That’s bizarre, given that they’d already done one of those with Whispers of Dawn. It’s as though they’re trying to make this an old-style OAV series, with a new part emerging every few months, which would be okay if they’d just say so. The unwillingness to commit to any kind of date, even if it’s next year, is frustrating.

I finally managed to watch at least one episode of everything I was interested in.

Dropped:

• Link Click (just didn’t, er, click with me)
• Farmagia (too much game showing at the seams, not enough depth, protag is an idiot)
• Greatest Alchemist (not good enough to survive having slavery treated as acceptable)
• Fruit Master (just mediocre all over)
• I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons (denial of the main character’s agency to an extent that’s downright icky)
• Magic Maker (um, dude, I don’t really care that she’s your sister, but you appear to be macking on an oblivious prepubescent girl. No.)
• Momentary Lily (motion sickness-inducing).

Hanging by a thread:

• Aquarion: Myth of Emotions (really ugly artwork and isn’t likely to be good enough in other categories to compensate)
• Promise of Wizard (first episode felt rather bland, haven’t gotten to the second one yet)
• I’m a Noble on the Brink of Ruin etc. (just really bland so far, no black marks but not very interesting either)

I’ll be picking one of those three to keep watching and dropping the other two.

By the way, does anyone know what’s going on with Fate/Strange Fake? I wasn’t anticipating it dropping off the schedule again after one episode.

And at the moment I’m watching an intriguing oddity called Scrapped Princess. At first glance, it appears to be a sort of cheesy swords and sorcery adventure story, but it’s been revealing surprising depth as it goes along and has really been quite good. Remains to be seen how it plays out…

Let’s just say that the ending is probably not what you’re expecting if you’re still in the earlier part of the show.

There’s a subset of Americans who are rather like ostriches: heads so deeply buried in the sand that they forget anything exists outside their immediate surroundings. Reminding them that the rest of the world is out there rarely has any positive results, however.

It’s . . . arguable. The Alberta oil and gas industry doesn’t really benefit “all Canadians”, just the ones working in that industry, and most of us who whose paychecks don’t depend on Alberta oil think the environmental oversight needs to be tightened up. In terms of advocating for the short-term interests of the subset of Albertans that elected her, Smith could be said to be doing her job. Problem is, she’s doing so in a manner that goes against the long-term interests of everyone in the country, including the people that elected her.

Ultimately she’s a whore for Alberta’s oil and gas industry, and Trump is just a means to an end. She’d put out just as readily for a Japanese tentacle monster if it promised to buy oil from Alberta. So this isn’t really about Trump or the US at all.

Somehow I knew he was going to draw the Fool. 😅

If I recall correctly, what they stole wasn’t even worth that much. Definitely not worth starting a high-speed chase over, and you can’t have a chase without a pursuer. If it had been a multiple murderer fleeing the scene, the risk might have been acceptable, but not for this.

I don’t understand how what once was rare in foreign tuition, then was a cash cow, and is now limited (but not eliminated) is now responsible for the total collapse of some schools.

They overextended themselves during the years the money was coming in, most likely, and now can’t afford the remaining payments on new buildings or equipment or the current staff salaries or whatever without the extra financial support. (There’s also the possibility of outright embezzlement having taken place, as at Laurentian U, which ended up axing a couple of programs.) Wikipedia suggests that Algonquin’s been building or renovating a fair amount of stuff on their main campus in Ottawa over the past fifteen years. If they took out loans to finance some of it, it would make sense that they’re short on cash now.

One of two things is the case:

1. The numbers are in the paper, and the person who wrote the article could have transcribed them but is too lazy.

2. The numbers are not in the paper, in which case I would class the article as inflammatory and irresponsible.

.

Do I trust the journalist? Not in the sense you mean, but I expect them to act responsibly and make a minimum effort.

