Not off to a good start. The nicest thing I can say is that the characters are drawn well. Unfortunately, the episode rips through a rematch with the Big Bad they barely survived against at the end of last season, and in their moment of triumph, he starts monologing and explains in detail how they just fell into his trap.

Verdict: they worked the recap in tolerably well, but my problem is what they worked it into: a generic “let’s go fight the demon lord’s general again!” plot. Fighting CGI mooks and a cliché villain is not what I’m looking for in a show about a sentient vending machine and his adorable super-strong busty girlfriend.

(also, the subtitles were a bit sloppy, which seems to be a theme with Crunchyroll this season, who got caught leaving AI droppings in one of their subs)

Unrelated, LLM != ML

I say this for the benefit of anyone who might be subjected to corporate training that conflates “agentic AI” (LLMs that can make API calls) with more traditional (and proven useful) Machine Learning approaches, in order to claim their successes.

The Apothecary Diaries 2, fin

Wait for it… Wait for it… Boom! Now for the agonizing wait until they make the next season.

Call Of The Night 2, episode 1

I appreciate a second season that respects the viewer and doesn’t waste half an episode on a lengthy recap. Or in this case, any time at all. The OP animation serves to remind you where we left off, and then it’s off to the races. Or at least the zoo.

The ED, on the other hand, has nothing to offer, visually or musically.

Verdict: solid start.

New GATE anime

Not more Rory Mercury and friends, though. It’s based on the spinoff.

(apparently they do show up at some point, but it’s not a continuation of the main story)

Finally!

When I moved back to Ohio three years ago, I kept my old iPhone with my California number, bought a new iPhone, and transferred over all the data, including my ~10,000 songs ripped from CD. This introduced the well-known problem where all the album covers were linked to the wrong albums. TL/DR: none of the recommended fixes worked, due to aggressive caching.

Today, I replaced it with a new iPhone (yes, I bought last year’s model, because new Apple hardware is a crapshoot with real crap). Before I set it up, though, I broke the sync connection, deleted all the music from it, and ran a backup. On the new phone, I restored the non-syncing backup and then synced the music over.

So I just had to burn the house down and build a new one.

(my iPhone history, coming from a work-paid Blackberry, is 4S to 6 Plus to XS to 13 Pro to 16 Pro. I still think the 4S was the best actual phone, but I don’t do much calling these days, and I’ve never really been much for receiving calls; these days, it’s mostly just email, texts, navigation, and PagerDuty alerts)

(3 years is basically how long it takes for Apple to lard up the OS and frameworks so that older devices are no longer viable)

Unrelated, Ai Shinozaki

Big Boobs Japan just went on a repost binge, adding back ~400 old photo shoots that got misplaced in one of its hosting changes. This includes over 40 shoots covering Ai’s entire career, from chubby-cheeked busty 14-year-old to still-got-it busty 33-year-old.

(shields up, Javascript down, as usual)

[Update: wow, either they just un-re-posted it all, or else went in and changed the dates to match their original uploads. The site went from having 30+ pages of stuff posted on the 4th to none at all.]

Kaiju No. 8 2 doesn’t premiere for two more weeks, but they’re filling the time slot with original side stories this week and next.

This week, a recap and a day off to re-introduce the cast.

And I’ll just throw in a little Frieren cheesecake.

The One True Sword Daddy returns!

…in Fall 2026.

Dear Elon,

No sooner do you announce your own political-spoiler party than my X feed turns into an endless shitshow of cryptocurrency fraud, Chinese bots rewriting history, and global warming hysteria, things that have never before appeared there. Coincidence, or something more?

(seriously, I blocked/muted more accounts in ten minutes today than I have in six months)

Dear Apple,

You filthy sons of bitches erased every mail-handling rule from Mail.app on my Mac when I upgraded my iPhone. No questions, no notifications, no backup. I can probably reconstruct it by browsing through my full-disk backups and putting it back, but these configs had survived dozens of semi-stable upgrades in the past. You just couldn’t fucking stop yourselves from using your “cloud” sync to overwrite existing data during phone setup (where I explicitly said “don’t sync email through iCloud”), could you? Guess I was holding it wrong again.

