More girls!
Magilumiere 2, episode 5
The credits have been advertising it, so it’s no surprise that Our Little Startup has gained two new magical girls, with one being Our Underrim Glasses-Wearing Magical Engineer Gal, and the other being last season’s Ambitious Magical Go-Getter Gal. Now they just need another engineer to share the operational load. Next week.
Verdict: settling in nicely.
(technically these are magical girls)
Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 5
Well, the Chest Cracker certainly lives up to her name. Also, she’s skilled at opening chests. Speaking of chests, if you’re going to make a fuss about how Our Former Boss’s new high-level armor shows off a lot more creamy skin, maybe draw some texture or color so we can tell where the outfit leaves off and the skin begins. The new bra at least has some color to it, so we can tell when it starts to fall off, although if I were the wearer I’d consider that a bit of a flaw in its construction.
Still ripping through the material at a rapid pace, although they slowed down to explain new skills and stat boosts, and actually created splash screens for major skill activations. Sigh.
Verdict: I’m not bored, but I really think this manga-based speedrun is making the whole thing feel like a more generic isekai. There’s so much more they could be doing with the source material.
(unrelated witch is clearly better-armored than Kyouka)
Skeleton Knight 2, episode 5
Our Big Bad and his organization have names now, and make no mistake, this is The Big Bad. I don’t know how far they’re taking it this season, but when they finally get to it, Our Boney Hero will finally not seem overpowered.
Verdict: holy crap that was a talky boss fight, but on the bright side, Our Titty Elf’s Big Sister had just the tiniest bit of jiggle animation this week.
(still no new fan-art)
The real downside of Amazon licensing anime…
…is that my FireTV box doesn’t have an audio setting for “original language”, so either I start an episode of Magilumiere and get terrible English voices, or I start an episode of Stargate: SG1 and get Japanese voices. Note that I did not say “terrible Japanese voices”; unlike the undersized US voice-actor pool, they seem to hire people who fit the roles.
(magical girl exploring new worlds; close enough)
Cats, horses, and mice
I took the JSON prompts from my 4K wallpaper and upcycled them with a consistent style (“digital illustration with detailed rendering, detailed worldbuilding, sci-fi aesthetic, and atmospheric depth”) and a random animal-hybrid description (“a beautiful sexy anthropomorphic X woman”). I think it says something about the available training data that “cat” and “horse” were the most successful, but I was surprised how often “mouse” worked out. Dog, fox, raccoon, and squirrel rarely worked, because they usually went too furry with full-on animal heads (also a training-data thing, I suspect). Some types rarely worked at all, adding no ears, tails, fur, whiskers, etc. Some simply didn’t match the human hair because the base animal had a limited color range.
A surprising percentage only got tails without ears, which I suspect is the prompt referring to human ears in some way, even if just describing jewelry. Lizard gals mostly got either a tail or some skin patterns that suggested scales without actually drawing any. Occasionally a gal would look completely human except for furry legs, which is not my fetish (“🎶 If you dare wear short-shorts, Nair for short-shorts 🎶”).
How The Retro-SF West Was Won
Everything a space cowboy needs:
Odd Apple ad placement
Reddit is flooded with ads claiming that Macs are #1 in enterprise environments, blah-blah-blah, and I really wonder who on the marketing team thinks that people reading the Palworld subreddit are making purchasing decisions at major corporations.
Fuck publishers
The Kindle edition of the original Dream Park novel is $12.99. This is just a touch outrageous for an SF novel released in 1981. Tor has structured the prices in a way that makes sense if you buy the complete series ($6.50/book), but sucks if you just want the first (best) one.
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