Contrary to previous reports, there was no special episode this week. Instead, Crunchyroll put up the two-hour season one compilation movie that was released in theaters in Japan.

(monster-girl maid is unrelated)

Found my new ringtone…

The jaunty opening synths from the Genesis song Illegal Alien.

🎶 🎶 🎶
Over the border,
    there lies the promised land.
Where everything comes easy,
    you just hold out your hand.
🎶 🎶 🎶

The music video and radio edit leave out the line where he pimps out his sister…

Raise your hand if you think Miss Sweet Sucker has Our Best Friend’s best interests in mind? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, we’re off to the races, with Our Sexy Killer Detective on the scene at the bathhouse. Sadly, she’s not dressed for the occasion, and they didn’t invite Our Remarkably Stacked Childhood Friend along, so the only bathing beauty is a trap.

Verdict: they are animating this story, sometimes, but also covering up a lot of stills with video effects. The voice performances are solid, though.

Netflix Leveling

I kind of wonder how diverse Netflix will make the cast of their live-action Solo Leveling series. Not enough for me to watch it, of course. Even if they made it far enough into the story before the inevitable Netflix cancellation, they couldn’t possibly find a cute-enough Esil.

Complete tonal whiplash, as Our Duped Heroes rush back to town to find it half-destroyed, with most of the people dead or missing and the survivors wounded, exhausted, and hungry, then the scene switches to Boxxo making time with his two Best Girls.

Verdict: again, the character art is the only thing that’s working for me so far. Some of the individual scenes are fine, but they don’t fit together. Lacking any source material to draw on, the show is all over the place.

Prime + ads - ads = ads

Amazon folded Freevee (free-with-ads) into Prime Video, but kept the ads. I pay extra for Prime-without-ads, so naturally I am forced to watch ads for anything marked Prime that used to be on Freevee. For now. I have this sneaking suspicion that they’ll silently expand this new category of Semi Prime over time.

Time to find a new hotel…

For years now, our preferred hotel in Kyoto has been the Citadines. Great location (two subway stops up from Kyoto Station, grocery and dry cleaners down the block, easy walk to all sorts of shopping, kitchenettes, solid wifi, comfy beds, etc). Sadly, they recently shut down.

Top contender for next Spring trip is The Blossom, which is a block further away from the subway and a block closer to the grocery. I’ve got time to look around, but the last time we tried another place, it ended up being a lot less convenient, with the only major “pro” being that it was near a bigger, better grocery. It was very close to the station, but on the south side, so it took a lot longer to reach the trains, subways, and other shopping.

This trip will be an interesting variation on our usual, since it overlaps with my sister’s work events. I’ll be on my own for a week in Tokyo while she’s working, then we’ll have a week together in Kyoto, and then I fly home while she heads to her next conference.

With a week on my own, I might be able to set a big-camera-friendly pace…

X mars the sport

I don’t know what Elon’s Elves think they’re doing, but the end result is that the “for you” feed has turned into a complete disaster full of spam, scams, and an intense focus on English-language “news” from non-English-speaking countries.

I deselected all of the topics it insisted were based on my (nearly-nonexistent) activity, which included such gems as “Allstate”, “auto racing”, “Big Brother Brasil”, “Clay Travis”, “David Hogg”, “Ezra Miller”, “figure skating”, “Jill Biden”, “McNeil-PPC, Inc”, “NCAA Women’s Basketball”, “Other competition”, “Super Mario”, “The Home Depot”, “Zohran Mamdani”, etc. I unchecked every item on the list, and two days later most of them were back. And it had no effect on the garbage in the feed.

The only thing that seems to work is playing whack-a-mole with block-by-word, which currently looks something like this, and slightly reduces the amount of crypto crap:

binance bitcoin blockchain chain crypto dapp decentralization decentralized defi ecosystem eth ethereum fintech founder funds gm gn haters liquidity migration monad nft pumps stablecoin transaction transactions venture web3

What really works is… never checking the “for you” feed. This is probably not the desired result.

The One True Sword Daddy returns!

…in Fall 2026.

Dear Elon,

No sooner do you announce your own political-spoiler party than my X feed turns into an endless shitshow of cryptocurrency fraud, Chinese bots rewriting history, and global warming hysteria, things that have never before appeared there. Coincidence, or something more?

(seriously, I blocked/muted more accounts in ten minutes today than I have in six months)

Dear Apple,

You filthy sons of bitches erased every mail-handling rule from Mail.app on my Mac when I upgraded my iPhone. No questions, no notifications, no backup. I can probably reconstruct it by browsing through my full-disk backups and putting it back, but these configs had survived dozens of semi-stable upgrades in the past. You just couldn’t fucking stop yourselves from using your “cloud” sync to overwrite existing data during phone setup (where I explicitly said “don’t sync email through iCloud”), could you? Guess I was holding it wrong again.

…

For reference, the data is in ~/Library/Mail/V10/SyncedRules.plist, and sure enough it was fine on July 3rd and wiped clean on July 4th. It’s plist-as-XML, which means it combines the worst features of two file formats, but at least it’s not one of Apple’s internal undocumented-garbage formats where it pretends to be XML but is filled with binary blobs. If I can’t just put it back and have it work, I should be able to mangle the plist contents into shape.

[Update: you must also completely delete the matching block in SyncedFilesInfo.plist, or it will immediately wipe the restored file again. Even once the rules are back, they will not be active, and you have to click them one-by-one.]

(and, yes, I see you also disabled SpamSieve, because for all your posturing about privacy, you have a strong interest in ads reaching user inboxes)

Kaiju No. 8 2 doesn’t premiere for two more weeks, but they’re filling the time slot with original side stories this week and next.

