Quick preliminary test of the new camera body’s low-light capability (double-sized if you open it in another tab):

This is the view of the neighbor’s house from my back yard, with no streetlights or other lighting, at midnight with no moon. It’s soft and quite noisy, but it’s clear and in-focus.

It’s also about three stops overexposed, because this is what the scene looked like to the naked eye:

In other words, it was able to successfully meter and auto-focus (admittedly with help from the built-in focus lamp) in conditions where I couldn’t even see that there were fences. Exposure was 1/30 at f/1.2, hand-held at ISO 204,800. By comparison, the latest and greatest iPhone tops out at ISO 12,768 with an f/1.78 lens, which would give a ~1.2-second exposure, if it could meter the scene at all.

Here’s a crop showing what the noise looks like on the full-sized image. Rough, but there’s still some good detail, and it can be cleaned up and sharpened.

No temple, castle, or museum is even close to this dark inside, and I haven’t even tried the built-in HDR features or adjustable Dynamic-Range Optimization yet, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting clear, crisp pictures of anything I can see. The zoom I’m taking has a constant f/4 aperture, so there may be conditions where it has to use a noisier ISO setting, but I don’t think I’ll need to crank it up to even 100K, much less this setting.

And, of course, I’ll be carrying my small LitraPro color-corrected USB-powered LED light. Which is sadly discontinued now that Logitech owns Litra and just used their IP to build a clip-on light for streamers. It looks like the Luxli Fiddle is the current hotness for pocketable LED lighting, although it’s only half as bright as the LitraPro.

Metering digression: the Sony A7S III’s meter sensitivity is EV -3 with an f/2.0 lens; with the 50mm f/1.2 that’s still only EV -4.5, and this exposure computes to EV -5.5, so it got a little help from the focus lamp, even though it was half-blocked by the lens hood.

Juxtaposition, Twitter style

66% No Yuuwaku revisited

So, quite some time ago I posted the cover art for the Japanese release of Meatloaf’s Two out of three ain’t bad single, which translated the title as “Two-thirds of Temptation”. Randomly, I found two things recently: a fan translation of the English lyrics, and the actual lyrics that were included with the single:

一晩中話し合ってもいいけど、
どうにもならないさ
言うことはすべて言ったよ、
もう何も残ってないさ

一晩中でも泣くがいいさ、
僕の気持は変わらないよ
外には雪が積っている、
僕に行かさないでおくれ

僕は努力した、
君を大切にしてる事を示そうとした
僕は言葉に疲れ、声も出なかった
僕の目からは涙でなく、 つららが下がった

僕に出来ることはこう言い続けるだけ
“君が欲しいんだ、君が必要なんだ”　とね
でももう君を愛することは出来ないよ
さあ悲しまないで
３人の内、
２人が出て行くってのは悪い事じゃないさ

TL/DR: it’s just the first verse, simplified but pretty much on target until you reach the last two lines, which are as far off as the title but in a completely different direction: (roughly) “out of three people, it’s not a bad thing when two of them leave”.

Props to the big G for Google Lens; when I fed it this JPG in the hopes of finding a higher-resolution source (because no one had ever transcribed these lyrics), it couldn’t find one but still managed to OCR almost all of the kanji correctly. The few errors were easily caught and corrected.

Why refer to Management of a Novice Alchemist by this title? Because while it didn’t come up in this episode, once she makes friends with girls closer to her age (starting next episode), she develops a major case of a-cup angst.

This episode is all setup, as every element of Our DFC Prodigy’s backstory is touched on, so they can get on with the show in episode 2. Which, given they only have 12 episodes total, is going to have to move briskly. I’ve skimmed the fan-translation that’s available, and I have no idea what they’ve picked as a stopping point; it kinda just drifts along, with the occasional crisis that they never really have trouble resolving.

