It’s father/daughter detective week, with Luomen and Maomao finding puzzle pieces in different places. Which puzzle? The big spoilery one that’s been building up since early in season one. They held back one last secret for next week, but once that cat’s out of the bag, it’s showtime.

…and if you’re not current on the show, beware major, major spoilers anywhere it might be discussed. Including new fan-art.

Unrelated, Gate manga volumes 20-21

Released together last week: 20, 21. I still think it’s a shame the light novels were never officially translated (and for a long time, the most complete English fan-translation was based on the Chinese translation), but at least the manga is now well past where the anime ended. Story-wise, it’s moving into the endgame.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 5

This week brings back Our Watery Tart Spirit Mama for, well, momma lessons. School, shopping, bedtime stories, reverse aging, a little light kidnapping; y’know, the usual.

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 5

Our Blue-Haired Young Pickpocket comes in from the cold, and she not only looks older than Our Legal-Loli Head Wizard, she dresses like she’s ready to graduate to adult crime. Seriously, where do these fantasy worlds come up with daisy dukes for hot gals to wear unbuttoned, when nobody else in the world seems to wear denim at all? Not that Our Hero’s Sword responds to either of them that way; he may be the only man in town who doesn’t wonder what it would be like to double-date the jailbait.

Anyway, since she’s in the ED animation with a sword, we know Blue is going to continue hanging out with Sword Daddy in some fashion. If he had the slightest inkling of exactly how Former Female Students feel about him, he’d think twice about training Yet Another Underage Treat.

Verdict: this one’s got some sass, at least; a nice contrast with the others. No redhead this week, though.

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 16

They blew half the episode on wrapping up the Rain-stealing-bozo B-story, so that when they finally got around to getting everyone into the bath together, they’d handed over the character art to a group of fourth-graders. They did airdrop Our New Magic Loli into the tub with them, but they forgot to bring Jamie. It’s not like she didn’t have time to travel to join them, since they made Our Hapless Harem Hero take two weeks to get home from last week’s big fight.

Verdict: it’s nice that the prince who was after Rain turned out to be a decent guy who wanted her adventuring talents, but not being able to draw the haremettes well in their moment of wet naked triumph is inexcusable. And they can’t excuse the lack of Jamie by pointing at the source material; it’s an actual trope to rearrange events in a harem comedy to get a gal onscreen early.

(proper bath scene is unrelated, dammit)

Clueless Crafter, episode 6

Our Impenetrably-Clueless Cleaning Hero mops up the demon army and saves Our Hot-But-Evil Ex-Priestess while Our Crushing Bug-Eyed Princess uses Her Ridiculously OP Sword to take out the Big Bad and save Our Gal Who Wears The Pants In This Harem.

Perhaps next week Kurt will invent a way to animate barely-panned stills and add lip-flaps on a shoestring budget.

Verdict: really cheap, but extra-cheesy.

Robo-Ho, episode 5

Wow, this show gives new meaning to “one-trick pony”, with the humor continuing to be so centered around her easy-off leg that she can’t make it down the hallway at school without slipping on a banana peel. Twice.

That’s after Our Hapless Robo-Nerd wakes up wondering why he’s had yet another sex dream about his sexy naked clinging roommate and tries to reach the tissue box so he can jack off before she wakes up. Fortunately she wakes up before he starts, so we’re spared that sight. Although it would help correct her persistent misunderstanding about what little boys are made of.

It would be understating the case to say that my expectations for this show were low, but it’s getting hard to watch, and we’ve only reached the first day back at school. They’ve gotta do something to bring in the other two gals, and quick. At least they showed the little blue-haired one just before the end credits, but there haven’t been any sightings of merc/lab gal and her squad of robo-clones since the first episode.

