Officially, Dekoboko Majo no Oyako Jijou (“The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch”). I’ve always thought dekoboko (bumpiness, roughness; imbalance, inequality) was an interesting word, largely because of how it’s written: 凸凹. There aren’t a lot of Tetris kanji.

Anyway, this is a show about Our Legal Loli Witch Mama and Her Voluptuous Witchy Adopted Daughter. Cons: it’s a four-koma gag comedy. Pros: voluptuous witchy adopted daughter.

Verdict: I lasted 4.5 minutes, and that includes the opening credits. Too shouty, and there’s something off about the faces. This was not unexpected, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

Time to wash the memory of this away with a Komi/Yor crossover:

(this is the second “found a baby in the woods” show of the season; how many more will there be?)

Someday, my (3d) prints will come

Looks like the latest firmware update bricked my Bambu Lab X1C. Customer support should will be mailing a new AP board out to me in a day or so.

Update: While the initial response from customer service took a few days, once it was in someone's queue, I got responses on both Saturday and Sunday. So, yes, they still need to staff up (the cloud hasn't been their only difficulty adjusting to success), but once you reach someone, they're good.

The one snag is that there's a final handshake when you replace the AP board, and that's sending them the old and new serial numbers so they can update your registration in their system, so you can re-bind your printer to your account. For The Cloud, of course.

Meet Our Shy Heroine Shy, who is both shy and Shy. Gifted with generic superpowers and crippling social anxiety, this newbie superhero is… less of a goofball than the more established heroes in her world. They skipped the origin story and dropped you right into her daily life, but also managed to cram in an entire crisis-of-confidence arc, set up Our Busty Drunken Popular Russian Heroine as a big sister figure, have Kikuko Inoue show up to announce a future conflict that’s worse than war, put Our Creepy Lurker Boy in the background, and still have time to airdrop Our Future Best Friend in at the end.

No idea where this is going, but it follows the same Western superhero tropes as My Hero Academia, including the first thing that All Might pointed out to his protégé: the heroes are the ones who run toward danger.

Verdict: if they can keep the shy/Shy thing from making her a one-trick pony girl (as opposed to a trick-turning pony-girl, which would liven up that other show…), I think I’ll like it. Lots of well-known voice actors in this one as well, including a few favorites. Bonus points for the lead actress not sounding anything like her vampire waifu from Hoe Harem or her desert princess from Restaurant To Another World.

Fan-art note: searching for the official title シャイ is useless, because it’s a substring match for the far-more-popular Idolmaster: Shiny Colors series. Hashtag SHY works better, excluding 99%+ of the irrelevant results, leaving you with a small number of SFW pics where the characters are at least recognizable (and the usual porn).

(the rest of the new shows I’ll try to watch won’t be until Saturday, when I expect to be disappointed by Shut-in Vampire, and hope to not be disappointed by Tearmoon and Potion Loli)

My mother found her old cast iron teapot and gave it to me, because I had none. It looks almost exactly like this one, for the very good reason that it’s the exact same model, only much older (on mine, the company name is done in basically-unreadable seal script, it came with an aluminum infuser insert, and it lacks the fancy bottom design for better compatibility with induction).

By the way, Today I Learned the difference between a tea kettle and a tea pot, and mine is indeed a kettle, intended for boiling water on a range, even though you can put tea in the infuser. Japanese tea pots have an enameled interior that can’t take direct heat, while the kettles are just seasoned iron. Both have replaceable stainless-steel mesh infusers available in a full range of sizes.

FYI, this is not seasoned the way a cast iron skillet is, because the oil would taste nasty. You maintain and touch-up the interior and exterior finish with… tea. Strong tea.

“Let’s just say we’d like to avoid any Imperial entanglements”

Dear Amazon Japan, when you use auto-translated listings to sell something, you really need to get the unit conversions right. Especially when you also list it on Amazon US with a completely different mistake.

Amazon US: Iwachu 12302 Teapot, Type 5 Arare, Black, 1.2 gal (0.65 L), Inner and Lid Back, Enameled Processing, Nambu Ironware

Amazon Japan: 岩鋳 Iwachu 急須 5型アラレ 黒 0.65L 内面・蓋裏ホーロー加工 南部鉄器 12302

Amazon Japan, auto-translation: Iwachu Iwachu 12302 Type 5 Arare Teapot, Black, 2.2 fl oz (0.65 L), Enameled Interior and Lid Lining, Nambu Ironware

Apparently in Japan, 0.65 liters is 2.2 fluid ounces, while in the US, it’s 1.2 gallons. So it’s not that the Imperial system is difficult, it’s that people raised on Metric are stupid. 😁

(there’s tea somewhere in this picture, honest!)

There’s a great deal of sweetness to this show, and I’m not just talking about the cute little merchant girl. To quote an underrated movie, Our Daddy-Loving Heroine suffers from a romanticism which is completely incurable, and even worse, highly contagious.