(there’s basically no fan-art of this show yet (this is from the cover artist), merchandise is limited to unlicensed shipped-from-China crap, and it doesn’t look like the source has been licensed)

Reincarnated as a sword is definitely based more on the manga than the light novels, although it’s thankfully not a page-for-page adaptation. Not that I’ll object to seeing Our Guild Receptionist And Friends providing full-frontal nudity in the bath. Just keep the Fran-service to a minimum, please; she’s 12.

No idea how far they plan to go with the story in only 12 episodes, but there are plenty of long-winded RPG-mechanic discussions in the books that can be chopped. Sword-dad is really obsessed with the stuff, but you don’t really start to get any answers about his nature until around book 9 or 10.

I’m happy with the performances of Our Heroes, but I’m not sure how much of Amanda I’ll be able to take, based on the trailers.

(unrelated catgirl is waiting for better Fran-art)

Futoku No Streaming

The cheesy fan-service harem comedy Futoku No Guild (“Guild of Depravity”), whose first episode aired today, has not been picked up by any streaming service, and there don’t even seem to be any raws floating around yet. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign, given the crap that does get licensed.

I mean, I fully expect it to be absolutely terrible based on the trailer, but that doesn’t make it worse than, say, Dungeon Slave Harem.

I’m always up for catgirls, but I didn’t put The beast tamer who was kicked out of the hero’s party and met a super cat girl on my watchlist because it sounded like a second-rate mashup of Pharmacist & Princess and Slime-killing Witch, complete with fight-happy red dragon girl.

I was, however, bored and sleepless due to a minor reaction to the bivalent booster and a flu shot, so I watched the first episode (“Dear Crunchyroll, buy some streaming bandwidth”), and Our Cheerful Loser gets one of the most contrived meet-cutes of recent years, jumping in to rescue a catgirl from a tiger, except he can’t fight it at all and she was capable of killing it with a single blow at any time. And then she begs him to tame her, without any explanation of why this is useful or beneficial to either of them, and goes on to praise his super-duper awesome taming power that he thought was nothing special.

Coming soon: Our Taming Hero collects a busty dragon-waifu, twin loli fairy-waifus, and a loli foxgirl-waifu, all extremely powerful and inexplicably susceptible to his super taming power. There’s also a lady knight who joins up to restore the reputation of her order, but it doesn’t sound like she’s on the taming list.

Voice notes: Catgirl = Senko-san, Dragon-girl = Lola from Hidden Dungeon (also the lead catgirl in Futoku no guild and the guild receptionist in Flatcat & Sword), Fairy#1 = Lily from Zombieland Saga, Foxgirl = Kaede Foxia from Realist Hero, Knight = Emilia & Megumin & Sagiri. Our Hero’s most notable role was as Yuito in Iroduku.

Love Flops

Out of idle curiosity, I watched the trailer for one of the last shows to premier this season (the last appears to be Urusei Yatsura, which will run 2 cours, take a break, and then run 2 more), and the girls are cute. That’s the good news. Other than that, it looks like a real paint-by-numbers ecchi harem comedy with conveniently color-coded haremettes throwing themselves at a guy whose only attractive feature is Being The Protagonist.

(unrelated harem is unrelated)

Posted by a human…

“Stable Diffusion made this”.

Daring Fireball swings and misses

“Smartphones replaced everything Radio Shack sold 30 years ago: still cameras, video cameras, music players, radios, alarm clocks, calculators, tape recorders, and, yes, cellular dumbphones.”

Gruber clearly never set foot inside of a Radio Shack. Probably scared he’d catch something, like a clue.

Let’s take a look at some of the things sold in a 1992 Radio Shack catalog (that took five seconds to find with google):

• electronic keyboards
• police-band scanners
• intercoms
• baby monitors
• PA systems
• bullhorns
• strobe lights
• alarm systems
• air purifiers
• printers
• surge protectors
• RC cars
• electronics kits (not just for kids)
• soldering irons, multimeters, breadboards, ICs, semiconductors, tubes, crystals, LEDs, resistors, logic probes, diodes, transistors, cables, adapters, wire, crimping tools, relays, transformers, fans, motors, switches, fuses, etc

(those last items being the things people went to Radio Shack for long before 1992…)

(sadly, they never sold these)

Things I never expected to write…

Gunsite accepts TSA Pre and Global Entry as proof you’re trainable.

