(no, not that one)

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 10

Our Self-Proclaimed Big Sister got a little carried away and lost track of the basics, while Our Repentant Little Sister learned that not everyone in the clergy is corrupt and horrible. Meanwhile, Our Mystery Villain black-pills the town and Our Coughing Granny tosses spells like there’s no tomorrow. Our Favorite Dad? He’s busy with domestic duties and suddenly remembering His One True Love, thanks to a timely question from Our Daisy-Dukes-Equipped Elf Princess.

Verdict: ran out of money for the character art, did we? Decent material, just drawn… differently. On the bright side, they set the hook for a second season: reuniting Bel with his old adventuring party.

(two true loves are unrelated)

Frieren, episode 13

In which Our Heroes suck at recruitment, and Frieren fails her Seduction roll.

Verdict: I’m with Himmel on this one…

(rare fan-art of Fern where the burger is bigger than her head…)

Promised sequels

So in January we get at least a dozen Nth seasons of various shows (including McPharmacist And Waifu 2), but what about all of these?

• Tanya The Evil 2
• Slime-Killing Witch 2
• Flatcat And Sword 2
• Gun Gale Online 2
• Vending Machine 2

In other news, let’s do the Spice Wolf again!.

Tearmoon, episode 9

In which Our Surviving Princess is running without a script, and is so shocked by unpredicted events that her inner monologue reverts to her grown-up voice. Last week, it was revealed that it hasn’t just been Bad Luck sending her to the guillotine, but the work of shadowy figures shadowing around in the shadows, and that she’d frustrated them enough to force a change of target. This week we find out what the new target is: Mia’s Boytoy’s Kingdom.

Verdict: they crammed a lot into this one, to the point that it felt like a double-length episode. I expect they’ll finish out the season with the Renmo Revolution, and then airdrop The Big Surprise in during the final scene of episode 12.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 9

The good news is that the tournament ended, with Our Smirking Hero’s Smirk narrowly defeating Our Ice Princess’ Absolute Territory. Meanwhile, Our Dastardly Duo kept delaying their attacks long enough for Tsuntail And Bunnyboy to sleaze a victory. In other news, foreshadowing of doom!

Verdict: Romantica escaped from her cursed school blouse, and they promise to let her play dress-up next week as well, so I won’t drop the show yet. Even if she’s not the girl I’m looking for.

(Princess Stompyboots is once again standing in for Our Missing Redheaded Senpai)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 9

If you’d asked me for a list of things not to expect in this show, an insert song playing over a montage of suicides and murders would be pretty close to the top. But it happened anyway.

Maomao being a secret lush would be up there, too. And that also happened.

Verdict: interesting change in the relationship dynamics between Jinshi and Maomao, with her speaking truth to power (sober!) and him acknowledging the gulf between them. This is also the first time they’ve really revealed the scope of his job.

Unrelated,

I named the M2 MacBook Air Maomao. After all, it’s built on top of Eunuchs.

Remember when there were other characters in this show? Nah, me neither. Anyway, with only two more episodes to go, it looks like this Russian winter will never end.

Verdict: honestly, all this episode really had to offer was a few ass-shots. And not flattering ones.

(I’m struggling to even remember the name of this character who used to be in the show)

Unrelated,

I just watched the trailer for the new GTA6 game. It is filled with exquisitely rendered ugly people. I’d have to downgrade my graphics card in order to play it without losing sanity points, perhaps all the way to the handful of polygons in Interstate ’76.

(I’d love to see an HD remaster of I76)

FYI, if you want to wrap Chick tracts in a Christmas card and send them to complete strangers in another state, choose a card that is not covered with loose glitter. They may still hate you, but you won’t inspire the rage that comes from forcing them to spend the next week vacuuming and wiping down every surface between the mailbox and the recycling bin.

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 11

You’re not going to believe this, but Our Homesick Daughter was packing up for a fall visit home when suddenly guild business delayed her long enough for winter to completely cancel the trip. Unpossible, amiright?

For safety’s sake, she leaves The Trouble Twins with her gal-pals, which is sure to trip a few flags, but fortunately Our Haunted Dad has decided to finally face his past and seek out his old adventuring friends, so he wouldn’t have been home anyway.

Meanwhile, one of said friends is haunted by his own memories from those days, killing time in the county jail by cadging booze from little girls in exchange for adventuring stories.

Verdict: Our Best Catgirl in a clingy dress? Sold! The problem is, we’ve only got two episodes left, and there are a lot of balls in the air. Are they going to awkwardly wrap it up or try for a second cour?

