It’s getting good traction, but I’m going to borrow the band blog to mention this now: if you have an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, etc), then go to Software Update and update it right now.

Here are some details at Gizmodo, and here’s the BBC story. Basically, it’s a single-click exploit and your phone isn’t yours anymore.

Seriously, update now, it’s a bad one. Actually, it’s three bugs, each of which is very bad, but they’re all fixed at once.

I haven’t written much about the alt-right/”Rabid Puppy” Hugo Award slate gaming lately; as last year, their slate utterly collapsed, with the core of it finishing behind “No Award,” again, just like last year. Theodore (“Vox Day”) Beale did of course claim TOTAL VICTORY, as he will always do regardless, and I got a small bit of banhammered hate on Twitter (aw, they remembered me! I’m flattered) and blah de blah de blah. To be honest, Dave Truesdale’s expulsion from the con was far more interesting.

Really, I’m kind of surprised they still care, what with actual fascists being actual contenders in elections in the west this year. It makes their chosen pond look even smaller. Scalzi wrote a column calling them gum on the shoes of history, which is about right.

I imagine they might give it another run next year even with the new rules in place, mostly ’cause Dunning-Kruger is gonna Dunning-Kruger, and if you want poster children for that effect, I have some suggestions.

Why do white supremacists always look like counterexamples?

Jim Hines has a nice post up about the actual award winners, and it’s a good read.

Meanwhile, the Sad Puppies – as opposed to the Rabids – are concentrating their efforts on a new set of awards, the Dragon Awards, to be given at Dragoncon. Those are over here, and it’s an internet vote so have fun managing that because wow I can’t think of anything easier to hijack, but y’know what? Great. Go have fun, I hope it works out (no, really, I genuinely do) and good luck.

Meanwhile, I’m going to post this and hope the construction next door takes a break today. My studio is sound-conditioned, not sound-proofed, and I have to ask, WHO NEEDS FIVE KINDS OF POWER SAW FOR A CARPORT? I mean, I’m guessing at five, given the number of different sounds I was hearing, and unless they’re starting some sort of electric saw noisemusic band, I’m assuming this is all for the carport and not either music nor lulz.

Then again, the griefer count has been pretty fuckin’ high lately. Maybe it is lulz. These chorus vocals I was mixing are sounding pretty damn sweet despite the saw effects, I got to say, so you’re gonna have to do better than that to stop me.
 
 

This is part of a series of posts on the Hugo awards nominations capture by rightist political slates.

Well played, Facebook algorithms. Well played.

Stranger Things title-style generator here.

The last few days have been really terrible for Tracer bombs – and quicily-timed ults in general – on Overwatch. It’s to the point where I don’t consider Tracer to have an ult – the last couple of days, it’s 50/50 whether it’ll even deploy and go off.

I’ve seen lots of failure to deploy with Tracer bombs. Particularly, jink-jink-deploy is almost guaranteed to fail now – if you don’t have time for jink-jink-pause-deploy, it mostly doesn’t, and adding that pause is pretty much a death sentence for Tracer.

I’ve seen explosions with zero damage even with confirmed STUCK notices (and similarly not showing up in stats, which means the server never saw it? despite the STUCK notice?), and in one case, the bomb just outright vanished. I stuck it to a D.va, it showed as STUCK, I teleported back, and it just… disappeared. I didn’t get it back in my inventory, it was just gone, and no damage.

I’m seeing it a lot playing D.va too – in a bad situation, I’ll go in with a nerf ready into a big pile of players, stay alive as long as I can doing as much damage as I can, hit nerf as my damage metre falls close to two digits, and historically, that’s a nerf – often not a very useful one, as it’s basically a Mech Reset – and I get a new mech. Now, generally, nothing. I get an eject, yes – but without the nerf, and without a new mech. And without the nerf to clear the crowd, that’s also an instant death.

Back on Tracer, the jink-unwind problem is getting worse, too. That killed me today in a screamingly infuriating way. We were defending stage 1 at Hanamura, and I do this thing when I’m coming back in after an elmination, where I jink over the short way from stage 2’s cliffside balcony to the cliffside rockery behind stage 1. It saves time and it’s neat, and it’s a triple-jink jump.

Today I did that, was over the stonework, then was suddenly unwound two jinks and falling to my death. It actually backed me up over the cliffs to drop me.

So, yeah.

Also, WILL SOMEBODY ELSE BESIDES ME GET ON THE FUCKING PAYLOAD? THANKS.

eta: jfc tonight, tonight, defence in Hanamura, I nerfed to clear the point in overtime on the second point, it rattled off eight(!) kills and destroyed mecha/objects, it was massive and last-second, and it brought up the VICTORY banner…

…and then declared in audio “DEFEAT” (with the VICTORY banner still up!) and unwound all my kills (none of them appeared in my end of game stats), and gave the win to the other team.

What. The. Fuck.

Hey, if you were one of the people liking and/or following me only on Tsū – and pretty much everybody who was doing that on Tsū was doing that only on Tsū – this blog is where everything lives. Welcome, Tsu refugees!