Unrelated,

I appreciate the way Engadget randomly serves up WEBP images to Safari users, the only major browser that has no idea what to do with them. It really speeds up their site.

The Ultimate FN PS90 Accessory

TP-Link delivered!

As promised, they sent the rack-mounting kit for my 24-port switch, so I can clean up the rack in the basement.

I think I’ll celebrate with a Coke…

NSFW

Beast Tamer 2

Our Catgirl-Waifu’s rapid personality shifts would make a personal-injury lawyer cream his pants imagining all the whiplash lawsuits he could file.

Meanwhile, Our Mild-Mannered Hero had no idea that taming a member of a supreme species would grant him a full share of her super-duper physical powers, so now he’s a fucking superman in a fight. Naturally, this gets his pet pussy purring.

In other news, The Hero-Party Bitch Witch gets a clear explanation of just how special he always was, but refuses to believe it.

New haremette next week! As you can see from her fashion sense, Our Red-hot Dragon-waifu won’t settle for light petting.

Breaking bread

I’m not sure how I ended up with too much salt in my dough, but a single taste explained why the loaf didn’t look right coming out of the machine.

Fast service

I ordered a brick of 5.7x28 from LuckyGunner at 2:30 PM Friday. It arrived at 1:30 PM Saturday. Pity the extra PS90 mags I ordered last week (from somewhere else) aren’t here yet.

Related,

This is a very silly pistol. I like the idea of building a pistol around a 50-round PS90 mag, and at least they made it fully ambidextrous, but inverting the magazine puts the barrel way above your hand, as you can see in this NRA quick look video.

It’s apparently on the third or fourth hardware revision already, due to problems discovered (and apparently fixed under warranty) in the early shipments. But you wouldn’t know that unless you went looking on gun forums, because it’s not mentioned anywhere on their web site.

Also, it comes with a custom-fitted hard case, which you’ll have to either throw away or cut new foam for, because while the gun is specifically designed to use with add-on optical sights, the case has no room for them.

Unrelated,

They dressed up Lum’s new voice actress to promote the series. I hope her voice is more enthusiastic than her cosplay; modeling is clearly not her chosen career path, and she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience.

In which Our Plucky Heroine cleans house, meets the neighbors, duels her master, picks up a girl and envies her bustline, and finally opens shop just in time to deal with a crisis! (next episode)

(still pretty much no fan-art, so this is by the light novel artist)

Router woes

Looks like both of my old Shuttle DS61 firewall routers have failing memory. I swapped the original out a while back because the SSD was failing after 8 years, but on Sunday the second box failed while I was downloading a bunch of Windows patches and game updates, limped along for a while after I rebooted it, and then failed again.

Meanwhile, I’d rebuilt the original on a new SSD, so I swapped back, and it promptly failed after a few minutes. Since each crash involved me going down to the basement, I went ahead and built a brand new one on a Protectli Vault 6 Port firewall appliance that I bought earlier this year and had just never gotten around to setting up. So far it’s been rock solid.

With the new rack in the basement, I’m thinking of buying another one and finally setting up OpenBSD’s CARP failover system. Easier than constant trips to the basement. 😁

(and this is where I praise OpenBSD for making it so quick and easy to configure new machines; I was up and running again in about five minutes on brand new hardware, since all I had to do was install the OS from USB, copy /etc from the old machine, and edit the configs to reflect the different NIC type (s/re/em/g); everything else I could do later)

In which Our Catgirl Heroine makes it to town, joins the Adventurer’s Guild, and acquires enough money for a room. I’d say that we’re moving really slow, but if this were the light novel, Fran wouldn’t even be in the story yet.

Our Spunky Receptionist provides most of the exposition and non-combat action this week, having squeezed herself into a uniform several sizes too small.

Floors incoming!

They’re officially showing up Monday morning to start replacing my floors.

