Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 2

Baby steps this week, as Our Emotionless Killer Maid is confronted with her induced trauma about vicious wild dogs, with the gentlest, squishiest trigger imaginable. I’ll give even odds that the person who left the puppy at their door was also responsible for sending her there, and that we’ll be seeing more surprise events that help her adjust to normal life.

As for her potential emotional range, the voice actress was also responsible for the super-genki lead in Bakuon!!, so there’s plenty of headroom there.

Verdict: she’s warmed up just a little, enough that I’ll give it another week.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 1

I could do without hearing the OP song ever again. Other than that, the recap is brief, and they quickly pick up where they left off, with Our Birdbrained Hero tackling a new area with two bunnies and a cat. Our Would-Be Romeo Cat clumsily woos Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, but still contributes significant combat power. Our High-Strung White Rabbit mostly panics, but manages to take out a few exploding golems.

The Sunraku/Bilac dynamic gives me hope that we’ll see a lot of her this season, but I suspect this arc is the only time we’ll really get to see her shine. I was sad that she wasn’t in the ED animation.

Verdict: off to a good start, with Our Frenemies showing up at the end with mischief in mind.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

With all the classes overhauled and the loot rescaled, the seasonal content is fine, and fresh enough to be worth playing. As for the $60 DLC, the first problem is that you can’t skip the story quests on a new character until you’ve completed the whole thing at least once. Which is the second problem: the story is slow, boring, filled with unskippable gibberish (excuse me, “ancient language”), and padded out with tons of mindless mook fights. Spoiler alert:

In the base game, you only needed to get through the prologue once, and all future characters had a fully unlocked world. Here, they’re determined to make you sit through their writing and voice acting. There are some tedious scenes you can skip, but not enough. IMHO, if they wanted players to care enough about Neyrelle to make her the emotional core of the DLC, they shouldn’t have introduced her as an annoying omnicompetent snarky teen sidekick in the base game.

“As I was going to St. Ives…”

A group of researchers tested LLM solutions to grade-school math problems, and reached the obvious conclusion that they weren’t capable of mathematical reasoning, being trivially tripped up by injecting variety into straightforward word problems of the type used to train them. Simply changing up the numbers reduced the success rate, but adding irrelevant clauses really killed it. They basically stumped the “smartest” LLMs with MadLibs.

(via Language Log)

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