Not that they don’t find room for a big chunk of exposition and worldbuilding in between introducing Our Single Dad to Our Talent-Scout Countess, Her Hero-Worshipping Adventurer Sister, and The Brains Of The Family (our previously-rescued damsel-in-red-underrims).

Recognizing that the Ange-can’t-get-home joke has just about worn itself out, the next-episode title reassures the audience that they’re about done with that. The bit about her inventing an adventurer title for her beloved dad, however, is the gift that keeps on giving.

Verdict: Ange’s not the only one with daddy issues, but at least Helvetica has a keeper.

(after their introduction this week, you could forgive the villagers for thinking the wrong sister became Countess…)

Meanwhile…

I’m waiting for the glue to dry on the replacement AP board for my Bambu Lab X1C. It arrived Wednesday night, and I carefully removed the old board, then put off installing the new one until morning. Which became afternoon, trending into evening, and then I got busy. Presumably because of all the vibration, they use silicone glue to hold all the connectors in place, and they have you wait a full hour after attaching the new ribbon cable before attaching the others.

The instructions are clear, but it would be nice if they made the thumbnails links, since the embedded pictures are actually a decent size if you right-click and open them in another tab.

(yeah, as if Lammis wouldn’t send Boxxo to the moon if she caught him changing into the dirty-magazine machine again…)

Tea for two

After re-seasoning the interior of my new old iron tea kettle, I made some actual tea. I used the same cheapest-on-amazon oolong loose-leaf tea that I bought for seasoning, and it was actually pretty good.

I made the mistake of using the correct amount of leaves for the full water capacity of the kettle, and there was barely enough room for the lid after they expanded. I also didn’t really need nearly a quart of tea, so I only drank half of it and left the rest (sans infuser) to see how long it would stay drinkably hot. (quite a while…)

Y’know, it can be hard to tell the difference between Frieren allowing her apprentice to learn a valuable lesson, and Frieren being an idiot.

Verdict: more of the same, in a good way.

Dear Bethesda,

In Starfield, please disable all animation and interaction with and between members of the crew when the player is in the cockpit. It’s bad enough that Cora composes haiku and tells dad jokes as soon as you warp into a system and get jumped by pirates, but when you’re in the special post-spoiler ship, they all casually stroll in front of the cockpit, blocking your view of attacking ships.

More Pixiv jargon…

Saw this one for the first time today, while looking for something else: 茶巾 (read “chakin”). I immediately recognized the characters for “tea” and “cloth”, and indeed I’d run into it earlier in the week while looking up my cast iron tea kettle: a chakin is used to safely handle a hot lid and wipe drips off the spout.

To me, it had no obvious connection to “skirt tied overhead”. The answer lies in the baking world, with chakin-shibori, a method of tightly wrapping mashed ingredients before baking, either with a literal tea cloth that doesn’t go into the oven, or with a wrapper that does.

Dear Emacs,

Please stop line-wrapping URLs that contain CJK characters. That is all.

(pretty-please with kittens on top)

(…with the exception of the show Pixy found that doesn’t premiere for another two weeks, for some reason)

Shut-in Vampire Princess

The girls are well-drawn. That is the only draw. If it weren’t for the maid’s pleasant-but-affectless voice, I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did; Our Blood-Hating Vampire Princess’ whining grates on my ears. Honestly, the only thing I liked about her was the dolphin plushie.

Verdict: I might check back in a few weeks to see if they tone down the slapstick and whining, and maybe get the empress and the maid into a bath scene together.

(this had an unpleasant aftertaste, kind of like the “Caramel Cold Brew” M&M’s I just made the mistake of trying…)

Tearmoon Empire, episode 1

A lot of reviewers are categorizing this as a “repenting villainess” story, but that doesn’t quite fit, even setting aside the dubious nature of the whole “villainess” genre (which appears to be a trope without an origin). In her first life, the crime Tia was executed for was being a clueless self-centered teenager. She wasn’t responsible for any of the misery that led to revolution, she was just the last member of the royal family, hated as a symbol.

In any case, this is not Realist Hero with his endless quotes from Machiavelli. This is a romp, in which Our Nearly-Headless Heroine’s greatest fear is being chased down by a cute chibi guillotine. There is a very real guillotine in her memories of what was, but her future past is being filtered through the mind of a spoiled 12-year-old.

Verdict: a little shouty, but she did just have her head chopped off, so it can be forgiven for now. I’d prefer to hear more of the adult-Mia voice, at least for her inner monologue, but oh well. Speaking of voices, chibi-guillotine is a former NGT48 idol singer, so that’s… something, I suppose.

(not fan-art; the official cover artist is on Pixiv, which is good, because pretty much everything else for this series is badly-drawn porn, and not even much of that)

Potion Loli, episode 1

Speaking of romps, Our Genre-Savvy Heroine rips through the isekai starter tropes at record speed, aided and abetted by some rather inept and stupid gods, only to be dropped in a world that isn’t quite the genre she expected. Armed only with OP cheat skills and evil-chibi eyes, Kaoru sets out for a life of adventure.

