• The Southerly Kerfuffle continues: After the weekend protest in Melbourne, the Victorian state government - which recently lost in a pub quiz to a plate of sandwiches - decided to shut down all construction sites and throw the workers out of, well, work.
  
  Instantly creating an army with nothing better to do than protest.  Every.  Single.  Day.
  
  
  
  
  Long, long thread.  News outlets, politicians, their own union leaders, and other assorted communists first tried to play down the size of the protest, and then, after  the center of Melbourne had been shut down for several hours, decided that they were all Nazis, probably come from overseas just to stir up trouble.
  
  Yes, they booked their flights two weeks ahead and sat around in quarantine all that time because they knew on the 4th that the Victorian state government was going to shut down building sites on the 18th.
  
  Our politicians up here in Sydney can certainly be heavy-handed and I would like nothing better than to never see any of them disgrace my TV screen ever again, but they can't come close to the self-destructive idiocy of the mob running Melbourne. 
  
  Case in point: Construction sites will be allowed to operate at 100% capacity in Sydney again, even though we've had more Bat Flu cases recently and fewer protests.
  
  
  
• Senate Democrats are calling for the FTC to pass privacy regulations because they are incapable of writing coherent legislation.  (The Verge)
  
  I'm not sure the federal government needs to get involved here, since California already has, and everyone is already failing to live up to those rules.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• After 30 years, Python is getting a case statement.  (Ben Hoyt)
  
  First defined in mathematics in 1952, first appeared in a programming language around 1960, so they took their own sweet time about it.
  
  
  
• You can also use goto.  (GitHub)
  
  Don't.
  
  Though it's impressive that this trick works with PyPy, the Python compiler, and not just regular Python.
  
  
  
• Amazon is filling search results with ads, making their own storefront useless.  (CNBC)
  
  "Other" is the company's second most profitable revenue stream, so don't expect them to stop doing this.
  
  
  
• After 30 years of PC Load Letter we've now advanced to Connect to printer Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation failed with error 0x0000011b which I'm sure we can all agree is a huge improvement.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not.

I'm not surprised that they can sing well; that's a major factor that comes up in their auditions.  (Though some of them can't hit a note with a baseball bat.)  The surprise comes with the difference between their speaking voices and their vocal range when singing.

Pina Pengin is with Prism Project, a smaller agency that only launched this year.  Genuinely fun and talented and underappreciated.

Anime Girls With Surprising Voices Video of the Day Two

Towa from Hololive Gen 4 (the same generation as Coco) already has a deep speaking voice for a five-foot-nothing Japanese girl, but her vocals are something else.

Anime Girls Sing Bonus Video of the Day

Just tripped over this one from the early days of Hololive ID.

It's fun if you know them, but they can all sing better than that.  Moona sings like a Disney princess, and Risu sings like an entire choir of Disney princesses.  I guess the ID branch didn't have the resources back then to do what the JP branch did with the same song.



Rule One of Hololive: Luna never breaks character.

Four of the members don't sing in that one, all for reasons perfectly in character: Korone and Fubuki were sleeping after prior commitments that kept them up all night, Coco didn't get the memo, and Haachama was trapped in Australia.


Here's a more recent example with all six of the current ID members.