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Miscellany

2019-07-30 20:30

Achieving a hardly-pleasurable orgasm from a fap session is, in my opinion, quite demoralizing. Pleasurable orgasm is one of the few things to which I feel entitled. Is this an unreasonable feeling? Or have I been brainwashed by reading too much hentai manga (and erotic literature) that features futanari ejaculating with sky-high levels of pleasure at the slightest provocation?

2019-08-01 18:46

In my early months of driving, I dared to switch lanes only when I could see the next lane's car in my center mirror. Nowadays, however, I use the side mirror instead. (This is, of course, in addition to looking over my shoulder. Don't forget about blind spots!)

2019-08-01 18:49

An eminently-achievable fantasy of mine: Force-feeding fruits and/or vegetables to a hot girl.

Slightly less achievable: Watching a hot girl read aloud from a book while intermittently drinking alcohol, until she loses consciousness. (Inspired by Hysterical Literature, inter alia. Actually, could I commission somebody to make a video of this online? I made a thread on 4chan's /adv/ board months ago inquiring about this topic, but nobody took it seriously.)

Maybe achievable: Having a roommate who pays her (or his) rent with well-written fanfiction on topics chosen by me. (>>>/soc/aan?)

Definitely not achievable: Locking a hot girl in my house and drastically restricting her caloric intake. (Of course, I don't have a house. Also, that probably would be a fire-code violation or something, even if consensual—reckless endangerment? Finally, I'm not a dietitian.)

2019-08-28 20:16

Just checked out the stuffing query on Pornhub (most recent videos). FYI, cringy narration does no favors.

2019-08-15 18:30

Is (up-front cost ÷ length of powertrain warranty + annual fuel cost) an accurate measure of a car's overall expense? Or are repairs that aren't covered by the powertrain warranty sufficiently expensive/common that they can't be ignored? (Or are repairs that are covered under the powertrain warranty sufficiently inexpensive/rare that they can be ignored?)

2019-09-26 19:34

Ebin idea I had earlier: Make a Steiner-tree-approximating road network from a set of randomly placed points by: (1) creating the Delaunay triangulation of the initial points; (2) creating the Delaunay triangulation of the initial points and their Delaunay triangles' circumcenters; (3) creating the Delaunay triangulation of the initial points, their Delaunay triangles' circumcenters, and the next set of Delaunay triangles' circumcenters; and (4) cutting down that final Delaunay triangulation into a minimum spanning tree of the initial points. I assume it isn't original, but maybe I'll get around to programming it. (Javascript-generated SVGs? Hmm…)

2019-09-27 05:54

What a dumb notion. Obvious better idea: (0) Start with a set of randomly-placed points; (1) create the Delaunay triangulation of those points; (2) for each Delaunay triangle, add the Fermat point, as well as the edge from that point to each point of the Delaunay triangle; (3) for each pair of adjacent Delaunay triangles, add the intersection point of (a) the shared edge and (b) the segment between the two Delaunay triangles' Fermat points, as well as (c) the edge from that point to each of the Fermat points; (4) create the minimum spanning tree of the initial set of points, also using the additional segments mentioned above. Blah, blah, blah…

2019-10-04 20:10

>want to remove the rear seats from my car, since I never use them
>find a guide to removing them online
>it says the bolts are 10x1.25 size
>buy a wrench that includes a 10-mm socket
>it doesn't fit
>do more research on metric bolt sizes
>10x1.25 bolts match 17-mm wrenches
>buy a 17-mm socket
>it doesn't fit
>look up more guides to removing my car's rear seats
>apparently these bolts require a 14-mm socket for some reason

2019-12-12 18:48

Dreamed about Goddess One last night. (Wrote this down after waking up around 03:30.)

1

Five or ten minutes into my commute, I realize I've forgotten to put on my socks. I double back and navigate heavy traffic to return to my (mother's) house. My mother is holding a class or a sermon of some kind in the front of the house (much larger than IRL), so I have to sneak past bookcases at the back of the house to get to my room. While I'm donning my socks, two cute (though a bit androgynous) sycophants of mine accost me. I disentangle myself from them and go to work.

2

After work, my mother asks me whether it would be wiser to divest from stocks and bonds and keep all her wealth in cash. I explain to her that cash still is risky. (I'm not sure whether this is good advice IRL.) She points to some municipal newsletters, in which local big names advise investing, as a counterexample(?).

3

My mother drives to a municipal event of some kind, and for some reason drags me along. As I'm waiting in the main hall of the community center (in a room of which the event is being held), I notice that being displayed under glass is a mid-sized scale model of a town. The model was constructed by me for Goddess 1, many years ago. (IRL, of course, I made origami, not dioramas. I obviously have been browsing /tg/ too much.) I take out my phone and snap several photographs of it, from all directions.