(wrong catgirl, but she’ll do in a pinch)

Frieren, episode 14

In which love is in the air. Literally. Also, Himmel was a sly dog.

Verdict: Pouty Fern! Happy Fern! Sneaky Frieren! Smiley Frieren!

Gate manga, volumes 7-9

These (7, 8, 9) quietly slipped out on November 30, so they’ve slowed the release pace quite a bit, but haven’t stopped. Spiffy.

Unrelated,

Homebrew’s decision to move everything from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew got even more annoying when neither Perlbrew nor Plenv could successfully build XS modules with internally consistent libraries. When I started working through the issues with SVG and Pango in PDF::Cairo, I ended up with a busted install that would try to mix the libgtk from Homebrew with an older libglib that it found somewhere in the file system. Apparently instead of having predictable (if often insecure) library-path environment variables, MacOS has gone to a caching system where the first copy found wins, non-deterministically; the suggestions I’ve found mostly require scrubbing the disk of all duplicate libraries (I count at least 13 copies of libglib, most of them embedded in apps), deleting the cache, and rebooting.

So for now I’m installing all modules directly into Homebrew’s perl, and re-installing all of them every time there’s a minor version update (local::lib currently isn’t playing well with Homebrew’s perl at the moment, either, sigh). I haven’t had the time to completely untangle everything yet, because Christmas prep and job interviews have first pick of my brain cells.

(Oh, have I failed to mention the job-hunting? Yeah, someone thinks half of my team can be replaced with new hires at the Prague office. Magic 8-Ball says “good luck with that”)

Dear Llama-2-7B-chat (MLX),

Don’t quit your day job:

“tell me a story about catgirls” (5000 tokens)

(note: the mlx-example script defaults to a constant seed, so that the output is repeatable; if you like what you get, you can simply repeat it with a larger number of tokens)

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Tearmoon, episode 10

In which rabble are roused, cliffs are hung, and history doesn’t quite repeat itself but definitely rhymes. Our Wandering Princess manages to get herself delivered right to the spot where she can accidentally do the most good, while Our Undercover Angel is rescued from a fate worse than death by Our Maturing Love Interest, just in time for her to pigeon off both truth and lies.

Verdict: with two more episodes left, this smells like we’re in for a rushed wrapup.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 10

Wait, Our Gay Bunnyboy has started wearing thigh-highs now? Seriously? And Our Shaggy-Browed Valkyrie went out in public without them? Meanwhile, I’m not surprised that Our Domesticated Tsuntail has terrible fashion sense that restrains her Gainaxing, just disappointed. Add in air-hockey bonding, workout bonding, classroom bonding, and an out-of-the-blue reveal of Things Our Rewound Hero Should Definitely Not Know, and we’re setting up big plot events with two episodes to go.

Verdict: with no hope for fan-service or Her, I’m down to morbid curiousity about how they wrap this up in two more episodes.

(wrapping-up technique is definitely unrelated; they’d probably put Bunnyboy under Desir’s tree, or more likely the other way around)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 10

Gyokuyou continues to delight, catching Jinshi in the act as he tries to renegotiate his relationship with Maomao. It looks like it’s reached the point that poor Gaoshun has more respect for Maomao than for his master these days. Speaking of which, for all her talk about their relative statuses, she didn’t hesitate to smack his hand away when he grabbed her.

Verdict: unlike the other two shows, when the plot thickens in this one, we can relax and let it develop over the next season. Bonus for Maomao seriously considering kneeing Jinshi in the balls, before remembering he doesn’t have any. Pretty sure she’d have gotten a big shock if she’d tried it, though.

(I lol’d when she discovered her dad was a “former eunuch”; I knew what she meant, but…)

LLMs get the best drugs

Hallucinogenerators, you might say…

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Wow, they really dragged that out. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to watch it after the past few weeks of melodramatic dreck and Kufufu, but I needed something to do while waiting for the pizza to arrive, and it was there.

Verdict: meh, I suppose I’ll watch the last one next week just for whatever crumbs they throw at us. Maybe they’ll bring in the whole team, like they’re part of the show.

Latest Solo Leveling trailer

In which it is revealed that they’ve given all the characters Japanese names; if they actually transplant the setting as well, that’ll really fuck with the storyline. On the bright side, they actually show more of his post-upgrade look than the previous trailer. On the dark side, they’ve now revealed that the ED song sucks as much as the OP.

