Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

CURSE FEDEX!

It's a pretty amazing setup. Two Mamiya 645s: one a 100S, a waist-level finder and an eye-level finder, an 80mm f1.9, a 55mm, a 210mm, an extra 120 film cartridge, both a teleconverter and an extension tube, and an aluminum foam-fitted case for carrying all of it!

It was delivered today. And signed for. Sort of. And when I got home, it was no where to be found.

A 24" by 24" by 11" box that weighs 30 lbs. Not exactly inconspicuous.

The name that signed for it was nobody that I know, certainly wasn't Russet. I went to a neighbor's house, and she saw the FedEx driver carrying a large heavy box back to the truck! Now, the problem is that it was marked as delivered, so I can't do much through my FedEx account to say 'Just leave it' because it's been delivered as far as the system is concerned.

I bought it off Ebay and won a screaming deal. The pieces individually are easily worth over $1,000, with shipping I got it for $760ish. Fortunately the Ebay listing showed all of the serial numbers for the pieces, so if the driver did steal it, the equipment is easily identified.

I'm hoping the driver made a mistake in marking it delivered and that it will be dropped off tomorrow. The seller opened a ticket, so we'll see what happens.

I have a Mamiya RB67, which takes amazing photos, but it is a heavy so-and-so. I bought the 645s as they're much lighter but produce a negative over 3x larger than 35mm, albeit smaller than the RB negative.

EDIT: LITERALLY between the time I posted this and began doing the same post on LJ, the driver called! He's got three more deliveries in the area and is going to swing back by, so I'll have my equipment in about half an hour!

WHEEEEEEEE!

We just got back from seeing it, and it is a fantastic sequel! They brought back pretty much the entire cast, though they did replace the mayor. I'm not going to talk about the plot at all, except to say that the script writers did a wonderful job on the story. And I'm going to leave it at that.

One thing is that I would strongly recommend re-watching the original movie before going to this one. It starts like a week after the end of the first movie and hits the ground running. Or hopping.

:-)

Oh, there's a 40 second clip at the end of the credits. There's something at the very end of the clip that I'm not sure if it's foreshadowing Zootopia 3 or not, I guess we'll find out when it gets made and released. NINE YEARS between the first and second movies, I hope we don't have to wait that long for #3.

This is bad, for both Russia and the USA.

There was a successful launch Thursday from Pad 31 in Kazakstan of a Soyuz rocket carrying two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut to the ISS. But there was a problem on the ground.

One of the launch tower's moving platforms that is used to inspect and service the rocket was not properly secured prior to launch. The blast from the rocket passing the platform blew it down into the flame trench, causing a lot of damage to the pad, probably the tower, and presumably destroying the platform - which weighed 20 tons. Roscomos, the agency that runs the Russian space program (roughly the equivalent of NASA) claims that the damage will be repaired shortly. However, so many materials in manpower, money, and actual physical materials have been diverted to their failing war effort against Ukraine that this might not happen. One specific example of how Roscomos is being squeezed is that they used to send four crews to the ISS annually, now they're sending three.

While Russia has many launch facilities through its countries and neighbors, i.e. former USSR countries, Pad 31 is currently the only launch pad that can be used to send Soyuz and Proton rockets to the ISS. Pad 1 at the Kazakstan facility - where Uri Gregarin launched from - could be used, but it's been decommissioned and is being turned into a museum.

The Soyuz launches are used for crew/supply missions, the Proton launches are solely supply runs but also used to boost the ISS into a higher orbit. Fortunately NASA can also use SpaceX Dragons and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnusfor boost and also for supply.

This will also put some pressure on SpaceX as they've been having some problems with their super-heavy booster, trying to get it reliable enough to get people to the Moon and allegedly to Mars, not to mention their lunar lander being so far behind schedule that NASA is sending out an SOS contract for someone else to come up with another lander, otherwise SpaceX's tardiness will delay the USA going back to the Moon.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/russian-launch-pad-incident-raises-concerns-about-future-of-space-station/

There are several things interesting about Zork. It was one of the earliest imagination games that didn't have set winning conditions, instead you explored and tried to figure things out. It also was perhaps the first multi-platform games. They developed the Z-Machine, sort of a virtual environment that allowed the game to run on IBM Dos machines, Apple IIs, and others. That was extraordinarily revolutionary for the time!

And now you can download the source code for free. You can also download Z-Machine implementations for free. There's also CRT emulators that you can download if you really want to go 1980s old school!