Verdict: my (pretty low) expectations were exceeded. Art and animation quality, not so much.

(there’s even less fan-art of this series than of Tearmoon, but even odder is that none of it is porn. yet)

A: “You got your magical girl in my superhero.”

B: “You got your superhero in my magical girl.”

A&B: “Heeeeeey…”

I suspected there’d be some magical-girl tropes showing up, thanks to the conspicuous presence of Our Expository Alien Shrimp, but I didn’t expect a high-speed corrupted-by-creepyboy-and-redeemed-with-the-power-of-heart arc that doubles as backstory for both Our Shy Heroine Shy and Our New Best Friend.

Verdict: still no idea where this is going, still willing to follow.

(I’m kind of getting a Gatchaman Crowds vibe, with more grounded characters)

Unrelated note to self

Next time, do the Ryujin Industries quests before becoming a Freestar Ranger. It’s a bit awkward walking into a building after you’ve killed their boss.

Because we missed missing shows?

Crunchyroll has jumped on the “linear channel” bandwagon, in which streaming services schedule blocks of programs with ads, so that we can return to the days of our primitive ancestors and watch Broadcast Television 2.0. Will they also add static, breaking news interrupts, weather alerts, and infomercials? Maybe some After-School Specials?

Decent bread recipe

My mother stumbled over this recipe for condensed milk bread. It promised the moisture and texture of the various tangzhong breads “made in a less complicated way”.

By which the author means “using condensed milk and yogurt instead of sugar and an egg”; the actual effort of making the tangzhong is trivial. Still, a quick run through my bakers-percentage script showed it as containing even more moisture than a tangzhong dough (80% versus 72-75%), so I tried it out, skipping all the complicated shaping and just pressing Go on the bread machine.

Worked fine, and stayed fresh as long as a tangzhong bread, due to the high moisture content. I think next time I’ll use the dough cycle and bake it in my pullman pan, for a better sandwich-loaf shape.

(downside: if you don’t bake several batches, you end up with a lot of leftover condensed milk and yogurt, which are arguably less versatile than eggs and sugar)

Got Frieren?

Want more? They’re streaming short gag comics on Youtube.

(speaking of things you won’t find in the main series…)

California freezin’

Clean and abundant natural gas bad, scarce unreliable expensive electricity good. But at least fast-food workers will be paid $22/hour! Both of them!

All I’ll say for now about this week’s events

Joe Biden paid Iran to murder jews. Anyone who voted for him (including the photocopiers) voted for this.

If you’re left wondering whether the guild master raided the nursing home or the nuthouse, I think it’s time to embrace the power of “and”…

Anyway, with Sufficient Firepower And Exposition, Our Homeward-Bound Heroine is finally able to take a decent vacation, and Our Boyish Archer and Our Excitable Mage get to find out if Our Favorite Dad lives up to the hype. Next week, that is, because the panned stills, speedlines, and CG that made up most of The Big Fight took up a lot of time.

Verdict: this completes the tutorial quest, and the open-world portion of the game is now available.

…okay, so maybe I was simultaneously playing Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield over the weekend. Not for long, I just completely re-installed the first two with a bunch of QoL mods, converting them to the modern Vortex mod manager. The old installs were pretty crufty and out of date, and predated the Nexus Mods collections feature.

Related, my most-upvoted-ever Reddit comment is about one of the first things I stumbled across in Starfield:

The first random base I went to was an abandoned research farm where the scientists must have been very lonely, since there was a bottle of lotion and a box of tissues next to every bed. And plenty more stocked in the closets.

Frieren, episode 6

I have decided that this is the antidote for all the recent shows taken over by shouting: Action shouting, Comedy shouting, Romance shouting, etc. I’ll let it speak for itself, which it does well.

Verdict: oasis of calm. and silliness. and a horrible OP song.

Tearmoon Empire, episode 2

“That’s what I do: I eat sweets and know things.”

Our Scheming Heroine has a one-track mind, and that track has a guillotine blade riding in it, aimed at her neck. To avoid that messy finish, she recruits Our Economic Genius, who instantly falls victim to Mia’s Retro-Precognitive Genius, impressed beyond measure at having his own future words thrown back at him. Rescued from obscurity, he swiftly begins to carry out his own will disguised as hers, only to be stunned into silence as her RPG reveals problems beyond even what he expected. Our Cuddly Loyal Maid already had a bad case of Mia-itis, and thanks to a timely ice-cream social, now they’re both incurable.

A bit shouty, but mostly Mia’s internal panicky monologue when she remembers that she’s utterly clueless and simply repeating memories and events written in her future-past diary. Which is no longer precisely the book she remembers from the future, even though the ending is still the same, so far. One important lesson still in her (next week) future is: don’t say things that trip death flags.

