Now, let’s see, what was I watching before I left for Belfast?

Red Cat Ramen, fin

Human-chan has found her place in the world.

Verdict: this show receives the Most Reliable Warm Fuzzies Award.

(picture is sadly unrelated)

Cosplay Harem, episode 12 & 13

12: Surprisingly Watchable Exposition

Our Cosplay Couple becomes an official club, as long as they keep everything PG. So much for the hentai doujin collection and the light bondage photoshoot from a few weeks back. Our Sympathetic Principal’s monologue was actually well-done, although I found myself picturing him wearing a KISS costume. We do not get to see Our Hot Teacher stripping down to teach Our Cuddly Heroine how to properly measure her curves, but Our Lovestruck Tsuntail does, and even in the face of massive competition, she’s determined to convince her management to let her join the fun so she can Win His Heart.

Meanwhile, Our Student Council President has just taken the Number Two Best Girl slot.

(file under peculiar that he actually threw out the porn, and didn’t try to take it home)

13: Enter The Autist

I think I just watched a compilation video of Every Komi-san Freak-Out Moment, as Our New Rising Star spends the entire episode failing to communicate. Cute little thing, though she could use a sammich or two to cover up those bones with healthy body-fat. Our Hot Teacher cements her position as Number One Best Girl.

(new OP/ED, so we’re officially into the second cour)

Dungeon People, episodes 11 & 12

11: Cosplay Or Death!

Our Dungeon Mistress finds another excuse to dress up Our Miss Clay: executing player-killers. So this is a slice-of-life episode in two ways.

fin: “But what do they eat?”

I’ll miss this show, too. Warm and fuzzy with a side of murder. Our Miss Clay hasn’t caught up with her father yet, but she’s got a friend.

Pom-Pom Girls, episodes 11 & 12

I decided to finish this one, despite the way it’s been circling the drain with the sudden focus on a completely different set of girls. TL/DR: cheap melodrama, complete with over-the-top musical cues, and then it just stopped.

Verdict: this show just fell apart, and poor direction and series composition are to blame. The last three episodes were about someone who was only briefly visible in the background of The Big Accident that they built Our Traumatized Genki Gal’s story around, leading people to initially think that Wheels was the one injured. Nope, totally different ponytail girl.

And then Our Parkour Gal spontaneously announces, “it’s been fun, but I’m leaving town to join an idol group, bye”.

Spice Wolf, episodes 15-25

I think I’ll catch up on this next season; based on the previews, I won’t even give most of the new shows a chance to disappoint me.

Loner Harem, episode 1

Speaking of next season, it’s here. This week is all setup, as it’s established that Our Hero is someone who’d rather sit alone and read books than interact with any of his classmates, and who tried to avoid being pulled into another world with them. When it happens anyway, all the super-cheat skills have been taken, and he gets all of the leftovers. Which he quickly learns to combine and use to build a comfortable life.

At this point, you might think that he’s a well-adjusted loner. If they’re working from the light novels, though, he will swiftly be revealed as a complete wackjob with no filter between his brain and mouth, and no interest in or ability to remember anyone’s name. And, yes, a sexy, eager girlfriend.

So he’s basically the perfect self-insert for the target audience.

Upcoming

• GGO 2 - next Friday
• Shangri-La Frontier 2 - October 13th? Ack!

Jibun Techō weekly page

Just for fun, I went through a bunch of fonts to find consistently-light symbols that would work for the weekly page design, and made a working version of it, leaving out the phase-of-moon and sunrise/sunset markup. I ended up using Google’s free Material Symbols Outlined Light font.

Note that Google buries the links to download the actual fonts. I assure you, they do exist as standard TTF font files in addition to the still-not-widely-compatible all-in-one variable OTF font.

“Back on the bus, y’all”

I have returned from Belfast. It was deeply weird sitting in an office surrounded by people for the first time since March, 2020. Good people, fortunately, although I had to keep my mouth shut at the occasional Irish-splaining of American politics. Fortunately Israel changed the subject quite spectacularly last week.