Missing from the article: actual amounts of PFAS found in the bands, what percentage of it can be absorbed through skin contact, how that compares to other sources the average person might run into, and how much you have to absorb before biological damage emerges out of the statistical noise. The information may be in the original paper, but I’m disinclined to search for it there. Without those numbers, this is meaningless.

Disgusted, but absolutely not surprised.

With Charlie Angus leaving, I’m curious if North Eastern Ontario will stay NDP.

It’s really, really hard to say. Charlie Angus’ riding and the other NDP-held riding up here have been redrawn by the last redistricting. The other current NDP MP in the area, Carol Hughes, is also not running for re-election. Both of them have held their posts for quite a long time, so there may be enough lingering pro-NDP sentiment in the far north to get their successors elected.

Most of the other ridings are currently Liberal-held, with at least one of those incumbents not running for re-election either. I have no idea what direction anything’s going to jump in. It may come down to who the candidates are, as much as anything about the parties.

Doesn’t fully capture usage of the service (visitors to Canada are not counted, but citizens who are absent from the country more than half the year may be). Are bilingual individuals counted as belonging to both sides, or do they have to add a rider to the census asking us which language we want to support? If someone, for whatever reason, wants to throw their support behind the language they don’t speak, are they allowed? If not, why not? And what are you going to give Quebec to keep them from throwing a political hissy-fit over getting short-changed?

Dividing the money in half keeps the lid firmly on all those cans of worms.

I get the impression that you’re the kind of person who complains about their tax money going to services they don’t use. By that logic, my taxes shouldn’t go to funding child care or primary-school education, because I don’t, and won’t, have any children. Thing is, both of those are general public goods, and I support them even if they don’t benefit me personally, because having them makes Canada a better place to be. And yes, French-language public radio is also a public good.

Shouldn’t this be split proportionately between French and English? That seems more equitable to me.

It depends—in proportion to what, exactly? Some things cost the same amount whether you’re using them 100% of the time or only 10%. Some costs may be shared between the French and English sides. Others scale with the amount of material being produced. Very few scale with the number of listeners, and French Radio-Canada is broadcast in large areas outside of Quebec. Splitting the money into even halves makes for simpler bookkeeping, and simplifying the bookkeeping saves money.

The purpose of a locked boot system is privacy.

No. Once you strip away all the rhetoric, the purpose of a locked boot system is control (over who or what can boot the system).

Current secure boot implementations are like a door lock installed by someone else, which you are not allowed to replace and that may or may not allow you to cut your own duplicate keys for it. You have no control whatsoever over who the people who installed the lock may have given keys to, and if it turns out that the lock has a fundamental design flaw that means it can’t do its job properly, well, sucks to be you. You can’t even guarantee that the lock won’t morph into a new shape randomly or under the control of the installer, invalidating your existing keys in the process.

Rooting a device is a tradeoff. An unreliable door lock that you don’t entirely control may be better than none, but if you know you’re leaving the door unlocked, you also know you need to take other precautions to safeguard what’s inside (or simply not leave anything of value there in the first place).

The ideal would be a locked boot system that is installed by the user and is fully under their control, but I have yet to encounter one.

To me, that look seems more like “Pardon me, sir/madam/other, but we do not accept canines as patients.” 😅

It isn’t in their best interests to threaten the loony Christian sects that are one of the right wing’s favourite brainwashing tools. Members of those sects rely on authority figures to “interpret” the Bible for them instead of actually paying attention to its content, but if you try to take it away from them, they’ll throw a fit like a toddler does when you take away a toy they’ve been ignoring. Restricting access to the Bible in the present day would make religious brainwashing more difficult and create more people who actually think for themselves, which is anathema to bad governments like Texas’.

That can be weaponized, though. US government publications are public domain. So is the Bible. We’d at least get to watch members of the Texas government tie themselves into knots worthy of a game of Twister as they try to argue that those texts are harmful on a porn site but not anywhere else.

That only leaves “is a mess”, though. You need at least one more word, possibly “Google” or “everything” (depending on your level of cynicism).