Verdict: if the “pure self-interest mistaken for compassionate genius” thing bothers you, with Mia’s followers inventing unlikely explanations for her words and actions, now would be a good time to quit, because there’s a whole lot more of it coming. Or just roll with it; I’m amused.

(unrelated Komi due to a relevant fan-art shortage)

Potion Loli, episode 2

In which the cast explodes and I’m not sure how many of them will be regulars. Fortunately (?) there’s plenty of exposition and lecturing.

Verdict: less interesting than last week, but I won’t write it off yet. Not as much fun as Tearmoon, though.

(speaking of scheming lolis, I give you Elf Yamada)

Rerun’s Special Magic, episodes 1-2

All through the opening scene with the terrible CG dragon, I found myself wistfully thinking of Peterhausen. Something to do with putting An Unreasonably Powerful Wizard in a magic school and having talky duels break out.

Anyway, with a voice last heard (by me, anyway) playing hero in Miss Kuroitsu (although it’s more like his Log Horizon Shiroe style), Our Second-Chance OP Hero finds himself flung back in time into a high-school hijinks story, and it takes some time for him to adjust emotionally.

The Very Strong Character Designs don’t do it for me, except for Our Little Redheaded Tsundere Senpai and Our Twintailed Gainaxing Tit Queen. Mostly the little redhead. Desim himself has a chin that could slice steel like butter, and he’s not the only refugee from a BL manga.

Verdict: the tonal whiplash in the first episode is pretty severe. Everything before the timeslip was a show I wasn’t really interested in, and everything after was a completely different show I wasn’t really interested in. Except for the little redhead, so you know how I’ll be judging next week’s episode.

Shy, episode 3

Y’know, in my headcanon, these two are already dating, but it’s not that kind of show. Inasmuch as I’m able to figure out precisely what kind of show it’s going to be, anyway.

So, as it was written in the ancient scrolls known as Marvel Team-Up, Our Shy Heroine Shy must battle another hero for her own good. Next week, because she and Our Surprisingly Healthy Best Friend spent so much time bonding at the mall that there was barely time for borscht and selfies before introducing another of the heroes and establishing that he is ruthless and merciless and probably has a secret teddy-bear lingerie collection that we’ll find out about later.

Verdict: drifting back over the line to the Western superhero tropes, but with a few curveballs to keep you on your toes. Still no idea where this is going, but I like the characters we’re spending time with.

ObStarfield

Victor Aiza is the worst monster in future history.

Loosely related, when forced to choose who to save in the Entangled quest, I went with the researchers, because Ethan Hughes deserves to live for handling the weirdness so calmly.

(I did save Rafael once and invite him to join my crew, but the only benefit is that you get special dialogue when you run into the random stranded geologist)

Roses are dead,
   violence is cool;
Space should be empty,
   but planets are, too.

Starfield Subtraction

Compared to Fallout 4, a lot of complexity was removed. Outposts are a significantly feature-reduced version of settlements, both energy and melee weapons take a back seat to good old-fashioned projectiles, and melee weapons cannot be customized at all. It looks like most of the combat animations were stripped down as well. Expect to see some of this return as paid DLC, since we all know it’s built into the engine.

For more fun, I just noticed that if you try to use the wakizashi (one of the few melee options), the third-person idle position for it has the blade upside down. Every other position has you holding it edge-down (including your inventory mannequin), but whoever designed the idle animation flipped it.

Gotta say, though, you can take some pretty screenshots. I need to turn this one into a virtual postcard, with a caption like: Leave the crowds behind on beautiful Toliman II.

(the joke is that it’s not only -18°C, the human population of this world was wiped out by A Very Nasty Predator; naturally, I built an outpost there)

Unrelated and NSFW…

“I claim this moon in the name of…”

NSFW

Maybe I’ll just play the character generator…

I’m not very far into it, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of do-it-again-stupid events. Wrong conversation choice or failed a saving throw? Flee from combat against a large group 3 levels higher than you, or reload from your most recent save. For extra fun, have it happen while the party has been forcibly split for story reasons, and then start a fight on the other side as well.

There also seems to be a severe shortage of sidequests, at least in the early game; you’re pretty much always on the rails.

But, hey, at least you can give your female character a penis!

(hmmm, maybe that’s what made that maid so mysterious…)

Every once in a while someone manually goes to the effort of posting spam comments here, which I can delete with one click and which never get indexed by search engines anyway. Click.

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 4

In which Our Obsessed S-Rank Daughter wallows in hometown nostalgia, Our Favorite Dad fosters a catgirl, Our Adventure Gals manage to bathe without significant fan-service, stern parenting succeeds by failing, and we learn Something Important about how Bel lost his leg.

Verdict: I enjoyed this little interlude almost as much as they did, but I think it’s time everyone got back to work. That nameless villain’s not going to defeat himself.