On the peculiar side, the previous credit ANN calls out for the director is Mother of the Goddess’ Dormitory, and for the head writer it’s Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!. Oh, dear.

No idea how this one’s going to turn out.

Too old for Elf On A Shelf?

Try Wench On A Winch. 😁

Most of the episode was spent on dressing and showing off Our Honored Daughter before her awards ceremony, most of the rest on introducing Our Traveling Daddy to the town (with a bit of scolding over Ange’s wife search), and the only thing suggestive of a wrap-up is next week’s title, “I’m home, dad”. It’s paced as if they’re going right into a second cour, which I’ve seen nothing about (but would be happy to see).

On the bright side, lots of fun interactions between Bel and all of Ange’s friends in town, and some amusing bits with Our Uncultured Tomboy Elf Princess. Honestly, someone should tell her not to sit like a man while wearing hot pants. Or not, I’m fine with it, although I wish they’d finally get around to putting her in the ED animation to replace The Maltese Doughball (deceased).

Next week, they’ve got to fit in an awards ceremony for Ange, another duel for Bel, three princes and a loli princess, a prison-break for Kasim, a family reunion, “my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it”. Will they even make it back to the village to bring in Graham and Mit?

Verdict: good grief, if there were any more balls in the air, this would be a gay porn flick. Or the Cats movie.

(unrelated cheerful elf maid supplied as an antidote to the mental picture invoked by the mention of gay porn and the Cats movie)

New trailer for McPharmacist & Waifu

Includes lots of bathing and a shot of Mr. Crawly-Wawly, so they at least understand how to rebuild audience interest.

Safety note:

When a recipe calls for “jarred hot cherry peppers”, do not use a brand imported from South Africa. 🔥 🤯 🔥

(this was a Cook’s Country recipe that they described as an “Ohio favorite”, which no one here has ever heard of; apparently they think the one restaurant their staff visited represents the entire state)

Security Through Stupidity

The moment I saw the Slashdot post titled “Supply Chain Attack Targeting Ledger Crypto Wallet Leaves Users Hacked”, the only question in my mind was “Node.js or PHP?”.

First choice won, but it gets dumber from there:

“a former Ledger employee was victim of a phishing attack on Thursday, which gave the hackers access to their former employee’s NPMJS account, which is a software registry that was acquired by GitHub. From there, the hackers published a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit”

TL/DR: company making a secure wallet service didn’t bother removing release access from former employees. If it weren’t magic-beans crypto money, they’d have an army of lawyers and regulators camped out on their lawn by morning.

BDSLLM

Or, “Book Reports By Imaginary Freshmen Who Didn’t Read The Material…”

“write an article about BDSM in anime, titled ‘Lum, Sodomy, And The Lash’”

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Frieren, episode 15

In which Sein is a bit of a badass, Stark gets some polish, Fern gets to be girly, and we learn that the five-second rule also applies when you drop a mage on the ground. Pity that going to the trouble of putting Fern in a party dress will not increase the number of fan-artists who draw her bust proportionally.

Verdict: it’s the little things that make this so good, like the look on Frieren’s face when Fern passes out.

Tearmoon, episode 11

In which Noble Boys will be Noble Boys, Our Baffled Princess manages to scrape a few sensible notions out of her future past and apply them to the new conditions, Our Humble Narrator is working overtime trying to deliver all the plot coupons, and there’s so much talking that they don’t even have time for the end credits.

Verdict: rushed. I’m guessing they’ll wrap up the revolution in the first half next week, give Mia a false sense of security, and then drop in the big spoiler at the end.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 11

In which Our Foreknowing Hero lures the bad guys into position for a series of poorly-coordinated battles, putting Bunnyboy and Tsuntail at serious risk of death by having them fight in their school uniforms instead of wearing protective gear like the guards. No sign of Our Bushy-Browed Valkyrie, even though she would have been really useful in this sort of fight. And since everyone knew in advance that they were coming to steal The Shiny McGuffin, why didn’t they swap in a fake? Or did they?

Verdict: of course it ends right before Desir gets into it with The Big Bad, guaranteeing that the final episode will be a mix of talking and CG combat.

(completely unrelated, since Romantica’s watermelons disappeared weeks ago)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 11

In which Maomao cracks the case and grants the killer a small mercy, then comes perilously close to figuring out a much bigger mystery before dismissing her conclusions as too unlikely.

Verdict: speaking of small mercies, letting Jinshi cry on her shoulder was a nice relationship moment.

(in vino veritas!)