It’s easier to go to Japan

• Saturday, 3 PM UTC-4: arrive at Dayton airport.
• Saturday, 3:30 PM UTC-4: only United employee in the place opens counter.
• Saturday, 6 PM UTC-4: board flight to Chicago.
• Saturday, 6:45 PM UTC-5: land in Chicago.
• Saturday, 9:30 PM UTC-5: board flight to Dublin.
• Sunday, 10:45 AM UTC+1: land in Dublin, stay on plane.
• Sunday, 11:15 AM UTC+1: power restored at Dublin airport, plane directed to new gate.
• Sunday, 12:00 PM UTC+1: pass through Immigration/Customs.
• Sunday, 12:20 PM UTC+1: board bus to Belfast.
• Sunday, 2:20 PM UTC+1: arrive in Belfast, google-walk to hotel.
• Sunday, 2:30 PM UTC+1: check in at hotel.
• Sunday, 6:15 PM UTC+1: dinner with boss’s boss’s boss.
• Sunday, 9:30 PM UTC+1: brain and body switch off.

(the fresh batch of Maiko Mouths my sister sent after her recent business trip to Japan were a hit at the office)

Everything’s closed

I knew that retailers generally close earlier in Ireland than they do in the US, but I didn’t expect pretty much everything but bars and dinner restaurants to lock up by 6 PM every night but Thursday. It’s a good thing I added some vacation days at the end of the trip, or I wouldn’t have been able to buy gifts for family, much less anything for myself, since I was in the office 9-5 all week.

Admittedly I hedged my bets by getting the free trial of Prime and ordering a bunch of stuff on Amazon UK. Oddly, several of the things I put in my cart wouldn’t ship to Northern Ireland at all, but I could pay through the nose and have them sent to the US, which would kind of defeat the purpose.

(file under annoying that the WH Smith that swore on their web site that they were open until 9 PM is inside of a small strip mall attached to a bus station that just shut down for good, and now closes at 5 PM)

(amusing note: when I asked a security guy where it was located (because Google sent me around in circles), he was really curious why everyone he runs into seems so interested in going to a WH Smith, like it’s special; I couldn’t help, because my answer was “it was on the way back from my office to my hotel”)

DP Considered Absent

Until I went into Boots (pharmacy), I was convinced that there was no Diet Pepsi in Belfast. The sugared varieties were widely available, but for non, Diet Coke and Coke Zero were what was widely stocked. There was a very-subtly-labeled non-sugar Pepsi MAX in some stores, but it doesn’t taste like DP, which I’ve reluctantly gotten used to over the years.

I can drink Coke Zero, but I don’t like it much unless it’s been dosed with Splenda. (liquid; the sweetener packets have a Mentos effect)

Cookies Considered Cooked

European Internet is not my friend; it’s just too damn annoying with all those “privacy” popups demanding that I either accept all cookies or spend three minutes de-selecting “legitimate interest” checkboxes and dodging deceptive buttons.

Spoiler alert: hey, tracker-boy, your fucking cookies will get auto-deleted anyway when I close the window, so it does you no good to get cute and try to hide the “no, I don’t want to blow hobos in an alley” option behind a wall of text. Also, 99% of your ads are being blocked by Pihole anyway, so fuck y’all.

Sadly, actually preserving my privacy exposes me to 10 times as many protect-your-privacy popups. Sigh.

(and how exactly does visiting a store’s site to find their (incorrect) hours create a “legitimate interest” for 518 third parties across a dozen categories?)

(note that blocking ads with a Docker-based Pihole on a Mac now requires manually disabling the kernelForUDP flag in Docker’s settings.json to stop it from screwing up the ability to bind to port 53)

Pastries Considered Decent

Two of my co-workers took me out for a walk around the neighborhood. Y’know, the one where the recent riots kept them away from the office for two weeks. On the way back, we stopped in at a local bakery where Paul was determined to buy me a proper Northern Irish pastry. He chose the Flies’ Graveyard, which wasn’t as sweet as I expected, being basically a currant jam pastry sandwich sprinkled with sugar.

(I’m sure all the walking was good for me, but my left knee was happy when it stopped; even with an aisle seat on the way out and no one next to me on the way back, flying coach forced me into uncomfortable positions)

(I amused myself by thinking of how I’d feed them proper native food in Ohio, which basically comes down to Wendy’s Frosties and Cassano’s pizza; I don’t count Skyline Chili as proper Ohio food, since I’d never heard of it until college)

(it would be amusing to feed them London Bobby Fish & Chips, but that brand’s been basically defunct for decades, and is only available at a few Cassano’s locations)

Dear Harris Campaign Aides,

If Kamala asks you to carry her pager, just say no.