(no new fan-art for this show, so here’s a cute dragonette foodie)

Top. Picks.

Amazon is heavily pushing “top picks for you” that include new books by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith. I don’t want to know what they were paid for these promotions, but they really stand out from the isekai novels, snack foods, and electronic gadgets that make up the bulk of their recommendations for me, and which are actually based on my purchases. I’m not interested in a sequel to The Firm, either, but I can at least understand why other people might be.

For two months now, they’ve also been constantly exhorting me to buy the hot-new-release Steven Brust novel, Lyorn, which doesn’t come out until April.

On that note, “Dear Amazon, this product couldn’t be gayer if it included a picture of two gay men drilling their buns, which it does”:

A glitch in the Matrix Starfield

Twice now, I’ve gone through the Freestar Rangers questline and ended up having to hoof it at least five kilometers through heavy jungle, because the game generated a random POI that overlapped with the place I was supposed to be landing. And there’s nothing to do during that run except scan the local critters and maybe kill a few, all of which are level 1 and completely trivial. It was supposed to drop you off about 100 meters from your destination; your quest objective explicitly tells you to land there.

For more fun, the distance-to-target display is wrong, so you have to use the terrible on-world mapping to figure out roughly how much farther you need to go. Kind of ruins the tension of the big fight.

(there are no ground vehicles in Starfield, despite how sparsely populated the planets are with procedurally-generated content)

Trevor’s Red Tape

An exercise in side-quest design and lack of ground vehicles…

Random Martian: Hey, you should maybe talk to Trevor; I guess he’s having some problems with the mine.

walkwalkwalk

Trevor: Hey, this mine we’re working that’s right under the middle of town? Yeah, we’re way below quota; could you maybe grab a cutter and get me some iron? For free?

bzzzzzzzt-plonk

Trevor: Great, now what we really need is a bunch of new equipment, but that dumb exec just won’t approve my POs. How about you fly up to Deimos and apply for a job as his executive assistant, fly back and hack into the local HR database to delete every other applicant, and then answer his mail and approve my PO?

whooooosh

clickclickclick

(fast-travel)

walkwalkwalk

sneaksneaksneak

Exec: Hello, assistant; did you change your hair, or are you a new one? I’m such a nitwit, but the first thing I need you to do is find out why I can’t get my special shipment; there’s some kind of hold on it.

walkwalkwalk

Mars Governor: Yeah, that nitwit’s got a lot of unpaid taxes, but if you do me a tiny little favor, I’ll release the hold. The favor? The Crimson Fleet stole my company car starship, and it’s really a sweet ride, but I need you to quietly destroy it, off the record. For insurance reasons.

whooooosh

Crimson Fleet: Seriously, kid, we let you bluff your way onto the ship, but you don’t speak pirate lingo at all, so we’re gonna kill you.

pewpewpew

Crimson Fleet leader’s body: I’m an incriminating letter from the Mars Governor hiring the Fleet to destroy his own ship to hide the evidence of his affair with the woman who ran off with his ship.

Woman’s body: I’m an incriminating suicide note, and she was really, really sorry for all the trouble she caused.

big-bada-boom

(fast-travel)

walkwalkwalk

Mars Governor: Nice work, I’ve released dipshit’s cargo. You didn’t… find anything interesting out there, did you? No? you just blew it up? Great!

walkwalkwalk

Head of Security: Thanks for this incriminating evidence, we’re going to have a little chat with the Governor.

walkwalkwalk

Exec: Ooh, thanks for the package; could you take care of my email now?

clickclickclick

Trevor: Awesome work, the new equipment is on the way. Hank volunteered to go get it, but he should have been back by now. Could you maybe check at the docks?

walkwalkwalk

Docks: Yeah, Hank left a while ago on some pickup job, but it was funny that he didn’t park here when he got back. I mean, there might be a good reason he parked waaaaaaaay over there, but really, that’s kind of a dick move. Or a smuggler move.

walkwalkwalk

Trevor: Gosh, that doesn’t sound right. Check the local bars, and ask him why he did that.

walkwalkwalk

Hank: Yes, I admit that I ripped off my fellow miners, because of reasons you won’t remember long enough to write them down. I repent my actions, though, so let’s go outside and I’ll hand it all over. My ship’s right over there, and while we spend the next 5-10 minutes walking, I’ll explain everything in a way that makes it really obvious that I’m going to try to kill you as soon as we’re alone. Really, really obvious.

walkwalkwalk

walkwalkwalk

walkwalkwalk

pewpewpew

(fast-travel)

walkwalkwalk

Trevor: Wow, Hank was a dick. We’ll go bring his ship back to the docks so we can grab our new equipment. Oh, and could you check up on Rivkah? She doesn’t sound good…

(I left out the step where I had to fly to a shipyard, switch to another ship, and fly back, because I only had auto-turrets and the Governor’s ship wasn’t flagged hostile, so they wouldn’t shoot at it)

Frieren, episode 7

In which there exist creatures who use language only to deceive their enemies, to create an opportunity to strike.

