what requires you to be more deliberate and tactical; you can’t button-mash your way through even if you can mash buttons quickly.

(Also, both Reggie and Mapo started off summoning an NPC for assistance, but the trouble with it in this fight is that the NPC AI is not very bright and tends to stand in front of the dragon and get eaten early, leaving the player dealing with a boss that still has the extra HP to make up for the summons.)

Conversely, after having a horrendous time with Capra, Symbalily reads the fight near-perfectly on her first try: https://youtu.be/ByTGX1NRFs0?si=VBbn5DLh0hK-Gqp5&t=3183

(Team Halberd for the win; that two-handed R2 is so good.)

Entry tags:

me: life

Week 39/52 and extending Project #65

The last quarter of this year is approaching too fast and I still have ALL THE THINGS to do!

#ORJENISE100 it's been slow for me this round possibly because it's intersected with a still busy period at work. I'm still a few days behind and will keep a note of the prompts I've missed and catch up in October. By the end I should have removed at least 200 items from my home and I am making inroads into eating down food stores and using up the toiletries mountain.

HOME: chaos still reigns in my bedroom and living room but I'm hoping to start on the bedroom today and get the first coat of varnish on the back door. There may be a bit of gardening or houseplants potting accomplished too. The ex was at the cottage last week so I did several loads of washing at his and I plan on taking the remains of anything that needs washing up to the cottage with me and drop it off for a service wash up there! I have fallen somewhat behind on #Project65days so on 1 Oct it will become #Project92days to see how much of my To Do List I can clear before 1 January.

HEALTH: knees still not happy. Really need to bust out the physio exercises and do them again. Also need to clear enough space to be able to exercise at home over winter as I'm feeling very stiff and inflexible.

LIFE ADMIN: slowly picking away at long outstanding tasks like a grown ass adult.

GARDENING/ALLOTMENTING: still have remaining winter pots to plant and allotment to sort!

COOKING/EATING: I'm tackling the coffee mountain and have begun to make it at home to take into work. Judging by the last week we'll soon be in porridge/honey season which means I can start tackling the honey mountain. I'm meal planning for the days I'll be at the cottage (tomorrow Sunday evening to Friday morning) so will be taking fruit/veg from home as I have things to eat up. I seem to have a ridiculous amount of fruit at the moment and may postpone next week's Oddbox to allow me to catch up.

READING/LISTENING: Not reading/ listening at the moment - possibly will tackle an audio book on the drive to Wales tomorrow.

WATCHING: Autumn shows are starting to creep back into the schedules. Not sure whether I'll be picking all my usual ones up this year. Trying to back away from both Doom scrolling and mindless viewing a little bit.

CREATING/LEARNING: still here -> summer has been nuts at work so hardly any time for crochet club or other creative endeavours.

CATS: all good.

VOLUNTEERING: we've not resceduked to end of season barbie yet but we do have a committee meeting Monday.

SOCIALISING: I went out with the allotment group (reps from all the sites I manage after their meeting on Monday). Went for one drink left the pub as it closed. Oops. Also met up with some work colleagues on Thursday and we went to More Than Human at the Design Museum. Interesting and now I have loads more photos on my phone. Totally forgot Thursday was the last Thursday in the month and missed my monthly Zoom with 2 friends. Thought I has another week...

WORK: I was invited to the meeting of the reps allotment group on Monday - they know I am under resourced and several things have not been done in a timely manner over summer because of this. I think it's a testament to how well we gave worked together since '21 that the meeting was not "you haven't done this" (which was very much the tone when I joined) but rather "what can we do to help - how about X, Y and Z" where X is an idea so simple I should have thought of it before and Y and Z will massively simplify some key processes, lightening my load and keeping them happy. I'm really happy they've gone from a group who were very disgruntled and finger-pointy, to being a lot more collaborative and having their own plans to do interesting and useful things. There was also a productive meeting last week around the small site which is being reclaimed by the cemetery and where we have you move 19 plotholdrrs and 4 charities to alternative sites.