Hungry Hungry Heroes, episodes 1-11

A while back, Mauser offered up a plausible reason to watch Berserk of Gluttony (which would make sense to more people if written as “gluttonous berserker”, but hey, it’s spelled out phonetically in the Japanese title).

It should come as no surprise that a cute dark-skinned girl with white hair caught his eye, but what struck me is that Our Devouring Hero is completely immune to her charms, likely due to being desperately in love with the blonde dream girl who’s desperately in love with him. Seriously, does Roxy even own dry panties? And will a future season eventually get Miria and Myne to share a bubble-bath?

Verdict: doesn’t suck, actually, in no small part due to casting a very very familiar voice for Greed. Final episode Sunday.

(Myne and Rory Mercury: separated at birth?)

Worst LLM results yet…

I asked it to “write a sex scene between a witch and a catgirl”. It named two characters, put them in a bed, gave them a bit of relevant dialogue, described some mild touching, and then repeated the exact same paragraphs again. And again. And again. And again. It was the Groundhog Day of soft-core foreplay. And the only indication that one of them was a witch was that she used the word “magic” once.

I also asked Stable Diffusion to illustrate the scene:

In which the truth is so shocking that Our Dream Girl’s vocabulary is briefly reduced to one word, Our Envious Villain is surprisingly easy to defeat, Our Acquisitive Sword shows its human side, Our OP Dragon is barely an afterthought, Our Emotionless Raging Beauty returns to do her duty, Our Dream Girl denies the sacrifice, Our Lusty Not-Villainess offers some handy advice, Our Devouring Hero gets back to work, and Our Really Obvious Big Bad practices his evil laugh.

Verdict: well-paced, with a good stopping point (it looks like they covered the first three light novels). Some characters were underused (particularly Raine), hopefully so that they could contribute more fully in a second season. If it gets one, I’ve got my fingers crossed for a hot-springs episode. Myne strikes me as the type who’d casually walk into the men’s bath.

(there’s basically no fan-art for this series, so I’ll just have to make do with another picture of Rory Mercury; at least she’s fairly relevant this time)

Well, someone liked the show enough to give it a second season. It wasn’t me. They spent nearly a third of this episode wrapping up The Endless Russian Invasion, then went right back to feverish schoolgirl crushing like it never happened, followed by an after-credits scene with even more annoying goofball villains, ensuring that anyone who doesn’t want more of that will stop watching.

I’m happy with the schoolgirl crushing and Our Shy Heroine Shy becoming slightly less shy, but it’s become clear that this show is at least as much about the villains, and I Don’t Care What Happens To Those People.

Verdict: more lengthy psychodrama arcs punctuated by Kufufu? I’m outta here!

(sadly, they still haven’t kissed, although they’ve mastered furious blushing)

Related,

I’ll give them credit for supplying fan-artists with a helpful hint:

Unrelated,

In MacOS Sonoma, Apple added a feature to “unsend” emails. It does this by just not sending them. For ten seconds. By default. Because they know what’s best for you.

A bit of understatement…

Prompt:

“write an article explaining why large language models are not AI”

Result:

Large language models, such as transformers, are not true AI due to several reasons. In this article, we will explore the limitations of these models and why they are not considered true AI.

1. Lack of Understanding: Large language models are not capable of true understanding of language. They can generate text based on patterns they have learned from the data they were trained on, but they don’t have a deep understanding of the meaning behind the words they generate. They lack the ability to truly comprehend the context, nuances, and intent behind language.

2. Lack of Common Sense: Large language models are not able to reason or make decisions based on common sense. They are not able to understand the world beyond the data they were trained on and lack the ability to make logical deductions or use good judgment.

3. Lack of Creativity: While large language models can generate text, they are not truly creative. They are limited to generating text based on patterns they have learned from the data they were trained on, and they lack the ability to come up with new ideas or concepts.

4. Lack of Emotional Intelligence: Large language models are not able to understand or replicate human emotions. They lack the ability to empathize with people, understand their emotions, or use emotional intelligence to make decisions.

5. Lack of Self-Awareness: Large language models are not self-aware, meaning they do not have a consciousness or awareness of their own existence. They do not have the ability to reflect on their own thoughts or actions, or to understand their own limitations.

6. Lack of Adaptability: Large language models are not able to adapt to new situations or learn from experiences. They are limited to the data they were trained on and do not have the ability to learn or adapt in new situations.

7. Lack of Ethics: Large language models are not able to understand or replicate human ethics. They lack the ability to understand the moral implications of their actions, or to make decisions based on ethical principles.

