In anime fan-art, the question is really what qualifies as wearing short shorts. When they’re not just made of body paint, they’re often either halfway to her knees or wide open in the front. For some characters this is canonical, for others it’s wishful thinking by an artist who draws with one hand in his pants. Pokemon’s Misty/Kasumi, whatever age she’s drawn at, generally falls into the latter category. And, of course, the shortness of the short shorts is often emphasized with Ｍ字開脚.

There are quite a few characters whose official costumes include short shorts. Browsing through the search results on Gelbooru, it quickly became obvious that I could just do a top-20 list of the most obvious ones, without even coming close to running out. But I’m not trying to be comprehensive, just provide an amusing diversion, so if I missed your favorite girl as I skimmed through the hundreds of pages of results, it’s not because I don’t like the way she fills out her short shorts, it’s because there were too damn many pictures of Yoko from Gurren Lagann. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 😉

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As usual, Honest Trailers is dead on in this one, but the single most painful revelation is The Barry Bobblehead.

No offense, but I don’t think I want your employees coming to my house, no matter what sort of background check you run before having them deliver packages on their way home from work.

What she thinks happened

What actually happened

DanSora 8

Talkiest. Boss Fight. Ever. (okay, “recently”)

Also, “As you know, Bob, this famous event that’s never been mentioned before not only explains the odd behavior of the character who was introduced last week, but will be crucial to the plot this week.”

This is not quite an actual conversation from the episode:

“Bete’s a dick”.

“Oh, that’s just his funny little way.”

Eromanga-sensei 9

Note to Our Hero: just because you’re too shy to enjoy the view at the beach doesn’t mean you can deprive us of the opportunity. Next time, hold off a little before offering her the shirt off your back.

Doctor Who 10.8

Well, that was… better than last week without actually being good. I preferred the 2007 version.

No chance for ambiguity here. When you’re going to つ (津市), つ Station is definitely the place to get off.

(via)

This one’s a bit of a stretch. And a bit of a yawn. And a surprising number of cats.

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Worth seeing on the big screen, which is something I haven’t said about a DC movie in many years. For that matter, I can’t remember the last one I said was worth seeing at all.

Apart from some shots that were ruined by being designed for 3D (which I never bother with; I’m a Monday-morning-matinee cheapskate), I thought everything looked great. Gal Gadot gives an excellent fish out of water, coming of age performance, and the rest of the cast holds it together nicely. I even liked the child actors.

Amusing note: one of the previews for this film was Atomic Blonde, which was absolutely filled with ridiculous chick-fu combat scenes that required more strength, speed, and stamina than James Bond and Jason Bourne put together. Wonder Woman can fight against men that way; human women cannot, and I don’t see anything about her being a cyborg. Also amusing was the “fight like a girl” trailer for the new Transformers movie, which carried a message of grrrl power and nice tits, which is always important when you’re watching giant robots bash each other into scrap metal.

Update: The BluRay pre-release is currently #11 on Amazon. I think it’s a hit…

Ongoing MasterCook molesting now up on github. I took advantage of the very restricted formatting of their XML-ish MX2 format to write cat/grep/ls tools, as well as a quick-fix for a common format issue in files imported from MXP format. It would be trivial to write those sort of tools for the XML versions, but working in MX2 is handy for things you plan to re-import to MasterCook (since I haven’t written an xmltomx2 converter yet…).

“Former hotel chef” Aoi Gotō is the latest in tasty dishes served up fresh by Japan’s gravure magazine/DVD industry. Age 22, so “chef” may be a bit of a stretch, but her bikini credentials are excellent.

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Your recent announcement that 32-bit iOS apps will stop working in iOS 11 means that 58 of the apps on my iPhone won’t work. This includes all of my Japanese dictionaries, the best dice-roller app, quite a few paid games where your store policies give them no reason to do the upgrade work for free, the only decent barcode scanner (that is, it is both accurate and doesn’t auto-open store web pages to try to sell me what I just scanned), Google Earth, Hyperdia, all of AAA’s apps, and, perhaps most importantly, BrianAlarm, which wakes me with the gentle sound of Brian Blessed.

If I have to choose between iOS 11 and !!BRIAN!!BLESSED!!, guess who wins? 😏

There is a partial workaround, at least…

This showed up on Takitumblr today, after being spotted on Twitter. It turns up in a lot of “wacky Japan” roundups going back years, and of course I immediately ID’d the color printer as Miki Fujimoto, a graduate of the Hello!Project School of Fashion. Seriously, who else are you going to hire to dress up like this?

