Stop the cloud, I want to get off

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Nut Salad, fin

Choco-blocked, pachinko-blocked, and cop-blocked; the days are just packed. Our Magical Daughter’s school life turned out to be just as ridiculous off-camera as on, and Her Best Friend found a place for herself as well. Our Girl Band made a good showing, but Noa’s sketchy past caught up with them in the end, ruining what could have been the finest scene of the season…

Verdict: worth it, and worth a rewatch if the upcoming season ends up being as dismal as it looks right now. More on that at the end.

(there are no busty catgirl waitresses with heterochromia in this show, but there could be one just off-screen; it’s that kind of town)

The Never-Ending Slime 3, episode 12

Based on the new, less-annoying credits (badly-integrated CG in the OP, slightly off (but still cute) design for Shuna in the ED), this is the first episode of the second cour. And to mark the transition, they talk in multiple locations about things that haven’t happened yet. And they even promise to do things soon.

Verdict: how many episodes will it take them to actually deliver the promised festival? With Milim. I don’t know that I can take another round.

Kaiju’s Got A Posse, episode 11

…but they’d better work fast. Our Transmonster Hero peacefully submits to confinement, but while everyone who knows him is on his side, they’re all constrained by orders. And the man giving the orders is as powerful as he is unreasonable. Which leads us to a cliffhanger ending in which Kafka struggles to save his Hyde.

Verdict: with one episode to go, can they wrap it up well?

(not a kaiju, but those giant monsters are about to escape…)

How did I not know about this?!?

Puppies At The End Of The World. Our Chibi Train Gals doing quick gags in doggie drag.

(speaking of giant monsters trying to escape…)

Next season?

New shows are already appearing, but are they watchable? Setting aside all the continuations and sequels to things I didn’t watch before, here’s my take based on descriptions and trailers, in the order they’re supposed to debut:

  • Gonna Be The Golfer (“Rising Impact”): little boy is instantly OP at golf. NO

  • Human Mage In Demon King’s Army: I liked this better when it involved shacking up with a giant-breasted village girl. NO.

  • Shy 2: there’s a hint of Kufufu in the trailer, which is a bad sign, but everything else points to a focus on the heroes, which is a good sign, and there’s a real crisis that’s not halfway around the world away from the rest of the cast. Maybe

  • Mid-Life Adventuring Crisis (“The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party…”): I mention this only to inform Mauser that there’s a white-haired dark-skinned elf maid in it. Based on the trailer, the music alone is enough to make it unwatchable. NO

  • Robo-Waifu (“My wife has no emotion”): this is going to end up being as accidentally predictive of the future as Demolition Man, isn’t it? Maybe

  • Tokyo Death Game (“Fate Of The Majority”): yeah, NO.

  • Russian Princess (“Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings In Russian”): the school goddess mutters in Russian, believing that nobody understands her, but Potato-kun does! NO

  • Banging My Stepsister: oh, wait, did I give away the ending? NO

  • Red Cat Ramen: human girl working in a food-porn restaurant run by talking cats. Maybe

  • I Parry Everything… Except My Harem: over-specialized adventurer wins fame and fortune. I liked this better when her name was Maple. NO

  • Fake Harem: Potato-kun’s new girlfriend changes personalities more often than Fletch. NO

  • Twilight Out Of Focus: gay high school romance. NO, NO, NO

  • Cross-dressing Senpai: bisexual high school love triangle. NO, NO, NO

  • Isekai Cheat Yada-Yada (“Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells”). NO

  • My Cosplay Girlfriend (“2.5-Dimensional Seduction”): this is one of those shows Steven would download only to add cheesecake to his site header rotation. NO

  • NieR 1.1A 2B||!2B: I could never get back into it after the sweatshop caught Covid the third time, and a lot of it was actually pretty annoying before that, even with the fan-service. NO

  • Dungeon People: adventurer joins the staff of the dungeon. Maybe

  • Fantasy Adventure QA: Shouty McShoutFace’s Big Adventure In Shoutyland. NO

  • Isekai Toolsmith (“Dahlia In Bloom”): looks like a typical isekai that’s been gender-flipped into a shoujo romance show. NO

