Harry Pottymouth And The Slave Elf Waifu

He’s a powerful dark sorcerer with no social skills. She’s a gorgeous elven slave girl with no social skills. Together, they fight shy.

Several sites had it as a two-episode debut, but Crunchyroll only has the first one right now. It’s enough.

TL/DR: somewhere between Chobits and DearS, desperately crying out, “trust me, I’m funny!”.

[update: Crunchy added the second episode a few hours later; the pervy angel-wing clothing-shop owner is the good part]

(I wasn’t amused, either)

Nut Salad

He’s a solo detective barely making ends meet. She’s a spunky loli magical princess from another world. They live together and fight crime.

Meanwhile, other-she’s a stacked gorgeous knight from another world who enjoys homelessness, recycling, and convincing men to shove money into her cleavage.

TL/DR: Lots of shouting and THIS IS COMEDY music. M.A.O as the fan-service knight.

Futoku No Guild OP song video

The actual opening credits of Immoral Guild are decidedly NSFW, so when singer Sayaka Sasaki recorded a video for the song “Never The Fever!!”, she did, um, something different. More different even than Nacherry’s video for the Gushing OP, My Dream Girls.

(I was looking for the video of her Bakuon! OP song, which I’ve had on repeat when out at the grocery recently)

Bargain-basement Japanese spam email

I hadn’t seen Japanese spam in my junk folder for quite a while, but suddenly one appeared, and it was hilariously bad.

There exists a legitimate ebay-ish marketplace called Mercari (メルカ リ), which I’d never heard of before today. So naturally a customer-service email that claims to be from them is going to be fake. Especially when the sender email is from a random 5-letter .com domain name and the links in the message go to a different random 5-letter domain (which the plain-text content doesn’t even try to obscure). The icing on the cake is that it was sent to my CPAN-specific email address, which has never been used for any account anywhere.

It was such a poor attempt at getting me to click on the links that it actually makes me want to check out Mercari. 😁

(or not. first impression: endless scrolling is always bullshit, but to do it on potentially thousands of search results while hiding all the usual corporate/support links in the footer is double bullshit; they clearly are an app-first, browser-fifth shop)

Coming in October: The Last Dangerous Visions; Harlan Ellison’s estate managed to do what he never would. It’s only 350 pages, which suggests that the majority of the stories he acquired over the years have reverted to the authors or their estates.

Will it live up to the hype? No; Ellison blew his credibility with decades of delays and broken promises.

Will it suck? Probably not, because Ellison’s estate is in the hands of J Michael Straczynski.

Holo, Live, episode 1

Rebooting Spice & Wolf still seems like an odd choice to me, given that it didn’t suck the first time. But the 24th volume of the novels was released last year, and the 10th volume of the spinoff novels comes out next week in Japan, so there’s clearly still interest.

First impression: they have a budget, and they’re putting it to good use.

(spicy wolf is unrelated)

Rewatch: Astra Lost In Space

The Clarissa-Explains-It-All infodump was as painfully stupid as I remembered, and the supervillain roundtable made no sense, but almost everything else about the show works well. In many ways, it’s a modern Heinlein juvenile, not just because of the early resemblance to Tunnel In The Sky.

Flashback: winmail.dat

I just got the first invoice of the year from my landscaping company. The PDF was wrapped in the Windows-specific non-standard TNEF-encoded winmail.dat. Fortunately, there’s a CLI tool for that.

Apparently a recent Win10/11 update managed to reset that Outlook setting for some people. Joy.

Solo: A Leveling Story, fin

Yes, there will be season 2. Which is both unsurprising and good, because half of the recent episodes have been setup for it. Including a good chunk of this one, where The Big Reveal is that the big bad bugs are getting better. The actual fight that continues from last week is resolved in the obvious way, leading to a prestige-class “choice” that even Our Self-Admonishing Hero can figure out was a setup.

Meanwhile, if this is not a fan-service show, maybe don’t shove the camera up his little sister’s crotch? Sure, she wears more to bed than most anime gals wear as street clothes, but come on.

Verdict: a good setup for a second season, as long as they don’t waste several episodes recapping what we just watched. Hopefully it’s already in production, so it’s not two years out.

