Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 7

In the least-plausible setup of the season, Our Busty Guild Gal In Red Underrim Glasses is unable to find a man, and drags Our Ever-17 Witch and company to a find-a-mate party as her wingwomen. We haven’t seen this character much this season, so her presence is welcome, even if Her Cunning Plan is a bust. Anyway, the local wedding spirit talks Azusa into buying a sister-bonding package for Our Slime Twins. This gets Best Gal Beelzebub into more clothing than we’ve ever seen her wear. But in a good way.

I wouldn’t have minded some more footage of Our Busty Undead Catgirl and her distracting casino-dealer outfit, though. Maybe she’ll make it into a LoRA.

This might have worked as a half-length sketch, but padding it out to an entire episode dragged.

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 7

This week, Our Sword Dad adjusts to life with a house and a daughter, getting through years of “am I a good dad?” in a few hours. It happens so fast that White and Red barely have time to be jealous that they don’t live under his… roof.

Verdict: a bit slow, but they compensated by giving Daddy his first encounter with an age-appropriate hottie who he has an excuse to spend some time with. Go, teacher!

(Guest Lecturer Zelda is unrelated)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 18

I just fast-forwarded through this because last week’s preview promised that Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch would finally be back, and she is, but fully dressed in street clothes. Other than that, it looks like it was a whole lot of talking and setup for the final story arc.

(spies are completely unrelated, and I just wanted to use this picture)

Traeger Update Update

I hadn’t fired up the smoker yet this year, so I went out to clean it and replace the ash bucket while it ran through the firmware updates. Apparently I’d left it uncovered for one of the bigger storms late last year, because the rain has to be basically horizontal to somehow get inside. That is, rain got inside.

It drained into the ash bucket and overflowed into the cabinet. The pellets were in sealed bins, so nothing was damaged, but soaking the mix of ash and rendered fat in the bucket made for a pretty nasty smell.

End-of-season note to self: thoroughly clean everything before the first snowfall, then leave the cover on all winter, even if you think you might have a chance to get out there and use it…

(maid is unrelated, welcome to drop by and do some cleaning)

Maomao’s going to have to stay in spoiler limbo for another week, because this week’s episode was apparently bumped. This would be less annoying if there were other good shows to watch.

Smoke-Signal Flag Day

Traeger has announced that you must update the firmware on your Internet-connected smoker by the end of September, or it will no longer be Internet-connected. Something-something-cloud-services.

BroadcomBot fixed it!

I have now successfully downloaded VMware Fusion 13.6.3. It even worked.

Yes, I saved the installer on my NAS, “just in case”.

No, they did not send the promised email; I had to keep checking.

Metaphor alert!

Vegan Toilet Bowl Cleaner. To put the sustainable organic cherry on top , it’s rhubarb-scented.

How to raise a busty waifu

Ina Enohara shows how it’s done: you feed them, you water them, they grow!

VMware (not) update

Finally advanced my VMware Fusion download failure to “Account verification is Pending. Please try after some time” (yes, I manually edited the page to enable the field, changed my one-letter name to a three-letter name, and overrode the disabled submission button; the fourth time it worked). Managed to get a chat window to connect me either to an Indian call center operator or an AI pretending to be one, who just sent me a link to the same download page that didn’t work.

Schrödinger’s chatbot claims to have escalated the ticket to “the concern team”, who will email me an update in the next 24 hours.

Clueless Crafter, episode 7

Well, that fell off a cliff, and not just the character art. This episode would actually have been improved by the addition of pies to the face.

And the flashback of Kurt’s childhood medicinal first kiss is clearly going to bring in a new horny haremette, since he just happened to be named Viceroy to the town that just happens to be next door to the demon kingdom, and I’m sure L’il Demonette just happens to have spent the last ten years dreaming of a reunion.

Verdict: one more chance before I drop it. Maybe.

(horny gal is unrelated, no longer on Pixiv)

Robo-Ho, episode 6

This week, the main character is once again her left leg, as Our Geeky Hero explores the busted joint while Our Naked Barbie Doll lies back and thinks of England. Then gets bored and calls Our Suspicious Galpal just as his probing starts to make her feel all tingly inside. She reacts as if the inside of her leg joint is lined with clits.

“These are the jokes, kid.”

Verdict: couldn’t finish it, giving up now.

