(classical reference)

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 3

So, the “clumsy” part seems to have evaporated into a generic “has no housekeeping skills”, but thanks to the arrival of Our Surprisingly Accepting Super-Genki Little Sister (who lives with the parents that I thought were out of the country or some such; I don’t care enough to rewatch the explanation of why Our Trashy Hero lives alone), Our Withdrawn Maid is coaxed a bit more out of her shell.

Verdict: well, at least next week she’ll finally be wearing less…

Since Maid isn’t a simulcast…

…and my brother and his kids had just left, I killed some time by watching the first episode of the new Ranma. As expected, I was left with no desire to watch the second or third. The only thing notable is that at some point in the past 35 years, the voice actress for middle daughter Nabiki lost the ability to sound like a teenage girl.

(I think it’s extremely unfair to start the OP with a gong and then go into a song that’s nothing like the original)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 2

Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny just met Our Hero’s Partners, but she’s a perfect match for their combat style. Pity the fight that takes up so much screen time is obviously going to be no challenge for them, but at least it gives us another chance to see her in action before she gets sidelined by the plot.

Verdict: I’d be up for a Bilac spinoff series.

Loner Harem, episode 4

Just to be clear, despite a crush so obvious it can be seen from space, Our Class President is not on the fast track to becoming Our Wacky Loner’s girlfriend. That role is reserved for a Very Special Native who’s probably 3-4 episodes away.

Verdict: I’m pretty sure now that they’re working from the manga, so the story will not degenerate to the point that you wonder if the author is working one-handed, as it has in the recent novels where Haruka’s internal narration consists of equal parts insanity and porn. His antics still lead to excessive shouting, though, which has to be weighed against the very mild fan-service.

(flying crazy person is… loosely related, come to think of it)

Super Dragon Balls, episode 3

“Well, hellooooooooo, Goddess! Please visit again soon!”

We’ll just gloss over the part where Our Totally-Not-OP Hero reveals another ridiculous power, and move on to the part where Our Cool Lady Knight duels Our Hot Village Guard with swords, then Our Rowdy Captain with… his wife’s freshly-squeezed milk, a story which is framed by the laziest hot-elf-in-underrim-glasses that I’ve ever seen.

Then Knight Gal gets to be the taste-tester for the fresh teen cowgirl, plants her tuber, summons the sylpheed, and testifies for the defense.

Verdict: The days are just packed. It made less sense than last week, but added more scenery, so we’ll call that a wash.

(pity the OP song sucks, because it has nice previews of the haremettes)

Cosplay Harem, episode 16

So, it turns out that the first rule of Cosplay Club is that you’re not really a member until you’ve gotten a squeeze of Ririsa’s boobs. When Tsuntail gets back into the story, she’s got to get a handful; it’s the law. As enticing as that sounds, this is a show where having three cute girls standing around in lingerie insisting that the other two have better bodies just kinda goes by without lots of closeups and lingering pans.

Anyway, this week is all about indoctrinating Gal Gal into otaku culture and how to dress up as more than “generic hot chick”. The brainwashing works just fine, but then Awkward Gal discovers her deepest, darkest secret, which fires Chekhov’s Gun so quickly your head will spin.

Verdict: getting too shouty, but still decorative.

GGO 2, episode 3

While Our Heroes are waiting for the tide to come in, Yes-I’m-A-Girl-Loving-Girl Clarence and I’m-Totally-Into-This-Now Shirley run wild, killing anyone who gets in their way. Until they get in each other’s way. Next week, Our Middle-School Rhythmic Killing Team takes the field.

Verdict: there’s really no emotional hook this season, no stakes beyond just watching familiar characters play the game. I mean, Shirley has a goal that’s led her to not just play the game but get really into it and have fun, but we just covered her entire story arc in one episode, and it’s done; we won’t see her again until Squad Jam 4.

Harem Ninja Team Gainaxin’

Coming in January to HiDive, I’m Living With An Otaku Neet Kunoichi.

Food for thought

Um, wha?

“order now on DoorDash and enjoy authentic Japanese cuisine, like their popular crab rangoon”

Grid of thirds

JetPens has an interesting kanji practice notebook, with a useful feature I hadn’t seen before: thirds markings. It has the usual half-grid lines, but also dots at the thirds to help you balance characters that aren’t split evenly. Naturally I immediately cloned this feature into my Perl script and made a PDF to try it out.