Verdict: we’re nearly halfway through the show, and we’ve really only introduced Our Badly-Coupled Couple and Our Overprotective Misinformative Galpal. Not that I’m expecting major plotting in a show that’s only got nine minutes in between the credits…

(there’s basically no fan-art; this is the manga artist, showing off the weak joint that’s effectively a main character)

Things you never want to hear from the director who’s adapting a novel into a movie or series:

“I thought this work could be condensed to explore modern themes and social issues”

I’m not really seeing how that translates to “skip the first novel but constantly reference it”. When I watched the first episode, I liked that the characters were presented as a pre-existing partnership, rather than having to go through their Odd Couple meet-and-greet, but then we were expected to just accept an emotional connection that we were never shown or told about.

Now we find out that the director isn’t really even interested in adapting the novels, he’s pissing in the whiskey to make his own story. Blech.

Those are definitely not noodle arms…

The text reads “Father’s a man”. Transphobic before it was hip!

Eighties Viagra

There’s an old cartoon that I think was in Playboy. Can’t find it online at the moment, but a man was walking past a construction site for a brothel, and the sign read, “soon you too can be erected on this site”.

Amazon proposes…

… J disposes. Latest recommendation for a novel was something called Direct Descendant by Tanya Huff, which the blurb promises will be a cozy-but-eldritch mystery with a bit of romance. Oh, wait, it promises to be “Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun”. With added boldfaced queer romance just in case you didn’t read the blurb to the end.

And to really make sure it appeals to a broad audience, the Kindle edition is $16.99. Yup, that’ll just fly off the virtual shelves. I liked the cover art, at least.

This isn’t the weird part…

spoiler

It’s the sniffing.

If anyone doubted the sincerity of Lakan’s feelings about his daughter Maomao, this week’s events should blow that away. As for Jinshi’s feelings about her, well, he’s had a life-changing epiphany about just how far he’ll go. It doesn’t hurt that, at the same time, he’s growing more aware of the ongoing revelations about the former emperor that we’ve been seeing.

Fuck you, Broadcom

I can’t download the latest update for VMware Fusion because it requires “additional verification”. The form auto-fills in your profile information, but the Javascript verification does not accept single-letter names such as “J”, and does not allow you to edit the field. In fact, their entire customer-support system has had read-only profiles for a while now, complete with an FAQ. And their chatbot does not understand the problem or connect you to human beings.

Well, that’s one way to keep costs down while you destroy an acquisition.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 6

Fight week times two. A bit shoutier than usual.

(fighter is unrelated)

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 6

Also fight week. This show has basically revealed itself as a jailbait-and-switch, with Our Affectionate And Servicing Former Students never hitting on Our Middle-Aged Rural Swordsman at all, and him never even thinking about it. And now Our Magical Blue-Haired Former Thief has moved into a clear daughter role.

Verdict: not that there’s anything wrong with that; S-Rank Daughter succeeded at supplying a collection of cute girls while keeping them out of Daddy’s pants, so maybe this one can, too. But they did kind of lead us on…

(Best Daughter is unrelated)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 17

Despite the six minutes of post-adventure exposition and the travel montage, this episode pretty much wrapped up everything, including shifting Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch into full tsundere mode, and it even kept the character art fairly consistent.

Verdict: I think this is a good place to stop for me. Big adventure is over, Yuke’s got a house full of gals who love him, and there isn’t an Asshole Party in sight.

(fan-art is still mostly just poorly-posed CG or bad pr0n, so an actual drawing of Jamie was a surprise)

Deep Thoughts, For Stupid People

Last night I watched Lucy, Luc Besson’s cinematic drinking game. That is, if you take one shot every time someone states something absolutely ludicrous as fact, you’ll be dead in the first fifteen minutes. With bonus animal husbandry.

Why did I watch it? It was free, I was bored, and the highly deceptive trailer was vaguely interesting.

Why did I keep watching it all the way to the end? For the same reason I watched Kill Bill 1: I kept wondering if it would stop getting worse. And it never did.

(crazy blonde magic engineer is unrelated)

Anti-Semantic Versioning

There’s a reason I froze the version of Hugo I use to build this site: constant breaking changes. Yes, version 0.146.0 completely changes the templating system, forcing you to move all your layout files around. No, this wasn’t clearly documented until after 0.147.2 came out.