As I didn't get up to the cottage during my annual leave I've negotiated working remotely for some chunks of time over winter. Heading up there tomorrow until Friday so I can get some uninterrupted work time as well as possibly a couple of slightly longer lunch breaks to tidy the cottage garden. There are less distractions there so planning on reading in the evenings and having a couple of early nights.

Entry tags:

The Day in Spikedluv (Friday, Sept 26)

I hit Price Chopper and CVS (prescription for mom) while I was downtown and got in a walk around the park. I dropped a book off at the library on the way to mom's.

I did a load of laundry (washed, dried AND folded!), hand-washed dishes, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, hard-boiled eggs and made egg salad, and scooped kitty litter. I grilled steak for Pip's supper.

I started A Murder in Door County.

Temps started out at 63.9(F) and reached 73.4. In the morning, there was some sun downtown, but the closer I got to back home, the cloudier it got. We weren’t supposed to have rain (15% means no rain in my book), so it was disappointing to not have sun. The sun did eventually come out, sometimes fully, sometimes just partially, and sometimes hidden completely by dark clouds. We did get a tiny bit of rain, just enough to have me running out of mom’s house to close my car windows. By the time I got out there it was over, but I wasn’t taking any chances. *g*

Mom Update:

Mom was doing better today. ( more back here )

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just One Thing (27 September 2025)

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Entry tags:

booklists - august and september

I haven't been seeing as many booklists as I sometimes do; maybe it is the quiet part of the year for it, or maybe I've just been skimming past and not registering them. Anyway, what have I found?

from the Otherwise Award site, Celebrating work from 2022-2023: Part I a list of works to consider from the years the awards were on hiatus. I was in a 'no, no more books' mood so was reading for interest but not to put things on the wishlist.

from pangur-and-grim at tumblr, their favourite books from this year. Not normally the kind of list I'd look at, but at first glance it starts with Alien Clay, which I loved, has a couple I think I'd like and a stack I've never heard of. It also has The Last Unicorn. There are six that Greer has read, and three 'up next'. Turned out some of the ones I hadn't read were already on the wishlist; i added all but one of the rest.

at tumblr, suspiciouspopsicle said I need some good fantasy or scifi to read that doesn't involve romance., First set of replies from specialagentartemis. Sadly, their absolute favourites is three I've read and one I don't want to (saw the movie, don't care), and the weird and interesting is a mix of read it, can't find it, that doesn't sound like my thing. Second from girlfailuregawain, where the ones I recognise make me a bit meh on looking up the rest, because very much Not My Taste. There are some more in the comments, but I ran out of steam. One book added to the maybe list.

I also added two to the wishlist after reading bibliofile's notes about them.

Entry tags:

culture consumed

Things

Books
Listened to the audiobook of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1921 dystopian SF novel We, translated by Bela Shayevich and narrated by Toby Jones. I don't have any basis for comparison for this particular translation, but I thought it was good. The narration was exceptional.

This edition also included a forward by Margaret Atwood, an old review by George Orwell, and an essay by Ursula Le Guin, 'The Stalin in the Soul'. By the time I'd finished the novel, I had forgotten the Atwood forward. The Orwell review was interesting. The Le Guin essay got up my nose: it was about how market forces can suppress ideas just as effectively as state censorship (a valid point), but somewhere along the way became about the dangers of unserious writing.

Read Victoria Goddard's newest novella, Olive and the Dragon,
and her previous ones Clary Sage and Traveller's Joy.

Currently rereading her second ever novel Stargazy Pie, because the fan server I'm in is doing a reread of the Greenwing & Dart series, and I'm hoping it'll lend me the momentum to read the rest of them.

Fandom
Still working on the concluding chapter to the fic I posted part one of at the start of this month. I've added at least a thousand words to the draft, and struggling with it.

Missed the nomination period for

trickortreatex and, subsequently, the signup period. Things have been difficult.

Did my Yuletide nomination a couple of hours before the AO3 server outage.

Games
Achieved A10 with all four characters in Slay the Spire and also killed the Transient before it faded; am now taking a break.