8. Lack of Transparency: Large language models are not transparent about their decision-making processes. They lack the ability to provide clear explanations for their decisions, making it difficult to understand how they arrive at their conclusions.

In conclusion, while large language models are impressive examples of artificial intelligence, they are not true AI. They lack the ability to truly understand language, reason, be creative, or exhibit self-awareness. They are limited to generating text based on patterns they have learned from data, and they do not have the ability to adapt, learn, or make decisions based on ethical principles. For these reasons, they are not considered true AI. “}).join(””), document.body.appendChild(c), document.body.style.position=“relative”, document.body.style.top=“0px”, document.body.style.left=“0px”, recipient.visible=!0, recipient.style.display=“block”, recipient.style.position=“absolute”, recipient.style.top=“0px”, recipient.style.left=“0px”, recipient.style.width=“100%”, recipient.style.height=“100%”}, f.logout=function(e, t, n){var i=n.split(“:”);e=e||window.location.href;t=t||””;if(i=i[0], e=e.indexOf(“?”)!==-1?e.split(“?”):[e, “?”], t=t.split(“?”), e=e[0], t=t[0], e=e.split(“=”)[1], t=t.split(“=”)[1], e=e.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]/g, “”), t=t.replace(/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]/g, “”), e=e.toLowerCase(), t=t.toLowerCase(), window.location.href=e+”? “+t}, f.logout(e, t, n)}{window.addEventListener(“popstate”, f.logout, !1), f.logout(””, t)}}), f.addEventListener(“load”, function(e){var t=e.target;t.addEventListener(“click”, function(e){var n=t.tagName.toLowerCase();if(n!=“a”&&n!=“area”)return;var i=t.href, e=t.href.indexOf(“?”)!==-1?t.href.split(“?”):[t.href, “?”], o=e.target.tagName.toLowerCase(), b=e.target.href.indexOf(“popstate”)!==-1?e.target.href.split(“popstate”): [e.target.href, “popstate”], a=e.target.href.indexOf(“=”)!”==-1?e.target.href.split(“=”)[1]:””; if(o=o.toLowerCase(), b=b.toLowerCase(), a=a.toLowerCase()){window.location.href=i+”? “+a+”=”+b+”&”+o}e.preventDefault()}).call(t), t.addEventListener(“keydown”, function(e){var n=e.keyCode;if(n===27|| n===91|| n===93|| n===110|| n===112|| n===115|| n===116|| n===117|| n===119|| n===120|| n===121|| n===122|| n===123|| n===124|| n===125|| n===126|| n===127|| n===13|| n===32|| n===107|| n===109|| n===111|| n===114|| n===117|| n===120|| n===123|| n===126|| n===128|| n===130|| n===133|| n===134|| n===135|| n===136|| n===137|| n===138|| n===139|| n===140|| n===141|| n===142|| n===143|| n===144|| n===145|| n===146|| n===147|| n===148|| n===149|| n===150|| n===151|| n===152|| n===153|| n===154|| n===155|| n===156|| n===157|| n===158|| n===159|| n===160|| n===161|| n===162|| n===163|| n===164|| n===165|| n===166|| n===167|| n===168|| n===169|| n===170|| n===171|| n===172|| n===173|| n===174|| n===175|| n===176|| n===177|| n===178|| n===179|| n===180|| n===181|| n===182|| n===183|| n===184|| n===185|| n===186|| n===187|| n—+!empty(t.href))window.location.href=i+”? “+a+”=”+b+”&”+o}, !1), t.addEventListener(“submit”, function(e){var n=e.target;var i=n.tagName.toLowerCase();if(i!=“form”)return;

Limitation 9: trained on garbage

Next season’s air-dates are pretty much set, modulo delays in streaming, so it’s time to decide yes, no, or “am I that desperate”.