I gave up after trying to go from 0.119.0 to 0.120.0 left me with ~30,000 lines of diff output again. I have seen nothing in the changelogs since September 2023 that would make me want to take on that mess again.

Clueless Crafter, episode 7

Well, that fell off a cliff, and not just the character art. This episode would actually have been improved by the addition of pies to the face.

And the flashback of Kurt’s childhood medicinal first kiss is clearly going to bring in a new horny haremette, since he just happened to be named Viceroy to the town that just happens to be next door to the demon kingdom, and I’m sure L’il Demonette just happens to have spent the last ten years dreaming of a reunion.

Verdict: one more chance before I drop it. Maybe.

(horny gal is unrelated, no longer on Pixiv)

Robo-Ho, episode 6

This week, the main character is once again her left leg, as Our Geeky Hero explores the busted joint while Our Naked Barbie Doll lies back and thinks of England. Then gets bored and calls Our Suspicious Galpal just as his probing starts to make her feel all tingly inside. She reacts as if the inside of her leg joint is lined with clits.

“These are the jokes, kid.”

Verdict: couldn’t finish it, giving up now.

(I was never expecting this show to be even a tenth as good as Gushing turned out to be, but I didn’t think it would be so cheap that they couldn’t afford a second joke)

Metaphor alert!

Vegan Toilet Bowl Cleaner. To put the sustainable organic cherry on top , it’s rhubarb-scented.

How to raise a busty waifu

Ina Enohara shows how it’s done: you feed them, you water them, they grow!

VMware (not) update

Finally advanced my VMware Fusion download failure to “Account verification is Pending. Please try after some time” (yes, I manually edited the page to enable the field, changed my one-letter name to a three-letter name, and overrode the disabled submission button; the fourth time it worked). Managed to get a chat window to connect me either to an Indian call center operator or an AI pretending to be one, who just sent me a link to the same download page that didn’t work.

Schrödinger’s chatbot claims to have escalated the ticket to “the concern team”, who will email me an update in the next 24 hours.

Maomao’s going to have to stay in spoiler limbo for another week, because this week’s episode was apparently bumped. This would be less annoying if there were other good shows to watch.

Smoke-Signal Flag Day

Traeger has announced that you must update the firmware on your Internet-connected smoker by the end of September, or it will no longer be Internet-connected. Something-something-cloud-services.

BroadcomBot fixed it!

I have now successfully downloaded VMware Fusion 13.6.3. It even worked.

Yes, I saved the installer on my NAS, “just in case”.

No, they did not send the promised email; I had to keep checking.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 7

In the least-plausible setup of the season, Our Busty Guild Gal In Red Underrim Glasses is unable to find a man, and drags Our Ever-17 Witch and company to a find-a-mate party as her wingwomen. We haven’t seen this character much this season, so her presence is welcome, even if Her Cunning Plan is a bust. Anyway, the local wedding spirit talks Azusa into buying a sister-bonding package for Our Slime Twins. This gets Best Gal Beelzebub into more clothing than we’ve ever seen her wear. But in a good way.

I wouldn’t have minded some more footage of Our Busty Undead Catgirl and her distracting casino-dealer outfit, though. Maybe she’ll make it into a LoRA.

This might have worked as a half-length sketch, but padding it out to an entire episode dragged.

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 7

This week, Our Sword Dad adjusts to life with a house and a daughter, getting through years of “am I a good dad?” in a few hours. It happens so fast that White and Red barely have time to be jealous that they don’t live under his… roof.

Verdict: a bit slow, but they compensated by giving Daddy his first encounter with an age-appropriate hottie who he has an excuse to spend some time with. Go, teacher!

(Guest Lecturer Zelda is unrelated)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 18

I just fast-forwarded through this because last week’s preview promised that Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch would finally be back, and she is, but fully dressed in street clothes. Other than that, it looks like it was a whole lot of talking and setup for the final story arc.

