Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 3

I appreciate the way the busty oni maid is completely resistant to the weather, and feels no need to bundle up for the cold. Same for the busty minotaur maiden who’s attracted a non-mayor suitor. Also, they gave a quick nod to the source having the dryads run around topless, so there’s clearly something in the air.

Indoors, the less gifted young ladies wear their usual outfits to participate in Japanese cuisine lessons, so we get some mild cheesecake to go with the sudden transformation into a cooking show.

Verdict: an entire season goes by with Our Harem Hotties spending most of their time locked inside with Our Hero, and there’s not a single new pregnancy. Clearly they’re Just Not Gonna Go There, sigh.

(unrelated demonic cheesecake is unrelated, potentially fails limb-count; this one came out of a random subset of Juan’s ridiculously-large collection of random prompts, augmented by a few passes through LLMs, and Klein-9B wasn’t able to reconcile all the body parts with only 16 steps, so I cranked it to 64, then upscaled with the SeedVR2 extension). There were millions of lines in the file I used, so I knocked together a quick “shuf|head” script that caches the location of the start of each line, making it easy to efficiently retrieve random lines from very large files)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 4

It’s increasingly common for fans to complain about “creative” translation that replaces the author’s intentions with the localizer’s biases. It’s a real problem, thanks to wokies capturing that part of the industry and steamrolling over anyone who dares to complain.

So I think it’s important to praise thoughtful, intelligent translation, like we’re getting in this show. This week, Our Plucky Apprentices go out on a shopping expedition, and get dragged into the main plot by trying to keep Coco out of trouble. Lured by Our Bad Hat into a rather dangerous place, Our Proud And Prickly Apprentice Agotte blames their predicament on Coco.

Trapped in a maze, on the run from a very Big Bad, she snaps at Our Heroine. Our Quiet One manages to blow a hole in the wall to let them escape. That’s the setup.

As she enters the escape hole, Prickly says, “let’s leave this dead-end behind”, coldly stating that the others can take that either way: the maze, or Coco.

The original Japanese is “let’s leave ‘koko’ (this place)”, which of course sounds exactly like her name, making the followup line a direct slap in the face, with no ambiguity. The translation does a good job of preserving that.

Verdict: from magic lessons and world-building, to extreme peril, the story is rock-solid.

Boldly going!

Although the USS Mauser had plenty of men on board, they never went on away missions, and always seemed to be drained.

Gaming when new toys cost too much …

I don’t usually read the Japan video game rankings, but I happened to click on it this week, and 5 of the top 20 are at least 6 years old. Two others are ports to current hardware.

Crossing the streams

I found a 3-year-old draft of the next scene in Virginia’s story, and liked it a lot better than the previous versions. So I touched it up and then wrote another. Hey, it’s only been five years since the last scene…

Anyway, it got me thinking about how my more recent hobby of creating pretty gals with GenAI might be useful for illustrating this tale. So I’m looking through the collection for a likely candidate to be the face (and figure) of OG Virginia, as well as her less-shopworn little sisters. Then I’ll need a Sally, a Jem, a Kit, and a new-life Virginia.

First random stab at Classic V:

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