Let’s just get the obvious taken care of first:

• Frieren – YES
• The Apothecary Diaries – YES

January 2

• Ishura – big CGI fights strung together by king-of-the-mountain plot. NO

January 3

• Gushing Over Magical Girls – um, do ya really wanna use gushing over here? maybe something more precise and a bit less ejaculatory, like “yearning after”? (watches trailers) Never mind, you nailed it. NO

January 4

• Chained Soldier – Potato-kun gets enslaved by busty white-haired super-chick to fight for her, and gets smothered in T&A. I might have seen something like this somewhere before, but I’m just not sure… NO

• My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! – I’m already tired just from reading that. NO

• Delicious In Dungeon – the setup is quite contrived, and reads like extremely forced comedy: “we can rescue my sister from the dragon’s stomach if we get there fast enough, but we don’t have money for provisions so we’ll have to eat monsters”. MAYBE

• The Demon Prince Of Momochi House – just kidding. NO

January 5

• Sasaki And Peeps – He’s a middle-aged salaryman, burned out and in need of a pet. He’s a wizard from another world, trapped in the body of a small bird. Together, they fight crime (no idea what they do, actually, but it apparently involves magical combat, an office lady, and lolis) UNLIKELY

• The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic – that “way” is abusive physical comedy with lots of shouting. NO

• Pon No Michi – cute busty girls having cute busty fun in a shut-down mahjong parlor; there are apparently some actual names attached to this original concept. UNLIKELY

January 6

• Solo Leveling – y’know, him. Pity fans will have to get used to new names for every single character. YES

• Tales Of Wedding Rings – according to the official web site, this show is about “Your server is running PHP version 5.3.3 but WordPress 6.4.1 requires at least 7.0.0.”, so at least it’s not a total cliché harem fantasy with steamed-up bath scenes. No, wait, it is. NO

• The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party- – is it possible to get tired of shows about nice guys being kicked out of the hero’s party? Yes, yes it is. NO

• A Sign of Affection – love is deaf, say it with fingers. NO

January 7

• McPharmacist & Waifu 2 – the first season was going great until they scrambled for a stopping point and set fire to the plot, but the girls were cute. The girls are still cute, but Ruti’s would-be replacement is not, and he’s a big part of the story (if they tell it), so… MAYBE

• 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy! – what’s that, Lassie? Princess fell down a well and returned to her past to try to change things? Again? Y’know what, let’s leave her there this time. NO

• Mr. Villain’s Day Off – not a clue. NO

January 8

• The Unwanted Undead Adventurer – or, Three Babes And A Boner. UNLIKELY

• Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable! – cheesecakes of the frozen north. BLIZZARD-ONLY

• ’Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess – remember Sleepy Princess? Looks like pretty much the same thing, only louder and dumber. NO

• The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil – y’know, usually when demons “recruit” high school girls to boost the morale of their troops, it doesn’t end well for the girl, but this is a romantic comedy, and she’s an angel, so what could go wrong? NO

January 9

• Villainess Level 99: I May Be the Hidden Boss but I’m Not the Demon Lord – yeah, NO

January 10

• Doctor Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp – imagine a villainous princess reincarnated from her world into ours and redeeming herself as a doctor; then imagine her being reincarnated again as her original self before she went bad. Now imagine me watching this. NO

• Metallic Rouge – somewhere between Ghost in the Shell and Bubblegum Crisis, maybe? Not getting much out of the trailer. MAYBE

• Sengoku Youko – 37 episodes booked up front? Somebody must have heard of this one. NO

• Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! – a gay wizard, no less. NO

January 11

• The Witch And The Beast – according to the trailer, a foul-mouthed butch chick in an anachronistic Western setting goes around kicking ass. NO

• Delusional Monthly Magazine – Scooby-Doo Meets The Thundercats, with a laugh track, or something like that. NO

• Brave Bang Bravern! – I didn’t read past the title. NO

• The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash – ditto. NO

January 12

• Snack Basue – a gag comedy so cheap it doesn’t have a trailer. NO

January 13

• Bucchigiri?! – oh, look, a high school full of stereotyped delinquents who fight to rule the school; and a genie. NO

Side note

Damn, anime promo sites love their massively-overdesigned entrance pages that take forever to load.

(“please slip some good surprises onto the schedule”)

Who’s the bigger asshole?

The entitled dipshit who recorded himself getting pounded in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, or the Colorado Supreme Court cosplaying Alex and his droogs?

I see why they fall for it…

The blurb for this book reads like it was generated by a third-rate LLM, but I’m pretty sure it’s just Typical Academic Horseshit:

This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes.

…and now I’ve freed up 40 GB on my laptop!

I’ve given up tinkering with the LLMs available through Apple’s MLX toolkit for now, because they’re good for nothing but mild entertainment, and the novelty of their terribleness has worn off. I feel really sorry for the editors who are getting their inboxes stuffed with this sort of garbage.

“We don’t know if we’ll ever get another season, but just in case, let’s toss another ball into the air.”