(spies are completely unrelated, and I just wanted to use this picture)

Traeger Update Update

I hadn’t fired up the smoker yet this year, so I went out to clean it and replace the ash bucket while it ran through the firmware updates. Apparently I’d left it uncovered for one of the bigger storms late last year, because the rain has to be basically horizontal to somehow get inside. That is, rain got inside.

It drained into the ash bucket and overflowed into the cabinet. The pellets were in sealed bins, so nothing was damaged, but soaking the mix of ash and rendered fat in the bucket made for a pretty nasty smell.

End-of-season note to self: thoroughly clean everything before the first snowfall, then leave the cover on all winter, even if you think you might have a chance to get out there and use it…

(maid is unrelated, welcome to drop by and do some cleaning)

Disturbingly accurate, but also deeply wrong

Still going…

New DOGE recruiting poster

Google AI: always confidently wrong

I searched for “otagiri history”. Random facts were merged together:

It does link to its sources, but fails to provide any reason to connect them in this way.

Actual facts, which can be derived by completely ignoring the prominent “AI” summary and reading through the buried search results:

1. Otagiri is a mildly-collectible brand of handmade dinnerware, made by a variety of Japanese kilns from the late Fifties through the mid-Nineties. Several American designers were hired to provide Hallmark-ish designs (not for tiki mugs). It’s widely available on Etsy and eBay at reasonable prices, and every once in a while new old stock turns up in Japanese warehouses, often from patterns that never made it to the US (Umami Mart used to sell coffee mugs they found in the warehouse of Kenzan Ceramics, some of which had Otagiri branding).

2. They also imported ceramic tiki mugs, chickens, turkeys, houses, music boxes, etc, as well as some decorative laminated platters.

3. The importer has no documented connection to anyone by the name “Otagiri” (小田切 = “small field” + “bounds”).

4. Further down under “other connections”, it finally says “Otagiri was also a well-known dinnerware company, particularly for its pottery, known for its firing and glazing techniques”, not recognizing that it’s the same company.

5. It also cites a phony book on Amazon that clearly exists just to sucker people who search for the word.

6. Finally, it links to the Wikipedia article for Otagiri Dam, which qualifies as “otagiri history”, but has no known connection to any of the others.

Why do I know any of this? Because a while back, my mom was sorting through stuff that’d been in boxes through multiple moves, and she handed me a small lidded crock and said, “I think you’ll like this, it feels very Japanese”. I turned it over, saw the name and country of origin, and googled the sticker. Then I checked the labels on the coffee mugs I’d previously bought from Umami Mart, and sure enough, one of them had the same Otagiri sticker.

Later I found a few nice-looking affordable pieces in the same pattern (Bittersweet) and bought them. I now have a number of their more decorative plate designs on the wall in my dining room, as well as a slowly-growing collection of that pattern. I was briefly tempted by a very complete dinner set of Bittersweet, but you had to pick it up in person in Monterey and I’d just left California forever.

I also discovered that there are a number of “Otagiri-like” patterns for sale online, almost all of them unlabeled, and based on the similarity in design, I suspect there were other importers working with the same Japanese kilns.

These, for instance, have the exact same size and shape as Otagiri soup mugs and bread plates, but don’t match any known set:

One reason a lot of Otagiri pieces are unlabeled is that the importer initially used a gold sticker on the bottom for their branding, and people often removed it or washed it off. The only reason we have official names for most of the patterns is that they later switched to stamping/painting the details on the bottom (likely when they filed their US trademark in 1980). I’ve also seen it claimed that the stickers were only added once the crates were unpacked in San Francisco, but the mug I got from Umami Mart had it applied in Japan.

By the way, Kenzan Ceramics doesn’t make coffee mugs and dinner plates any more; they’re strictly high-end wall and floor tile. I guess the export business got them through some lean years while they were establishing their business.

Google AI turns up the heat…

As for OpenAI…

If I were an investor, I’d have serious questions about spending $6.5 billion on a hardware startup that’s never demoed a product, with announcements that name-drop the look-and-feel designers, not the hardware team. Especially when the Chief Used-Car Salesman claims they’re going to sell 100 million of the gadgets at record speed.