Also, Fern teaches Stark that getting what you ask for is not the same as getting what you want, but also reinforces Frieren’s flaws with positive feedback.

Verdict: more, please, both serious and silly.

Tearmoon, episode 3

In which no plan survives contact with the enemy, especially when it’s authored by two nitwits. Fortunately, Our Hollow-Skulled Heroine succeeds by failing, although her interior monologue remains quite shouty. This week, our compensation comes in the form of a steam-filled bath; I’m not interested in having 12-year-old Mia de-steamed as a Buy-the-Bluray feature, but I’d like to see more of Anne and Rafina.

Verdict: Anne is Best Girl, in or out of the bath.

Potion Loli, episode 3

In which the wisdom of an overworked office lady destroys the spirits of the queen and every noble lady in the kingdom, which was way too talky but briefly funny, and then Our Potion Loli shoves off to Yet Another Kingdom to build a quiet life as housekeeper by day, vigilante healer by night.

Verdict: changing the cast every week forces Kaoru to carry the show solo, and her monologing is getting on my nerves. Don’t know how much more of it I can take. This week’s new cast isn’t in the ED animation, but the ones she’s already run away from are, so…?

(no, not that potion loli!)

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 3

In which my primary reason for continuing to watch this show did not appear even once, and the story is dominated by Our Obnoxious Twintail Who Didn’t Even Gainax This Week and Our Lovestruck Gay Shota Bunnyboy. Bonus negative points for the mustache-twirling (or at least beard-stroking) villains on the school board.

Verdict: this show makes me nostalgic for Vermeil In Gold, and I didn’t really like that show, either. Although it had its charms.

NSFW

Starfield photography

You have to tinker with exposure and filtering, turn off clipping in the console to adjust the height of the camera, and the way the game emulates depth-of-field is painfully awkward, but you can take some decent snapshots in Starfield, and the reward is that they get used as loading screens.

So, I don’t remember the name of this particular moon, but this is what I saw the moment I landed on it:

And this is what it looked like when I turned around:

Back on Toliman II, this young lady really needs to get her priorities straight, because she was absolutely terrified of a gang of Spacers hanging out in an abandoned mine a kilometer away, but wasn’t even a little bit worried about the three Terrormorphs currently sneaking up on her.

(if you’re going to populate the universe with procedural content, you really ought to have some knobs and buttons to tweak, so you don’t end up with oblivious technicians hanging out in t-shirts in -18°C weather on a world where there’s a whole set of quests about how the entire population was wiped out by psychopathic mind-controlling xeno-critters)

(zero-atmosphere outdoor picnics are another common find)

Related,

If you buy the physical edition of Starfield for Windows, you get a DVD box with a Steam code inside, so you might as well skip the middleman. It’s only really useful if you need to buy it as a Christmas/Birthday present.

(I got it free as part of Game Pass Ultimate, but MS alumni price is half of retail if I didn’t have that, or if it eventually leaves the portfolio)

Before Firefly…

…there was Titan A.E.? There are plenty of reasons that this movie flopped, but it wasn’t the fault of the screenwriters: Ben Edlund & Joss Whedon. If they’d had any creative control, they might not have gone for the magical genocide ending, although they might have added some waif-fu.

Let’s just get this out of the way first: Our Friendly Concubine sounds nothing like Frieren. Not that Our Medicinal Heroine sounds anything like Tanya Degurechaff, of course.

This one’s an odd duck. Between the animation budget and the avoidance of the currently-trendy anime tropes, it feels more like one of those NHK big-budget historial dramas than a weekly anime. I haven’t read any of the source material (10+ light novels & manga volumes), and I don’t generally do court dramas set in a serial-numbers-filed-off Imperial China, so I have no idea where it’s going or what to expect.

Verdict: a little slow, but entertaining so far. And it doesn’t take itself completely seriously, but also doesn’t assume shouting is humor.

Here’s another oddity: nearly 3,000 pieces of fan-art on Pixiv for the books, and less than 150 of them porn; that’s a ratio you don’t see very often.

(unrelated flat-chested girl who’s good with poison, because I didn’t say the fan-art was good)

Y’know, I was looking forward to the introduction of the black-haired twintail from the OP, but it turns out she brings all the shouty. Let’s keep her seen-but-not-heard from now on, okay?

Before that, though, is the fight we’ve all been waiting for, or at least for it to be over with, since the failure condition set by Our Sociopathic Rockstar Hero would basically end the show. His methods will never make him any friends, but his goal is to light a fire under Our Shy Heroine Shy’s cute little ass, and he succeeds. As a bonus, her powers are no longer generic.

Verdict: the big fight is full of tell-don’t-show, but it still manages to move things forward and develop Shy’s character. I’m still enjoying it. Also, “Praise Conflict!”