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Scott reports, you decide:

My gaming laptop started getting really flaky (first one USB port went, then two more, then the wireless and HDMI out, etc) a couple of weeks ago, so I ordered a brand new Alienware 15. It arrived on Wednesday and I started the process of downloading and installing Windows updates, Steam, Fallout 4, etc. The only problem was that it kept going to sleep during the downloads. No matter what I changed in the power settings, it kept going to sleep.

As it turns out, some idiot at Dell thought it would be a good idea to install and enable by default eyeball tracking software that puts the laptop to sleep if you look away from it for “too long”. (Where “too long” is no more than a minute or two.) Needless to say, that package has been removed from the machine.

There’s a short story just begging to be written here, where an enterprising hacker releases ransomware that, instead of asking for bitcoins, hijacks the eye-tracking software and demands that you watch ads all day. Or just shouts “show your tits!” whenever it detects a college girl using a laptop.

Viewing the Honest Trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (featuring Michael Bolton) reminded me just how creepy the adult-child interactions are in that movie.

That got the song Pure Imagination running through my head, and things went downhill from there…

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Come with me and you’ll see
what it’s like to live by child predation.
What you’ll find in their hearts
is fear, shame, and degradation.

To begin, take a spin
on one of my deviant creations.
Here your sins won’t require expiation.

If you want to do little kids,
I will teach you how to find them.
You can sneak up right behind them,
drag them to your van, then gag and bind them.

There’s a place you can go
to wallow in pure degeneration.
In my lair you’ll be free
to commit atrocities.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

DanSora 9

In which Lefiya’s hormones go viral, infecting Filvis, and we once again discover exactly where we are in Bell’s story.

Also, I didn’t check the credits, but Hestia’s voice sounded off. Different seiyū for this cameo? [Update: no, it’s her; maybe she just didn’t get back into character for such a brief scene.]

Eromanga-sensei 10

Muramasa takes center stage, and takes over the ED with bikini shots, but what the hell is up with her face in profile? Cute from the front, WTF from the side.

Note to Pete: based on her instinctive use of her left hand to bonk Elf on the head, Love Rival Muramasa is definitely a southpaw, and since she’s such a traditional gal, I think the reason her right hand is always bandaged (besides “character design”) is what my Japanese teacher told me when she caught me with a brush in my left hand:

“Shodō is right-handed.”

After struggling to describe my reaction to the latest episode, the only word I can come up with is “perfunctory”.

A search tag that’s inherently NSFW, naked_ribbon also crosses over into bondage and “suggestive use of chocolate and frosting” that push many images beyond my self-imposed limits. There also seems to be some confusion regarding what is and is not a “ribbon”, as well as what qualifies as “wearing” it.

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For many years, I’ve been saying that the core values of the Left are hatred, intolerance, and bigotry, and there’s always been plenty of evidence to support my view.

Based on the widespread social-media response to the recent mass-murder attempt by an unexceptional Leftist, I must revise that list to include “killing anyone who gets in their way”.

No wonder they admire Islamist terrorists; they recognize kindred souls.

For a measly $13.7 billion, Amazon will gain 431 brie-and-mortgage outlets in upscale neighborhoods around the country. I’m wondering if they even care what products they currently sell…

Just shut down our Bugzilla server as Our Little Elves start the task of migrating all the data into Jira. Which would have been done six weeks ago if Someone hadn’t demanded at the last minute that we rearrange the product structure to reflect Our New Way, and then spent a month being too busy to actually reveal the new design. And then IT still had to do all the work of creating the new products and components, and actually updating the bug DB.

(in fairness, I volunteered for that last bit, because I knew exactly how to do it; Someone (yes, The Same Someone) had asked me to do it at Digeo, over ten years ago…)

Meanwhile, the team responsible for designing the Jira ticket workflow finally delivered a picture of it at 7:55pm. Our Little Elves were scheduled to start the migration at 8pm.

I have a hunch there’s going to be widespread panic on Monday, as they get what they asked for, good and hard.

“Dear Bugzilla, please take us back. We’ll never cheat on you again.”

Hey, I shut down our Bugzilla server last night, so what could be more natural than a bug theme? I figured I’d get girl-with-bug, girl-as-bug, girl-vs-bug, etc, but damn you, Rule 34, I wasn’t expecting quite so much girl-raped-by-bugs. No, no, not going there; all cartoon girls pictured on this site consist of 100% consenting pixels.

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R.I.P. Stephen Furst.

I hadn’t realized that the entire wardrobe department was out with the flu, forcing the company to bring in some temps to outfit the girls. I’m sure this will come as a shock, after our years of peaceful conflict, but I hope it’s a long flu season.