March Of The Useful Idiots

The jew-haters were out in force Saturday, proudly marching down the streets of Belfast carrying professionally-printed signs and custom-made Palistinian-solidarity flags, banging on drums, and shouting slogans comparing Israel’s “occupation and genocide” to historical English oppression of the Irish.

Y’know, morons.

Gift shopping

Since I extended the trip over the weekend, I was able to hit a craft market for presents: St. George’s Market (small, but I met some nice local crafters). I also stopped in at Carrolls Irish Gifts on Thursday, because Thursday. I made one final stop at Carrolls on Monday, to pad out the small gaps in my suitcases, mostly with good wool socks.

Tourist-y things

I reluctantly bought a ticket for a small full-day group tour to Giant’s Causeway, with an assortment of other sites thrown in. I’d have preferred to just go there on my own, but my schedule was tight, and this was the best thing I found that didn’t involve hiring a driver for several hundred Pounds.

I have zero interest in Game of Thrones filming locations, negative interest in anything related to the Titanic (ship or movie), and complete indifference to The Troubles, so this was pretty much my only “tourist” activity.

The coastal drive was quite scenic, which was a significant improvement over the path the Aircoach takes to and from Dublin; you could basically only see the trees lining the highway.

How was it? Giant’s Causeway itself was a lovely rocky coastline with a brisk wind. Fortunately we had un-Irish weather the entire week, so it was sunny and warm enough for a light jacket.

The Dark Hedges did nothing for me (“um, a row of trees?”), the Bushmill Distillery was just for shopping, and the other minor stops are blurred together in my memory.

Connections…

Bushmills Village had a bunch of signs on the streets featuring an assortment of largely American celebrities. Our bus was just driving through, so I couldn’t read the fine print, but Neil Armstrong was one, which didn’t surprise me since I was vaguely aware he had Irish roots. But The Beverly Hillbillies? I’m guessing they were supposed to be descended from Scots-Irish Planters, but I don’t know if that was ever stated in the show or just assumed.

Note to self:

Next time I order British currency, don’t let them give me so many £50 notes; most of the places that’ll take them, I’m spending enough to use a card anyway. I want an even mix of £5, £10, and £20 notes, and a decent amount of £1 and £2 coins; a few £50 notes only if there are new craft markets to visit.

Ten Square

The company put me up at Ten Square Hotel, which was a nice place with only one real flaw: live music on weekends, which I could hear from my third fourth-floor room until at least midnight.

Not well enough to enjoy it, even if it had been pleasant, just enough to annoy me with thumping bass coming up through the walls and vibrating the headboard.

(my room was of course nothing like the suites in their gallery; pretty standard, really, with nothing noteworthy about it)

Fall anime

(which should start premiering around the time I catch up on the last few shows I was watching this season…)

• Shangri-La Frontier 2: Choco! Bunny! Good Good!

• GGO 2: The return of LLENN.

• Loner Life In Another World: the “loner” quickly gets surrounded by hot chicks, and eventually ends up banging two gorgeous gals every night in increasingly depraved ways while occasionally molesting the other hot chicks with his magical tentacles. Downside: he’s somewhere between incomprehensible and batshit crazy. Screenshot material, basically.

Priorities…

As I was coming out of HellCat Maggie’s Sunday afternoon into the first rain I’d seen since arriving in Belfast, I found two college-age men waiting for it to stop. They were friendly, first joking around with an older gentleman who was heading in, then chatting with me. Their primary interest: was cannabis legal where I lived in the States?

(for family reasons, I could not possibly ignore a diner named Maggie’s; TL/DR: decent pie and champ, slightly undercooked chips)

(best chips I had? The Nook at Giant’s Causeway; pity I didn’t have time for a full meal, since the driver highly recommended the place)

Dear xTwitter,

Please stop making me manually choose to sort replies by “latest” every fucking time I click on a tweet. Your opinion of what’s relevant is not interesting to me.