They’re officially showing up Friday morning to move everything out of the way for the first stage, including the washer and dryer.

Which means I’ll be spending tonight and Thursday night boxing things back up that I want to be able to find again in a hurry after the work is all done, carrying them all down to the basement, and then packing to spend a few days in a hotel so I can work while they work.

Tactical Bib!

Why, yes, I did buy an “executive shirt protector” to keep my PS90 from covering me with burned powder. I also bought the snap-on brass catcher (which is less intrusive than the ones for side-ejecting guns), but that doesn’t arrive until Friday.

And, no, I don’t intend to reload the brass (I sold my old single-stage press in California, and the PS90 magazine requires special handling), I just want to be able to let friends shoot it at the range without bringing along a spare shirt.

Okay, “thin veneer of isekai”, but…

Flatcat for the win!

Reincarnated as a sword book 11 is currently the #1 light novel on Amazon US. It comes out a month from now.

Renai Failure 1

Love Flops is worse than I thought it would be. I made it as far as the dog scene, but did not enjoy anything that happened before that point, either. Honestly, I wish they’d have licensed Futoku no Guild instead; it would be less painful to watch, and that’s really saying something.

Urusei Yatsura 1

No. Not even with earplugs to mute the screams (theirs).

(Vermeil would look good in Lum’s outfit…)

Reborn as a mimic with amazing legs

No, seriously, this is a thing that exists. I have to admit, a mimic makes more sense than a slime.

It took a lot longer to find happy-fun NSFW pics, between models trying/failing to look “sultry” or “sexy”, and the fact that most AV actresses don’t seem to be too happy with their career choices (and the vast majority of nude models in Japan these days are porn starlets; didn’t used to be that way).

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Beast Tamer 3

In which we answer the question, “what if someone remade Dog Days as a light-hearted slave-harem comedy without the isekai element?”.

Also apparently without the MCSAs. In fact, it’s pretty much a fan-service-free zone; Our Skirted Haremettes even possess powerful anti-upskirt magic.

Anyway, after two episodes with the catgirl-waifu, we apparently get two with the dragon-waifu. Note that after worrying last week that acquiring her powers might burn out Our Tamer’s nervous system, Our Catgirl doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about him doubling the amperage by adding a dragon; He’s Just That Good.

Hoe Harem 1-3

More officially, Raising my farming skills somehow made me powerful.

And by powerful, they mean “godlike”, because his perfectly ordinary fantasy world has status screens that everyone can use, and that give clear numbers showing him to be off the scale, enough so that within minutes of getting his DLC upgrade, he rescues the local princess in a way guaranteed to set fire to her panties. To which he is of course oblivious.

Why did I watch this? Because there was a lot of dead time in the Confluence upgrade I ran on Saturday (dumping and reloading the DB to upgrade from Postgres 9.6 to 14, rsyncing the shared-home content, running the upgrade, reindexing, etc, etc).

Also, the haremettes are cute, particularly short-haired heroine-wannabe Ruri, who hasn’t shown up yet, sadly.

Note that the one who glomps him in the OP is not a haremette. At least I hope not; she’s his mom.

(there’s hardly even any inept porn for this show, much less decent fan-art; then again, in the first two episodes, they really only introduced the first haremette, and episode three ends on a cliffhangerpigsticker)

When the sun’s juuuuuust right…

…I can’t close my garage door. At this time of year, that happens to be right about 5 PM.

Fortunately, I saw this twenty years ago at the old house, so I knew why the same remote control that was able to open the garage at a distance of 75 feet suddenly couldn’t close it from 6 feet away: the sun is striking the do-not-crush-things sensor. The quick fix is to tape a piece of cardboard next to it as a sunshade.

