(I was planning to post this Friday night, but I saw three inches of global warming building up, so I saved my energy for clearing my steep 75-foot driveway first thing Saturday morning, before the delivery drivers showed up. The scraping and salting took quite a while, and led to a relaxing soak in the oversized tub that requires every drop of hot water in the house. Then a nap. And Chinese takeout once the roads were clear)

Hand Maid May Bluray!

This one’s a guilty pleasure that Steven and I spent a lot of time talking about back in the day. Possibly the thing I’m most looking forward to is that it won’t have the obnoxious-to-navigate menu system the DVDs had, which tries to tie into the first episode, and which uses the English dub actor for Nanbara, who was terrible at it. It’s not any more fun in Japanese, but it was a dumb idea for the US market at the time, where most people buying the DVD wouldn’t have seen the show on TV first to get the joke.

There was an attempt at an adult OVA sequel, Hand Maid Mai, which was largely handled by the C team at the studio, but it completely lacked the charm of the original, and the best thing about it was the ED song. Only the first episode was released, despite studio claims that the entire thing was completed and ready to go once they worked out the problems with their bankrupt distributor.

(and, yes, that’s a link to a 21-year-old web site)

(it comes out the same day as Farm-Related Skills AKA Hoe Harem, and Fired From The Demon King’s Army AKA Twin Peaks)

Frieren, episode 23

If there’s a mimic on the mantel in the first act…

Verdict: there’s finally a reason she keeps falling for it. The other mages are still annoying and tedious, but at least they’re flashy this week. Next week: that’s just not fair.

(I might even learn the name of the cute refugee from Dead Or Alive if this keeps up)

Bikini Pon, episode 7

We begin by celebrating International Mahjong Day (Pai No Hi, not to be confused with National Mahjong Day in April or Pie Day in March), which is also Pai’s birthday. At the beach. In swimsuits. Surprisingly service-free swimsuits. Despite a game of beach volleyball.

I’m willing to believe that Our Little Riiche Girl is so divorced from the concept of money that she’s willing to give a solid-gold mahjong set as a birthday present, but what I’m not willing to believe in is a solid-gold mahjong set. Never mind that the tiles would weigh about 30 48 pounds and be worth over $800,000 $1,150,000 just for the metal, solid gold is soft; there’s a reason it’s not used much. This may be a mis-translation in the subs; I’ll have to listen to the Japanese dialog more carefully on a rewatch to see if she says “jun-kin” 純金. [update: yes, she says jun-kin, and so does the magic bird]

That said, it would have made a much better joke if they’d turned out to be gold-wrapped chocolate in a weighted box; she wouldn’t look like the sort of heiress who’ll hand over the family fortune to two gigolos and a psychic. Now, if she were giving away Riiche’s Peaches, I’d be all in, but it’s not that kind of show.

(yes, there’s a maid in red under-rim glasses for some reason)

Swiftly, Discord!

My spam folder had a bunch of messages telling me to log into Discord and change my username from the deprecated “name#number” format. But it wasn’t my Discord username, and it went to a non-standard email address. Not one of my used-with-one-vendor-only aliases, just one that I don’t typically use for online services.

The message certainly looked legit, and the links in the email went to the right place, so I went to their site and requested a password reset. Sure enough, the account existed, and it was subscribed to some modder’s forum that I don’t remember ever using eight years ago. The username was a keyboard pattern, so all I can think is that I made a throwaway in order to download one mod, and didn’t even bother recording the username or password. Deleted now.

(hmmm, robot maid or robot bunny girl? Or embrace the power of “and” and embrace both?)

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