Tech
I've been working through the original levels of Reeborg's World, a gentle guide to programming using Python. As of this post, I've completed all the original levels except Rain 2, Centre 1 and 2, and Storm 2 through 4. (Edit with breaking news: I beat Centre 1 and Centre 2.)

Garden
Harvested some broccoli, purple and green varieties.

Hired a mower to come do what I was not managing.

Misc
Got out my old Lego Classic set, sorted the contents, and started working through the instruction booklet in order. I've never been into Lego: as a kid, I had my older brother's hand-me-down bricks and half an instruction manual with crayons scribbled across it. In my early teens I was in love with the short unit we did at school, using Logo to program Lego Technic sets (this was long before Mindstorms), but I couldn't get my parents to buy me Lego Technic to have at home. And as an adult the Lego kits just seemed too expensive and also too specialised. Recently I've been thinking I'd like to give Lego another look, in particular the less... "spend a lot of money on a playset to assemble and then dust" side of it.

Subsequently bought myself a "miniblocks" Halloween pumpkin kit from KMart, and have started building that. Much swearing has ensued. The quality really isn't as good as Lego, and the smaller size does not help.

Entry tags:

UK - London

I arrived in London on Friday evening, a little after the time the host and I had agreed upon thanks to a late flight departure. It was still earlier than it would have been if I'd caught the multi-stage flight that was on my itinerary.

( london )

Thanks so much,

rmc28 for coming out and meeting me on not just one, but two days! It was so great to catch up, talk, see a bit more of the UK, go steam-training, and watch women's football!

And then I went to see Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre - the old-fashioned style theatre that Shakespeare's plays would have been shown in (ever seen 'Shakespeare In Love'? That kind of theatre). Six or seven years ago, there was a Popup Globe that came to Australia, and I saw shows in Sydney and in Melbourne, dragging various friends along, and it was just the best fun. Highly recommended.

On the way home, went and picked up some wagamama munchies - not for dinner, but for lunch the next day while I was on the train. An EastAsian-fusion restaurant, wagamama went out of business in Australia a decade ago and more, but apparently is still doing pretty well here. Not entirely surprising, I guess. We have so much food from Asia - East, South-East, South, not to mention all the other types of food from non-white countries we have in abundance - that something that's 'Asian lite' is not going to get much traffic here.

I got back to the room, and chatted a bit with the host. A nice longer chat, we touched on a bunch of topics, and I was a little disappointed that I hadn't had the opportunity to talk to him earlier.

But the place was excellently positioned, near an underground station with three lines passing through it. My only complaint was that it was a little close to a couple of pubs that were very noisy on a Friday night, although they quietened significantly after 11pm.

And the next day, I caught a train up to Chesterfield to meet the tour group for the Pride and Prejudice pilgrimage...

Entry tags:

games

(no subject)

Playing Wrath of the Righteous and my characters have levelled up to the point where the main problem is standing still for two minutes before a fight while we cast all the buffs.
Also remembering all the buffs. That is a non trivial problem now. There are... so many.

I am having a weirdly unsatisfying time playing even though I am beating most fights and even the tough ones only take two or three goes, on Core. I think it's because I am aware I am not doing it right. I haven't thought of a better way but I know this one is actually rather rubbish. So I am winning, but it is not elegant glorious solutions to demon problems, it's just the thing where I can stack buffs until the enemy are rolling for twenties just to have a chance to hit, we've got armour and damage reduction, their elemental damage can't get through, everyone is protected from poison AND disease, and death ward is taking care of level drain and negative energy on the whole, so when they actually do hit at all with anything? There's barely any damage. Teensy tiny damage of smallness. So I can do really badly, Woljif tends to be rolling for twenties himself because I cannot build that guy so he can hit for toffee, I've had to turn off half the clever feats because they might up the damage but the to hit is too bad, and yet still, I can just ignore the being hit, so I win.

It's like I'd rather play like Batman but at the moment I'm just a set of somewhat mobile walls and that's somehow working.

Still, progress is being made, and new things happen a bit because I am playing Angel this time, so that's neat.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

naryrising!

