https://store.steampowered.com/app/89875...t_Wars_30/

See this, this is Super Robot Wars 30, the first licensed game in a 30-year-old franchise that is legally purchasable in the United States and Europe without importing with a full official English translation.

I just pre-ordered this and can confirm it's real, it's not a joke, somehow, the absolute nightmare of licensing issues that prevented this series from seeing western shores (aside from fan translations and the GBA Original Generation games with all original stuff) has been worked past, we can now get this without importing.

If this is clown world, get me my floppy shoes, red nose and grease paint, cause this is insanity I can totally appreciate

Time for folks to clean out their PM queues...

Note that anything in the Trash still counts toward your limit - you have to empty the trash in order for the space to be freed up.

It's a ten-year-old article, so it isn't "news"...

How to Build a Newsroom Time Machine

Quote:“There’s no number 1 key.”

Quote:Rice had a ratty old textbook stashed in his camera bag, which he referred to furtively and often. After all, one wrong mixture of chemicals, or one processing step out of order, and a roll of 35-mm film or piece of light-sensitive paper comes out blank. And neither of those items come cheap.

Quote:(They enjoyed playing stupid and asking me questions like, “Who’s Marge?” Huh? “MARG RELEASE!” At least, I hope they were playing.)

Quote:And no one tried to get high by huffing the rubber cement. (An improvement over my days at the University of Florida newspaper in the mid-’80s.)

Quote:Just like the reporters have learned that “cut and paste” once involved actually cutting and pasting, the copyeditors have learned that the copydesk was once a real desk.

Quote:Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for All On Paper. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…

You must do math.

Quote:The editors had the nifty idea of compelling the writers to paste up their own pages. That didn’t survive the first week. Many staffers learned that, while they can deftly manipulate a mouse to kill hundreds of bad guys in a videogame, few of them can draw a straight line.

Right here.

So stop asking, already...

Been doing a reread of DW8 the last couple of days and I suddenly had the thought:

Whenever the next DW chapter drops - whichever chapter it is - this will be the first time I won't read it first in my email when the post hit the FFML.

I'm not sure how to take that, honestly.

Starting this thread on Canada Day, July 1... but giving it a title that'll let it be used for July 4 as well.

Who else is just taking the entire weekend off?

This has just (sort of) resolved in the last twenty minutes, so I figured I'd share it with everyone as I threatened Amazon.com I would.

So... two weeks ago I made an Amazon order.  A one-pound box of freeze-dried mushrooms, four bottles of sugar-free vanilla syrup (for Peggy) and four bottles of sugar-free butterscotch syrup (for me to make ersatz butterbeer with).

What came five days later was a pound of freeze-dried mushrooms, four bottles of vanilla syrup... and four bottles of raspberry syrup.

Okay, no problem, contact Amazon customer service. "Oh, you can't return it, but that's okay, keep it and we'll order the right stuff for you. However, we can't expedite the order, it won't arrive until early July." Well... that's not acceptable because as I noted in another recent thread we're going to be elsewhere in early July, but I negotiate a delayed shipping arrangement that will drop it on our doorstep the day we get back and think, cool, all resolved.

Until suddenly I get a notice in email a couple days later that my butterscotch syrup has shipped and will be arriving on Monday the 21st. Bwah? Well, okay, that's cool even if they told me they couldn't do that. Gotta love the efficiency of the Amazon machine, right?

Come Monday, the package arrives, I open it up... and find a box two-thirds the size of a box of syrup bottles, with six-inch-wide "Oregon Chai" logos on several sides. It's holding six cartons of... you guessed it... Oregon Chai. On one of the sides without a logo is a one-and-a-quarter-inch long inventory sticker with a bar code declaring to all the world that despite its labeling and contents this is actually a box of four bottles of no-sugar butterscotch syrup.

i disbelieve, and contact Amazon customer service again.

"Oh dear," they say. It can't be returned, but I can keep it, and they'll ship the right thing out to me. Sadly, the order can't be expedited, it'll have to come at its own speed. I'm not surprised -- it's almost exactly the way the first contact went. What I am surprised about this time is that now it can't be delayed, either. They can't make any kind of special arrangements at this time, and I am told that I'll just have to wait until I get an email saying it's been shipped, call them back and then change the shipping instructions.

Well... okay. I want that damned syrup, it's been out of stock for months and dammit, I paid for it. So imagine my surprise when yesterday I get an email telling me that my butterscotch syrup has been shipped and will be arriving late today.

Not only that, imagine my surprise when it arrived about half an hour ago, and I open the box to find that inside is... Butterscotch-Caramel syrup. A very similar but not identical product to what I ordered.

Back to Amazon. Oh, they're very sorry. Do I want them to reorder? I very bluntly tell them I have no faith that they will ever get this order right. Refund my fucking money and I will never again bother them about sugar-free butterscotch syrup. And tell the boneheads in the warehouse to actually pay attention to what they're putting in the smiley-face boxes.

Oh, and I'm going to share this story on social media. (Which I will, when I get around to taking pictures of all three wrong products standing side-by-side.)

Now I'm just waiting to find out if they're refunding me the cost of just the syrup, or of the entire order it was originally part of. The way this has gone, I would not be too surprised if I see a near-$80 credit on my bank statement instead of a $25 one.

So, come the 3rd of July, Peg and I will be heading off with her family to Long Beach Island for a week once again, as we have for something close to twenty years, if not more.

As is usual in latter years, this won't disconnect me from the Net in any way, so what used to be a warning that I'd be away is barely more than a minor heads-up.

However, this year is slightly different in one way...  the 28th through 30th of June, the Monday through Wednesday immediately before we go to LBI, Peg and I are heading to Atlantic City for my birthday, where we'll be staying at the Hard Rock Hotel.  So I'm getting almost a two-week vacation here. 

Unlike with LBI, it's actually likely that during the AC days I will be somewhat less present on the forums, if only because Peg and I will be out on the beach, pool or boardwalk, or at one of the restaurants, for most of the approx. 48 hours (Monday afternoon to Wednesday morning) we'll be there.

I love it when I find a filk site that I didn't know about before. This is the guy who does Cthulhu filk set to ABBA songs... none of which are linked below.

Cutting to the power and image songs:

• This one isn't about any character in particular, but when I listen to it, I'm thinking "Anthy". Maybe it's an image song.
  
• Doug already knows how to cook. Maybe this will let him share his skill.
  
• Magical encryption-cracking, anyone? (Maybe it'll only work for Eimi.)
  
• I suppose one could create a simulacrum of the title character with this one... but why?
  
• A somewhat more useful simulacrum song.
  
• There's already a nanoStep with Doug in the world of The Prisoner. Here's the gatesong that sent him there.
  
• Another gatesong... to a series that I'm not familiar with and can't find on All The Tropes or Wikipedia, except as a mention on the author's Wikipedia page