(“look, we’ve got Jony Ive!”)

Touch Grass Boobs!

I decided to collect a few names and links for the next time I have to criticize someone who tries to create a LoRA for generating “natural” large-breasted women using only pictures of obvious plastic titties. It’s just sad that they don’t know what breasts look like.

NSFW and sites filled with predatory Javascript and sketchy ads, as usual:

• Momona Koibuchi
• Yuu Tano
• Matsuri Kiritani
• Nanami Matsumoto
• Ai Sayama
• Nana Fukada
• Yuria Yoshine
• Miharu Usa
• Kana Tsuruta

The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 19

This week, Shisui is looking particularly foxy. Pity I can’t say any more than that without massive spoilers. Fortunately, this show is still carrying the entire season.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 8

This week, a swimsuit episode. Next week, an Egyptian pyramid filled with undead. I know this because they uploaded next week’s subtitles. I think it improved the experience.

(don’t know that I’ll bother rewatching the fixed version later; the bikinis are the best part, and they don’t need translation)

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 8

This week, Thirsty McWhitehair takes Our Oblivious Sensei on a date, using shopping for court-friendly clothing as an excuse to spend the entire day with him. Then she challenges him to a duel, planning to confess her feelings if she wins. Despite stacking the deck with well-displayed cleavage and a thong, she ends up on her back, but not in the way she wants.

Verdict: if the Sweet Young Thing Brigade aren’t going to be proper haremettes, we need more screen time for Hot Teacher.

(hot teacher is unrelated but all grown up)

Please wait until it’s signed…

There’s a whole lot of cheerleading going on about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Yes, it’s very nice that the House actually passed a budget, but it still has to survive being molested by the Senate before reaching Trump’s desk.

“Why don’t Senators use bookmarks? Because they like their pages bent over.”

(ironically, you actually could bend over someone dressed in this costume…)

(bundling the Hearing Protection Act into it sure sounds nice, and it would definitely boost American manufacturing, but you know there are squishy RINOs in the Senate who’ll fold under the pressure of a light breeze)

TL/DR: train wreck in progress.

Coming soon on Netflix, something I learned only because one of the songs is done by members of the girl-group Twice.

Department of faint praise:

Note that this is not from any of the writers, directors, animators, or actors involved in Across The Spider-Verse, just from the same studio. At best, maybe the animation team used the same rendering farm.

If they had confidence in the production, they’d say, “director of Wish Dragon” and “writers of Gabby Duran & The Unsittables”.

(not a lot of literal “trainwreck” pictures on Pixiv, and “cute girls jumping in front of trains” isn’t on my list, so I’ll go with a less bloody disaster to get some girls into the picture)

Unrelated AI bullshit

Hype: “Our new AI refuses to let us shut it down!”

Reality: sudo killall justanotherllm

Seriously, “agentic AI” is a random sentence generator that can make API calls, nothing more. You can deliberately create a function that lets it run arbitrary commands and then watch it cut-and-paste from Stack Overflow with all the grace and style of a junior intern who barely speaks English, but that’s only if you’re an idiot.

Just got an ore-ore scam phone call!

First time in years. “Hey, Grandpa, how are you?” It was such a change from all the Medicare/Medicaid scam calls I get that I kinda wish he hadn’t stopped talking after I laughed at him.

Fantasy Life i

This newly-released slow-life RPG on Steam looks interesting, with a wide variety of things to do, but it’s infected with a mandatory third-party “anti-cheat” malware install. If you don’t care about playing online, there’s a way to prevent “Easy Anti-Cheat” from ever being installed, but you have to re-disable it after every update to keep it from trying to install.

Or wait for the Switch 2 version, which relies on Nintendo’s closed platform for security.

Note that player avatars are not shaped like this; in fact, it follows the common trend of pretending that gender is all just a fashion choice, and allows you to freely mix-and-match parts on your pre-adolescent character. For the realism, I’m sure.

Never mind that as soon as you get the story going, you meet a king and his princess sister, who exhibit stereotypically male and female behaviors, because that makes sense.