While I'm snapping photographs, who but the Goddess herself should stroll into the hall, along with a sycophant of hers? She reminds him of the details of her history with me. I prudently pretend to take no notice of them, and, my photographs taken, leave for the parking lot.

As I'm waiting at my mother's car, the Goddess, sycophant in tow, walks up to me and suggests that I can join their friendship. I write my email address on a sticky note and give it to her.

2020-01-01 14:26

Yesterday afternoon, I set my file server, an Odroid XU4 with two 8-TB drives in external enclosures, to compress my most recent dashcam footage. (Simply running the original files through ffmpeg reduces their size by half or even two-thirds. I still had several TiB of free space remaining, but I just felt like doing it.) Some minutes later, I noticed that the Samba share with my primary (Windows) computer wasn't working and switched back to the server to see what the problem was. I was greeted with an error message. (I don't remember the details, but it may have been something like thread overloaded.) Hitting Ctrl-C accomplished nothing, so I held down the power button on the XU4 to shut it down.

When the computer started back up, I was somewhat distressed to see that neither of the drives could be mounted. Luckily I had foreseen the possibility of such a situation, and, rather than losing all my files (waves at FilthyRobot), merely had to retrieve my third 8-TB drive (synchronized only two days prior) from my car. Significantly more annoying, however, is that simply wiping the file systems and starting fresh didn't fix the problem. I guess I'll have to wait for a few days, until fsck has managed to fix literally millions of inodes…

2020-01-27 13:13

Funny anecdote: In preparing to calculate my income-tax bills (yesterday), I was somewhat nonplussed to see on my 1099-DIV six dollars of REIT income. After an entire extra form's worth of calculations, it turned out that six dollars of REIT income translates to one solitary dollar of tax deduction. Yay…

2020-03-02 04:05

I watched School-Live! yesterday. It was fun, but the artstyle really threw me off. The five main characters are stated to comprise a high-school junior, three high-school seniors, and a young teacher—but all their faces are drawn as if they were middle-schoolers. (Compare Angel Beats! and Naruto Shippuden, whose artstyles are significantly less jarring.)

Overall, I give the show three and a half stars out of five—the ending felt as if it should have been significantly less happy.

2020-03-11 18:30

>be me
>using Odroid XU4 (two USB 3 ports FTW!), with two encrypted 16-TB drives in external enclosures (one for storage, the other for daily backups)
>(yes, I have a third drive for weekly backups elsewhere)
>typically leave both drives on all day while I'm at work
>start thinking this is a bad thing to do (unnecessary power usage and drive wear)
>start turning off drives when they aren't in use
>this morning, turn on secondary drive in preparation for daily backup
>get USB error; both drives stop showing up
>wtf, reboot XU4
>drives show up
>but all information on the drives apparently has reverted back to the last time I encrypted them
>double wtf

What a weird bug. At least the drives weren't corrupted. I guess I'll just have to leave them on 24/7.

2020-03-11 19:00

That last part actually was the result of my using lazy drive labels rather than UUIDs: after I rebooted the XU4, the secondary drive was listed as /dev/sda. That doesn't make the first part any less dumb, though.

2020-03-22 15:37

>be me
>live in low-end neighborhood
>paranoid about coronavirus looters
>probably unable to get a firearms license in my authleft state
>buy a 150-lb crossbow (and arrows and arrowheads) three weeks ago
>actually buy three crossbows, so a thug can't run up and shank me while I'm reloading
>today, finally get around to assembling a crossbow
>it turns out I'm too much of a soyboy to be able to cock it
>the pulley-based cocking device that I had the foresight to additionally buy doesn't work—pulling its handles all the way up to my shoulders fails to bring the bowstring up to the cocking mechanism

guess_ill_die.jpg

2020-06-18 18:35

(I did eventually get around to buying winches to go with the crossbows.)

2020-04-27 08:59

Just finished downloading the entirety of Homestuck with wget. The comic's actual size is 1.12 GiB, but its size on disk is a whopping 17.4 GiB, because the minimum file size on my NAS's 16-TB drives is 1 MiB. Hilarious!

2020-05-03 07:30

Whoops, never mind. The NAS's block size actually is 4 kiB, not 1 MiB. I guess Samba is incapable of reporting size on disk to Windows.

2020-08-09 06:02

Storage progression:

  • One 1-TB drive (in an external enclosure)
  • One 2-TB drive (in an external enclosure)
  • One 4-TB drive (in an external enclosure)
  • One 8-TB drive (in an external enclosure)
  • One 16-TB drive (in an external enclosure)
  • Four 16-TB drives (in RAIDZ2; 32 TB of storage)
  • Six 16-TB drives (in RAIDZ2; 64 TB of storage)
  • Ten 16-TB drives (in RAIDZ2; 128 TB of storage)

2020-08-09 02:59

I dreamed about cuddling in bed with Goddess Two, Pseudofriend One. Alas!