And if you don't want to bother with all that, you can buy the game at Good Old Games for $6, but it's Windows-only.

One thing that I'm kind of curious about, though: when did Microsoft acquire the rights to Infocom IP? I don't recall that. While this is a cool thing for Microsoft to do, the source code for Zork and pretty much all the other Infocom games has been available for a few years, I downloaded them ages ago.

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1942250/microsoft-open-sources-classic-text-adventure-zork-trilogy

In the House of Representatives, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed almost unanimously, 427 to 1 with Clay Higgins (R-LA) the lone no vote, claiming that it will expose victims. I personally expect their names will be redacted, but I could be wrong. In the Senate, Chuck Schumer called for the bill to be passed by voice acclamation and it passed unanimously. There were five or six non-votes in the House at the conclusion of the vote, I don't know if they were absent or didn't vote.

So the bill has overwhelmingly passed Congress. And now comes the interesting part - it goes to the White House for Trump to sign! If he doesn't sign it, he grossly breaks campaign promises going back years which he could have fulfilled at any time by his command. And he's facing a truly huge veto-proof margin. I would really like to see the blow-back of him not signing it and it going back for an override vote.

But here's another thing. He has blatantly ignored and broken the law so many times during this presidency, ruling by fiat. If he refuses to sign the bill and tells Bondi to not release the files, what's Johnson going to do? Does Mikey have the cajones to hold impeachment proceedings?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-epstein-files-bill-rebuke-trump_n_69174f28e4b0191be9d4d60c

Jon/Thespian/DisneyDreamer voiced questions as to whether the files could be altered. As it happens, England has their own set of the files. It's possible that other countries also have sets. I expect that as soon as more information is released that they will be meticulously double-checked against other copies.


Second event: TEXAS!

The United States District Court Western District of Texas, El Paso Division, issued a 160 page document to preliminarily enjoin the State of Texas using their redrawn maps, reducing the number of Democratic districts in the U.S. House of Representatives for the upcoming 2026 elections next year. The best part: the judge signing the statement was a Trump appointee! He was joined by an Obama appointee.

Needless to say that this was a preliminary injunction and it will be appealed to the circuit court, and then to the supreme court if it's upheld at the circuit level.

Still, it's a beginning.

I absolutely loved the quote at the beginning of the decision:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The person who said that? United States Supreme Court Justice John C. Roberts.

In another blow to the administration, the Indiana legislature stopped their plans to redistrict, I believe their main point being questioning the legality of the action. I'm not sure what this action will hold in regards to California's redistricting as theirs was passed by ballot proposition, of course it is guaranteed that just as the Texas decision will be appealed, the California proposition will be challenged and then endlessly appealed in court.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-redistricting-court_n_691cb930e4b0414d84d7b979

GREATLY loosens! Even people with just Bachelor degrees are potentially eligible - and freshly-minted ones at that! If the degree is in robotics, AI, or new materials - and even if you don't have a job-offer from a Chinese company - you might be able to waltz into China and start marketing yourself.

This includes teachers in these subjects.

The Nature article is partially paywalled.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03657-6

https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/11/1857233/chinas-new-scientist-visa-is-a-serious-bid-for-the-worlds-top-talent

And by Leon, I mean Leon Muskbrat, the world's richest manchild.

(He's officially Leon 'cause the Prez called him that twice, so that makes it official.)

3am Saturday morning, Leon posted a Grok-generated video of a 'woman' that resembles his ex-wife and weirdly-named child's mother Grimes, who smiles and says "I will always love you" in a very bad lip sync.

I'm a little unclear whether he thinks this was a spiffy tech demo or showing off something that he did or just what this was.

The 87-y/o acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates had a very interesting observation:

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,” Oates wrote.

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world,'” Oates concluded.

WOW. Pity he can't take Tylenol for such a burn as it might cause him to become autistic.

He, of course, retorted and tried to disprove her observations and, in doing so, pretty much reinforced them.

But I was thinking about her statement of how it could be used as a metric about what a lot of political figures post about. Now, Leon, AKA the Ketamine Kid, AKA The Edgelord, AKA the frat boy who never grew up and hires gamers so that he himself can appear to be a skilled online gamer, this clearly applies. I can't imagine how boring a conversation with him would be: he'd probably have to steer it towards himself and his companies so as to have something to talk about!

(tagged under Tesla since I don't have, and don't want to add, a Musk tag)

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-ai-girlfriend-love-grok-desperate-2000683797

Today Russet had an appointment in Las Cruces to get her eyes poked, and with the early sunset, plus dinner, plus not getting into the back of the office for almost two hours after her appointment time it was well after dark before we were driving across White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) going home.