(using up more Frieren leftovers, because most of the fan-art is of Our Hero, not the girls)

Choco, Bunny, Good-Good, fin

(NSFW classical reference)

First, second two-cour season announced for October. Maybe someone will finally license the light novels (the manga is currently well ahead of the anime).

Second, Chocolate Bunny’s Got A Posse Pussy.

Third, Sailor Goon asks, “is that a cat-sith under your robes, or are you just happy to see me?”.

Verdict: Our Cocoa-Colored Craftsbunny continues to impress, although her interactions with Our Freakish Hero inevitably bring all the shouty. 8/10, would grind again.

Twittering Over Magical Girls

The official TwitX account for Gushing Over Magical Girls has lots of nice preview pics and action/reaction GIFs. I’m just following it hoping for an eventual season 2 announcement…

Publisher oopsie!

I had a light novel ebook on preorder, and when it auto-downloaded, it was just a 19-page preview. The book is currently in the top 50 of the “Fantasy Adventure Fiction” category, but it’s getting pummeled with 1-star reviews, because it’s short a few hundred pages and you can’t get a refund. (likely because Amazon thinks you read it all the way through…)

It came out on Friday, so it probably will take until at least Monday to get a corrected version uploaded and approved.

(Update: customer support on publisher's forum, Monday morning: "This will be a process to fix, it always is with Amazon and they have no incentive to not make it a long process, they are Amazon.")

Today’s forecast: hot and sunny with scattered perversity. Naturally all of our girls end up at the beach together, and we get a lot of fun character interaction before it all goes south. Or should I say “down under”, because the indiscriminate naughty tentacles are in it to win it until they’re interrupted by the revealed power of Super Sentai Azure, whose true form is an ice maiden with a heart of oh-don’t-stop. Special bonus points for NeroAlice clearing the screen for the showdown.

On that note, now that she knows what a dedicated fangirl Utena is, do you think Azure will offer her a special five-finger discount on merch? And I don’t mean shoplifting. Just the fact that she shyly approached Utena while wearing that nosebleed-inducing bikini suggests they’ll become Very Good Friends in the future.

Verdict: if you grade a show on being true to its premise, this was easily in the top five this season. The characters are wonderfully developed (and I don’t just mean 14-going-on-Penthouse) and well used, and they never forgot to bring the funny.

(“please, sir, I want some more”)

Bad news:

The trailer for the new season of Doctor Disney+ is a steaming pile of nope. Pretty sure this isn’t the way to lure back the Doctor Who fanbase…

Good news:

I haven’t done a cheesecake roundup for a while, and kept nearly 20% of the month’s downloads.

more...

Shangri-La Frontier, episode 24

Extra-shouty with extra-shiny CGI, as Our Overambitious Hero comes up with a way to farm mobs he can’t kill in a fair fight. Some fun reaction shots from Vanilla Bunny, with the promise of Chocolate Bunny reactions next week.

Verdict: one more to go; will Our Overarmored Heroine manage to squeeze in a scene?

Van Interrupted, fin

Van fight. Lavender fight. Instant redemption. All is forgiven. No bath scene.

Verdict: technically, this was better paced than the first season, in that it didn’t suddenly accelerate over a cliff. It was just faithful to a source that isn’t faithful to the slow-life theme. Meh.

(the tag “Frieren eaten by a mimic” (ミミックに食われかけフリーレン) has more fan-art than this show; just sayin’)

This week’s endings:

1. Wednesday, Gushing Over Magical Girls
2. Saturday, Solo Leveling
3. Sunday, Shangri-La Frontier

(took me a moment to remember the actual title of the first one…)

This week’s premieres:

None for me, thanks. If you’re also not up for Angel Meets Potato-kun or a new Saint Seiya season, have some Loco Musica to forcibly reset your preferences.

Note that I did not say “cleanse your palate”. Eye candy, yes, but she's more ear candling than ear candy.

Next Monday’s premieres:

Shouty Train, God Game, Re-Monster, 7th Shota, Spicy Wolf, Regurgitated Hero (double episode, no less). So, that’s one.

Most of the season starts next weekend. I will not be catching them all.

Frieren, fin

Half the episode was wasted trying to make more of the dull mages retroactively interesting, but the rest was fine. Bonus points for Fern picking a Very Practical Spell for a traveling mage.

Verdict: the tournament arc did its best to suck the life out of the show, but only managed to half-suck.