Explaining The Lost Dangerous Visions

So, The Last Dangerous Visions is out, finally completed after Harlan Ellison’s death by executor J. Michael Straczynski. I’m working my way through the stories slowly, but I thought I’d comment on JMS’ intro and explainer, in which he gives a brief history of his close relationship with Ellison over the decades. What explanation does he give for all the delays, broken promises, and outright falsehoods that surrounded this project?

TL/DR: Ellison was manic-depressive for his entire adult life and not only refused to recognize it for most of that time, but held off on seeking treatment until way too late.

Yup, that’d do it. I don’t discuss family here much, but I am very familiar with what happens when a bipolar person goes off their meds, and it maps well to Ellison’s reported behaviors. I would never have tried to diagnose him myself, since I was only ever in the same (large) room with him once, and his behavior that hour was quiet enough that I only knew he was there because he loudly harrumphed upon learning that C.J. Cherryh had just written a Lois & Clark tie-in novel. The crowd’s oh-Harlan reaction was louder than he was.

How are the stories so far? Pretentious twaddle from a vanished world where the Left still thought their ideas were “edgy”. Some of them have the excuse of having been written decades ago by people who died waiting for Ellison to publish, but others do not.

My-HiME, revisited

Not by me, I haven’t lit one up in years; the original show just had its 20th anniversary. The busty and titular heroine Mai was easy on the eyes, and the spoiler-heavy episode previews they inserted for the DVD release led off with a memorable slow-pan of her in lingerie, but the story was a mess, with too many heroines and too many mechs and too many easily-killed keys/hostages. Much of this was due to the fact that the original manga was more of an action/harem story centered around Tate, who got some memorable “unlocking” offers from various girls.

The second and third series were better planned out.

Unrelated, “secondhand smoke” was always bullshit

…and the American Cancer Society finally agrees. Yes, cigarette smoke is foul stuff. Yes, constant exposure has an impact on people with respiratory conditions. Personally, I’ve always rated it right up there with “excessive hairspray” for interfering with my breathing, and second only to pot for leaving rooms and clothing reeking.

Pipe smoke, on the other hand, is potpourri.

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 2

Baby steps this week, as Our Emotionless Killer Maid is confronted with her induced trauma about vicious wild dogs, with the gentlest, squishiest trigger imaginable. I’ll give even odds that the person who left the puppy at their door was also responsible for sending her there, and that we’ll be seeing more surprise events that help her adjust to normal life.

As for her potential emotional range, the voice actress was also responsible for the super-genki lead in Bakuon!!, so there’s plenty of headroom there.

Verdict: she’s warmed up just a little, enough that I’ll give it another week.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 1

I could do without hearing the OP song ever again. Other than that, the recap is brief, and they quickly pick up where they left off, with Our Birdbrained Hero tackling a new area with two bunnies and a cat. Our Would-Be Romeo Cat clumsily woos Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, but still contributes significant combat power. Our High-Strung White Rabbit mostly panics, but manages to take out a few exploding golems.

The Sunraku/Bilac dynamic gives me hope that we’ll see a lot of her this season, but I suspect this arc is the only time we’ll really get to see her shine. I was sad that she wasn’t in the ED animation.

Verdict: off to a good start, with Our Frenemies showing up at the end with mischief in mind.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

With all the classes overhauled and the loot rescaled, the seasonal content is fine, and fresh enough to be worth playing. As for the $60 DLC, the first problem is that you can’t skip the story quests on a new character until you’ve completed the whole thing at least once. Which is the second problem: the story is slow, boring, filled with unskippable gibberish (excuse me, “ancient language”), and padded out with tons of mindless mook fights. Spoiler alert:

In the base game, you only needed to get through the prologue once, and all future characters had a fully unlocked world. Here, they’re determined to make you sit through their writing and voice acting. There are some tedious scenes you can skip, but not enough. IMHO, if they wanted players to care enough about Neyrelle to make her the emotional core of the DLC, they shouldn’t have introduced her as an annoying omnicompetent snarky teen sidekick in the base game.

