Chibi Life, episode 7

The most surprising thing to happen this week is that Crush-chan did not explode, despite her clear displeasure at her man hanging out in the dungeon with Our Hot Adventure Gals, all of whom are starting to develop a special tingle around Our Action Hero. Yes, even Hot Naginata Gal, and she’s self-aware enough to know what she’s feeling about a boy at least two years younger, although her friends haven’t figured it out yet.

He remains completely oblivious, of course, and even his realization that Crush-chan is the platonic ideal of “his type” isn’t enough to get her out of the friendzone when she hints that maybe he could consider himself close enough to her to finally use her first name. He dismisses the concept of her being jealous that he’s close to other girls as absurd, and focuses on what’s important: how to placate the chibis after skipping a day.

No chibis this week, but we got a new ED song set to stills of the light-novel covers. (note the impressive cleavage on Our Chibi Valkyrie, one of the things they toned down for the anime character designs)

Verdict: first Crush-chan casually gets him to admit he’s been in the dungeon, then she silently accepts being dismissed as just the childhood friend next door, and maintains a frosty silence as each new revelation comes out, all while keeping up a cheerful facade in front of the gang. This chick is damaged, and if this keeps up there’ll be blood on the walls. Next week, a wild villain appears!

(maybe someone should explain to him that that’s not what the “platonic” in “platonic ideal” means…)

Cheer Life, episode 6

“Okay, now that we’re at the hot-springs resort, we need to put on our costumes and go looking for people to cheer for to make videos!”

“No, Smoochy, you need to get into the bath and start selling Blurays.”

Yes, it’s that well-worn trope about winning an onsen vacation for the whole group in a raffle (tickets donated by the record store owner last week), but instead of changing into yukata and heading for the bath, they go out on the town, to cheer!

As for the bathing, hope you liked Smoochy’s painted-on travel outfit, because apparently this is the only hot spring in Japan where girls wear red cocktail dresses into the bath. It’s like it was supposed to be fan-service, including Parkour Gal being shy about stripping in front of others, but someone chickened out at the last minute.

Anyway, an assortment of plot points are sprinkled on the water, including a very mild yuri tease, and Our Pom-Poms formally announce on their new channel that you can call them up if you need a cheer, anytime anywhere. In any realistic universe, they’d show up at a deserted parking lot and never be heard from again.

Verdict: it appears this will not follow the standard underdog sports story. Even when they meet up with the “rival team”, they’re not actually competing in any way; Wheels Gal even promises to join their team once she gets her muscle tone back. That just leaves the cheesecake, and if this is how they do the hot-springs episode, there’s not much hope for a seaside episode with gainaxing beach volleyball.

(which reminds me that they can all be summarized with one word each: Smoochy, Parkour, Princess, Yoga, Genki, and Wheels)

uc2p: cutting over

For many years, my dotfiles included the following aliases:

dlpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -2rGL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    enscript -MLetter -GL66 -DDuplex:false -p- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

Cruftily overriding auto-duplexing and European default paper sizes are exactly the sort of things that people don’t want to type every time. -M for media size was another. When Apple ditched PostScript for good, I had to add GhostScript’s ps2pdf - to the pipeline, too. But as of today, it’s just:

dlpr () {
    uc2p -2rL66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

slpr () {
    uc2p -L66 -o- "$@" | open -a preview -f
}

(I made gaudy headers the default, since I always use them anyway, and I haven’t actually written a “simple” style yet)

Not ready for distribution, yet, since Reportlab’s font-handling is a mess. The API for loading custom fonts is awkward, but I could make it work… except that for some reason the font-search functionality is storing all the metadata as byte arrays rather than UTF-8 strings, and it’s failing to reliably extract simple characteristics like “bold” and “italic”. For now I’ve just hard-coded it to use my IO Terminal fonts for everything.

Gate manga, volumes 13-15

Amazon took two weeks to let me know that a series I’d already bought twelve of had three new ones: 13, 14, 15.

(this recommendation is a lot more useful than their relentless promotion of The Little Big Book Of Chatting Up Kids About Sex)

Speaking of Amazon…

…the “four-star styles recommended for you” section keeps getting worse. These were all from one set:

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