…

For reference, the data is in ~/Library/Mail/V10/SyncedRules.plist, and sure enough it was fine on July 3rd and wiped clean on July 4th. It’s plist-as-XML, which means it combines the worst features of two file formats, but at least it’s not one of Apple’s internal undocumented-garbage formats where it pretends to be XML but is filled with binary blobs. If I can’t just put it back and have it work, I should be able to mangle the plist contents into shape.

[Update: you must also completely delete the matching block in SyncedFilesInfo.plist, or it will immediately wipe the restored file again. Even once the rules are back, they will not be active, and you have to click them one-by-one.]

(and, yes, I see you also disabled SpamSieve, because for all your posturing about privacy, you have a strong interest in ads reaching user inboxes)

Complete tonal whiplash, as Our Duped Heroes rush back to town to find it half-destroyed, with most of the people dead or missing and the survivors wounded, exhausted, and hungry, then the scene switches to Boxxo making time with his two Best Girls.

Verdict: again, the character art is the only thing that’s working for me so far. Some of the individual scenes are fine, but they don’t fit together. Lacking any source material to draw on, the show is all over the place.

Prime + ads - ads = ads

Amazon folded Freevee (free-with-ads) into Prime Video, but kept the ads. I pay extra for Prime-without-ads, so naturally I am forced to watch ads for anything marked Prime that used to be on Freevee. For now. I have this sneaking suspicion that they’ll silently expand this new category of Semi Prime over time.

Time to find a new hotel…

For years now, our preferred hotel in Kyoto has been the Citadines. Great location (two subway stops up from Kyoto Station, grocery and dry cleaners down the block, easy walk to all sorts of shopping, kitchenettes, solid wifi, comfy beds, etc). Sadly, they recently shut down.

Top contender for next Spring trip is The Blossom, which is a block further away from the subway and a block closer to the grocery. I’ve got time to look around, but the last time we tried another place, it ended up being a lot less convenient, with the only major “pro” being that it was near a bigger, better grocery. It was very close to the station, but on the south side, so it took a lot longer to reach the trains, subways, and other shopping.

This trip will be an interesting variation on our usual, since it overlaps with my sister’s work events. I’ll be on my own for a week in Tokyo while she’s working, then we’ll have a week together in Kyoto, and then I fly home while she heads to her next conference.

With a week on my own, I might be able to set a big-camera-friendly pace…

X mars the sport

I don’t know what Elon’s Elves think they’re doing, but the end result is that the “for you” feed has turned into a complete disaster full of spam, scams, and an intense focus on English-language “news” from non-English-speaking countries.

I deselected all of the topics it insisted were based on my (nearly-nonexistent) activity, which included such gems as “Allstate”, “auto racing”, “Big Brother Brasil”, “Clay Travis”, “David Hogg”, “Ezra Miller”, “figure skating”, “Jill Biden”, “McNeil-PPC, Inc”, “NCAA Women’s Basketball”, “Other competition”, “Super Mario”, “The Home Depot”, “Zohran Mamdani”, etc. I unchecked every item on the list, and two days later most of them were back. And it had no effect on the garbage in the feed.

The only thing that seems to work is playing whack-a-mole with block-by-word, which currently looks something like this, and slightly reduces the amount of crypto crap:

binance bitcoin blockchain chain crypto dapp decentralization decentralized defi ecosystem eth ethereum fintech founder funds gm gn haters liquidity migration monad nft pumps stablecoin transaction transactions venture web3

What really works is… never checking the “for you” feed. This is probably not the desired result.

Raise your hand if you think Miss Sweet Sucker has Our Best Friend’s best interests in mind? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, we’re off to the races, with Our Sexy Killer Detective on the scene at the bathhouse. Sadly, she’s not dressed for the occasion, and they didn’t invite Our Remarkably Stacked Childhood Friend along, so the only bathing beauty is a trap.

Verdict: they are animating this story, sometimes, but also covering up a lot of stills with video effects. The voice performances are solid, though.

Netflix Leveling

I kind of wonder how diverse Netflix will make the cast of their live-action Solo Leveling series. Not enough for me to watch it, of course. Even if they made it far enough into the story before the inevitable Netflix cancellation, they couldn’t possibly find a cute-enough Esil.