2021-03-17 16:30

(Though, of course, it's a somewhat strange thing to dream about, since my plan for her was (pseudo)friendship, not romance (and certainly not slavery). Whatever. I have no control over my dreams.)

2021-03-17 16:28

Recently, I finally got around to unpacking Bios: Origins, a board game that I bought on Kickstarter more than two years ago. I was quite astonished when I realized what an enormous amount of space playing it actually requires. The board alone is 28.5 inches wide × 19 inches tall, and the cards take up another 7 or so inches of width.

Then, however, I looked up the size of a Monopoly board and realized that this size really isn't out of the ordinary. Rather, I just haven't played a board game on a table in quite a few years. El oh el.

2021-05-01 04:07

Dreamed about Goddess Three, Pseudofriend Six.

I was visiting some Korean guy in the second or third floor of a dormitory-style building and watching a Pokémon-like (or maybe gacha-like, though I have very little knowledge of how those games work) animated show with him (Korean with English subtitles). While taking a break and walking in the hall, I was surprised to see photographs of the Goddess posted above a door across the hall. Peeking inside the (open) door, I saw her at a laptop computer.

Some minutes or hours later, most of the people in the building left. I followed her down the stairs and said Boo!, but after looking behind herself to see who I was she merely ignored me, getting into a fancy Volvo sedan and driving away.

Also: Goddess, how I despise sleeping! After going to bed at 20:30, I didn't fall asleep until maybe 21:30, and then woke up at 1:00 and again at maybe 3:30. (The above-described dream occurred in the second period. In the first period I had a different dream, which involved carting three hundred reams of printer paper, which I ordered online but accidentally had shipped to the wrong address, from a clubhouse of some kind to a farm apparently owned by my mother. I don't have dreams very often, but they're enjoyable when they do appear.)

2021-10-20 20:07

My introduction to the Gundam franchise was somewhat circuitous. I have some vague memories of watching a few episodes of G Gundam from a library DVD (specifically, a very cool shot of a pilot in his Fighter's cockpit, holding onto the invisible edge of a cliff by the fingertips of one hand, stuck very strongly in my mind) and maybe an episode or two of Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network at my grandmother's house, but my first real immersion probably was Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire, a video game for the PlayStation 3. I was very impressed by the music, but my understanding of the gameplay was severely hampered by my ignorance of the series. As I progressed through the game and upgraded my mobile suits and their weapons, I found achieving much success with beam weapons very difficult (due to the slowness of their projectiles and the extremely low ammunition reserve), and therefore stuck with the bullet‐firing guns. However, I quickly discovered that bullets, despite being a lot easier to hit with, don't deal much damage, while the AI enemies are experts at sniping the player from across the map with beams that will tear apart the player's MS quite quickly. I then abandoned the game in disgust.

Later, however, I acquired the first three games in the Dynasty Warriors Gundam series. The first was a bit rough around the edges (fighting a powered‐up enemy ace on an empty map, with no way to regain health or super gauge, isn't much fun), but the second and third were an absolute blast. Sometime around this point, I realized that nearly all the suits were using beam weapons rather than bullet weapons, and resolved to try Crossfire again. Once I figured out how to aim properly, conserve ammunition, and dodge enemy beams, I managed to beat the game handily. In my opinion, it's significantly more fun than the dismal review scores would have you believe. Yes, the frame rate regularly drops to single digits—but the mobile suits are quite nice to look at, and the music can't be underestimated.

(At some later date, I found the official GundamInfo channel on YouTube and watched the Gundam SEED HD remaster, G Gundam, and Gundam Build Fighters, which finally cemented my liking of the series.)

2021-11-21 20:31

As I type this, the voltage in my room (according to my UPS) is at 113 V under ordinary load (two idling computers, two 23‐inch monitors, an alarm clock, an LED light, a network switch, and a carbon‐monoxide detector). If I dare to turn on my space heater, it falls all the way to 103 V. I wonder whether this is the fault of the power company, of the people who renovated this house ten or fifteen years ago, or of the people who built this house in the 1950s.

(About a year ago, I personally measured something like 100 V at the spot where power enters the house. However, that issue didn't affect my bedroom (it was on the other half of the wiring—I don't know the technical term, and don't care enough to look it up), and it was fixed after we complained to the power company.)

2022-04-12 17:44

I recently was rather disgusted to learn that Arial doesn't have a hyphen character (U+2010). I guess I'll have to set my HTML documents to use Noto Sans or something as their preferred sans‐serif font. Ugh…

2022-04-24 07:16

I came across Goddess Two in a dream last night. A pair of huge breasts had been bolted onto her, but she was dressed modestly—it was just a chance meeting on a sidewalk.