“As I was going to St. Ives…”

A group of researchers tested LLM solutions to grade-school math problems, and reached the obvious conclusion that they weren’t capable of mathematical reasoning, being trivially tripped up by injecting variety into straightforward word problems of the type used to train them. Simply changing up the numbers reduced the success rate, but adding irrelevant clauses really killed it. They basically stumped the “smartest” LLMs with MadLibs.

(via Language Log)

Loner Harem, episode 3

The mild fan-service compensates for the shouty freak-outs. Mostly. Our Hero shows off some very mild examples of his unsane view of the world, and proves his trustworthiness by not assaulting the girl who comes into his tent to announce that breakfast is served. (a low bar, sure, but one not cleared by Team Delinquent)

Verdict: decorative, but still very early in the first arc.

Super Dragon Balls, episode 2

I don’t know which is harder to believe, that the village women are happy with their men lustily drinking milk freshly squeezed from the local busty cowgirl (whose daughter looks ready to tap), or that Our Formerly-Draconic Hero has lived sixteen years as a human boy without getting slapped silly every day by the village girls for his clueless behavior. Fish-out-of-water comedy doesn’t really work when the fish is in the water.

Verdict: the premise is already wearing thin. Seriously, this can’t be the first time he’s seen a villager in danger and thought, “oh, no, I have to use my dragon speed to save him”, but they keep setting up situations where he behaves like a dragon disguised as a villager, Clark-Kenting his way through life.

(white-haired dark-skinned dragonette is unrelated, but easy on the eyes)

Cosplay Harem, episode 15

Good news! Gal Gal doesn’t unload her psychological baggage on us. Bad news! Because we spend half the episode dealing with Awkward Lass’s residual trauma. Super Cuddly’s just happy to embrace another cosplayer, while Busty Pro and Hot Teacher mentor the team. We’re also given a hint about The Secret Adventures of Soft Gay and Ambiguous Woman; he’s another teacher at their school who Looks That Way, and she(?)’s an old friend who runs a photo studio that is conveniently free for noob cosplayers.

Verdict: it ends right before we get to see Gal Gal strip down and suit up for photos, so we still have no idea what her costume is; also, no one remembered seeing her at last week’s event. I kinda wish they’d spent some time with Tsuntail before adding two more girls.

(I’m going with a League of SuperPlayers naming theme this week, because there’s a callout to The Avengers assembling)

GGO 2, episode 2

The OP animation needs a seizure warning. Also an explanation of why there’s a flash of LLENN in barely-there lingerie; not the service I was looking for. Now, if they’d swapped that with the tank-top-and-shorts outfit Karen’s wearing in the ED…

Anyway, on to the gun-service, as we jump right into the fight, with all the well-known teams separated to the far corners of the field, and nameless mooks sacrificed to the gods of bullet hell. Next week, two side characters get developed.

Verdict: a good chunk of this is wasted on a CG-heavy extended dance mix of last week’s “LLENN runs away while being shot at by everyone” sequence, which is also quite shouty. Meh.

(a few hours late showing up on Crunchy)

White Clouds Can’t Sync

Earlier in the week, my brother called to inform me that his kids wanted to come over to my place and hang out on Saturday. I thought this was a grand idea, so I blocked out the time on my iPhone’s calendar. This morning I was rearranging a few things on my Mac’s calendar, and noticed that it wasn’t showing their visit.

I had to edit it on the phone and add an alert, and then it immediately appeared on the Mac. How long has “sync” been a feature of Apple’s cloud offering, and they still can’t get the basics right? It’s not like I’d been wandering in and out of coverage areas; they were on the same wifi when I made the calendar entry.

Speaking of which, I once again have the problem where all of the music synced to my iPhone has incorrect cover art, because I told it to sync some videos. So it’s not just their cloud…

Dear Apple,

Why is it that Terminal.app occasionally loses the Command-1 through Command-9 keyboard shortcuts for the open windows? This bug has been around for years now. Is it because the few MacOS QA people left only test the default “use shortcuts for tabs” option, and have forgotten the older mapping?

The interesting thing is that opening additional windows assigns the shortcuts to them starting at 1, so the app’s not losing the functionality, just the current mapping.