Contrary to previous reports, there was no special episode this week. Instead, Crunchyroll put up the two-hour season one compilation movie that was released in theaters in Japan.

(monster-girl maid is unrelated)

Found my new ringtone…

The jaunty opening synths from the Genesis song Illegal Alien.

🎶 🎶 🎶
Over the border,
    there lies the promised land.
Where everything comes easy,
    you just hold out your hand.
🎶 🎶 🎶

The music video and radio edit leave out the line where he pimps out his sister…

Well, at least they’ve finally committed to the serious st… oh, never mind, whiplashed it in the final scene. Honestly, I’d have been much happier if they’d done it the other way around and spent only two minutes on The Big Mission, and the rest on Lammis reacting to Our Vending Hero’s accidental proposal.

Verdict: they tried to force a “character development” scene for Lammis, but the only actual character development this season has been promoting Our Neighborhood Hospitality Officer to “former adventurer who’s rather handy with a whip”.

(adventure gals gotta adventure)

DFC Chick On Porno Island ultimate censored edition

One network will only air the audio of this upcoming show. (which has been licensed by Oceanveil, Yet Another Streaming Service that seems to exist only to announce licenses like this)

This timely announcement has been brought to you by VividPink Operation:

NSFW

[simulcast not simul, today; this seems to be the new normal]

We have a plot! It’s thickening! Our Hot Killer Detective is on the case! And even the characters are moving! Okay, sometimes; there’s still a lot of “nighttime is dreamy so lets pan stills and cover them with effects”, and some moments that stood out for finding ways not to animate lip flaps.

Verdict: the story is advancing, with Our Bite-Seeking Hero spending some quality time with His Jealous Best Girl, while all the other local vamps react to an existential threat.

Way overdue for a photo-oriented trip…

Not around here at the moment, given the near-constant rain, humidity, and highs above 90° American (32° French). It’s just that thinking about being on my own in Tokyo next Spring for a week led me to check over my camera gear, which meant finding my camera gear.

I’ve “tidied the house” so many times since I moved in that it took me nearly two hours to find my good cameras and almost all of their accessories (still a few little bits to find, like the power hose for one of the chargers). The upside of the search is that I finally located the boxes containing the rest of my marudai, which were cleverly concealed under a bunch of books in a box at the back of one of the closets.

Finding the cameras led me to finally follow up on an email from B&H Photo letting me know that there was a major firmware update for the A7SIII (the big full-frame camera with insanely good low-light capability). The email was for version 3.0.1, but when I clicked the link, 4.0 was also available, and I was all the way back at 2.11.

First, I had to upgrade from 2.11 to 2.15, which required installing a kernel extension on my Mac. Which required allowing kernel extensions. Which required rebooting while holding down the power button and navigating through the maintenance menus (this, admittedly, is better than the old system of memorizing half a dozen magic key combinations). Two more reboots later, and I could run the updater. Then the other updater to get it to 3.01.

Going to 4.0 was trivial by comparison: copy a file onto an SD card and tell it to update itself. So, kudos to Sony for removing a bunch of useless pain from the process, although they really want you to switch to their new Cloud app with bonus subscription AI features…

The downside of getting everything checked out and charged up was that I discovered that Sony recently released what may be their sexiest lens ever: FE 50-150mm F2 GM.

Okay, so it’s 8 inches long, 4 inches thick, and weighs 3 pounds (coughcough). And costs $3,900. But it’s pro-grade glass with reach-out-and-touch-someone range at f/2! Combined with the A7SIII’s ISO 102,400 (or 409,600 when you’re short on candles), it would be perfect for dimly-lit temples, museums, etc.

I lust for it, but I think I can hold out until early Spring. I definitely don’t need it right now.

Speaking of lust…

Baiser hits the beach:

Two weeks ago, they gave us a special filler episode to remind us of the supporting cast. Last week, they gave us the theatrical movie cut of season one. So this week they can just jump right in and start with the new stuff?

