Getting close to the end...
Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, episode 11
Our Slow-Moving Couple spends this week in the real world, taking a trip to Our Hero’s hometown, smuggling Our Foodie Dragon Mama along in the form of a cat. Cheaper than trying to buy an extra shinkansen ticket and explain her presence to Grandpa, although I’m sure he’d have been impressed to have Kazuhiro bring two hot gals home. Next week will likely be spent dungeon-crawling.
Verdict: Cat-Wridra needs to be more aggressive at helping out with matchmaking duties, but hey, at least they’re holding hands more often now.
The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 11
Jinshi suffers through half an hour of teasing by Gyokuyou in order to “borrow” Maomao for a hunting trip, with the intention of revealing his true identity and status. Her well-practiced density allows her to avoid figuring it out, until gun-toting assassins leave the two of them truly alone together. Finally. Next week’s episode title reveals all.
“Ka Zuigetsu” is his true name.
Hammer Of The Guild Gal, episode 11
Monologing. Not a great way to spend your next-to-last episode. Blech.
Solo Leveling 2, episode 12
After the obligatory “Thank God The Hero Has Arrived” reaction shots by everyone who’s had a speaking role this season, it’s time to go mano-a-hormiga in a… fistfight? Yeah, let’s have Jinwoo and Badass Ant punch each other for a while. Fortunately this isn’t an old issue of Marvel Team-Up, so they eventually get down to the serious business of killing each other.
Lots of CGI ant-movement that sticks out badly, and some weirdly bad animations of the spear-carriers (for a moment I thought TV Guy had jello arms as a superpower), but the actual fight was pretty good. Naturally they had to end it on a Second-Best-Girl cliffhanger, with Our Mangled Blonde Hunter Gal at that very specific level of too hurt to cure but too tough to have died ten minutes ago.
Verdict: no, she doesn’t die next week.
(fan-artist headcanon I can get behind)
A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 10
Aside from the lengthy travel montage and walk-and-talk exposition scenes, this was fun, as the show casts aside the Asshole Party baggage and leans into harem/adventure goodness. Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch had to sit out this adventure, but she did at least make it into the OP animation as an official haremette. Pity she didn’t make it into the hot-springs bath scenes with the rest, although they were shorter than the travel montage and showed no signs of Buy-The-Bluray advertising.
Unrelated, they went seriously old-school for the new-town guildmaster’s look.
Verdict: new waifu-focused ED animation to celebrate a new asshole-free era. I’m not counting the brief encounter with some foreign chauvinists, since that led Yuke to accidentally proclaim that he’s a proper harem lord, thrilling the educated haremette who spoke the language.
(I didn’t even have to ask the LoRA to give me some special costumes for Silk…)
Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 24
Fish fight! Our Bird-Brained Hero spends pretty much the entire episode figuring out how to defeat the giant electric whale, and then executes the plan (and the whale) with the help of Our Friendly Fishman NPC. While all the other NPCs sleep and the other players are off living their real lives.
Verdict: …which means that all the character interaction is getting crammed into the final episode of the season next week. …which means that they’d better announce another season already in production, since we’ve got two cliffhangers.
Mistakes Were Made™
They’re pushing an accelerated rollout schedule for the Veterans Administration’s New Thing, despite its poor track record in current deployments, delays, cost overruns, near-universal negative reaction from health-care professionals and IT staff, proven risks to patients, and lack of trained staff to handle the transition even before the push to RIF thousands of employees.
Based on what I’ve heard from insiders, the correct response should be to have Team Elon dispatch an anal-probe software forensics team to thoroughly investigate New Thing before it kills more veterans, with major penalties to the vendors for their failures.
Transdependency
I have a lot of open-source packages installed on my Mac through Homebrew. 16 of them are now cannot be upgraded because I pinned Perl at a specific release. Most of them are stuck just because someone once wrote an optional Perl script that’s included in the repo, and it’s still there years or decades later.
(I originally pinned Perl because the person who maintains the recipe didn’t understand how to set it up to preserve installed modules across minor releases, and Perlbrew simply didn’t work on my M2 Macbook Air when I bought it)
Back in black…
Glen Cook’s original Black Company trilogy was really good. Several of the later books were interesting, but never recaptured the magic. So I wasn’t terribly interested when a new book came out seven years ago that was set between the first two, especially since it seemed to incorporate Cook’s interest in anime that made the final Garrett book such a disaster. And they still want $13 for the Kindle edition seven years after release, so I’m still not interested.
And now he’s got another one coming out in November. What’s it about? No idea, but apparently he signed a contract to write a whole new BC sequel series, since it’s titled “Lies Weeping: Volume 1 of the Black Company Saga: A Pitiless Rain”. I doubt I’ll pick it up.
(loli dragon gal is very loosely related, since she’s from a show called Dungeon of Black Company…)
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