(okay, it was mildly amusing that psycho chick spent half the season hitting on a guy who wasn’t even there; it didn’t improve either character, but it helped make up for their presence in the show)

The Last Pon-Fighter, fin

Okay, this one was bullshit. My expectations after last week’s fake cliffhanger were low, but they failed to meet them anyway. Even the brief plug for Mahjong Soul was half-assed.

Why not use one of the other tables when Janta-kun broke? Because Girl#2 threw a tantrum and Girl#4 seconded the motion: it would be a betrayal of the broken inanimate object. So half of the episode is like a post-graduation “our club broke up, but we still meet as friends sometimes” downer epilogue.

And then they finally decide to call for service, and discover it will cost about $150 for the repair, which Girl#1 can’t afford, and she’s surprised that they all want to pitch in. Never mind the solid-gold mahjong set on the counter and Our Poor Little Riiche Girl who could buy the service company with her allowance.

Waiting three months to make a service call was apparently to force enough time to pass for the show to end with cherry blossoms and a very-short-but-qualified newcomer.

Verdict: Our Pon Gals might be naturally padded, but this episode was strictly artificial stuffing all the way. Hell, even the repair took too long because they had to order the part, instead of taking it out of one of the other machines they weren’t using anyway. Having the barely-used magic bird write out “the end?” was more of an insult than a promise. The only reason to Buy The Blurays is if they promise to hire animators to replace all the non-panned stills and cardboard-cutout “animation”, and cut the volume on the music.

(y’know, usually when women get this attached to an appliance, it’s got “massage” features…)

Solo Ragdolling, episode 11

The prestige-class fight cheated on the animation in several places, but it at least made Our Hero look like the underdog again after wiping the floor with his opponents for the last few weeks.

But they took plenty of time to set up the still-unannounced next season’s events, which kind of negates any built-up drama. As did the lite-cheesecake shots of his little sister. And of course the drama of having him lose the easy-out option was undercut by telegraphing the stunt he’ll pull next episode.

Verdict: everyone else announced second seasons at the big anime show this weekend; why wait?

(“gosh that defensive item really came in handy!”)

The Apothecary Diaries, fin

And so the Daddy Issues arc is resolved. Maomao’s months-old leg injury, not so much. How many times has she reopened it off-camera? Bonus points for finally tying the first OP’s dancing into the show.

Verdict: with the second season not coming until 2025, I’m going to have to break down and read at least the two novels that have been covered up to now. How much I read past that, I don’t know yet.

Spice & Wolf: The Remake

…will be two cours; please don’t suck, so I have something to watch for six months.

(unrelated spicy wolf)

July: Cat Food Porn Girl

Not food for cats, or porn catgirls, but food porn by cats, with a girl. I’m not recommending it, just noting its existence…

[Update: I rewatched this trailer because I thought some of the voices were familiar. Turns out, almost all of them are; the human girl is a kitten among tigers.]

Less exciting than cat food porn: Shy 2 teaser

Yeah, whatever; the endless Russian invasion overflowing with Kufufu ruined the first season for me.

(nothing relevant left in my collection, so I’ll start using up some of my spare Frieren pics)

Next year: Beelzebub returns!

Oh, also the rest of the Slime-Killing Witch characters.

Oopsie!

Someone pasted in the wrong blurb, making Rerun’s Special Magic considerably more entertaining:

“What happens when you put one down-on-his-luck amateur novelist and one amnesiac ghost girl in one bargain-basement haunted apartment?”

Unrelated, Blue Archive shooting blanks

I have questions, but on the other hand, I’m a bit afraid of the answers…

NSFW

Now that’s how you sell Blurays! First, Our Commanding Dom restores her faith in the world by seeing that Our Busty Sub ain’t broken, and then manages to lure her into a compromising position without using her powers. Just two fingers. Where they feel best.

Then, armed with new toys, Our Sleepy Loli takes on Our Ditzy Redhead in a giant monster fight, giving everyone in the neighborhood a giant upskirt shot. Dom and Our Shooty Catgirl go undercover to increase the exposure, quickly joined by Busty and Our Punchy Blonde in a knock-down, knocker-out, knicker-down, drag-em-out fight with a photo-finish.

Verdict: this was the funniest episode yet, and they still managed to work in their character-development kink! I’ll be sad when it’s over next week.