Red Cat Ramen, episode 9

Human-chan has broken through the last barrier to full acceptance at the shop: Waitress Kitty not only called her by her first name, but shortened it and added a -chan.

Cosplay Harem, episode 9

I wasn’t sure how they were going to set it up, but I fully expected Our Hot Teacher to end up in her sexy succubus costume this week, and not only does she deliver, she mentors Our Crushed Heroine as both teacher and idol, learning a few things about herself in the process. Meanwhile, Our Goofball Mean-Girl Pro struts her stuff and works the crowd, but it turns out her 2D crush bears a striking resemblance to someone we know…

With the costume and confidence crises resolved, it’s time for Our Heroine to suit up and start the show, but how can they keep the crowd from leaving while she’s changing? Next week, Battle Of The Legendary Cosplay Queens.

Verdict: this is better than it has any right to be. And I’m not just talking about Teacher’s barely-there succubus outfit.

Molesting Magical Girls continues to have a lot of success running promotions at cafés with themed drinks and snacks. I think this show should should do the same, and their first offering should be the Lust-A-Latte, in honor of Our Hot Teacher’s favorite character.

Earth: Final Bye-Bye, episode 8

I’m not sure whether I lost the plot or they did. The lengthy revelation about the local god seemed utterly out of place in the middle of a battle where dozens of spear-carriers have already died and Our Boring-Bath Catgirl was barely rescued in time.

Verdict: this is either a highlight reel from a book that explains everything in immense detail, or a faithful adaptation of a complete clusterfuck.

Dungeon People, episode 8

“Do you have a floor preference?”

"Yeah, I would like a floor."

“No, I mean, what level?”

"Beginner."

(classical reference)

This week, Our Intrepid Explorer is given the chance to design a new version of dungeon level five, which not only exposes her to some practical design issues, but to the secret of why they really lock the door to the boss room. She also learns that spirits do not respect your personal space; in another kind of show, that would have been a major buy-the-bluray scene. If we’re lucky, fan-artists will pick up the ball and run with it.

Verdict: low-key fun, as usual.

(Lily remains my favorite dungeon pick-up)

Wow, that’s actually novel

Typical Nigerian money-scam email, but the person seeking my assistance in “processing” the fund has an Arabic name in the body of the message and a Korean name in the headers (“트라피스트수녀원” = “Trappist Monastery”. It has also been stripped down to the essence of the scam, not bothering to mention the source of the money or even what country the bank is in that’s holding it. I particularly enjoyed this phrasing:

“I am reaching out to you for a sincere collaboration in partnership to actualize this potential.”

Totally legit, I’m telling you.

UC2P progress

I’ve cleaned up the code and documentation, added error-checking in all the useful places, tested a number of edge cases, embedded my font and set up a well-defined font search path, packaged it with Poetry, etc. What I haven’t done yet is implement any page styles other than the old Enscript Gaudy, or support for defining them.

Which isn’t a problem for me, since I’ve been using Gaudy since the Eighties, but the point of making this a real project was to make something useful for people other than just me. 😁

Enscript’s flexible page-layout system was based on template files written in raw PostScript, which doesn’t translate well into PDF, so I need to convert the box-splitting and text layout code into a mini-language that can be loaded from the config file, which is a classic project epicycle. For now, I’ll define a minimal framework for style code and just eval() it; that will let me make progress on supporting multiple styles without taking time out to write a parser.

The second priority on my to-do list is testing the actual version dependencies against what Poetry baked into the install. I think I used some 3.12-specific syntax for f-strings, but if I change those, it should run in a much older version of Python with a much older version of Reportlab. Which would be sociable of me.

Third priority is to flesh out the documentation for the included box-manipulation library, which I ported over from PDF::Cairo; this will be necessary for the box-related operators.

I miss Perl’s in-place POD documentation, which is so much nicer than the Python culture of API dumps that sometimes link to web pages; you can put real documentation into docstrings alongside your code, but for some reason almost nobody does.

(I think it’s the same mindset that led the NetPBM clowns to change --help output to say “go read the manpage, dipshit”, and then make the manpages a deprecated optional install that just contain “go read our website, you troglodyte”)

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