“All contract web developers are bling-happy assclowns with no concept of revision control or release management, who think 1,000 is a large number.”
— revealed truths, #17aOne big long fight with decent 2D animation but way too much CGI. Couldn’t be helped, given the nature of the beasties he’s fighting, but I still didn’t get much out of it.
Verdict: remember, he’s doing all of this so that Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny gets her reward… before Our Hero switches to another game for a while, sigh.
Make Anime Girls Gainax Again!
The Rise And Fall Of Snidely Whiplash. With hugs and the promise of cute girls helping Our Victorious Loner bathe. Off-camera.
Verdict: The Battle To Save The Class had only one possible outcome, and to get through it we had to hear detailed explanations of how it was done as well as the villain’s backstory. The clumsy parody of a “genius math nerd” made me glad he won’t be a returning character.
(most of the relevant art on Pixiv for this series is from the official cover artist for the light novels; this one is waaaaay down the road from what will happen this season)
Also a dose of Snidely Whiplash this week, with two demon generals monologing and playing with their food. I’ve completely lost interest in Our Really-Still-A-Dragon Hero and whatever the plot was supposed to be, so it’s up to the cute girls to carry this one, and so far they’re staying dressed. They gave plenty of screen time to a brand-new one this week, forgetting to make us care about her before putting her in peril, then ended with a superhero landing as he arrives in the nick of time.
Verdict: eye-rolling train wreck with mild eye candy.
(there is one recognizable fan-drawing of Our Snake Gal on Pixiv, and it’s not actually good)
It’s getting hot out there, and not just because Summer Comiket is held in miserable weather. Sadly, Our Hot Teacher is not in costume, and last week’s comment from her was either a mistranslation or a headfake. I mean, she’s technically there, but not exposing luscious flesh. Our Gals are a bit intimidated by the crowd, and Mr Exposition explains why they’re not getting the attention they expected (TL/DR: it’s harder to get a good picture of four girls at the same time), but they’re also facing stiff competition, including The Power Of Twins. Next week, will they rebuild their crowd and get a decent picture livestreamed to Daddy in time for a reunion?
Verdict: plenty of tame eye candy, but the most skin we see is a trap for Our Hero.
I am slightly disappointed that the shopping montage did not include a stop at a lingerie store, but Our New Partners finally got to the monster-fighting part of the gig, with a cruel cliffhanger.
Verdict: Our Fashionable Magical Senpai is going to be righteously pissed next week about taking a shot to the face. And I don’t mean in the Kamala-Career-Path way.
“We’re running out of time before everyone drowns! Let’s talk for five minutes until we come up with a plan! And be sure to linger over all the bad ideas different teams come up with!”
Verdict: so, yeah, not loving this; Our Chibi Heroine is off her game, the stakes are completely artificial and boring, and the big twist to the big twist is not what you’d call subtle.
(whoops, wrong girl-with-gun! or is she…)
…scale up the old .45 Super round, call it .47 MAGA, and make long-slide 1911-pattern pistols that chamber it. They make some in 10mm, so the pressure shouldn’t be a problem.
(“Say ‘Hitler’ again. I dare you, NeverTrumper, I double-dare you, say ‘Hitler’ one more goddamn time.”)
My #1 xTwitter ad today is homeopathic medicines for dogs.
(note that California estimates that over 5 million ballots are still out there somewhere (1/3 of the total mailed out); if they don’t show up by the 12th, they can’t be counted)
With more than 20 years of purchase history, what has led you to think that I’m in the market for 8 dozen canned snails? Or a 10-pack of tinned sardines?
Whenever Gruber steps outside his core expertise (fellating Apple leadership) to talk politics, it’s pretty sad, but his response to several pretty-obviously-insincere congratulations from various tech CEOs to Trump really “lacks introspection”.
When I lived in California, it didn’t matter how I voted. It was rare for anything to be close enough that you could plausibly affect the results at a county level, much less state or national.
In Ohio, however, even though my county includes the sort of liberal cesspool downtown that reliably harvests blue votes, Harris beat Trump by only 0.2%, or 513 out of 248,105. Statewide, Trump won by 11.3%, and when someone’s able to make a precinct-level map, the size of the blue dots will be even tinier.
(the national precinct-level maps of previous elections make it very clear that most of America has no interest in Democrat policies, and I expect this one to be even starker)
(coincidentally, around midnight the clouds burst open and my neighborhood was inundated with liberal tears…)
I’ve never wanted turkey on a pizza, but it at least sounds plausible. Green beans and cranberries, however, are way over into hell-no territory. Might as well eat the bugs at that point.
Return To Crystal Mountain, where Our Half-Dressed Hero swears to deliver mass quantities of rare drops to Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, only to discover his strat has been nerfed. So we get some quick grinding and the execution of a new strat.
Verdict: Biiiilaaaac!!! (enjoy it while it lasts)
Every once in a while you come across a glamour photoshoot that screams Eighties. The hair, the posing, the lighting, the sets, the ludicrous fake bondage, and the overall aesthetic of “we’re making Art here, not just getting a pretty girl nekkid”. Sadly, you can still find photographers today who think that showing off their distinctive style is more important than showing off the model, only now they lack the training to know which lens to use.