Also, what’s up with scrolling back to the top of the thread every time I mute an ad?

Red Cat Ramen, episode 11

Kittens! First we flash back to the secret origin of our leader cats, and then Human-chan finds a stray and brings it to the experts, who fill her head with useful information. She won’t need it for long, though, because the kitten quickly finds a person. Then there’s a crisis of confidence as Our Noodle Tiger can’t seem to produce the new style adequately, until the boss walks by and spots her never-sharpened noodle cleaver.

Verdict: one more and we’re done. I’m going to miss it.

Cosplay Harem, episode 11

This week, The Big Payoff. Our Cuddly Noob and Our Reborn Pro share the crowd and A Good Time Was Had By All… until Nagomi got a good look at Our Suspiciously Similar Senpai. Now they’re rivals.

Our Hot Teacher gets paid off as well, first with a gut punch from Our Busty-Besty Elf Gal-Pal, and then with a look into just how oblivious Our Cosplay Couple is.

Verdict: At least three genuine LoL moments. Worth it.

Dungeon People, episode 10

Our Dungeon Wallflower Clay has no idea what to do on her day off, so she resumes her search for Her Missing Daddy by eavesdropping in the monster break room until she hears the voice that had earlier referred to her as “the wind-slicer’s daughter”. The new information she obtains muddies the waters, leaving her no closer to finding out what happened to him.

Also, goblins grow like weeds.

Dungeon Chibis, fin

As we wrap up, A Moment Of Clarity leads Our Chastened Hero to visit Crush-chan in the middle of the night to kneel before her pajama-clad cuteness and… apologize for being a thoughtless dick about the whole dungeon thing. As a bonus, he finally calls her by her first name, without even a -chan.

Anyway, after eight minutes of that, it’s back to the dungeon, and back to what Kaito finally realizes he should have been doing all along: hunting rare slimes on the noob levels, like the ones that got him the chibis in the first place. And after a montage of slaughter, they steal Our Dying Princess out of the hospital and…

By The Power Of Chibi, You Shall Be (Partially) Healed!

Verdict: fresh off their victory, Kaito finally tries to confess to Crush-chan, only to be cock-blocked by Her Hot Mom; note the train suggestively going into the station as they part. They kinda include The Quest For Daddy in the final scene, as a hint at their shared long-term goal.

(It’s been bothering me all season: why does Kaito have a safe next to his bed?)

Earth: Final Bye-Bye season 2?

Announced. I’m kind-of curious what they’ll put in the recap episode, and if it will make any sense at all.

There’s basically no fan-art of this one, so here’s some from the very tiny selection of Tama pics:

Okay, that’s a little over the top…

Not only do the weekly pages in Jibun Techō planners include phase of the moon, they color-code the hours by the approximate time of sunrise and sunset throughout the year. If you’re in Tokyo, anyway.

Combined with the weather, mood, and meals icons scattered across the columns, I think it makes the page much too busy.

(do they also sell night-planners for vampires, with the daylight hours colored red?)

Blogging’s going to be light-to-nonexistent next week, for business reasons.

Labor of Love?

I did not have a brand-new Negima! online RPG with microtransactions on my Bingo card. It doesn’t sound like a gotta-poké-em-all game…

Core competencies!

There are days when it’s quite clear that the people pasting English onto product pictures at Amazon have no idea what the words mean.

Anime adaptations we need…

…based on how this season has gone: Elf With Bikini And Machine Gun.

(from the author of the novels Cat Planet Cuties was based on)

If you mindlessly smash clay pots to music…

…is that Terracotta In A Fugue, To D Minor?

(…or are you just in a Zelda game?)

Dungeon Chibis, episode 11

Famous. Last. Words. Our Hero And His Adventure Gals (Minus One) plunge deeper into the dungeon in search of the rumored elixir, but he overdoes it, and exhaustion and desperation lead to poor decision-making.

Pro tip: when even your semi-slave chibis tell you to take the day off, the correct response is not “we’ll just check out the next floor real quick”. Getting gang-banged-up by a stampede of wild porkers leaves him in Darwin’s Waiting Room, and if Our Chibi Heroines hadn’t leveled up and gobbled a bunch of crystals, he’d have pulled his last train. Even then, his survival depends on mouth-to-mouth delivery of healing potions, which Our Dismayed Slightly-Gay Chibi Devil Shota is not allowed to participate in. Of course it turns into a kissing competition, which Our Popular Hero’s in no condition to appreciate or be squicked out about.