That is, changing a long string of weak seasons into a strong one!

(running behind because I had to clean house for guests)

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 5

Enter The Loli! In which it’s all fun and games until someone looses the plot. Our Favorite Dad pays the price for his failed attempt at stern parenting, and then goes on a leisurely trip with Our Adventure Gals to visit Our Noble Sisters, while the power of loli stirs up unrest. Next week, action!

Verdict: a light-hearted transition episode. If you were wondering who three of the chibis were in the ED animation, now you know. Bonus points for Helvetica refusing to give up easily.

(No new fan-art for this show, so here’s an elf who likes bone. I had hot elf chicks on my mind because there are two of them in book 10 of this series, which came out this week; only one of them has boobs even vaguely competitive with Arianne, though, and she will not be appearing this season. Or dressing like Arianne.)

Frieren, episode 8

Fun fact: Our Villainous Villain Lügner shares his voice with Our Favorite Dad. Watching these two shows back-to-back was a little disconcerting.

This week, Frieren’s little smile says an awful lot about what she thinks of her party’s potential. What she doesn’t tell them says something about caring enough to not make them worry about where’s she’s going while they’re off dealing with the threat they know about.

Verdict: aaaaah, that’s the spot. Right there.

(this one needs an “Ex Libris” caption…)

Honou No Haramase Dosanko-Gyaru?

ANN links to two teasers for an upcoming winter harem anime about Gals in Hokkaido who gather around our recently-transplanted Tokyo Potato-kun.

I would swear on a stack of titty-mags that they hired the staff of SQUEEZ (NSFW!) to produce the teasers, if not the actual show. That is, the music and character-introduction style are straight out of a hentai game, and there’s at least one SQUEEZ-scale bust; it’s just missing the nipples, and you know how stingy they can be about that these days, until the Bluray release.

(unrelated cute dragonette foodie is probably not from Hokkaido)

Related…

I broke down and bought the Bluray of Immoral Guild, because for all that it’s a trash-tier ecchi harem comedy, Our Frustrated Hero is actually a decent guy who cares about His Constantly-Molested Companions, and there’s some actual character development in their relationships, especially between him and Our Remarkably Busty Separated-MILF Guild Receptionist.

(the receptionist is married to perhaps the stupidest man in their universe, who ran out on her as soon as she had the kid, and in fact only slept with her once, a fact that runs through her head when she ends up in Accidental Cowgirl position atop Our Stiffened Hero while wearing nothing but a men’s white shirt)

(her 11-year-old remarkably busty daughter, who very deliberately dressed her that way, walks in on them and shouts “make me a little brother!”)

The Bluray uncensoring mostly consists of nipples and how monsters suck on them, but there are also more close-up panty shots (and how monsters infiltrate them), and a few scenes that I think were added or redone. For instance, I don’t remember the pure-souled priestess recreating one of her molestations at home by experimenting with auto-asphyxiation while humping her magic staff; if that was in the broadcast version, it must have been heavily censored.

I agree, but not the way they think…

“AI risk must be treated as seriously as climate crisis, says Google DeepMind chief” – headline from The Guardian

(the only kind of AI I can get behind…)

Starfield landing issue

It seems I misdiagnosed the problem in the Freestar Ranger quest where your ship lands about 5 kilometers from the target. It is sending me to an unrelated Point Of Interest, but that’s not the actual problem:

My ship’s too big to fit on the landing pad.

If you stick to the starter ship or another small fighter-type, you get to land near your target. If you acquired something relatively large, you’re forced to land waaaaaaaay the hell out in the boonies. But your quest marker still says “land at X” until you walk right up to it; the left hand isn’t on speaking terms with the right.

(I learned this while experimenting with minimalist ship design; the UI for the ship editor is horrible even by Bethesda standards, so it takes a while to get a handle on it, and you have to travel to multiple shipyards to get all the good parts)

Glasses Girl…

Dear Coco, while I’m definitely interested in girls wearing glasses, it had never occurred to me to specify where (site NSFW and filled with obnoxious Javascript):

Tearmoon, episode 4

Just so we’re clear, this will not be the last time a horse sneezes all over Our Occasionally-Elegant Princess.

Anyway, if you were wondering how seriously the production team is taking this show, the ballroom dance scene should answer that rather definitively. Of course, Mia’s self-centered plotting backfires in the usual way, this time aided and abetted by Our Heroine-Worshipping Twintailed Redheaded Freckled Maid and A Retainer Who’ll Be Turning Up Rather A Lot. On that note, remember when Anne was a total klutz? It seems her coordination problems were cured by Mia-Worship.

Which reminds me, I should dig up the video where a member of Korean girl-group Girls Generation was booked to tango for a celebrity dancing show; her stable-bred life had clearly not prepared her for so much close contact with a man, and every time he touched her during practice, she teleported across the room. 12-year-old Mia might want to recoil from the touch of Our Perfect Prince, but she doesn’t let it get in the way of her dancing.