This week, a recap and a day off to re-introduce the cast.

And I’ll just throw in a little Frieren cheesecake.

The Apothecary Diaries 2, fin

Wait for it… Wait for it… Boom! Now for the agonizing wait until they make the next season.

Call Of The Night 2, episode 1

I appreciate a second season that respects the viewer and doesn’t waste half an episode on a lengthy recap. Or in this case, any time at all. The OP animation serves to remind you where we left off, and then it’s off to the races. Or at least the zoo.

The ED, on the other hand, has nothing to offer, visually or musically.

Verdict: solid start.

New GATE anime

Not more Rory Mercury and friends, though. It’s based on the spinoff.

(apparently they do show up at some point, but it’s not a continuation of the main story)

Finally!

When I moved back to Ohio three years ago, I kept my old iPhone with my California number, bought a new iPhone, and transferred over all the data, including my ~10,000 songs ripped from CD. This introduced the well-known problem where all the album covers were linked to the wrong albums. TL/DR: none of the recommended fixes worked, due to aggressive caching.

Today, I replaced it with a new iPhone (yes, I bought last year’s model, because new Apple hardware is a crapshoot with real crap). Before I set it up, though, I broke the sync connection, deleted all the music from it, and ran a backup. On the new phone, I restored the non-syncing backup and then synced the music over.

So I just had to burn the house down and build a new one.

(my iPhone history, coming from a work-paid Blackberry, is 4S to 6 Plus to XS to 13 Pro to 16 Pro. I still think the 4S was the best actual phone, but I don’t do much calling these days, and I’ve never really been much for receiving calls; these days, it’s mostly just email, texts, navigation, and PagerDuty alerts)

(3 years is basically how long it takes for Apple to lard up the OS and frameworks so that older devices are no longer viable)

Unrelated, Ai Shinozaki

Big Boobs Japan just went on a repost binge, adding back ~400 old photo shoots that got misplaced in one of its hosting changes. This includes over 40 shoots covering Ai’s entire career, from chubby-cheeked busty 14-year-old to still-got-it busty 33-year-old.

(shields up, Javascript down, as usual)

[Update: wow, either they just un-re-posted it all, or else went in and changed the dates to match their original uploads. The site went from having 30+ pages of stuff posted on the 4th to none at all.]

Not off to a good start. The nicest thing I can say is that the characters are drawn well. Unfortunately, the episode rips through a rematch with the Big Bad they barely survived against at the end of last season, and in their moment of triumph, he starts monologing and explains in detail how they just fell into his trap.

Verdict: they worked the recap in tolerably well, but my problem is what they worked it into: a generic “let’s go fight the demon lord’s general again!” plot. Fighting CGI mooks and a cliché villain is not what I’m looking for in a show about a sentient vending machine and his adorable super-strong busty girlfriend.

(also, the subtitles were a bit sloppy, which seems to be a theme with Crunchyroll this season, who got caught leaving AI droppings in one of their subs)

Unrelated, LLM != ML

I say this for the benefit of anyone who might be subjected to corporate training that conflates “agentic AI” (LLMs that can make API calls) with more traditional (and proven useful) Machine Learning approaches, in order to claim their successes.

“Why, yes, I do want my money”

I just received an (actual paper mail) unclaimed-funds letter from my insurance company, telling me to claim an uncashed check from 2022 before the $1,650 gets handed over to the state. While this resembles a common scam, I went to their site and confirmed that it was legit.

Best I can figure, they sent a check to my California address right after I left forever, and marked it do-not-forward.

eBay: this time for sure!

The “gofo” last-mile delivery service spontaneously updated their tracking site after the package showed up Saturday evening. Placed at the very edge of the porch in a thunderstorm.

It came wrapped in plastic, but what kind of idiots are they hiring these days? Not just this crew, but I get this from about 1/3 of Amazon drivers and 1/4 of FedEx drivers in my area as well. This is Ohio, where it can rain at any time, and in fact has rained heavily enough recently that we’ve had multiple flood alerts.

The US Postal Service crew is uniformly professional and good-natured, and will bring packages up to the door even if they would have fit in the mailbox at the street, saving them a 75-foot uphill hike.

Related, no matter how many “please come back” emails I get from Grubhub, I will not order food through them because they insist on placing your food on the ground, even when I explicitly check the Covid-is-over-dammit button and offer an extra tip if the driver hands me my food directly. The last driver claimed that the app required drivers to put the food on the ground at the door and take a picture. Don’t care, hand me my food.

(the contents of the package? A Chinese McDonalds limited-edition Ultraman-and-fries mini-Mahjong set)

“Stupid On Pavement”

I was driving up the highway Sunday morning to pick my sister up from a brunch with old school friends, and there was a car hanging out in the fast lane doing about 10MPH under the speed limit. Traffic was light enough that he wasn’t really annoying anyone else, but suddenly a Highway Patrol car overtook him from behind, clearly wanting to use the lane for its proper purpose.

Driver did nothing, even though there was plenty of room to move into the next lane. After about 30 seconds of this, the cop pulled up quite close behind him.

Driver did nothing. Cop blipped his lights, waited patiently.

Driver did nothing. Cop did it again, waited, and then a third time.

Driver did nothing. Cop lit him up.

Driver did nothing. Cop activated loudspeaker and ordered him to pull over immediately.

Driver finally complied. I quickly passed their pulloff point, so I don’t know what came next. But I’m betting it involved shouting and an expensive ticket for everything the cop could think of.

A-Rank Adventure Harem gets a second season

I gave up on the show, but maybe someone didn’t.

(second season that I’m much more interested in is not yet on the schedule)