Y’know, if Himmel had discovered Methode’s method, things might have turned out differently…

This week, we get only the opening moves of The Big Fight, which is going to be three separate fights (or perhaps four…), so I revise my estimated length to four episodes. That’s not a complaint.

(y’know, Fern may be the least eccentric of the first-rank mages, old and new)

First Ass-Guardian trailer

Here. Not much substance to it, but it looks to be competently done. Fingers still firmly crossed they don’t screw it up.

Also coming soon…

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. At what, you’ll soon see. Assuming people haven’t already figured it out…

Worth the wait, as Frieren is reunited with two of the least annoying characters from the exam arc. I’d have preferred the little hot-pants redhead, but she and her frenemy failed the exam, so they’re not allowed to enter the Northern plateau. Sadly, this means we’ll likely never see them again unless there’s a collection of side stories.

Anyway, this week reminds us that demons are evil-with-a-capital-E, using language only to deceive. This will no doubt trigger another round of how-dare-they reactions from the Left, sigh.

It’s a slow buildup to a confrontation with a new Big Bad, that’s at least a two-parter. With four first-class mages on the scene, plus Stark, the fight is likely to be flashy, so maybe they’ll pull out the stops and give it three.

(unrelated postcard from AI Japan, because AI love you long time)

In which Frieren does the meme, and then gets sentenced to 300 years hard labor.

I’m guessing there’s an AI behind this…

Dear Apple,

A while back I bought the recently-updated AirPods 3 Pro. They worked fine with my phone, tablet, and laptop, but Apple’s “find my” service couldn’t see them. At the time, the explanation was that I hadn’t yet upgraded my devices to the “Liquid Ass” OS v26. Since I wasn’t traveling much (indeed, I often don’t leave the house for days, especially the way this winter has been going…), I didn’t worry about it.

Now that they have a mostly working 26.3 release, and they’ve added back some of the legibility that was abandoned in the pursuit of random UI restyling, I updated my phone and tablet (not the Mac; that needs to work). To no surprise, the AirPods did not magically start working correctly in “find my”; they were detected, but it insisted that setup was incomplete and they could not be located.

Clicking on the error message took me to a support page, where none of this worked. At all. There’s yet another screen where you have to completely disassociate the device from your Apple account and then reconnect.

(flux2 is a lot slower and more memory-intensive than Z-Image Turbo, but it’s better at text, styles, and prompt following; there’s a lot I can’t do with it because my graphics card only has 24 GB of VRAM, but for simple one-off pics without refining, upscaling, or multi-image editing, it’s great; I’m thinking about setting up SwarmUI on Runpod with a better card, for the times when I want precise prompting)

Amazon Japan gets clean

Unless you have an active VPN connection with Japanese servers, you can no longer view adult books and videos on Amazon Japan. Searches pretend there’s nothing there, and direct links to products throw up an error page as if the page doesn’t exist. Items in wishlists appear normally with their title and picture, but you can’t click on them or move them to your cart.

(the accurately-rendered poster titles come from the collection of dirty-book covers I acquired some years back as part of my collage-wallpaper project)

How to spot the hero in a harem anime…

This week, it’s the thought that counts, especially when you’re a pair of socially-awkward teens fumbling through their first date. Much easier to fight ogres. Or Pokemon.

(fan-artists frequently draw Fern much bustier than she is in the anime, while Nagi is pretty much spot-on)

Underground Healer, anime and novel

Since I’m only watching Frieren this season, I cast back looking for recommendations of completed series, and found a lot of positive commentary for this one. I’m watching about an episode-and-a-half a day while on the elliptical, but it’s interesting enough that I picked up the first few translated light novels.

And then I hit this bullshit in book 3:

“You clap at us, we clap back harder.”

The speaker is one of the three slum-gang boss hotties, squaring off with a bruiser from the Black Guild who’s smashing up their festival. She says this as their argument escalates into a full-scale gang battle.

This is not the first line that didn’t ring true, but it’s easily the worst.

Not only does the slang instantly date itself, it makes no fucking sense in the scene. It’s like a mafia don getting uptwinkles from his lieutenants.

What could possibly go wrong?

Apple is allowing third-party AI apps in CarPlay. The jokes just write themselves…

I’m okay with it this time…

I put in an Amazon order Thursday night that promised delivery between 7AM - 11 AM Friday. Sometime before that window opened, the “clear skies” forecast proved wrong, and 4 inches of fresh snow was dumped over the course of several hours. It didn’t stop until after noon, and the trucks didn’t come out to clear the roads until evening.

I cleared a path to the street and salted it, but I didn’t actually expect the package to show up until Saturday, which it did.

Setting aside the sequels to shows I never watched or have abandoned, Spring is not looking great, but summer has some promise:

• Spring: Farming Life In Another World 2: still hoping they stop being coy about how thoroughly the divine farming tool plows the fields. The first trailer shows off plenty of pretty gals, at least, so it promises to be as decorative as the first season.

