[Microsoft/Google/etc were useless for figuring out why my parents’ Windows 11 PC was booting up fine but just sat and spun when they tried to log in; as they say, “the users were not empowered to solve the problem themselves”. Actually, Google was worse than useless because it prioritized scam and malware “solutions”. In the end, it took repeated hard power-offs to convince it to display the recovery menus, and then it came up in safe mode. There were no errors in the logs from the attempted logins, but reverting to a 3-day-old system restore point worked.

Anyway, time to catch up on Monday shows.]

Level 2 Cheat Boy, episode 3

Our Cheating Hero’s reluctance to sleep in the same room as Our Demon Wolf-Waifu is anime-original; in the light novels, they don’t even make it back to town before he spends the night working her over with Level 2 sex cheats.

Given that their enthusiastic nightly romps are actually a plot point, his freakout and their Ozzie-and-Harriet bedroom are stupid choices. Not that this was high art to begin with, but it didn’t need to be dumbed down even further. At least we have a very catlike catgirl now.

(cattier than this one…)

Earth Day Eco-Wolf-Waifu, episode 4

In which the relationship deepens, the plot thickens, and Our Wise Wolf-Waifu decloaks in the middle of town.

(…but just the cloak; we’re out of nekkid-Holo scenes for a while)

Planet Crafter 1.0

Full release of an indie crafting/exploration game that’s been in early access for a while, currently discounted on Steam. The gameplay loop is entertaining, but very slow; they do a good job of capturing the sheer scale of terraforming an entire planet, as you repeatedly scale up production by orders of magnitude. It’s not a realistic model, of course; there’s no attempt to balance the changes you make to the planet, and you can’t actually make things worse.

Downside: a single hand-crafted map with fixed mini-dungeons and item spawn points (there are no monsters of any kind; your opponents are hunger, thirst, and gravity). There’s enough variety in starting locations and difficulty to give it some replay value, but down the road they’ll need more maps, either from the vendor or as mods.

I’ve definitely gotten my $16 worth.

Offered and accepted

I’ve just signed the offer letter from my soon-to-be new employer. In months of casting resumes into the waters, the vast majority have been rejected by software without ever being seen by human beings. Even the few that actually resulted in interviews ended up with the position not being filled at all; they’re still listed months later. Not to mention the recruiters who expressed interest, scheduled first-round interviews, and then ghosted me afterwards. It hasn’t been a fun experience, and I imagine it’s a lot worse for all the laid-off tech folks who aren’t as technical. Or as financially secure.

On the bright side, I can now start blocking unknown callers on my cellphone again, and make all those bottom-feeding Indian contract recruiters go away.

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