So in Southern New Mexico on the west side of the basin is Las Cruces, then east of Cruces you have the Organ Mountains. On the east side of the mountains you have White Sands Missile Range, and an Army post of the same name. There's also a NASA engine test facility (I almost had a job there once) and who knows what else there. The space shuttle 747 transporter, complete with shuttle, once landed there when the weather was too bad for it to continue on to Florida from Edwards in California due to storms over the gulf states. Turns out it was a really bad mistake as the gypsum sand from White Sands really screwed over the plane (mainly the brakes, maybe some engine damage?) and they had to fly in a maintenance crew and work on that plane for the better part of a week before it could leave!

On the east side of the valley you have Alamogordo on the west base of the Sacramento Mountains. Just west of town there's Holloman Air Force Base, and just beyond that is the actual White Sands Desert, the largest gypsum desert in the world. Looks really cool on Google Earth. Pretty much the entire valley between those two mountain ranges is the White Sands Missile Range, with U.S. 70 running through it, about 60 miles or so. They close it occasionally when they test missiles.

WSMR is a HUGE test range that also includes the section where the Trinity Test took place! They offer tours there once or twice a year, I've been there two or three times.

So Russet's eyes are dilated and she can't see much, I'm driving east and suddenly I see four little red dots appear in a line! And they fade really fast. It sort of looked like the lights on a broadcast antenna, except they were at about an 80 degree angle, not a healthy angle for an antenna, and way too high for such a thing. Too close to be on top of the Sacramento Mountains and the antenna clusters that are on the mountains are much further south. I ask Russet, but she hadn't been looking, she'd probably had her eyes closed. If straight ahead was twelve o'clock as a compass point, this was probably at around 10 or 11 o'clock.

Just a couple of minutes later, on the right side of the car - call it about 1:30 as a point, four more! It was clearly anti-missile flares: a tight pattern, rapidly deployed, and quickly extinguishing. If they'd been illuminating flares, they'd have had a much longer duration. This time Russet saw them, and she was impressed!

That was pretty cool to see! But there's no way of knowing what type of aircraft was popping them. Odds are it was an F-16 Falcon (jet fighter/light tactical bomber) as that's the main aircraft based at Holloman, but it could have been a helicopter out of either WSMR or Holloman or some other plane visiting Holloman. Holloman used to base F-119s and F-22s, but those went away and we got a whole bunch of F-16s from Luke in Glendale, AZ. We also used to have a German Luftwaffe detachment that flew two different types of fighters that were very cool as they had great paint schemes! Sadly one of the jet types was retired and the other was moved to Goodyear, AZ to consolidate operations and the detachment left. They were really nice people, I liked working with them.

Holloman is famous for its rocket sled program which is still occasionally in use - at my wife's observatory they would slew the telescope around and watch this little bright light go ZIP! across the desert when a test happened, the base was also the home of Ham the Space Chimp, the first American monkey in space! Ham is actually an acronym for Holloman Airbase Medical, and Ham is buried in Alamogordo at the New Mexico Space Museum.

Still, those flares were something that I've never seen before at night.

Two very timely articles! Now, if possible, it'd be a good idea to do a backup of your devices before performing such procedures just in case something goes wonky! But they're probably safe.

The first, from Ars Technica, delves into what we can do with Windows 11, and specifically the 25H2 update and the Edge browser. Lots of good stuff, alas I have not had time to dig into it yet.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/what-i-do-to-clean-up-a-clean-install-of-windows-11-23h2-and-edge/


The second is from Consumer Reports and has all sorts of nifty information on decluttering Apple devices, Android devices, Google apps, Meta stuff (Facebook et al), and Samsung devices.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/artificial-intelligence/turn-off-ai-tools-gemini-apple-intelligence-copilot-and-more-a1156421356/

Well, one of comics, the other of a manga series. First, the manga.

The series is called Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro, and it's called The (Nearly) Complete Collection. That's because this collection has 19 issues, the 20th that completes the series was just released. While this may be incomplete, it comes to a quite satisfactory resolution in 19 volumes, each of which is roughly 130-150 pages, so lots of good stuff to read.

First off, as is typical with Kodansha collections, these are Japanese-format: you swipe left to right to advance the page, you're reading it back to front like Japanese books/manga. But it is fully translated. Second, it's a high school romance. And it's a lot of fun.