(I was never expecting this show to be even a tenth as good as Gushing turned out to be, but I didn’t think it would be so cheap that they couldn’t afford a second joke)

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 6

Fight week times two. A bit shoutier than usual.

(fighter is unrelated)

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 6

Also fight week. This show has basically revealed itself as a jailbait-and-switch, with Our Affectionate And Servicing Former Students never hitting on Our Middle-Aged Rural Swordsman at all, and him never even thinking about it. And now Our Magical Blue-Haired Former Thief has moved into a clear daughter role.

Verdict: not that there’s anything wrong with that; S-Rank Daughter succeeded at supplying a collection of cute girls while keeping them out of Daddy’s pants, so maybe this one can, too. But they did kind of lead us on…

(Best Daughter is unrelated)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 17

Despite the six minutes of post-adventure exposition and the travel montage, this episode pretty much wrapped up everything, including shifting Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch into full tsundere mode, and it even kept the character art fairly consistent.

Verdict: I think this is a good place to stop for me. Big adventure is over, Yuke’s got a house full of gals who love him, and there isn’t an Asshole Party in sight.

(fan-art is still mostly just poorly-posed CG or bad pr0n, so an actual drawing of Jamie was a surprise)

Deep Thoughts, For Stupid People

Last night I watched Lucy, Luc Besson’s cinematic drinking game. That is, if you take one shot every time someone states something absolutely ludicrous as fact, you’ll be dead in the first fifteen minutes. With bonus animal husbandry.

Why did I watch it? It was free, I was bored, and the highly deceptive trailer was vaguely interesting.

Why did I keep watching it all the way to the end? For the same reason I watched Kill Bill 1: I kept wondering if it would stop getting worse. And it never did.

(crazy blonde magic engineer is unrelated)

Anti-Semantic Versioning

There’s a reason I froze the version of Hugo I use to build this site: constant breaking changes. Yes, version 0.146.0 completely changes the templating system, forcing you to move all your layout files around. No, this wasn’t clearly documented until after 0.147.2 came out.

I gave up after trying to go from 0.119.0 to 0.120.0 left me with ~30,000 lines of diff output again. I have seen nothing in the changelogs since September 2023 that would make me want to take on that mess again.

If anyone doubted the sincerity of Lakan’s feelings about his daughter Maomao, this week’s events should blow that away. As for Jinshi’s feelings about her, well, he’s had a life-changing epiphany about just how far he’ll go. It doesn’t hurt that, at the same time, he’s growing more aware of the ongoing revelations about the former emperor that we’ve been seeing.

Fuck you, Broadcom

I can’t download the latest update for VMware Fusion because it requires “additional verification”. The form auto-fills in your profile information, but the Javascript verification does not accept single-letter names such as “J”, and does not allow you to edit the field. In fact, their entire customer-support system has had read-only profiles for a while now, complete with an FAQ. And their chatbot does not understand the problem or connect you to human beings.

Well, that’s one way to keep costs down while you destroy an acquisition.

Those are definitely not noodle arms…

The text reads “Father’s a man”. Transphobic before it was hip!

Eighties Viagra

There’s an old cartoon that I think was in Playboy. Can’t find it online at the moment, but a man was walking past a construction site for a brothel, and the sign read, “soon you too can be erected on this site”.

Amazon proposes…

… J disposes. Latest recommendation for a novel was something called Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff, which the blurb promises will be a cozy-but-eldritch mystery with a bit of romance. Oh, wait, it promises to be “Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun”. With added boldfaced queer romance just in case you didn’t read the blurb to the end.

And to really make sure it appeals to a broad audience, the Kindle edition is $16.99. Yup, that’ll just fly off the virtual shelves. I liked the cover art, at least.

This isn’t the weird part…

spoiler

It’s the sniffing.

Things you never want to hear from the director who’s adapting a novel into a movie or series:

“I thought this work could be condensed to explore modern themes and social issues”

I’m not really seeing how that translates to “skip the first novel but constantly reference it”. When I watched the first episode, I liked that the characters were presented as a pre-existing partnership, rather than having to go through their Odd Couple meet-and-greet, but then we were expected to just accept an emotional connection that we were never shown or told about.

Now we find out that the director isn’t really even interested in adapting the novels, he’s pissing in the whiskey to make his own story. Blech.