Thunderstorms and new shows
The thunderstorms are literal, accompanied by tornado alerts, for pretty much the entire week (I was surprised not to get a power outage or surge Wednesday night). The anime are showing up a few per day until the weekend deluge.
KOOTHP, OP And Clueless
AKA “The Unaware Atelier Master”. The second Spring show to premiere, since Crunchyroll quietly released Delusional Space Virgin several days early. The trailers really scream WE’RE BEING FUNNY NOW, and while the gals are agreeably gal-shaped, they also have that self-conscious exaggerated design that I associate with Pokemon quest NPCs. Which is at best a mixed blessing.
In the usual way, the hero party kicks out the person who did all the grunt work, eventually discovering that they’re helpless without him, while he goes on to enjoy life with the amazing powers nobody ever noticed. He also attracts babes like he’s been dipped in honey and wrapped in $100 bills.
This one also pulls in the tropes from the “grew up in a secret village where everybody is OP, so he thinks it’s normal” genre. So:
- Innocently do something impossible.
- Obliviously acquire thirsty new waifu.
- Cut to hero party to show them suffering.
- Repeat.
Verdict: no sign of elves or catgirls yet; are all the waifus going to be human? Now that would be novel!
(KOOTHP = Kicked Out Of The Hero Party, a genre that seems to be roleplay therapy for writers carrying a grudge about their office jobs and college group projects)
Sword Of The Demon Hunter
Well, it’s got an art and animation budget, but I got bored really fast, and didn’t make it through the double-length first episode. Tried again, failed again.
I might skip the tedious backstory and try again next week.
(unrelated, not boring)
Your Forma, episode 1
“I’d like it if you don’t behave outside of my expectations.”
Dude, this is clearly your first time interacting with a woman.
Not licensed in the US yet, as far as I can tell, so I watched a multi-subbed torrent. There are claims it will be available next week, somewhere.
The show drops you into the world and the characters, gradually adding in facts as it goes, almost like they’re trying to tell a story. The ubiquitous heads-up display that everyone seems to have implanted is so annoying that I’m sure there are frequent self-inflicted icepick wounds happening offscreen, but for the viewers it’s conveniently-timed supplementary exposition, potentially saving us from some as-you-know-Bob moments. Negative points for having the robot sidekick come right out and say “I see you’ve stopped hating androids”, with her responding like a high-school tsundere.
Our CyberDiving Heroine spends this episode covered from neck to ankles, except for an inexplicable upper-chest window in her uniform (definitely not a boob window); her street clothes are missing the window. All of the female characters have pretty faces, but apart from a few “interesting” camera angles, they’re not on display. Almost like they’re trying to tell a story. Unless they all end up bathing together for some reason…
A non-subtle point in the ED animation is Our Heroine reading a book called “The City of Steel”, a very obvious reference to Asimov’s robot-detective novel “The Caves of Steel”, which ties into both the plot and the general three-laws setting. Almost like they’re trying to tell a story.
Verdict: Are they telling a new story? Not so far; I can think of at least three SF murder mysteries that share the basic tropes, and could come up with more if I thought about it for a minute. That doesn’t mean it will suck, simply that it may play out as just a mashup of material familiar to print-SF fans.
(no fan-art to speak of, so detective is unrelated)
Isekai Prime, fin
“Instead of banging you, your majesty, could I have some old furniture instead?”
The cast picture in the OP just added three new women, two of whom are dressed. The third is a sexy mage gal with boob tassels on her dress, and she’s introduced right away, with Our Shopping “Mage” ordered to duel her in front of the royal family. She summons a dragon, apparently from a Seventies cartoon, and it’s game on. Magical Loli does the heavy lifting (sure, let’s make it a family duel!), and yes, he ends up killing the dragon with his remarkably nimble bulldozer. Wow, that really hurt to type. Almost as much as hearing him go full chuuni again.
Then he gives Our Manipulative Princess a pearl necklace (not the kind
he’s been giving the other gals), and Her Wicked Busty Step-Mother
demands equal treatment, which she rewards with the key to the
kingdom her bedroom. Which he rejects in favor of vintage furniture.
I’m surprised she didn’t throw in the kitchen sink. The writers certainly did, in a walk-and-talk exposition-and-flashback scene that goes from soup to nuts. Then Tassels asks Daughter how she learned magic, with the not-at-all surprising result that she’s so good at magic because her mother was the mage who wrote her favorite grimoire.
Then Our Hero gets a real reward: title to the land he’s been squatting on, with a noble title to go with it. He also gets Spoiled Princess and Her Willing Maid.
Verdict: it had its moments (including one LoL moment this week, with the catgirls mesmerized by the windshield wipers on his van), but wow what a load of crap was mixed in.
AI and the barn door
I was listening to an overview of securing LLMs with other LLMs, and the speaker was talking about his real-world experience helping companies give an LLM unrestricted access to confidential customer information and then “secure” it by having another LLM classify natural-language queries into “safe” and “forbidden”. He gave copious examples of how hard this is to accomplish, how fallible and trickable such systems were, and handwaved away attendee concerns with “our clients’ customers are demanding this!”.
Spoiler alert: customers aren’t demanding AI chatbots, they’re demanding customer service, which they’re not getting from overseas contractors reciting cookie-cutter scripts in a language they’re not fluent in.
Instead of solving real problems, the clients are just replacing a call center with a data center.
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