It starts in the school cafeteria, the boy - a junior - is deeply involved in art: drawing and painting, and is very much a loner, though he has some friends. He's occasionally looking over at a group of younger girls (sophomores) who are having a good time and draws in a sketch book. He's making his own manga, a fantasy adventure focusing on a man and woman saving the world sort of thing. When he leaves to go to the art room to work on a painting, he accidentally leaves his manga sketch book behind. Miss Nagatoro sees it, grabs and and flips through it, then runs after him to return it, catching up with him in the art room where he's working on a still life. She starts criticizing his manga, then declares him to be her senpai and she his kohai, a hierarchical relationship between the two since he's a year up on her in grades.

And thus begins twenty issues of relentless torture and mockery, her of him. She's constantly calling him a creep-o and a perv, bapping him in the head, etc. And he's taking it! She's constantly hanging out in the art studio - he seems to be the only member of the art club - and soon her friends join her since she's no longer hanging out with them, and they join in with the creep-o mockery. But whenever anyone threatens or sneers at Senpai, they all fiercely defend him. Obviously there's much more going on here than meets the eye, or his eye, at least.

It was a very very charming story that I'm glad that I read, I also expect it'll get re-reads from me. I plan on picking up the final volume shortly. You can buy the first two issues for $1, or plunge in with all 19 for $18. The charity of this set is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund which helps comics creators with legal difficulties. The bundle is running for another 12 days from this posting.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/dont-toy-with-me-miss-nagatoro-manga-collection-kodansha-books


The second Bundle to discuss is a very large collection of Image Comics from the '90s. We're talking Spawn, Savage Dragon, Cyberforce, Tellos Saga, Witch Blade, Darkness, Battle Chasers, Lady Pendragon. LOTS of stuff! A 38-volume bundle for $18!

But there's two particular series that I want to talk about - Mage and Astro City.

These are particular favorites of mine that I'm really glad to see put into Bundles. I got lucky at Denver ComicCon about a decade ago and Matt Wagner, the creator, writer and artist of Mage was there. I found the then available three volumes of Mage and got them signed! Had a great time chatting with him. It's a fantastic gritty retelling of the Arthurian legend from the eyes of Kevin Matchstick that began in 1984 and wasn't completed until 2019! It's a not unfamiliar story of publishers going bankrupt, creators struggling to get the rights back on the things they've created, etc. But he did get to complete the series. I don't know if this collection is the entire series, I suspect it's only the first or first two thirds of it. I haven't bought the entire collection yet, that'll be happening a little later today.

Wagner has won multiple Eisner awards in addition to an Inkpot, he's a very talented creator and story-teller. He also created the character Grendel - not to be confused with the Marvel comic - which is a study in aggression. It is really an amazing series that resulted in a Batman/Grendel mini-series that was highly praised. Both Mage and Grendel have been options for movies and TV, but nothing has come of them. Seems like everything gets optioned for TV and movies these days, just in case.


Astro City is the creation of Kurt Busiek, who has also worked on The Avengers, Thunderbolts, and Superman, among other things. Astro City started in 1995 and is on-going. It's superheroes and villains with a large ensemble casts, kind of like what you'd like to see the Avengers universe be. They have a Superman character complete with secret identity called The Samaritan, only here he's a time traveler, and he literally spends his day flying around the world at superspeed saving people. A Wonder Woman character called Winged Victory (who actually goes on a hilarious date with The Samaritan once), a Fantastic Four family, all sorts of parallels to more recognized heroes but pulled off with much more believability, they feel like they could actually exist in a real world.

To quote its Wikipedia entry, "Its stories focus primarily on everyday life in a superhero comic universe, rather than on superheroic adventures and battles." That nails it spot-on. It is really, really good. I'm quite looking forward to re-reading these.

Kurt is the recipient of both Eisner and Harvey awards, the latter being the equivalent of the Hugo for comic book creators/artists.

The charity for this Bundle is Binc, the Book Industry Charitable Fund. According to HB, "Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation has helped bookstore and comic book store employees and owners who encounter unexpected financial crises. The Binc Foundation works to keep book people in their homes, in their jobs, and with their families – stabilizing the brick and mortar bookstore community." Definitely a worthwhile charity.

As I said, $18 gets you 38 items in CBZ, PDF, or Epub format. The Bundle is available for another 19 days. Myself, I'm buying the full bundle, but I'm not going to bother downloading the Spawn and some of the others. I've read Spawn, it's just not my cup o'tea.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/image-comics-in-90s-books