Just another government database…

Japan Post has announced a digital address system. No, it does nothing to overcome the deficiencies of Japan’s baroque block/intersection addressing schemes and help people find places quickly and reliably. What it does is assign a random code to anyone who requests one, which users can then type into shipping forms instead of typing their actual address.

If customers don’t ever type the code wrong, and if vendors update their databases to store the code instead of a multi-field address, and if the customer moves and remembers to update their record in this government database, then they will not have to also update those vendors’ web sites to ensure that future orders go to the right place. They will, however, have to remember which vendors didn’t accept the codes the last time they placed an order…

(vendors will of course also cache the actual address, because they don’t want all of their logistics to depend on real-time calls to some random government-maintained API)

The funny thing is, taxi driver GPS systems have been doing this for years with phone numbers, because it can be a pain in the ass to type addresses in Japan and make sense of them. I make pre-perforated inkjet business cards for planned destinations before our trips to Japan, and always prominently include the phone number.

(people have already thought of a bunch of other potential problems with this system; probably more than the creators of the system have thought of…)

“German-inspired craftsmanship”

There’s a brand of home & commercial cookware being sold on Amazon, Wagensteiger. It name-drops Germany in the ad copy (with a “brand by GERMANY” rollmark on many of the products), and even uses a cute little line drawing of a farmer to reinforce the image. In reality, the company is 100% Korean with much of their manufacturing in China, but they’ve hired Germans to do some design work.

It’s not hidden on their web site, but you won’t find it stated on Amazon, just the weasel words. Which is kind of sad, because these days South Korea probably has a better reputation for quality than Germany…

(I bought this bowl/strainer set for $21, by the way, and it looks quite well-made)

Action!

Somewhere on a dusty VHS tape, I have someone interviewing a nude model, answering a question about what her job is like. She laughs and says (from memory) “‘more titty action!’, photographers shout it at me again and again, having me run and jump and make them bounce around; it’s all they want”.

In that vein, while reviewing the extras on Matsuri 5, I found an ad for Matsuri 4, where they had her jumping rope nude. Poor gal must have had bruises after every shoot of her career.

All is revealed, and the players take the field. The most interesting thing to happen, though, is that we get to see things from Shisui’s point of view for once.

Fan-service rocks!

Another announcement for the summer season establishes the “cute girls finding cute rocks” genre, with a teacher whose boulders bounce. Cast and crew are mostly inexperienced, with one true first-timer counterbalanced by Raphtalia.

Not going on my list unless something goes really wrong with the three (sigh) shows already there.

Unrelated, I would support this adventuring party

It might surpass the limits of my carry weight, but somehow I think I can keep up.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, episode 9

Last week ended with Our Heroines about to brave the depths of a dungeon filled with undead to… convince another undead shut-in to come out. Surprisingly, they didn’t send for Our Busty Undead Catgirl Gamer to join the quest. Fortunately Best Gal Beelzebub is around, and Our Queen Of The Undead turns out to be a nerdy cutie. Second half has Our Legal Loli Plant blossoming; it seems concentrated fertilizer makes everything grow.

Bumpkin & Harem, episode 9

Red seems to have grown out of her crush on Our Daddy Figure, and to signal this, the show went out of its way to avoid some very obvious opportunities for fan-service. She still dresses for it, but despite all the action as she horsed around in the woods, they even skipped showing her heaving bosom when she was sweaty and out of breath.

White, on the other hand, is still easy to rile, such as when a brand-new contender for Most Affectionate Former Student suddenly appears.

Verdict: Beryl is a total dad now, buying school supplies, saving up for Mewi’s future, and even walking her to the school bus carriage on the first day. He even works in a dad joke. The only flaw is that we didn’t get to see hot teacher.

(Mewi’s uniform and bustline are both much more modest than this, but she’s getting good nutrition now…)

The algorithm is learning…

I scrolled my xTwitter “for you” feed all the way to the end, and it filled up with half-nekkid Japanese gals.

Then when I went back to the top, it had more of them. Finally, AI I can live with!