• Summer: The World’s Strongest Rearguard: please-don’t-suck-please-don’t-suck. Still no video preview, but the initial casting is up, and Our Upright Ass-Guardian is voiced by The Universal Boy Hero, Mute Lizard Best Girl is Komi, Sexy Former Manager’s biggest roles have all been porn, Cursed Swordsgirl is perhaps best known for voicing 2B, and Jailbait Shrine Maiden is Yor (aka Visha, Yun-hua, Ryu, Angeline, etc). And both the light novels and manga are resuming after a lengthy hiatus.

• Summer: Bumpkin & Harem 2: yes. From what I know, the gals never actually become haremettes, despite Red showing signs of jealousy. I would like to see Age-Appropriate Hot Magic Teacher emerge as the leading candidate for wifehood, but White is determined.

• Summer: Skeleton Knight 2: yes, please.

• Summer: Magilumiere 2: yes-yes-yes!

Mini-gyoza!

I’m really looking forward to spending a few weeks in Japan soon. Osaka-style hitokuchi (one-bite) gyoza will be on the menu, but not quite this tiny. It’s going to be a mostly-Kyoto trip, but thanks to my sister having to leave early, I’ll have two-and-a-half days on my own in Tokyo.

Not the usual hot-springs episode. Or the usual first-date episode. As usual for Frieren, it’s the journey that matters.

Related,

I would not have guessed that Himmel had the same voice actor as Bakugo and Accelerator. I learned this after viewing a short clip from the Japanese-dubbed Chinese animation series “The Last Summoner” and finding the voices of hero and heroine kinda familiar.

It’s a shouty, tropey Boy-Meets-Goddess show where she spends most of her time as a bratty shoulder chibi, because full-figured-full-power form is too expensive to maintain, and any power use at all requires stuffing her face. Y’know, a Completely Original Story™.

The punchline is that her voice actress is Frieren.

(Anime News Network has no record of this show, so off to MyAnimeList; licensed by Crunchyroll, by the way, who lists it as two seasons, but it’s just Chinese vs Japanese audio)

Unrelated,

Chaney’s latest series “Accidental Astronaut” is called that because…

…“Flash Gordon” was taken.

Z Image Base knows ray-guns and retro, but the name “Flash” is rather heavily trained on the wrong character. It does get some things right, though:

NSFW

MZ4250 pulls a Penzeys

The creator of a large collection of excellent 3D models for gaming miniatures just announced on his Patreon that he’s got severe IDS (ICE Derangement Syndrome), and has invited people who disagree with him to stop supporting him financially.

His proposal is acceptable.

This week, a study in heroism. More shows like this, please.

(sadly, Crunchyroll has decided to add a mandatory post-credits recommendation page to the app (FireTV version, at least), and there’s no button to get out of it; dipshits)

Ready for the big snow!

(related, Apple’s Weather app has an annoying behavior on all platforms: the predicted precipitation for a day is from midnight to midnight except for the current day, where it’s “the next 24 hours starting right now”; as a result, the only time it provides useful information is at midnight)

Why is the west end of my house 10 degrees cooler?

Update: No, the correct answer is that the furnace was dying, and is being replaced completely on Tuesday (he says, writing from the future with the installers on site).

Because the thermostat was balancing the house based on multiple sensors; the east end has all the computers, and one of them was running all night making GenAI-gal wallpaper.

Clearly, the fix is to move that computer! Which is actually tempting, because that room has a gas fireplace that will still work if the power goes out. So I can heat the room one way or another…

(I’ve linked to a lot of Hiyodori’s Chiharu cartoons, but the complete English version of the Christmas story hasn’t been posted yet)

Every picture tells a story, but…

…with AI, that story is usually complete nonsense.

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“We know you watched season 1, and you came back for the story, so we’re not going to waste your time and ours on a lengthy recap.”

Verdict: seasonal oasis.

(“I was just polishing my staff, when it suddenly went off”)

Official Fallout TV merchandise

Includes sofa throw pillows. For throwing at the screen because season 2 is sofa-king awful.

Compatible ZIT LoRA

Misty - Tomboyish Mermaid and PencilMadness, which I’ve used before.

Hmmm, let’s push it a bit, shall we?

NSFW

(the hypnotism coin is one of the most popular accessories in Pokegirl fan-art, often used by Hypno for non-consensual interspecies action; I don’t think she’ll need it to mesmerize any male creature who walks in on this scene, though…)

True

Hmmmm, let me think about it for a minute…

Caption Contest…

There have been several iterations of the new partially-LLM-enhanced prompts, and not all of the results have been completely successful. In fact, some of them cry out for snarky captioning. Feel free to join in.

To avoid ambiguity, I’ve added numbered headers.

1

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