Almost. Our Monsterized Hero has a combination nightmare/flashback to remind us of his personal goal, and then everyone heads off to their new post-graduation assignments. Our Mighty Tsuntail gets to watch her new team take out a fairly generic kaiju, in a way that’s both sloppy and messy, then finds out that Kafka will be on the same team. As the trailers promised, her backstory is foreshadowed in several quick scenes, and it looks to be a major part of this story arc.

Verdict: well somebody got an animation budget this season. I’m still not seeing much point to most of the goofballs in the supporting cast, but Kafka, Kikoru, Reno, and Mina are all interesting characters that I want to see more of.

(3,644 clean pics on Pixiv, 241 dirty ones; this is for the best, really, since most of the pics are guys and kaiju…)

The forecasts swear that it will not rain again until Friday. I find myself unable to complain about how wet it’s been this year in front of my Irish co-workers, so I’ll do it here…

Dear Amazon Logistics,

I’m so old I remember when two-day shipping meant that I got my package in two days. It looks like the stuff I ordered from a Tokyo camera store via eBay will arrive faster than the small “next-day” item I ordered from Amazon US.

Always in the last place you look…

Three years ago, I changed my primary phone number everywhere I could think of, but kept it active on the old phone in case there were a few places I missed. When I bought a new phone recently, I considered finally retiring the California phone number, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. It was just sitting on a shelf, powered off.

Yesterday, I had to power it up and retrieve a two-factor-authentication text message. From my domain registrar (no idea how I missed that one…). I couldn’t log in to update my billing without it, and one of my idle domains is up for renewal soon.

(picture is unrelated but cute, and overdue for posting)

(oh, and if you leave an iPhone turned off for a few weeks, it loses all charge; good work, Apple!)

The promise of streaming?

I’ve been a good boy, paying for numerous streaming services, even though some of them are getting increasingly user-hostile, like Amazon switching to an ad-supported model even when you pay extra to not see ads.

I’ve held up my end of the bargain, but they keep letting me down by silently trimming their catalogs to the point that you need another streaming subscription just to watch the same movie twice. And at least half of those show invasive ads. And a lot of things are just gone.

In short, I just grabbed a torrent of Vividred Operation because it’s not available on any streaming service at any price (Crunchyroll dropped it four years ago, and physical media is only available at collectible prices from Japan). At least with a 24-year-old show like Rune Soldier I can just break out the DVD box set, but something 12 years newer has almost completely vanished.

File under peculiar the fact that you can still buy all sorts of merch from the show, including cosplay outfits if you have the ass for it, but you can’t get the show itself. Sigh.

Anyway, I just watched the first episode, and it’s really jarring how much more animated the animation is than the majority of shows airing this season.

(Miss Kuroitsu never got a US release at all, and only a limited-edition Bluray box set in Japan that currently costs around $200 with shipping)

Hammer Of The Guild Gal hammered

The light novels have been de-published after the illustrator confessed to kiddie-diddling. Apparently they’ll be reprinted with new art, as will other series he’s done work for.

Boxxo Or Bust 2, episode 4

Finally an episode that focuses on the silly, with cheesecake provided by Our Health And Safety Officer and perversion supplied by The Universal Boy Hero in a less-innocent-than-usual role.

Verdict: more like this, please. And the next time all the gals jump into a pool, we need Boxxo to transform into a string-bikini vending machine. And a changing booth with a hidden camera.

(fan-artists haven’t really picked up the second season, although hopefully this week’s Shirley-service will inspire a few pieces…)

Call Of The Night 2, episode 4

In search of Our Sucking Heroine’s unknown past, we get part of an answer through a very-slightly-bloody flashback featuring the human life of Our Hot Busty Undead Nurse and her suspiciously familiar-looking love interest.

Verdict: I could use some hot-detective-on-hot-nurse action, but it’s really not that kind of show.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 2

“This sort of thing’s never happened to me before.” (classical reference)

The threat escalates, and Our Hero fails to get it up. Fortunately Our Mighty Tsuntail has his back, and he gets another chance. Next week.

Verdict: the CGI isn’t perfectly integrated, but everything works pretty well. Nice echo with the young boy and his injured little sister.

(there’s a lot of fan-art; very little of it is cheesecake for straight men)

The Divine Farming Tool is back (soon)

Farming Life In Another World season 2 is in development. Pretty much every comment is hoping they don’t erase the harem antics again.