I’ve also got echos on Livejournal if you like things oldschool, and Facebook and Tumblr and Google+ and even ello, tho’ I just post links mostly at the last two.

Let me know where you are now, so I can follow you back there.

rip, tsū

(typing it Tsū and Tsu in case people are searching and can’t easily type ū)

Anybody know anything about what the comments page in the WordPress administrative interface might be doing to call into themes?

I’ve been trolling through the codex for a while, but hey surprise wordpress is a big project and this is a lot of code to troll. But basically, the comments page in the administrative interface takes a very long time to load (>20s) if my current desktop theme is in use.

If I switch to twentysixteen (the current standard included theme), it takes very little time – basically, an immediate load. That’s changing nothing else, and it is 100% reproducible.

My suspicion is that it’s running some sort of check against the comments contents and/or metadata. I suspect specifically something to do with the avatars, but that’s very much a guess.

This is 100% unrelated to my digital audio workstation woes – completely different machines – and is something that has been bugging me for a while. It started all at once, after we rebuilt the server following the hax0r last year.

Anybody out there with knowledge? Do I get lucky?

eta: I was chatting with mpol on the wordpress IRC channel, who found something in the theme’s functions.php that I’d looked at askance before, and it’s this filter call:

add_filter('get_comments_number', 'comment_count', 0);

And if I comment that out, suddenly we behave a lot better and I don’t see a functionality loss. Anybody know what this might even be doing? It’s line 364 here.

eta2: I know what that filter was doing now. I think without that filter their custom comments counter (which added behaviour I didn’t actually like and had worked around elsewhere) becomes redundant and I’ve commented it out entirely with no bad beahviour so far. Anyone see anything weird with comment counts?

eta3: So far this is working much better! But possibly related, and possibly not, I am still getting admin-panel connection resets at random. Reloads always work, and of course, Query Monitor is not helpful here because the reload works fine without issues or errors. All of Firefox’s explanations are wrong, and this happens under Safari too.

The connection was reset

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

eta4: Many super-thanks to Kirrus on Twitter who has been majorly helpful on this. I’m still seeing the connection reset, but the comment issue is cleared out and along the way, using tools he and mpol recommended, I found an assortment of bugs affecting performance in the two abandonware plugins I still run and more or less privately maintain. Also, one in my now-custom once-piano-black theme which would’ve meant White Screen of Death under PHP7. I’LL NEVER CHANGE THEMES NOW XD

eta5: For even more confusing information on the remaining problem, see this entry on Dreamwidth. Honestly, what the hell?

Back up again, after yet another Puget Sound Energy power outage. That’s… six this year? Four during good weather?

I can’t get those atomic generators back up to speed soon enough, I’m telling you. But: we’re back. At least Bandcamp stays up!

On the other hand, George the cat is snoring, and it is adorable.

We’re sitting in the hotel restaurant tonight, waiting for our food, when suddenly we are enveloped in stank. Not restaurant stank, either: worst case body stank.

Solarbird: Oh my god. Wow.
Minion Anna: Yeah.
Solarbird: This is… this is bad. And we’re just… swimming in it. I mean, damn, this is…
Minion Anna: <nods>
Solarbird: …somebody has cut some fierce cheese.
Minion Anna: <starts laughing>
Solarbird: What?
Minion Anna: Fierce Cheese is my Cows With Guns cover band.
Solarbird: …well done.

Who’s going to be at Westercon in Portland? That’s this weekend! Anna has a share of a dealer table, so you’ll find us at least some of the time in the dealer room – at both conventions, actually, because that’s how it works out sometimes.

To be honest, we weren’t originally planning on Westercon, but a bunch of friends from afar are showing up, so we decided hey, let’s go for it.

About the only new thing here aside from my Overwatch addiction – my username is solarbirdy, surprise – is that I got a 6m long MIDI cable so I could try to get the electric piano’s MIDI output over to the desk.

See, I’d got this keyboard only after I’d bought a very large MIDI-only keyboard controller (because reasons), and said MIDI-only keyboard controller – a Roland A-30 – is nice, but it’s huge and kind of a pain in the ass to set up for small things. I have to get out the ironing board to use as a support, it’s wider than the desk, etc, etc, etc.

But I had some idea that the electric piano’s MIDI didn’t work, and it didn’t when I tried it, but I dug out how to reset its internals, and did so, and that made the MIDI port come back online, which was great, except that also turned on this auto-accompaniment feature which takes away like a third of the keyboard and wow it is terrible, like a parody of piano music, terrible in that oh-god-oh-god-how-do-I-stop-this kind of way, in that either-this-has-to-go-or-I-do kind of way, in that I need to stop this right now or there are going to be detonations kind of way, and I’m just saying we got unnecessarily close to tire explosions before I was able to dig out how to turn that shit off.

(WHY DOES “SYNC” MEAN “OFF” THIS MAKES NO SENSE WHAT IS GOING ON IN YOUR HEADS YAMAHA?!)

So, yeah, basically, it’s been quiet. See you at Westercon or Clallam Bay? Hope so! I may nerf you, but I still love you.