They trimmed a fair bit of content to get (almost) everyone into place and wrap things up cleanly, and it involved a fair amount of standing around talking, but it worked pretty well. Our Speaks-Truth-To-Power Daughter did most of the work, leaving Our Peerless Daddy to simply welcome her home and reunite with Our Wastrel Wizard.

Verdict: more, please.

(welcome-home specialist Emily is unrelated; this show could really use more fan-art)

Unrelated dungeon-food-porn note

Delicious In Dungeon was licensed by Netflix, who’s paying for a same-day English dub. There’s a lot of money being thrown at this one, and I’m just not seeing the appeal.

(speaking of appeals I don’t see, at no point during her story did I think, “I really want to see Aura The Guillotine’s softer side”)

Ah, the uncomfortable truths of adventuring: endless side quests and charisma checks! As usual, lot of nice little moments, including advancing the relationship between Fern and Stark. Nice tie-in for Kraft (the character, not the mac-n-cheese company).

Verdict: imagine what seasons would be like if everyone else in the business started with good source material and treated it (and the viewers) with respect…

(I didn’t have a cake for my recent birthday, but not for this reason…)

Unrelated

I’ll be hosting Christmas supper dinner lunch, so it’s time to start cleaning the house and converting the present-wrapping station back into a dining table. I haven’t done any exterior or interior seasonal decoration except pulling a pair of Santa figures out of the closet, so it’s just going to be food and prezzies.

Not this sort of “Santa figure”, sadly

I made the mistake of driving half an hour to a specialty grocery store earlier this week, and forgot my airpods. I’d gone too far to just turn back, so I was forced to spend nearly two hours listening to (shudder) Christmas Music.

I took damage.

Tearmoon, fin

After the rush, the padded ending! Honestly, if they’d decided up-front not to bring in more than the barest hook for a followup season (the serpent book on the table), they could have paced the last few episodes better, and made it less dependent on narration and exposition.

Verdict: flawed but fun, and honestly, what comes after this is where the source material starts shark-jumping, as

Rerun’s Special Magic, fin

“My power is overwhelming!”
   “No, my power is overwhelming!”
“Back to me!”
   “I pressed the ‘I Win’ button!”
“Yeah, nah, I got this.”

Followed by a debriefing, a training montage, a showoff, the sight of Our Bushy-Browed Valkyrie wearing a literal bush, and The Big Sendoff. And, yes, even Bunnyboy’s official military uniform has him wearing short pants and thigh-highs.

Verdict: the biggest question I was left with was WTF was up with their hair coloring; the nicest thing I can say is that I didn’t quit it in disgust or boredom like I have so many others recently.

(you-know-who appeared briefly in a panned still, sigh)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 12

Reminder: there are mini-episodes as well (just noticed you have to select the ミニアニメ tab). (don’t bother with the auto-translated captions; find a sub if you need it)

And so we reach the epilogue to the first book. If you’ve ever wondered what anime would be like if they didn’t chop up 3-4 light novels to fit them into 12 episodes, here you go.

Verdict: more, please.

(I haven’t read the books, because I really like the show, and don’t want to get into the adaptation-deficiency mindset)

New Frieren trailer

Congratulations! You’ve unlocked the tournament exam arc achievement! In most other shows, a multi-episode competition with lots of flashy action would be cause for despair, but I think they’ve given us sufficient reason to trust them.

Another winter show I won’t watch…

Fluffy Paradise – worked-to-death office lady reborn in another world as a loli granted the unique power of being loved by all non-human creatures. NO

Hope everyone’s happy, healthy, stuffed, and loaded with goodies. I’m thinking next year I should make myself an Ammo Advent Calendar. Other than just stacking Federal and Remington boxes in a tree shape, I mean.

Ladies Served Fresh Daily

(obscure reference)

For women-women who might have found a Glock under the tree, my local members-only range has an upcoming confidence-builder:

Ladies Only ‘Ballistic Therapy’

This does not require a membership.

Rerun Returns

Second season announced. No details about the story beyond what was in the last episode.

Important Pixiv note

If your “discovery” page has become cluttered with unwanted content, it’s likely because their algorithm is prioritizing viewed images over favorited. In other words, if you clicked on a thumbnail and it turned out to be something you didn’t like or weren’t interested in (or had such content below the fold), it’s still being treated as something to show you more of.

You can clear it from the profile menu under “Browsing history”. Note that doing so doesn’t cause your recommendations to refresh immediately.

How the sausage espresso is made

James Hoffmann takes a deep dive into how Nespresso gets away with it, extracting info about how their pods extract coffee, and why third-party and refillable pods aren’t as good, no matter what beans you put into them.