Verdict: if only horse sneezes could cure her of shouty internal monologing…

(Best Girl Anne is Best Girl)

Potion Loli, episode 4

This week’s highlight: not changing the entire supporting cast again, and even bringing back some characters from the credits. Downside? My willing suspension of disbelief is foundering on the rocks of Our Potion Loli’s continued ability to confound nobles, royals, and priests with Office Lady Logic.

Verdict: her cheat power is not potions, it’s Axel Foley’s fast talk ability, goddess-enhanced. And it’s wearing thin on me.

(I’d have an easier time putting up with Kaoru if she looked and dressed like Thighza…)

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 4

In which I am taunted by their decision to insert Our Cute Little Redhead Senpai into this episode as part of a panned still. Meanwhile, Our Tsuntsuntsunderedere Twintail manages to wrap herself around Our Manipulative Hero without even a moment of gainaxing. Rats. In other news, Our Gay Bunnyboy Shota should not be allowed to shop without adult supervision.

Verdict: I keep finding myself distracted by the odd way they color the hair of the Core Trio, especially the way it doesn’t move with their heads. That I’m noticing this at all is a pretty good clue that the story isn’t holding my attention.

(unrelated distractions that I’d prefer…)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 4

The OP and ED songs do not belong to this show. Other than that, I’m enjoying this. This week, Our Unflappable Heroine’s reputation forces her to Heal or Die, but it takes the intervention of Our Pretty-Boy Harem Manager to get her to the patient’s bedside. Whereupon she quickly discovers that someone has been undermining the foundation of her previous work. With foundation.

Verdict: watching Maomao get literally bounced out of the room by haughty ladies-in-waiting adorably lightened the mood of an otherwise serious situation. Bonus points for blowing her top and putting them all in their place. Double bonus for growing up in whorehouses and learning things that will blow the mind of a veteran concubine.

(Vermeil: “hey, I wonder what Maomao whispered in her ear?”)

NSFW

Unrelated, Yui 유이

I’m generally disappointed with Korean glamour models; so much potential, sadly wasted. So when I find one who’s actively participating in the shoot, showing multiple realistic facial expressions, and revealing that her skin is free of plastic, steel, and ink, I take note (site is NSFW and full of nasty Javascript!).

A Day In The Life of Our Shy Heroine Shy, where a visit to the stationery store leads to adventure and enlightenment. And shouting, as Our Shouty Super Gal drops in for some physical therapy and secrets and shouting. The adventure involves trying to keep up with an old lady on a mountain hike, because Teru’s not the outdoorsy type. The good news is that Miss Shouty actually stops shouting, and even gets a little quiet when she reveals that she’s not completely feral.

The enlightenment continues as Our Best Girlfriend is upstaged by The Strong Silent Type, who lures Teru into the world of zen brush calligraphy, where she gets some surprisingly relevant advice about focusing her heart to unlock her fire powers.

Verdict: a nice change of pace from the costumed adventure, even with the shouting.

First-World (Gaming) Problems

Fallout 76, which to my surprise is a thing that still exists, is steeply discounted at the moment, but that wasn’t enough to convince me it could be worthwhile. However, it turns out to be free with Game Pass Ultimate, so I went ahead and downloaded it to try out.

TL/DR: it sucks. I was willing to overlook the graphics and UI issues for the $0 price, but I never even made it to the bottom of the hill outside the vault, because I kept getting rubber-banded back to the top. If this is what it’s like now, after all the widely-praised improvements, at launch it must have been an even bigger clusterfuck than I imagined.

(apparently one of the ways they’re trying to stay afloat is adding an optional monthly fee to allow you to play with just friends, not Random Internet People)

Related,

I had to revert to a previous save in Baldur’s Gate 3 after getting stuck in a conversation loop with an NPC. And it wasn’t any good the first time. I’m still not loving the do-it-again-stupid quest design, but this was a minor glitch compared to F76 (or some of the things I’ve run into in Starfield that require console hacking or reverting to much earlier saves; being trapped on an exploding starship is almost as bad as not being able to board it in the first place).

First-World (Wireless) Problems

When my sister came to town last week, the first thing she commented on was that her Zoom meetings were a little choppy. Which was surprising given my trouble-free business-class Internet connection, and the fact that she was in the middle of the house right between the high-end Orbi base station and satellite.

After much fiddling, I discovered that the latest firmware update broke the connection to both satellite APs, so the only active wireless was in my office. In between her meetings, I moved the base station to the middle of the house and spent a few hours trying to get the satellites to sync back up. No luck yet, so I’ve left them unplugged until I find the time to factory-reset the whole system and build it back up from scratch. It knows that it has satellites, and I can connect directly to them via ethernet, but they think they’re fine while the base thinks they’re missing.

I’d been wondering why the Sonos speaker in the living room kept going offline; now I know.