Witchy Woman

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/09/27/witchy-woman

My daughter is whole! She has not succumbed to peer pressure, at least not in the way the strip suggests. She is no doubt subject to it on some wavelength my calcified brain can't even perceive, but she doesn't have a Hades II style ghost arm and I don't believe she is learning witchcraft at the foot of Hecate, patroness of witches. I feel like there would be signs. And potentially wonders. Maybe even both.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/09/27/witchy-woman

Entry tags:

Like a Carousel That's Turning, Running Rings Around the Moon

When last I reported on the mice they had just got a couple new toys, a bridge and a balsa-wood house. They still have them, and they're enjoying them a great deal based on how they're burying them and using them to hide from the world. They also have a couple small plastic igloo-shaped houses that they keep turning upside-down, so they're more like a bird's nest than a sheltered area. They've done this consistently enough we have to suppose it's a deliberate choice and I think bunnyhugger has given up on trying to set it right.

But they have something new as well. bunnyhugger was satisfied that they were not fighting, at least not seriously, and had settled on what they figure their social arrangements should be. And so that encouraged her to put in the sort of toy that mice might fight over. That is, of course, a wheel, which every kind of animal, not just mice, turns out to like.

The mice took to it quickly, like you'd expect, particularly with the brown mice doing a lot of running. At least one of them was taking to it, at least; we haven't figured how to tell the two apart. We might have to wait until they're grown more and hope some clear difference shows up. But at least one of them would build up a lot of speed and then stop running, letting the momentum spin them around. We don't know whether that's a deliberate choice or just a failure to understand momentum yet. But it's also easy to suppose they find that fun.

Which made it odd that after a day or two they stopped running the wheel. Investigation revealed that they'd gotten paper caught in it, keeping the wheel from spinning freely, and once that was moved mice were back on the wheel and doing well. Besides the brown mice we've spotted the grey one. We don't have a confirmed sighting of our original, white, mouse on the wheel. I know I often saw her running the wheel when I got downstairs at like 7:30 am, but since it's been only a couple days since she had the option I haven't had the chance to observe whether she is running in the morning. I'll have more on this mouse activity stuff as it comes to pass.

Now let's look at a thing that has passed, photos of Marvin's in our November visit. Don't worry, there's another to come.

One of the mechanical contraptions, the ``Michigan Anteater''. I forget whether it was actually working which leaves me wondering just how it was that it didn't hunt well.

A head of Elsie with the explanation that cows have two stomachs and use cud to aid digestion.

bunnyhugger coining up on Attack From Mars. And why was she doing this at this moment? That will be revealed shortly.

Some of those old Chuck E Cheese figures. I forget their proper name and also the name I gave them in jest like a year ago so I won't bother calling them anything.

Another of the Chuck E Cheese figures. They aren't operating at Marvin's.

And this isn't Chuck E Cheese but rather FunHouse's Rudy as the Three Stooges.

Trivia: The United States Lines shipping company was formed in 1921 by the United States Shipping Board as a government-owned corporation. It was sold in 1929 to the P W Champan Company, which soon defaulted, and the government had to foreclose. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: Heaven
Current Music: "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads" - Nina Simone

Final Garments

This season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt concluded with two episodes this week. The first contained two stories, the second of them being the first part in a four part narrative that concluded in the subsequent episode. They dispensed with most of their movie references in the first story, which is primarily a Nightmare Before Christmas parody with throwaway references to Gremlins, Edward Scissorhands, and a mashup of Cast Away and Terminal. I know from experience, by the way, junior high school students in Japan generally don't know who Tom Hanks is. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'd say Panty and Stocking is made exclusively with American audiences in mind. Nightmare Before Christmas and Gremlins, oddly enough, both have cultural currency in Japan.

In this parody, one of the demon sisters replaces Santa for the holiday as the jolly old elf claims to have worn out his hips having marathon sex with Panty. I wish the show had shown what the demon sister then gives to all the world's children but I suppose at that point it would be less of a parody and more of a remake of Nightmare Before Christmas.

