(classical reference)

I was not in the mood to watch anime on Friday. I also tried to stay far away from social media. My efforts were not 100% successful, since I was still exposed to mind-boggling stupidity and vile hatred, but hopefully only a fraction of what was out there.

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 11

Shiftless Older Brother is quickly reformed, a mysterious visitor rewards Our Hero with exactly what he doesn’t know he needs yet, and Our Waifu casually provides some delightful service. Oh, and then there’s a cliffhanger that comes out of nowhere.

Verdict: as delicious as Alna looks with just her white bikini, I really wish she’d bought some of that frog’s lingerie…

(belatedly, I realize that they kept Our Cute Doggie Waifu from going for a soak with the others, because they’d have had to draw her wet fur…)

10 Years A Harem Lord, episode 11

I’m pretty sure we could have gotten the point with a lot less tedious backstory. “Glasses Gal Alchemist accidentally made Bad Stuff that makes vampires tougher”. See, there’s ten minutes back that could have been used to animate the fight scenes.

…

For fuck’s sake, would you STOP TALKING! Seriously, I thought that once the parents filled in the backstory, we’d be able to get on with it, but noooooooo, as Teh Tru Ebill manifests itself, it takes a long nap to allow the girl to explain Even More Backstory, without a trace of expression thanks to the animators just moving her lips.

The battle’s going to carry over to next week’s finale, though, thanks to a completely underwhelming cliffhanger. Will anyone still watching this show actually believe that Our Hero is down for the count, and that Glasses Gal is now just a tasty snack before the end of the world?

Verdict: 20 pounds of exposition in a 5 pound bag leaves me gagging.

(glasses gal is unrelated)

Magilumiere 2, episode 10

Team Good Guys plan to intercept Team Bad Guys’ offensive. Meanwhile, Our Spunky Magical Gal manages to draw some humanity out of Our Robot-Like Magical Hottie. This will be important later.

Then it’s counter-offensive time, as Our Surprisingly-Well-Connected Office Manager manages to acquire the exact time and place that the new monster will be released. Our Magical Gals are first on the scene and spring into action, despite facing a girl’s worst nightmare: all hands.

Verdict: next week, Even More Hands.

(recognizable fan-art!)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 11

“That’s not the way mommy tells it!”

    “Shut up, kid, that’s the way I tell it.”

(there might be a handful of people in the world who recognize this quote…)

Last week, we interrupted the rescue mission, so Our Heroic Harem finishes up the battle against Miss Evil Plant Puppet using the kinda-sexy harpies and a well-timed backstab. Then we get to meet Shield Gal Seraphina, someone who’d be important in a future season, but will at least be of some use next week.

Then the story diverges significantly from both the novels and the manga, as Our Cheek Protector is forced into a battle of wits against the remnants of Evil Puppet Plant inside the Miss. The results are basically the same, with Our Best Lizard Gal showing up naked in his dream in time to save the day, but in both sources he knew what would happen and faced it deliberately, it wasn’t some sort of trick what-if scenario. And there was some key exposition left out, in which Evil Plant calls out Theresia’s demi status as a failed conversion into a full monster. This would have been useful information to guide Our Hindmost Hero toward her cure.

All’s well that ends well, and they say goodbye to The Recovering Other Guys and step toward the entrance to the next district.

Verdict: not bad, just a bit baffling why they changed things up. Both fights were a bit rushed; not the early-season speedrun, but still less than satisfying.

(no new fan-art for Best Lizard Gal, so how about a new figurine of Best Cowkini-Clad Naughty Magical Gal?)

Free the bits!

I was playing with some old encrypted volumes that I converted from the long-dead TrueCrypt to the VeraCrypt fork. Since I’d done the conversion on Windows (using the last version that handled both formats), they were stored on my NAS.

When I opened them on my Mac, everything was fine until I tried to copy all the files, and then I started getting timeouts and errors, so I copied the images down, opened them from there, and started moving the files around. Then I ran out of free disk space. Then my external SSD backup drive started thrashing and complaining about no free disk space. Then the Finder went out to lunch, which pretty much leaves you with only the apps that are already running, although sometimes you can still launch apps that are on your Dock.

Apple provides no tools that would help diagnose or solve the problem. The Apple solution is simply to reboot and hope for the best, except I know from experience that it won’t reboot cleanly when any process is hung, so you’d actually end up holding down the power button and rudely powering down the system.

Fortunately I always have terminal windows open, and I knew what I was looking for: unlinked open files. I was looking for processes holding onto those VeraCrypt images, and I found them with: sudo lsof -n -s | sort -k7rn | head.

Sure enough, Google turned up a bug in the latest version of VeraCrypt for Mac that leaves fuse-t processes running after unmount, even for clean unmounts. This doesn’t just hold onto disk space after files are deleted, it leaves the encrypted volumes accessible. Oopsie.

(the original timeouts and errors? Apple’s SMB stack is fragile under load, and while I’ve done all the recommended tuning, VeraCrypt’s encryption method leads to constant random-access reads, which is pretty much the worst-case scenario)

(oh, and after cleaning up the mess, the internal SSD went from 7 GB free to 200+ GB)

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