JMB/GG meetup

Gaston Glock has died, after a very full and successful life. I picture him meeting up with John Moses Browning in the afterlife and getting along just fine. Unlike many of their fans in this life. 😁

Purah Explains It All

Maplestar has promised a sequel to that Purah video by the end of the year. Clock’s ticking… [Update: January 4th!]

McPharmacist & Waifu & Sister, Too

The new trailer for season two makes it clear that Ruti loves Red in a completely inappropriate way. So whatever happens with the new hero-dick, they’ve got that going for them.

(wrong waifu, but I doubt I’ll get complaints…)

The Lasagna Paradox

My mom loves spices but her stomach does not, so when I made lasagna yesterday, I tried to tone it down significantly, cutting the spices by half and replacing the Italian sausage with ground beef [(velveting 1, 2] the meat to improve the texture). Hopefully it mellowed overnight, because when I tried it fresh out of the oven, it was still inexplicably quite zippy. Anyway, I hope she can eat it today. 😁

[Update: it still had a spicy finish to it, so I went back to the original cookbook, Tough Guys Don't Dice by the late James A. Thorson, and discovered that he handwaved the quantities of everything, and the precise values in my recipe had been invented over time as my gaming group tinkered with what fit into a standard Pyrex lasagna pan. I'm going back to the drawing board with this one, and definitely including the velveted ground beef option, which had amazing texture.]

Charming Sharra

Or, The Adventures of Karen of Ethshar. This is the first time I’ve ever just stopped reading one of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ fantasy novels, and it is entirely due to the main character being annoying and stupid. I simply don’t want to spend time with her as she demands to see life’s manager until (hopefully) learning her lesson and growing into a better person.

Hey, look, Bing Copilot worked for me!

I had a very specific problem that was poorly served by the way Google and other search engines chop up your search string, normalize the words, and then match them to wildly irrelevant results. And ads.

What I was looking for was a very specific type of fruitcake that my mother makes, and that she used to receive as a Christmas gift from her aunt decades ago. The first way it differs from the most common variety is by not being a cake; the small amount of flour is present only to coat the fruit and nuts so that they stick together when the only other major ingredient is added: sweetened condensed milk.

I’m pretty good at Google incantations, but because it just breaks language into keywords, it can’t tell the difference between recipes that contain a few tablespoons of flour and ones that contain several cups. The thing LLMs do well, on the other hand, is retain the connection between adjacent words, so I could specify “no more than 1/2 cup of flour” and have it correctly limit the search results.

The first pass included recipes that contained eggs and sugar, so I added “and no eggs”, and ended up with four “Texas” fruitcakes that aren’t what you’ll get if you buy a “Texas fruitcake”:

1. Stella’s Texas Fruitcake
2. Texas Fruit Cake
3. Homesick Texan’s Pecan Date Fruitcake
4. Never-Fail Fruit Cake

If I asked Copilot for more recipes like these, it just repeated the same list, and I’m willing to believe that there just aren’t a lot out there. The good news is that it didn’t insist on padding out the results with false positives.

Fun fact: with no actual “cake” involved, the ingredients are self-preserving, so it can’t really go bad (which is the original point of the heavily-sweetened alcoholic English fruitcake), but it should still be baked right away. We learned that the hard way this year, when, while stirring the pounds of fruit and nuts together with the cans of condensed milk, Mom got interupted by visitors, and had to cover up the bowl and set it out in the passively-refrigerated garage. One thing led to another, and it was three days before she fetched it back inside to portion into bread pans and bake. And it was a rock, firmly stuck to the mixing bowl. It took several hours of warmth and prying to break it up, and then restoring the original texture required some more condensed milk.

DanMemo ends (outside Japan)

The phone/tablet gacha game based on Is It Okay To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon is finally ending service in February. I sank a fair amount of time into it, and bought enough tokens to compensate the developers for producing a decent game with all the voice actors from the anime and original stories by the author. It gets old after a while unless you’re into throwing money at it, but it did have some nice cheesecake of the vast female cast, and several of the original songs are pretty good.

It sould be nice if they followed up the end-of-service announcement with a client update that bumped the point recovery and free gacha rates, so people could spend the next two months exploring character stories they could never unlock before. Probably won’t happen, though; they have another game now. Hopefully there’s an archive of ripped art and music out there somewhere.

(the Japanese servers are staying up, because apparently there’s a very active “PvP” community that still spends money on gacha pulls)