(via Big Boobs Japan (1 & 2) which as usual should only be viewed with shields up and Javascript down)
Kanori Kadomatsu, better known to anime fans for her voice work as Ryōka Yuzuki, and still looking like she made a deal with the devil, debuted in the late Eighties, but didn’t get nekkid until she turned 18 a few years later (1, 2), so she got to miss the worst excesses of Eighties glamour photography. Sadly, her cutest video clip is no longer available on the site I linked to last time I mentioned her (in which she rubs oil onto her breasts and explains that it’s supposed to keep them from sagging when she gets older; since she turned 50 this year, I think the world deserves to know how that worked out…).
Update: found a copy of the clip, and after dodging a bunch of very sketchy ads, I was able to extract it. Om nom nom nom.
“Mom said Daddy’s dead! But I’m okay now! But I wasn’t okay enough to ask her WTF!” Fortunately Our 2D-Lovin’ Hero has a nose for ears, and he’ll whiplash this mess into shape!
Anyway, the psychological trauma is resolved with a good cry and some hugging, and even an invitation to join the squeeze play doesn’t give Our Devoted Hero a stiffy (the camera actually checked). We got a brief cameo from Our Hot Teacher providing advice on dealing with Comiket announcements, but she was scooped by Our Eager Tsuntail, who took advantage of her modeling popularity to spread the word on TV.
Verdict: the fates are conspiring to reunite Daddy and Daughter through the power of cosplay, and they’ve made sure it will all work out by enlisting Our Universal Father Figure to voice him.
(Teacher ever-so-casually admitted that she’ll be there showing off alongside the other three “heavenly queens”, so next week should be full of eye candy)
I think they spent more money animating Our Wide-Eyed Cuddly Newbie’s karaoke dance scene than they did on last week’s fight scene. I suppose they could afford that because there’s no fight scene this week, just team-building and a chance for Kana to find out what life is like at one of the big MG corps. Which means we get to see a new gal doing… something next week.
This week, half of the surviving players think the new twist sucks the fun out of the event, and the other half think it’s gonna be awesome to screw everyone over. In other words, half of them don’t get to play the game they signed up for. This can be considered a metaphor for recent anime seasons.
Verdict: so far, the running battle in episode 3 between two side characters who killed each other off is the high point of the show.
I have received more mail in the past month than in the previous two years, all of it political spam for offices other than the president. I have received no SMS or MMS political spam, but I have (company-confidential) reason to believe that there’s a double fuckton of it being sent to other people. Possibly a triple fuckton.
As for The Big Race, some of the wealthier neighborhoods around Dayton have some Commie-Waltz signs up, but the working-class areas I drive through every day are swimming in Trump/Vance signs, many quite large, and unlike when I lived in California, they don’t get torn down.
Last week I linked to Jacob Holo’s Freelancers of Neptune, due to the presence of a sexy catgirl on the cover. How’s the actual book? Fun. The world-building gives the reader enough to work with while hinting at future possibilities, the heroes are good people with actual motives, there’s a complete absence of preachy woke bullshit, and the story moves along at a decent clip. The Big Bad does twirl his mustache a bit, but you can’t have everything, and you can have a catgirl. (well, somebody can have a catgirl; Our Captain doesn’t want this one)
(most of my saved catgirl pics are more “M appeal” than Emma Peel, but some of them are at least armed)
Our Local Noble’s Exasperated Daughter rewards Our Hero with the three things he desires most: cash, meat, and a ticket out of town. This frees him up to finally confront the One True Class Villain, a mustache-twirling bloodthirsty math nerd. Meanwhile, the girls are doing what they do best: shopping, killing monsters, and worrying about Haruka.
Verdict: less shouty than last week.
A large group of nameless wood elves (fortunately all male) get chomped by CG spiders to set up the stakes, and then threaten Our Future Threesome as they escort pigs on a truffle hunt. Our Draco-Adjacent Hero casually lies his way out of trouble after he not only recognizes the never-before-seen demon attacker but names the species. After escorting what’s left of the pigs and the other escorts back to town, they return to… lunch with monsters and flirt.
The planning for their polygamous wedding night is interrupted by even more CG demon spiders, which pose no real threat as they team up to… Oh, come on! Bad enough small-town dragon-boy is throwing around advanced combat spells like there’s no tomorrow, but he casually whips out a fucking dragon arm mid-fight without even worrying that his girlfriends might notice?!?
Verdict: is there no end to Dolan’s I-Win buttons? Excuse me while I go ogle a proper dragon:
(…or something like that…)
Mauser’s suggesting this one, and the lead voice actress deserves a win after slogging through Earth: Final Bye-Bye, so I gave it a shot while checking the porch for little monsters. Speaking of voices, one of them should be very familiar to anyone who’s watched pretty much any anime made in the past 25 years. Okay, two. Maybe even three. Actually, the casting budget probably explains cutting a few corners elsewhere; they didn’t hire a bunch of noobs.
