How bonkers was Bye Bye Earth?

This bonkers:

the entire thing was taking place in Disney World. Disney World on the moon. Belle was left behind after humanity fled some plague or something into space, and the Disney World robot AI decided to create the perfect world for her, so it put her in stasis and set about playing god, evolving new life, etc. After a few millenia, it got tired of that, woke her up, and needed her to kill it because it was really tired of this. So she does, thus freeing everybody from the invisible AI that held their puppet strings and giving the entire world freedom.

(it’s been too long since I’ve put up a Grea pic…)

No Maomao this week

Continue avoiding spoilers.

To Another World… With Land Mines!

The most important thing to know about this isekai light novel series is that the “land mines” are metaphorical. Given the way things go in the isekai genre, that couldn’t be assumed.

Specifically, Our Hero and his classmates are killed off in a bus crash, and find themselves being offered new lives in a fantasy world, with special skills purchased from a list. The self-proclaimed “evil god” repeatedly stresses that there are no cheat skills, even as he adds “cheat” skills to the list on request. Unless you spend some of your points on the help guide, you won’t find out that the “cheat” skills are balanced out by severe drawbacks, some of them fatal.

Anyway, Our Hero ends up spawning next to his two childhood friends, one male, one female, and they start cautiously adventuring together in the “slow life with monster-bashing” genre. From the start, First Boy and First Girl are an obvious eventual couple, while Second Boy is hampered by his overwhelming desire to find a cute wife with animal ears. They have a few early run-ins with wicked classmates, but most of those quickly kill themselves off, and after finding two more female friends, they settle into a party of five with one non-combatant classmate friend in town.

They are more successful than common adventurers due to making effective use of their literally-god-given skills, helped by the fact that they knew each other well enough to have correctly guessed the sort of skills the others would take, but they’re not OP, and they don’t get carried away exploiting their skills the way some classmates tried to do.

In addition, the author doesn’t obsess over it, but also doesn’t just skip over issues like slavery, prostitution, hygiene, rape, sanitation, feudalism, forced labor, child welfare, etc. Most of those issues are organically integrated into the story when appropriate and not dropped in as axe-grinding moral lessons.

Ten translated volumes so far, and they’re light-but-not-entirely-fluffy reads, which shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with her other series, Management Of A Novice Alchemist.

(starship wrench-wench and her bouncing betties are unrelated)

IP Confession

I still check for outages with my home Internet connection by pinging the corporate firewall at the company I haven’t worked at for five years. I ran the corporate network for 10+ years, so that IP address is burned into my brain forever.

Spot on

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