Or not leave the house while the sun’s up. 😁

In which Our Glowing Alchemigal saves one life for money, and then saves everyone’s life for free, although she’s sure to make a tidy profit by harvesting gooey bits from the raging mob of giant flaming bears that she pretty much kills without any help and at no risk to herself. Clearly this is the same sort of “alchemy” that Edward Elric practiced…

Floor up, floor down

The front half of the house gets covered back up Wednesday. By the way, I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but this is the stuff we’re using. Today was spent smoothing, leveling, and de-squeaking, so the flooring guy is going to, um, “hit the ground running” in the morning. I won’t be hanging around and getting in the way; I’ve been in a hotel since Sunday, and I just show up in the morning and evening.

“Do you have a floor preference?”

    “Yeah, I would like a floor.”

“No, what level?”

    “How about… ‘Beginner’?”

(and if you find that quote naggingly familiar, as I did, it’s from an early Paula Poundstone concert)

In which Our Flat-Affect Flatcat lights up after acquiring Our Visionary Blacksmith’s conveniently cute armor, and Random Lingerie Shopkeep saves us from the perilous possibility of no-pantsu shots. The animators have so far expressed no interest in upskirting Our Underage Heroine, but best to avoid temptation.

Exposition and status screens are kept relatively low-key this week, continuing the trend of avoiding the stat-overdose present in the light novels. Other things are also nicely streamlined, with Garrus just handwaving away how he happened to have some cute armor on the ready-to-wear rack.

And cute is indeed the theme of this show, despite the jarring tone shift in the OP. Fran is an adorable engine of destruction, who’s happy just to have good food, a soft bed, and unlimited monsters to kill.

(I hope the show is successful enough to show her reaching her goal in a future season, and that it’s handled better than in the light novels, which spring it on the reader and then reveal the details in a flashback)

“Squeak, I tell you, squeak!”

Flooring guy hadn’t been told that some of the squeaks are not the usual sort of thing where the boards have come loose from the joists over the years, but are the result of metal cross-braces in the basement having worked themselves loose. Those aren’t something he’s equipped to fix, so he called the main contractor, who was already planning to handle them himself.

(classical reference)

Photoshop-be-gone!

The latest updates to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite are not compatible with macOS Catalina, although it looks like they’ll continue to do security updates and bug-fixes for a while. One more reason to finish migrating things to my Windows 11 laptop!

Hoe Harem 4

In which Our Feckless Farmer faces a legendary dragon, armed only with the power of… another legendary dragon. And his farmer’s soul, which is equally important. So, basically, just being insanely OP isn’t enough, and he gets even-more-powerful help for no good reason.

Does he manage to save Our Busty Guild Receptionist? Well, yeah, obviously, since she’s in the credits as a haremette. The experience not only cures her depression and survivor’s guilt, it makes her a little bonkers, as well as a suitably equipped Companion In Arms (and legs, and quite likely wings and a tail).

She doesn’t yet know that her new romantic rival is Our Besotted Princess, but I’m sure it will come up soon. Meanwhile, Our Hapless Hoe-master is inexplicably weak to being molested by orcs of both sexes, despite his ability to one-shot a dragon with a carrot.

Next week, Ruri!

(unrelated swordswoman is not Ruri, and, seriously, enough with the orc-rape running gag, please)

Beast Tamer 4

In which Our Thoroughly-tamed Dragon-Waifu learns important lessons about friendship, loyalty, and not wandering around in Condition White. Also, the underwhelming secret origin of Our Taming Hero!

Next week, Our Asshole Adventurers come back to mess with his peace of mind.

(and, yes, he gained super-fire-magic from last week’s taming)

Question of the day…

Has anyone written a “Reincarnated As Truck-kun” meta-isekai story yet?

Glorious typo!

In P.C. Hodgell’s latest Kencyr novel, Deathless Gods, a character is described as having a “scowling continence”. 😁

I had to stop and reread the line just in case, because in the previous book, there was an incident where a pair of abused twins used their powers to inflict explosive diarrhea on their tormenters. As one does.

(picture is definitely unrelated; you’re welcome)

This week, Our Flash Heroine makes a quick recovery from the effort of slaughtering the raging mob of giant flaming bears last week, enough so that she decides to visit the nearest big town and makes a three-day trip in half a day. There she meets a bad alchemist and a good alchemist, turns a profit on gooey bits, and heads home in time to invite Our Gatherer Girls to move in, get her house repaired, and make magic induction ranges for both herself and the local inn.