(seriously, having only one of his dozens of waifus pregnant by the end of the first season really watered down the source material)

“AI’s more of a Shelbyville idea…”

Sam Altman sells the Fed a monorail

OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI
Sam Altman also said AI could already diagnose better than doctors, as his company expands into Washington

(classical reference)

This week stayed on the light and fluffy side, which is good, and leaned into the primary conceit of the series, which is better. Up to now, this season hasn’t done much with increasing Our Vending Hero’s transformations, just rehashing things he’s used before, but he takes some time to think about the concept of a vending machine and how he’s already stretched it, and then exploits it.

I’d be happy if he never used the diet-coke-and-mentos “explosives” ever again, and if his telekinesis wasn’t a whatever-the-episode-needs power (seriously, when did he learn to make balloon animals?). Creating an endless supply of pachinko balls is new, and soaking them in lube and launching them in two-liter coke bottles is pushing the boundaries of “vending”. I thought he could vanish generated “trash” at will, though, so I don’t know why he used his car-wash sprayer to get rid of the slippery balls.

The other thing they did was actually create a tiny bit of backstory for one of the supporting characters, deciding that the mage in the Fools party was half-vampire. No idea if they’ll do anything with it, but it stuck out.

Verdict: I hope these last two weeks represent the overall direction of the show, and it’s not going to veer back into high-stakes world-saving again.

Zombies vs Aliens

New Zombieland Saga movie trailer.

‘Hot’ take

I have yet to see a picture of Sydney Sweeney in which she appears to be more than a mildly-pretty young gal with a decent body; I’ve had better-looking women bag my groceries. But I’m not dunking on her for that; I’ve spent enough time with professional models to know that what I’m seeing is severely edited, and that the blank stares and lifeless poses are what the client wants (I swear to this day that Playboy must have used an electric cattle prod on Julia Schultz to eliminate her sweet personality and glorious smile in her centerfold shoot).

Anyway, to Our Clueless Leftie Friends: if you’re gonna smear Miss Sweeney as a Nazi, you really shouldn’t be surprised when a million men show up begging to annex her Sudetenland. I’d tell you to pick your battles more wisely, but I like seeing you lose.

Where did they go wrong?

IMHO, it wasn’t the woke bullshit that killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it was already dead to me by that point. The first Marvel movie I walked away in the middle of was Age Of Ultron. I couldn’t even tell you precisely where I gave up; it didn’t interest me enough to watch it in a theater, and when I rented it for streaming, I just stopped watching at some point. Iron Man 3 and The Dark World were okay, The Winter Soldier was decent, and Guardians Of The Galaxy was a blast, but Ultron just felt tedious, and I had to fast-forward a lot to make it through the wretched Civil War.

Rewatching the older movies recently reconfirmed the real fatal flaw: mandatory crossovers, the same thing that drove me away from their comics many years before. When a linear story gets spread across multiple franchises to force fans of one character to follow every other, they’re exploiting customer goodwill to make a buck, and deliberately making their product worse.

Ant Man and Doctor Strange succeeded by being standalone movies with brief cameos that placed them in the same world. Shang-Chi, while quite flawed by “the concerns of ‘modern audiences’”, was still fun, and even managed to make Awkwafina engaging. The rest? Just not worth my time.

Along this line, it’s relevant to note that one of the primary callouts in The Critical Drinker’s positive review of Fantastic Four is:

“For once, I didn’t have a laundry list of movies and TV shows I needed to catch up on just to understand what the fuck was even happening here.”

(Deadpool & Wolverine only worked because the baggage for both characters was outside the MCU, and they took plenty of shots at the cruft that’s built up over the years; a future project that’s fully incorporated is unlikely to recapture the magic)

Loosely related…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 came out recently, and I was so excited that it took me a week to remember it existed. The first episode resolved last season’s cliffhanger ending in an only moderately-contrived way, but it worked well enough. Characters got to do character stuff, and Young Scotty being shaped by his mentor was actually fun to watch.

The second episode immediately dove into Spock’s love life, though, and I stopped watching. I might grind it out, or I might skip ahead.