Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas

March 16, 2019

Car Shopping

So I bought a car today.

Actually, I didn't, I ORDERED a car today.

Nearest Subaru dealership has 50 Imprezas. Only 1 Sport model with a manual transmission, and it's white. None of the other dealerships have one, and none in the pipeline. I guess they know the market.

Yeah, I'm getting Red, dammit, and I'm getting a Stick. I don't care if the CVT automatics get slightly better mileage, the main reason I have a 27 year old Loyale is the mechanical simplicity of a manual transmission.

Took it for a brief drive. Like all cars today, it insulates you more from the road. So even the Loyale is a little sportier, but then, I've been driving that one so long it's like a part of me.

Really long throw on the clutch pedal, with very little resistance or feedback. A lot of takeup on it I think. Enough that I was wondering if it could be adjusted.

Since I am not getting the automatic, a lot of the safety features that take control from you aren't available, as well as the remote start function etc. No big deal, I'm an adult.

A lot of the onboard electronics work in concert with a smart phone. Anyone who's seen my phone knows that's not gonna fly. Alas, The Sport model doesn't support navigation, which is a big loss.

The VIP pricing program doesn't save me a whole heck of a lot, maybe $1100. The Tax, my god, tacks on another two grand or so.

So, I'll have bought a new car, in the next up to 60 days.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:16 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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1 My Bimmer does not have navigation either. The reason is, phones progress faster than cars and I don't want to be saddled with obsolete crap, especially for navigation. A year after I bought my house, I had a replacement Lexus while my wife's car was in for an oil change. It still didn't have my street, which was there for years now. Google in my phone knows about it today.
I designed a holder for my phone and printed it on my 3D printer. Voila, navigation!
Car makers try to address it by having modes where car's infotainment serves as a remote desktop for your phone. The trouble is, Google is often lags or missing. BMW only has Apple CarPlay, but no Android Auto. Although, Subaru has both.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 16, 2019 08:00 PM (LZ7Bg)

2 However, I have neither an Android nor Apple phone. I DO have a Garmin GPS though.... (And I found some good sites for free Garmin compatible maps).

Posted by: Mauser at March 16, 2019 09:50 PM (Ix1l6)

3 Oh, as for WHY I insist on red.
My first car was a 1978 Chrysler LeBaron, red, So quite obviously it acquired the nickname Le Red LeBaron. I had a lot of adventures in that car. Even drove it onto the Atlantic City boardwalk once. When I moved to Virginia, I got a vanity plate that said "Le Red". (My Honda CB550K got one that read "I Mule" for its name, the Iron Mule - it was too small to be an iron horse).
When it died (Threw a timing chain, but waited until I was safe at a rest area on I-95 before refusing to ever start again), thanks to a friend who worked at the dealership at the parts counter, I got a good price on my 1992 Subaru Loyale, which also worked out be being red. So Mitch dubbed it "Le Red Jr." (His nicknames for things involved a lot of Jrs.)
So when the Impreza comes in, it will be dubbed Le Red 3.

Posted by: Mauser at March 17, 2019 07:56 AM (Ix1l6)

4 Feh, car arrived at the dealer today, but they didn't get all the prep work done. Including some programming or a else there was some other glitch that turned off all the doo-dads like traction control and tire pressure monitoring. Still, took it for a test drive. I was set up better than I was in the white one, but it will take a while to get used to the different torque curves on this one. (one fast pull out from a store parking lot was disastrous.... damn near stalled it!)

Posted by: Mauser at March 23, 2019 05:10 PM (Ix1l6)

5 Careful with the torque curve measuring, bro. Read the manual for the break-in instructions first. The BMW manual said not to exceed 4,000 rpm and 100 m.p.h. for 2,000 miles.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 26, 2019 06:17 AM (LZ7Bg)

6 Well, what I meant there is that the Loyale produced peak torque at 2.8K, and peak HP around 7K. but the engine in the Impreza wants to be faster than that or it bogs down at the start. I just need to learn how much faster.
Alas, that may take a while because this particular example came with a bad crankshaft sensor, and they're still working on it. I am annoyed. But then, I haven't actually bought it yet.

But yeah, the Loyale was really happy loping along at 3K rpm for miles and miles. And it was geared such that that was around 55-60 mph.

Posted by: Mauser at March 28, 2019 03:34 PM (Ix1l6)

7 Dealerships is STILL replacing sensors and crap. I have a feeling they're milking Subaru for Warranty work before I even buy the car, to make up for the lost profit from me using the VIP program.