That sounds like a lot, but the pacing still feels like casual slice-of-life, mostly due to the time spent on Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

(spooky cute girl doing spooky cute things is unrelated but seasonal)

Late Floor Mold

Mold-ing, that is. The flooring was ordered back in July, and arrived at the warehouse well over a month ago. So it came as a surprise to me that the shoe molding wasn’t even ordered until Friday. The guy installing the floors was equally surprised, when he asked the contractor last Tuesday when it would be on-site so he could finish the front half of the house.

So when it came time to move everything from the back of the house onto the finished sections, we had to leave 2-3 feet for access to the walls, so now everything has to get moved an additional time to put it all back where it belongs on Thursday. sigh

On the bright side, my new custom bedroom set from the local Amish furniture store is ready, and will be delivered Thursday. By English truck, of course.

(pretty sure Kiki doesn’t do furniture deliveries…)

In which a mountain of exposition is bookended by some good old-fashioned goblin-slaughtering. In the middle, some very mild cheesecake, as safety bubbles protect Our Maiden Adventurer from exploitation, and even Our Bountiful Receptionist doesn’t show the goods in the bath; not that kind of show.

(Fran-art continues to be in short supply, despite the apparent popularity of the show)

Home = Depot

Yesterday, I had furniture being delivered, plants being removed, flooring being finished, the landscape designer showing up to suggest some changes, the contractor showing up to figure out how to fix the entry to one of the showers (the old piece was damaged by heavy wheelchair use), three different package-delivery companies dropping things off, “my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it”.

Sadly, they ran out of flooring and shoe molding, and while the sales rep managed to find more from the same lot, it has to be trucked in from a warehouse in California.

The shoe molding was the contractor’s late ordering, the shortage of flooring was the sales rep’s miscalculation. Despite measuring the interior and having the original blueprints in hand, instead of ordering at least 104%, we ended up with about 98%. Sigh.

Today, I’ve got a plumber coming to re-seat the last toilet (new floor is significantly lower than the old one in that room), two guys coming to help me move furniture back into place, my sister coming for the weekend, and the Dread Pirate Roberts is here for your souls. There will be no survivors.

Hoe Harem 5

In which Our Wannabe Heroine Ruri instantly claims the coveted Best Girl position. Also Breast Girl, because the camera just can’t stop panning up from her impressive chest to her lively face. More, please.

Our Overpowered Overprotective Mom, on the other hand, is a real pain (literally and figuratively). Sadly, I think the writers believe her severe physical abuse of husband and son is funny. Less, please.

Next week looks to uncover The Mystery Of Ruri, while hopefully also uncovering The Body Of Ruri. Fingers crossed, but likely broken in three places by Mom, whose secret was almost revealed, and which is almost certainly the reason Our Hoe Master accidentally became OP.

(unrelated swordswoman is unrelated; I swear there’s even less fan-art for this show than there was last week, and the only picture of Ruri is recognizable only due to her costume)

Beast Tamer 5

In which Our Pricktastic Hero Party really, really needs to learn to read the room… as soon as they recover from the savage beatdown inflicted by Our Tamer And His Amazing Waifus. Seriously, I think they all need clean panties now; especially the two guys.

Next week: into the woods! Which will probably involve a cameo by the chastened hero party, and some tag-team waifu-taming action.

Clean Sweep

As in, I did a lot of sweeping and mopping, after staring in awe at just how much vegetation they cleaned out of my yard. They left the healthy trees and took out pretty much everything else, and the new plants will start going into the ground in a few days.

They should be starting on the new drainage and the privacy hedge this week, as well as ripping out the grass down by the street.

(sadly, none of the slashing crew looked like this…)

The literal meaning of リブ生地 is “rib fabric”, but in context, it refers almost exclusively to snug knit sweaters. This theme brought to you by Best Girl Ruri (sadly not pictured).

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