…although I do have a few questions about how “trainee” Kurumi Noguchi (age 15) got into those pants. And who else is trying to get into them…

NSFH!P

DanSora 10

If the goal of the writers was not for me to hope that Lefiya falls into a pit and gets devoured by monsters, they have failed. As expected, we’re up to Bell’s minotaur fight, but they didn’t let it consume the entire episode. So, if it’s going to be 13 episodes, I figure we have “getting to level 59”, “discovering the secret of level 59”, and “finding Bell on level 18” left.

Eromanga-sensei 11

After two episodes with minimal Sagiri, the animators (or as they’re better known, “still-panners”) have resumed their lusty exploration of her under-developed body, and have upped the ante in flashbacks of her at age 7. At least the expository lumps finally introduced Mr. and Mrs. Brady, answering several questions and raising a few new ones. The worst thing about revealing The Secret History, though, is that an episode without Elf is like a week without sunshine.

Doctor Who 10.10

I get the impression that they suddenly realized they’ve never actually shown Bill’s character development, and decided to just present it as an accomplished fact. And is it just me, or was the Doctor’s “plan” the most pointlessly melodramatic phony dilemma of the entire Capaldi era?

Update: No apologies…

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Doctor, Bill, and Nardole,
on a Tardis expedition,
met the lostest Romans ever known.

Light-eating dog-thing,
hand-waved as major threat,
led cowards to noble self-sacrifice.

In the Moffat Puppet Show.
I can’t wait to see him go.
Can Chibnall save this frickin’ showwwww?
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Since the new Amazon Dash Wand is effectively free for Prime customers, and it gives you a home-automation controller, bar-code scanner, and a hand-held Alexa device that is not always listening, I ordered one.

When it arrived this morning, I followed the instructions, opened the Amazon app on my iPhone, and went through the setup process. Wifi Fail. Wifi Fail. Wifi Fail. “You should contact customer service”.

The first 20+-minute call went through a bunch of cookbook questions about who my Internet provider was, and how to change the channel on my router. I had a brief flashback to the Seventies, then realized their script assumed Comcast meant “all-in-one cable modem, router, and wireless access point”. I played along, knowing this would make no difference, and the call eventually ended in an RMA.

I was curious to see if it really was a wireless problem, so I logged into the OpenBSD router, checked the DHCP logs, and found an entry for a new Amazon MAC address. I fired up tcpdump and went through the setup again, and sure enough, the device got DHCP, connected to the Internet for DNS, connected to an Amazon server, and then started trying to talk to a public (non-Amazon) NTP server to set its date and time.

It failed every time. Annoyingly, it wasn’t even looking in DNS for its NTP server; the addresses were hardcoded in either the build or the config it had downloaded.

So, armed with the knowledge that the hardware was fine, I tried to get back through to customer service with this knowledge. An hour later, after two different people tried to debug phone app, wireless and bluetooth problems (including telling me to turn on GPS on my phone!), I finally got someone to twiddle the right bits so it could connect to servers that were up, and then cancel the RMA.

Now I have a Dash Wand. Ho, ho, ho.

I’m not sure why I’ve never mentioned watching the SciFi Channel’s series Dark Matter. I just caught up on the start of the third season, and I can’t really say anything to praise it, but somehow I keep watching. It’s shallow and clichéd and cheesy and Canadian, …and just as good as it needs to be.

Three, Five, and Six have plenty of sf-ghetto cred, and of course series regular Truffault goes all the way back to Forever Knight, making her time in service longer than Five’s life. Three did the best job of selling his character at first, but I’d say he and Six hit parity about halfway through the first season. Five is fun, but she suffers from having to be the genius teen who can do amazing things with technology (perhaps it’s no coincidence that Wil Wheaton has been a guest star…).

Two is a newcomer to the SF ghetto, moving from Canadian Idol and Broadway Éponine to “mildly-psychotic semi-superpowered space mercenary captain”, but she’s doing a solid job, and quickly grew out of the “badass eye candy” they wrote her as initially. Android is an acquired taste, but the actress has been able to have fun with the role.

If you’re counting, you’ll note that I’ve left out One and Four. While Four’s been driving the plot recently, so much of it revolves around him being King Of The Assholes that I kind of wish it was over (“dear writers, pleasepleaseplease kill off Misaki before her dialog and delivery kills me”); the more central his story has become, the less interesting he is as a character. One was Captain Whitebread from the Planet of Sensitive New Age Guys, so I can’t say that I object to his story being wrapped up abruptly.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that the original pilot graphic novel had Two as the only female, which would have made things a lot less interesting. And a lot less decorative, even though Android rarely lets her hair down, and Five’s awesome bosom is generally concealed to pretend she looks like a teenager.