  • Potato-kun’s Dungeon Harem Adventure (“A Nobody’s Way Up to an Exploration Hero”): yeah, what it says on the tin. NO

  • Harvest Goddess’ Island Adventure (“Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin”): shouty video game adaptation. NO

  • The Elusive Main Character (“The Elusive Samurai”): honestly, I can’t tell from the trailer if the main character is supposed to be a boy or a girl. Anyway, NO

  • Plus-Sized Elf: reverse-isekai chunky elf chick meets dietician; Wacky Hijinks Ensue. NO

  • Ordinary Romance (“How To Become Ordinary”): boy meets girl, stuff keeps happening to both of them. NO

  • Rune Soldier Willie (“Wistoria: Wand And Sword”): a swordsman in a school for magic. He must get stronger. NO

  • Isekai Cheat Daughter (“Head Start At Birth”): I can’t even keep track of these any more. NO

  • Antler Girl: NO, NO, NO

  • Drunken VTuber Gone Wild: um, way to jump on the bandwagon several years late. NO

  • Pom-Pom Girls (“Narenare -Cheer For You!-”): not to be confused with Pon-Pon girls. Maybe

  • Isekai Child-Rearing: yeah, NO

  • Kicked Out Of The Vtuber Agency, I Went Indie With A Real-Life Vampire And Her Wacky Friends: did I miss anything? NO

  • Magical Girl & Villain In Love: didn’t we do this a few seasons ago? NO

  • Isekai Harem Novelist (“No Longer Allowed In Another World”): suicidal pre-WWII writer ends up in fantasy world with busty catgirls and elves, remains suicidal. NO

  • Every Boy’s Dream (“Love Is Indivisible By Twins”): Potato-kun has twin babes begging for the D. NO

  • Human Swordsbabe In Furry World (“Bye, Bye Earth”): I think I’ve OD’d on trailers now. NO

  • Isekai’d To A Nearly-Identical World (“Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World?”): NO

  • Robot Leg (“ATRI -My Dear Moments-”): I’m not feeling it. NO

  • Secondhand Haremettes (“Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!”): the music in the trailer immediately put me off. NO

(better find a good book (or 20) to curl up with…)

New Game+

I’d last bought a gaming PC in 2015. It was pretty well-specced for the time, with a Core i7-6700, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 2 TB hybrid HD and 256GB SSD, and a GTX 980. Over the years I upgraded to newer SSDs, more RAM, and a GTX 2060 (best I could fit into the power budget), and it’s still able to play most games decently if I’m careful with the settings.

But things do bog down sometimes, and nine years is a pretty good run, so I ordered something significantly faster from Corsair, with a Ryzen 9 7950X, 64 GB DDR5 RAM, two 2 TB SSDs, and an RTX 4090. And a 2.5Gbit NIC, which will be useful if I connect it to the NAS for photo processing.

UPS was scheduled to deliver it Wednesday between 5:15 PM and 7:15 PM, with signature required. I had the day off, so I was out running errands when the driver showed up at 12:15 PM and left a sticky note promising they’d try again the next day.

I was not happy.

UPS has online customer support; it’s a chatbot that has no actual functionality except scheduling a callback. The callback came from an Indian call center that was completely unable to assist me in any way, claiming their system was down. They didn’t even have basic information about UPS.

Fortunately the local UPS depot is literally down the street from me, and I got there within five minutes. They called the dispatcher and instructed her to tell the driver to bring the package to the front as soon as he finished his route, and I picked it up just after 3 PM.

It took about four hours to install all the available updates and transfer everything over with PC Mover Pro (which mostly worked, but did not reliably register Game Pass games; re-downloading 134 GB of Starfield was annoying).

By the way, I was happy to take the customer-service survey at the end of the useless time-wasting phone call.

And what did I name the new PC? Reimi.

Oh, and as soon as PC Mover Pro finished copying 1.3 TB over, OneDrive uploaded gigs of data to the cloud without asking, relocating everything from my Documents, Pictures, and Desktop folders. Fuck you with a claymore, Microsoft; this should not be opt-out.

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