First up, let’s just pretend that there are no OP or ED credits for this show. I certainly plan to never watch or listen to them again.
I’m not going to go episode-by-episode, I’ll just say that I appreciate a heroine with the power of R.T.F.M., and point out that I binged four episodes in one evening without suffering.
Verdict: episode 4 brings it all together.
(bonus magical girl shows a lot more skin than Our Venturing Heroines, but if we’re lucky, those full-body transformation sparkles are called “Buy-The-Bluray”)
Between the sidewalk ending at my house and the driveway being 75 feet long and steep, I felt the need to decorate the front windows with silhouette bats and cats and tombstones with witch hats, and the front door with silhouette ghosts, all cut out on a Silhouette (Curio 2, a recent crafting toy).
First trick-or-treater was my Amazon driver. He thought he was kidding, but I gave him a big handful of candy. Over the next hour, I got… 16. Nothing like my place in California, but better than last year, despite the fact that it was raining half the night (sigh). I’ll have to find something to do with the leftover candy that doesn’t involve eating it myself…like give a few pounds to the pizza driver, who not only has a store full of people to share with, but a kid.
“A Portal From Another World Spawned In My Basement, So I Turned It Into A Dungeon (But Not The Kind With Monsters) And Now I Train Sexy Elf Chicks And Sell Them On Etsy”
On-call alerts interfered with my plans to make it to the range on Sunday or Monday, but I snuck out of the house on Tuesday with four pistols and 317 rounds of ammo, and gave my new split-prescription safety glasses a quick test.
That is:
Bifocals (1):
OD SPH -100 CYL -050 AXIS 90
OS SPH -125 CYL -075 AXIS 60
NV-ADD +225
Computer (2):
OD SPH +025 CYL -050 AXIS 90
OS SPH 000 CYL -075 AXIS 60
Shooting (left eye dominant):
OD SPH -100 CYL -050 AXIS 90 (1)
OS SPH 000 CYL -075 AXIS 60 (2)
I picked a variety of sights, including basic black, and all of them were in crisp focus against the fuzzy black target 20 yards away. I hardly noticed the switch between eyes when focusing at different distances, and my grouping was much better than last trip.
Next trip, I’ll take the ones where I’ve barely been able to locate the front sights for years; it sucks getting older.
(317 rounds may sound oddly precise, but I’d pre-loaded a bunch of magazines at home: 5x 10-round .22LR, 4x 17-round 9mm, 2x 11-round 9mm, 5x 15-round 9mm, 2x 15-round .45ACP, 4x 18-round .45ACP)
Okay, so Our Emotionless Hot Maid shows up at school as a new transfer student claiming to be Our Hapless Hero’s cousin, gets assigned the seat right in front of him, and calls him by his first name with a -sama attached, and after a single reaction shot, the only other thing that happens at school is the well-worn trope of students stampeding for the lunch special, which doesn’t interest her until she finds out that it’s all about her special sauce, and then she performs multiple super-human feats to cut in line.
Verdict: when Our Manic Pixie Little Sister decided to push for maid/master matrimony, I stopped watching and went off to do laundry. I don’t plan to come back.
(how well-worn is the trope? well, this week is apparently also Ryoga’s intro in the new Ranma show, and school-cafeteria-food-fight is the origin of their rivalry…)
(oh, and while she was technically wearing less as a student than as a maid, this amounted to a few square inches of skin exposed below her neck)
This week, Our Heroes steal a page from That Slime Show and spend the entire episode sitting around a table telling us how good it’s going to be when they get back to actually playing the game. It’s well-drawn but drawn-out, with comic relief coming from Our Animal-Loving Animalia molesting Our Formerly-Pure White Rabbit into a catatonic state.
Verdict: basically an entire episode of exposition and plotting, filled with reaction shots of characters reacting to said exposition.
(admittedly, I am curiously attracted to Animalia, and unlike Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, she’s at least in the ED animation, so she should be showing up more this season)
The late Shamus Young often ranted about his hatred of “do it again stupid” game design, something I share. This game is full of it, with many of the puzzles forcing you to figure out a solution while dodging bullets, and Zelda is very squishy while most of the enemies are decidedly not. It’s notable that Breath of the Wild had only one major puzzle that had to be restarted from the beginning if you made a single mistake, and that’s in the DLC.
Something I hadn’t seen on any Mac before: the mouse stopped hovering. In every app where there’s some kind of mouse-hover support (including Finder), it just… didn’t. Elements in apps were no longer being informed that the mouse was hovering over them. No tooltips, no scrollbars, no pop-ups, no menus, no video controls, no full file names, nothing. I had to reboot to clear it up. In fairness, I doubt that there’s anyone in “QA” any more who tests how the system behaves after being up for a full month.
(elf-hover > mouse-hover)
This may be the most accurate depiction of an anime heroine ever committed to 3D, courtesy of the Molesting Magical Girls xTwitter account:
This one definitely does not belong on the shelf behind my work computer that shows up in Zoom meetings. I can explain HoiHoi-san, Totoro, Jiji, The Tick, and an assortment of Funko Pops, but not Magia Baiser riding her crop.