In the end, maybe I like it because most of the actors have managed to make their characters work. It’s no SG-1, where the entire cast hit the ground running, but it works.

[Side note: the gang’s handler Calchek hasn’t showed up nearly as much as Truffault, but not only was he a villain in Forever Knight, he goes all the way back to Friday The 13th: The Series.]

The gentle slope on the top of my new clothes dryer came as quite a surprise to me.

And to the open bottle of fabric softener.

On the bright side, the floor in the laundry room smells very nice now.

By the way, did it occur to anyone that with all of the advanced controls on your user interface, you could implement sound controls more sophisticated than “completely silent” and “play a jaunty ‘done’ tune and echo every keypress REALLY REALLY LOUD”?

DanSora 11

Good Lefiya: well, that certainly qualifies as “casting while moving”.

Bad Lefiya: just beg for a piece already, sheesh.

Bonus Lefiya: congrats, you finally ended up sleeping with somebody.

More and more, I wish they’d made Tiona the focus character. She’s the most interesting of Aiz’s gal-pals. There’s a novel in this series that’s focused on the Amazon twins, but we’re not going to get anywhere near it this season.

Eromanga-sensei 12

In which sinister dom Sagiri abuses Elf and Dere-Dere-Dere Muramasa in the service of her muse, leaves her subs to suffer as she discovers The Secret Rival, then finds a new ecchi hobby that she doesn’t know dick about. In the aftermath, Megumin provides definitive proof that she is both a virgin and a total noob, and Muramasa demonstrates that she pays attention in art class. Even with her help, though, Sagiri still has a hard problem to solve before she can really nail this new style. Maybe Elf can swipe some videos from her brother, although that might lead to other problems.

Also, bookstore-chan tries the just-kidding-only-serious method, which Our Hero is naturally oblivious to.

If this ends next episode, I’m guessing the big finale will be Sagiri setting foot in the front yard. By the way, if that’s the Aunt in the OP, she’s running out of time to show up.

Slight change to the ED this week, revealing more about Our Hero.

Doctor Who 10.11

The beginning of the end, with terrible Zathras impression. Also, more third-rate meta.

Dark Matter 3.4

I guess every writer and director has a Groundhog Day episode they need to get out of their system. While nothing can live up to the ones done by Xena and SG-1, this wasn’t bad, and made good use of Three’s character development and Anthony Lemke’s talents.

Quote saved to use on Rory:

“No. You can’t just make up your own words. You have to actually repeat the words that I say.”

The ancient wisdom passed down from father to son was “don’t stick your dick in crazy”. In the 21st Century, a new truth emerges:

“Don’t let crazy stick zyr dick in you.”

I have a few questions…

(via)

A few months ago, I observed that DanMachi must be doing well, because there were two series of spinoff novels, in addition to the manga and the anime.

Well, guess what? There are also two 4-koma manga series (1, 2).

Pretty sure the second season of the main series is on the way, although I don’t see any announcements.

Twelve days after moving the company from Bugzilla to Jira, it looks like we’re mostly out of the woods.

Except for people whose workflow is built around archived links to Bugzilla URLs, and still try to use it even though I’ve made it read-only, moved it to a different URL, and replaced the old URL with a list of links mapping old bug numbers to their new issue IDs.

And people who crash the Jira server and take down corporate email by using the bulk-update feature to rearrange hundreds of imported bugs at the same time on their own initiative, without disabling notifications.

Bulk updates are now restricted to three users, not including the admin group. Naturally, the person who sent 8,000 emails on Monday abused admin privileges to add himself to the new bulk-update group and send 4,000 more this morning, costing him his admin privileges (and his consciousness, if I could have reached through the Internet and throttled him). Perhaps another day I’ll do an “ambitious Russian developer” rant, about the sort of contractors who would rather break into a server to restart a daemon than send email to IT.

The #1 problem with Jira is that it sends out notifications every time a user picks his nose, so even when people aren’t abusing the bulk-update feature, users are complaining about getting five notifications when someone edits an issue.

My response is to say, “this is what you asked for”.

Gelbooru just isn’t meta enough for me to fill a post using only the cheesecake tag, so I added pie as well. If you want delicious cake, you’re on your own…

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Today’s “recommended for you” email from Amazon Japan was all photobooks, and led off with Pai-nyan, which is exactly what it sounds like:

Not to be confused with Neko to Futomomo, which is also exactly what it sounds like.

The list also included Naked Gems, Tokyo Lovers, Cute Skirt-Flipping, and the creatively-titled Thigh Photo Studio 3.

(Update: just noticed that I wasn’t paying attention, and that last title is “photo studio 3” not “photobook 3”)