Verdict: one more week to save the princess, and they really keep making a fuss about Crush-chan’s Missing Daddy…

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 10

What if they gave a beach episode and nobody dressed for the occasion? Sure, they were there to cheer for a beach volleyball team, but we’re not watching this for the NPCs. Ditto for the advancing drama involving characters who’ve basically shown up twice all season.

Verdict: they didn’t put in the work to make me care about NPC Mean Girl’s confession or penance. Besides, whatever’s gone wrong, it’ll get fixed next episode; that’s just how they roll.

Fun with packages

That Amazon package that was delayed six days by UPS, then retroactively delivered to someone’s loading dock by FedEx? Showed up Saturday morning with the original UPS sticker, but Amazon tracking’s still loading data from another universe. Explains a lot about their logistics problems, really.

NSFW

This is why we can’t have nice things…

I was tinkering with my PDF::Cairo continuous-calendar script with an eye to porting it to Python to use my updated box/paper libraries and Reportlab (even though that’s a regression for font support), so I tested out various options, and none of the Japanese fonts worked.

They were fine a few days ago, and “nothing’s changed”… except that Homebrew upgraded Cairo from 1.18.0 to 1.18.2, and the PDF file size dropped from ~14K to ~4K. Which means that CJK font embedding broke. This is probably the fault of the person who updated the Homebrew recipe without reading the updated dependencies, but I reverted to 1.18.0 (which is now quite annoying to do) and pinned it there for now.

Wait, what was I doing again?

By the way, this is a cool little JavaScript app that puts a dynamic continuous calendar in your browser. It’s not really useful, since it stores your annotations in browser local storage, but it’s fast and stable.

And the reason I was stealing calendar code…

…was to make these: Jibun Techō B6 Slim monthly and project pages.

Because my shiny new Japanese day-planner doesn’t start until November, so I cloned the design with PDF::Cairo and made pages for September and October. I haven’t made the weekly page layout yet, because it’s less useful to me; outside of work I don’t have a lot of appointments, and at work it’s all in Outlook.

The basic idea is that there are three separate booklets: Idea, which is just graph paper; Diary, which you replace every year; and Life, which is filled with hopes and dreams and stories and family and pets and a whole bunch of other shit I’d never use. I’m going to replace it with another graph-paper booklet.

I’m actually surprised that they release the first-time-customer kit in August, but make you wait until November to start using it. I can understand that for recurring customers, but why not just print a few extra pages that can be manually slipped into place? So I did it myself; the paper’s not as good, but the layout matches.

(to no great surprise, Utsutsu-chan is by far the most popular character for fan-art; sorry, Hajime)

Red Cat Ramen, episode 10

There’s hints of a very slow-burn romance between Human-chan and Our Allergic Handyman, but that’s not going to go anywhere this season. Instead, we get a look into the skritchable underbelly of the idol industry, as Waitress Kitty’s deep dark secret is finally revealed. Extra credit for making the plastic-surgery victim look just wrong.

(this is not her secret…)

Cosplay Harem, episode 10

I like Nagomi’s instincts. When faced with a loss of audience to Her One True Rival, she immediately reaches for a powerful weapon: the zipper on her skirt. Despite the bountiful cheesecake on display, most of the battle is actually in their heads, with both she and Our Hot Teacher reviewing their shared history and rediscovering The Joy Of (Busty) Cosplay. The whiplash of being faced with two goddesses holds the crowd long enough for Our Cuddly Noob to get fully dressed and make her (busty) debut, as Teacher rushes to get back into her civvies so she can watch. A brief reaction shot suggests that she’s going to get cornered by her former partner, Our Helpful (busty) Elf Maiden, for showing up out of nowhere like that.

Verdict: good clean fun, and hopefully now we can work the (not-busty) tsuntail back into the story.

