Chibis-A-Go-Go, episode 8

Our Severely Chibi-Whipped Hero almost loses a chance at another rare slime while negotiating with appeasing his mistresses. Then Our Hot Adventure Gals show up, putting him right back in the doghouse, and Hot Naginata Gal offers private tutoring. Gosh, she seems a bit disappointed when he invites Crush-chan, and then her pals want in as well, even the one who isn’t taking the entrance exam.

As if that weren’t dangerous enough, they run into a helldoggie that shouldn’t be on this level, and as soon as they barely manage a victory, its master shows up and curb-stomps them. With everyone about to die in a slow-motion overtalky battle, Our Hero frantically reviews everything he’s got left and finds a trump card: Chibi Devil True Form (powered by his rapidly-dwindling HP).

Our Cute Chibi Hot Busty Devil’s life-draining accelerated puberty unlocks powers well beyond her official rank, leaving the villain baffled. And dead. Her personality hasn’t changed, though, so she demands praise before reverting to chibi form and letting Our Hero live to sub another day.

The helldoggie drops a premium crystal that Our Rich Mage-Maiden quietly states isn’t the one she’s looking for, so we’ll call that something like foreshadowing. Being all Rich Gals, they don’t care about the money from the crystal, and they award the big prize to Our Hero as well: a servant card of the defeated villain.

This should be worth orders of magnitude more than the crystal, but the girls don’t care about that either, and, impulsive as ever, he summons the mighty villain from the card and gets…

Verdict: so much for getting any info on Crush-chan’s missing Dad, and now the villain from the credits has become Our Kinda-Gay Chibi Devil Shota. Yeah, Our Hero regrets the summons.

(maybe he could hand off Snatch-cleaning duties to his new shota)

Cheer Gals, episode 7

Our Cheer Mercenaries are bummed about not getting any orders, until they receive a special request: join the cheerleaders for a losing high school baseball team as they take on Their Rivals, who just happen to be the team from Genki & Wheels’ school. Tropes go wild in this infodump-heavy cheer battle that impresses the roving reporter more than it does the crowd. (note: it must suck to have games scheduled during summer vacation)

Verdict: let’s just call this the summer slump episode, and hope it gets better next week, when Wheels tries out her legs.

Font-manager update

FontBase (even with an “awesome” subscription) is limited to very basic functionality. Worse, it has a two-years-and-counting bug where it will just stop working on a Mac until you completely wipe its configuration and start over (rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/FontBase"). So that’s a big no-can-do.

Typeface, the Mac-only app that directly imports from FontExplorer X Pro, makes extensive use of tiny gray fonts, with the sidebar putting them on a slightly-lighter-gray background, so a giant go-fuck-yourself from 20-year-old app designers with perfect vision. It also uses tiny low-saturation color dots to indicate font-activation status, so that’s a double go-fuck-yourself.

And its focus is very visual as opposed to technical. The only view option is to see large numbers of fonts presented as rendered preview strings. Not, say, a nice tabular layout containing useful information about the fonts you have. And if the font doesn’t have the characters you ask it to preview, it renders them in a default font in (wait for it…) gray. That isn’t even a “preview”.

Sigh. I really, really miss FontExplorer X Pro…

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