Posted by: Mauser at April 06, 2019 10:10 PM (Ix1l6)

8 And I finally got my car on Wednesday. Drove it to work today and was totally paranoid about door dings all day. But it was fine, until some nimrod in a giant Ford pickup tried to back out of a parking space downtown into a packed, stopped street - i.e. into the spot I was stuck in.
The horn works. Idiocy averted. But it was cose. When I moved forward a bit the guy behind me let the idiot back out, and he STILL nearly clipped me with his front bumper.

Some people should not have big trucks.

Posted by: Mauser at April 12, 2019 07:22 PM (Ix1l6)

9 When I bought the Wrangler, I was entirely unconcerned about the cosmetic damage. Previously, I received a number of fairly long scratches from Nevada sagebrush with my RAV4, which was a little annoying. But a Jeep is made for this. And what's remarkable, it worked perfectly: the inspector thought it was in a good order, scratches and all. Coincidentally, I never received a door ding in 9 years I had the Rubi. But some stupid broad with a Volvo made a dent in the door of RAV on 2nd week, in the parking of Trader Joe. I never bothered to fix it, because it wasn't deep enough. Although, I remember now that I did some damage that needed a repair. I backed into a side of the ditch and smashed the plastic bumper. I didn't expect that to happen because the ground was soft. I replaced that bumper with a take-off that I found on Craigslist.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 19, 2019 07:36 PM (LZ7Bg)

10 Oh, and congrats.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 19, 2019 07:37 PM (LZ7Bg)

11 Thanks. It's still taking some getting used to. (Hmmm, the clutch smells like someone lighting matches...). There are some really stupid issues I have with how they implemented the audio system vis. playing off a USB stick. (Plays tracks in alphabetical order. Switches to the Radio between the time you shut off the engine until you open the door). But the heater REALLY works, plus the seats are heated too. Still learning how close I can get to things. The visual cues are different from the Loyale, even though they're basically the same size. And the back seat is remarkably roomy. Not that I carry passengers - ever.

Posted by: Mauser at April 19, 2019 08:05 PM (Ix1l6)

12 I have a separate directory for the MP3 stick. I inherited that from the days when I used real CDs. There's no other way but play in alpabetic order, if you think about it.... The only thing an audio system can do is to walk folders. However, the problem is that on ISO CDs the names are still in 8.3 format in listings, even when you have RR extensions. Therefore, I have a bunch of subdirectories in that directory, and all the files are named "i001.mp3", "i002.mp3", etc. It was the only way to do it. Maybe still is!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 21, 2019 05:13 PM (LZ7Bg)

13 Well, okay. A smart enough audio system could also pick some playlists from .xmms or .mpl files. But without those it's alphabetical or die.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 21, 2019 05:14 PM (LZ7Bg)

14 Thing is, it's smart enough to pick out the album names, and to index by artist, title or album, and even display a thumbnail of the cover if one is available (I basically duplicated my Clementine music folder onto the stick). So I think it must be reading the MP3 file info, but it's not checking the track number.

It also stays stuck in one folder at a time, instead of going to the next one.
Ah well, perhaps they can eventually update.

Posted by: Mauser at April 21, 2019 06:42 PM (Ix1l6)

15 My BMW does a little better by going through folders in order. But it does not list folders (Jeep did).
At this point I think the only option left is Android Auto.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 22, 2019 05:26 PM (LZ7Bg)

16 Yeah, I wanted to try Android Auto on the little tablet I bought, but since it's not actually a phone, Google won't let me do it.

Still need to get used to this different clutch. I guess 27 years in the Loyale made shifting it second nature, but I'm getting a lot of clutch odor just getting out of my uphill driveway. Or maybe that's part of breaking it in, with less than 500 miles. I think I'm generally shifting late.

Oddly, now that I'm driving the Impreza, the Loyale feels like it has a lot of rolling resistance.

Posted by: Mauser at April 23, 2019 06:00 PM (Ix1l6)

17 I don't think the clutch burn is normal. I only had it happen once, when parking for Russian Consulate General in SF.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 29, 2019 11:56 AM (LZ7Bg)

18 Well, it's getting less and less, so I imagine it's part break-in (We're still under 500 miles) and part me learning. The clutch force feedback is virtually nil. You can't tell the initial slack, from the engagement range to the overtravel. The spring is very light, so it's a bit harder to control. the Loyale was a lot heavier, and I think the engagement was a longer part of the stroke.