The long four parter following this is framed as a Star Wars parody with its titles but there's nothing especially Star Wars about the stories. Panty and Stocking are unexpectedly recalled to heaven by God. Previously, God had been implied to be the live action legs of a woman in lingerie protruding from the clouds. This figure is revealed to be God's wife, Queen Silk, who wears a creepy metal mask, and God Himself is more properly known as Luniere, King of Gods. Oh, I loved it. Especially the design of God as a little old bald man with an enormous beard.

These episodes kind of reminded me of the end of Kill la Kill, another project masterminded by Imaishi Hiroyuki, and his most successful. I think Kill la Kill really evolved from Panty and Stocking in that both are stories are about girls who wear clothes that have or confer on them special powers. The conclusion of Kill la Kill is the most unsatisfying part of that series and Panty and Stocking's is similarly so. It's mainly characters screaming and things blowing up. It all feels a bit obligatory. But some of the action is good.

Panty and Stocking is available on Amazon Prime.

Entry tags:

food,
health

(no subject)

The posties are on strike, again, and Interac is down. We won't talk about what's happening south of the border. When I get really depressed I watch that YouTube video of the Queen's funeral ceremonies, set to Thaxted, because from here 2022 seems remarkably sane.

So I went and lined up at the Texas steakhouse to see what it's like. It's full of Dudes On Phones who still believe in six feet of social distancing because they won't step up to shorten the line that's out the door and down the street, and dudes who've been in line half an hour looking at the menu but don't know what they want when they get to the counter and must consult in detail with the BBQ guy. Fortunately the latter were behind me and I got my chopped brisket in short order from the superhumanly patient clerks. It's good stuff, but I'm glad she misheard me when I said For here (mind, the music there is loud and echoes off the high ceilings) because while I can eat a Macdos quarter pounder no problem, a quarter pound of the real thing is a good two meals for me. And of course, when I came back after shopping across the street, the line had vanished. But this is not to be taken as a hint to come at 3, because their actual closing hour is not 4:30 but when they're sold out. And anyway, there's a limit to how often I want to eat red meat.

Otherwise it's still warm but the rain may have ended for a bit. As well, because I have the mucousy cough of allergies that's not helped by mould growing everywhere. But somehow I can now walk up stairs step step step, meaning that maybe those quad strengthening exercises are actually strengthening my quads. Which is about time.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

Weekend Plans

Well, I was supposed to be playing D&D tonight, so I napped for a bit after work to make sure I could stay up without issue. The DM isn't feeling well, though, so we ended up having to cancel at the last minute. So instead I think that I'm going to make a giant mug of tea and curl up in front of my desktop with a video game the rest of the evening.

Right now, I'm leaning towards Baldur's Gate 3. I'm at the very end of Act 2 with my playthrough where I'm romancing both Karlach and Wyll through the liberal use of mods, and I'd really like to get into Act 3 proper with it tonight if I can manage. Plus if I get tired of anything in that playthrough, I can always jump over to another one instead since I have quite a few ongoing ones right now at various points in the game.

Tomorrow, I think that I'm going to get up, catch the bus, and go run some errands in the morning. I've done my budget for the next two weeks and, while things are going to be tight until my 10/9 paycheck, I should have enough to cover all of my bills, wash/dry a load of clothes this weekend and another next weekend, and have $15 or so to spare towards groceries without going into the hole. So I'm going to hit up Aldi tomorrow to pick up a handful of groceries to get me through until my next paycheck, and then I'm going to walk over to my storage unit to grab a few things from it while I'm over in that area.

This isn't going to be my big trip where I'm specifically looking for things to sell. This is just one of my regular seasonal trips where I get out a few things clothing-wise and kitchen-wise that I'm probably going to need now that we're slowly edging into cooler weather. And maybe a small personal item or two, depending on what I can find near the front of the storage unit without having to do any actual climbing inside (as I don't like doing any proper climbing in there without someone else around).

Eventually, once I make it back to the hotel tomorrow, I'm planning on alternating between reading/writing fanfiction and playing video games the rest of the weekend as my Sunday D&D game is cancelled this weekend as well. Although I might try to watch a little Critical Role in there as well as I'm still trying to catch up on the last few specials before CR4 starts next Thursday.