Dungeon People, episode 9

It’s cosplay week in the dungeon, as Our Dungeon Mistress renegotiates her contract with the kingdom and convinces Our Dress-Up Darling Clay to wear a maid costume. Not having much non-dungeon life experience, she thoroughly misunderstands the king’s reaction to the sight of a strong cute maid.

Verdict: they’re really enjoying the just-missed-it fan-service dodges. I’d be annoyed if it weren’t otherwise fun to watch.

Dear Amazon,

First you told me that my guaranteed-Friday package would not arrive until the 12th, and was “delayed in transit” (somewhere; it had not yet been handed off to a non-Amazon carrier). Then you rewrote history and declared that it was “left on the dock” at 9:30 AM and signed for by “L. Keil”. Two claims that come as quite a surprise to me, since I have neither a dock nor a Keil.

The original Friday notice had a UPS tracking ID, but the replacement timeline has it delivered by FedEx. What will reality be tomorrow?

“My AIs are up here!”

WIRED has the vapors over third-party auth services like Google, Apple, Patreon, X, Line, etc, being used to… authenticate to web sites; specifically, the sort that paste heads onto naked bodies. I’m sure they tried to blame Elon Musk, but reluctantly had to admit that X’s auth wasn’t the only one being used.

So, nothing to see here. Literally; it’s like the folks at WIRED and Ars have never heard the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen”. 😁

I’m sure there’s a ToS issue in there somewhere, but they seem to be particularly upset at the idea of teenage boys using the sites to generate imaginary nudes of their female classmates, demonstrating that they’ve never met a teenage boy.

NSFW

“What’s holding back America’s move to electric cars?”

…asks Slashdot, quoting The Verge’s transportation editor.

Answer: electric cars.

See also “winter”, “spontaneous combustion”.

UC2P: the testining

Building a test suite for a PDF generator requires some way of validating what ends up in the binary output file. For PDF::Cairo, I supplied a reference PDF file and used Poppler’s pdftocairo to render to PNG for comparison. Unfortunately, what this really ended up testing was the underlying libraries rather than my code, which is why the CPAN automated tests keep breaking.

For this script, my testing can be limited to determining that known text ends up in the correct region of the page, at the correct size, and it doesn’t have to be precise. It turns out that Poppler’s pdftotext extraction utility has a -tsv option that reports the bounding box of each word on every page, which will suffice.

Once that’s in place, I think I’ve got everything compatible as far back as Python 3.9.x and Reportlab 3.6.x, and for the regular test suite I can just dump the internal state object to compare to a reference version stored in Configparser format.

But I still think I’ll work on page-styling first.

Dungeon Chibis, episode 10

This week, we get the backstory of Our Junior Adventure Gals, with a dramatic reveal of a typical anime vaguely-described fatal illness where everything looks fine right up to the end. There is no cure, but there are Internet rumors about a Very Rare Dungeon Drop, an elixir that can cure anything, so that’s why they became adventurers. Now the gang has a mission and the clock is ticking, since she’s supposed to be dead by New Years and we got a shot of cute girls wearing Santa suits. Also, we only have two more episodes.

Verdict: will they find it in time, even with Our Hero’s power to stumble over rare drops? Will Crush-chan’s Missing Daddy be involved? Will they do it all next week and spend the last episode on fan-service? Let’s find out!

Pom-Pom Gals, episode 9

As has become typical for this show, last week’s cliffhanger crisis was resolved effortlessly, like cheers in the rain. But first we had to spend most of the episode watching them stumble around sadly, wondering if they’d ever get the band back together.

Verdict: the cuteness of the character designs is really all that’s holding the show together at this point.

In other news,

Cosplay Harem: The Mobile Game launches Tuesday.

In other other news,

Senko-san is also getting a game this week. Pretty sure this one won’t be always-online with micro-transactions. Pretty sure. Okay, mostly sure.

UC2P best intentions…

I tried to see how much work it would be to run the script under older versions of Python. I’ve identified at least three syntax changes and an API change, and the way the Python interpreter works, I can’t be sure those are all the bad spots unless I build a full test suite that exercises all the code. Which is another project epicycle.

Oh, well. Maybe move that idea down the to-do list.

(and have I mentioned just how much I enjoy searching multiple web pages to find clear module explanations and example code? and how much more fun it is when the language and libraries are moving targets with changing APIs?)