The thing coasts like mad though. Last time I drove the Loyale I was wondering if the parking brake was still on....

Posted by: Mauser at April 29, 2019 06:52 PM (Ix1l6)

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March 10, 2019

What I've been watching this season

The Rise of the Shield Hero.

Magical Girl Special Ops Asuka

And I've been DLing but haven't really gotten around to watching:
The second season of 3D no Kanojo

the Umpteenth episode of Gegege no Kitaro.

Frankly, I had no idea that last one was going to go on so long when I started it. I have a bunch of images uploaded here for the last write-up I was going to do about it that got lost in an inadvertant click. And now so much more has come in that most of that is obsolete.

Someone was recommending "My Roommate is a cat" if you really wanna get socked in the feels.

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February 17, 2019

Watch for the Duck

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February 04, 2019

Not at Duckberg levels, but still...

... it Snew.

click to embiggen

Think I'll stay home today, we have mountains, and drivers who can't even cope with our regular rain.

Update: Still coming down.

click to embiggen

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January 31, 2019

New post on my writing blog

"Message Received" on a particularly arch example of message fiction and why SJWs are attracted to such.

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January 02, 2019

Winter Season

Here's the Chart. What looks good to you?

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December 23, 2018

Freebie

December 31 is my birthday, and I'll be giving away my Novelette Kiwi for free (99 cents normally). https://amzn.to/2RlPczb

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November 17, 2018

Tweetstorm

So I made a tweet about Comicsgate. I mentioned it to a friend with a lot of followers and he retweeted it.

125,000 impressions later.... it's just not stopping. Almost 500 retweets, 1500 likes, and all kinds of nasty too. It's amusing, but time consuming, and not terribly productive.

(182K impressions, 2K likes, and 540 retweets. Twitter has been useless for any other purpose, and will be until this dies out.)

(And now it has exceeded 200K impressions. But at least it seems to have slowed down.)

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November 06, 2018

Kissmanga of death

So I was reading that Isekai manga about the spider. Checking it out on Kissmanga every month. But as of chapter 30, every time I load up that page (I update the bookmark each time I read) it loads all the chapter pages, then, as I scroll down to read, suddenly the page auto-refreshes, and all the images disappear. And any attempt to reload after that throws up a "Site is down for maintenance" message. Tried bringing it up in Explorer instead of Firefox, and the site came up, but said no such file for the Manga.

Yanno what? Screw it. I wasn't enjoying it that much anyway. I don't know if it was anti adblock or some other misfunction, but I'm done.

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October 06, 2018

Invisible Bunny Girls

It started in Twitter, someone posted an animated .gif of an opening scene from Seishun Buta Yarou wa Bunny Girl Senpai no Yume wo Minai (I don't know if there's a shorter name for it yet).

Now, if you're a really deep SF reader, you might remember a novel from Larry Niven called "A Gift From Earth." The protagonist, Matthew Keller, had an odd ability - while he couldn't actually turn invisible, he had the ability to make people's vision just glass over him, so they wouldn't actually see him. He made people SO disinterested in him they wouldn't even react to his presence.

Enter Mai Sakurajima, famous child star, taking a hiatus from her career to go to a little out of the way seaside village's high school. Also Sakuta Azusagawa, ordinary high school student (Well, not QUITE so ordinary as we find out later). Sakuta is in the public library when he notices a girl running around wearing a bunny suit. It seems also that he is the ONLY person in the library who sees her. He recognizes her as his Sempai, and she tells him to forget he ever saw her, but he can't. (Otherwise there wouldn't be a story.)

Eventually they talk about it. Some time ago Mai discovered situations where nobody could see her. The whole Bunny Suit thing was a game to see if she really couldn't be seen, because anyone who could would stare at her. He was the first.

He believes this is part of some supernatural thing that happens to some teens. His little sister, for example, started manifesting actual injuries from internet insults sent by mean girls at school, and he was sent to the hospital after having his chest slashed by some unknown monster. He's an outcast at school because somehow the rumors transformed into HIM sending three other people to the hospital, and he is resigned to the idea that trying to correct the "Atmosphere" at school won't do anything. Mai is an outcast as well, since she didn't join the school at the beginning of the year, when all the social circles were set in stone. (It's a pretty bleak view of high school in this show).

Unfortunately, Mai has no control of this ability, and it's getting worse. After two weeks, she shows up on Sakuta's doorstep, starving. It's awfully hard to buy food when the clerk can't see you.

Yeah, this is on this season's To-Watch list.

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