Coke adds cookie

Nope, not on a bet:

Why you shouldn’t use wide-angle lenses to photograph models, Reason #34C

The sad thing is that neither the photographer, the editor, nor the site that reposted this set noticed how ridiculous it looks. Fortunately there are some shots that actually flatter her.

NSFW

(via Big Boobs Japan, a site that should never be visited without an ad-blocker and Javascript-disabler)

One year ago, Joe Biden funded Iran, who funded Hamas, who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and slaughtered Jews.

If you’re eligible to legally vote in the upcoming US presidential election, your choice is not “Trump or Harris”. It’s “Western Civilization or barbarism”. If we can beat the margin of fraud, Harris will end her career the way it began, by blowing it.

Loner Harem, episode 2

While the ED consists primarily of cute girls, the OP is borderline psychedelic with an annoying song; I don’t want to see or hear it again. Anyway, this week explains the other side of the setup: what is the rest of the class up to?

The answer, of course, is “socialism doesn’t work”, with most of the class leeching off of the nerds who spent their lives prepping to live in an isekai, and the worst of them planning to use their new cheat powers to force the girls into sexual slavery. Our Loner learns all of this by… hanging out with the nerds and… accidentally enslaving Team Gal. His “loner” life is further compromised by running into the Class President the moment he thinks of her.

Lots of exposition, which explains why the trailers only showed his first girlfriend; they’re not going to reach the second one in only 12 episodes.

(with his class full of cuties, I’m sure there’s room for a Rem in there somewhere…)

Cosplay Harem, episode 14

Awkward Gal is awkward, but manages to speak three complete sentences that change her life. Also, Our Reformed Pro now gives pep talks, and Our Determined Tsuntail forces her way onto the team.

Verdict: I am pleased that we’re upping the cutie count, but I hope we don’t have to spend time resolving their psychological traumas, too.

(first-cour OP and ED were much better, especially the songs)

GGO 2, episode 1

Apart from a brief flash-forward to Our Little Pink Devil being shot at by basically everyone, this episode is mostly a refresher on the players and the basic structure. It’s unfortunate that the light-novel author is pretty much stuck on the idea of “squad jam”, because it rules out telling any other kind of story in this world or with these characters. This season, though, it’s still pretty fresh; if they make a third season sometime, it’s likely to drag.

Verdict: Miyu should not be the sole source of fan-service with her bath scenes (again); equal time for Karen!

Super Dragon Balls, episode 1

He’s a perfectly ordinary 16-year-old human male with the memories and powers of an ancient dragon.

She’s an airheaded husband-hunting 17-year-old snake gal with a killer body (literally).

Together, they fight monsters!

Verdict: if they can keep the Gainaxing budget up, this will at least be visually interesting. Definite harem vibes, although these days it’s surprising to see a lovestruck loli that’s just a loli.

(file under peculiar the fact that he wears thigh-high cuffed boots, being neither a pirate nor a cavalry officer; maybe he’s compensating for the lamia’s inability to wear thigh-high stockings?)

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 1

Wow, somebody really wanted to save money on the animation budget, with all the CGI, rotoscoping, and panned stills of lightly-filtered photographs. The two positive things I can say about the actual episode are that it was not a struggle to make it to the end, and I didn’t have to cover my ears to deal with the usual shouty freakouts that are so common these days. This week’s pretty much all setup, though, with some very forced This Is Adorable bits to counter the maid’s near-total lack of personality.

Verdict: I’ll give it another episode in the hopes that she either rapidly develops some emotional range or starts providing fan-service.

Ranma 1/2

No. The early episodes amused me 35 years ago, but I see no reason to watch them again, and I particularly don’t want to suffer through any discussions that filter it through the lens of modern gender politics. FYI, it’s licensed by Netflix for some reason.

(also, girls no longer have nipples; given that boobs are involved in at least half the jokes in this series, that is a criminal act)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, next Sunday

…but at least it will run for 2 cours.

Definitely on-brand…

The hits keep coming from Molesting Magical Girls, with their xTwitfeed announcing a tissue dispenser:

Also a naughty pop-up shop in Akihabara…

And the moment we’ve all been waiting for… season 2 announcement with teaser video.