(okay, the title would work better if Shouty and Farm Harem aired on the same day; WHA is definitely not a bust-forward show…)

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 8

This week, A Wild Loli Appears. Also, the most nudity we’ve had in this show all season. From the loli, sigh. At least Our Gorgeous Oni Chief Maid gets some good screen time, and maybe three frames of streaking across the room in pursuit of the naked loli.

After that, a huge helping of tell-don’t-show plot coupons, as Our Divine Toolsmith narrates the mystery found under the hot springs.

Verdict: another example of how removing all the harem elements has damaged the story. The behavior of Our OP Dragon Gals would make a lot more sense if they were openly attached to him, as in the source. As is, the only reason we’re given for their continued presence is a vague “we like it here”.

(ditto for these two…)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 9

We’re well into the plot now, but there’s still time for character development for all four of our little witches, and our increasingly-complex teacher as well. Even a side character gets some respect.

Verdict: don’t make us wait too long for a second season.

Magilumiere 2 promo video

Here, introducing a magical-girl-research engineer magical girl whose civilian identity includes underrim glasses. Also, for those who might be interested, the ED song is by Marine Houshou.

Heartwarming, with a side order of titties

Finally got around to reading the manga for Cosplay Haremettes. The anime was a quite faithful adaptation, except for toning down the delightfully gratuitous nudity, and there’s enough material for them to do another 2 cours.

Also, in recent volumes there’s a thicc cutie with glasses and long braided twintails, insisting that she’s forever 17 (plus 20). And she gets more impressive the more we find out about her.

The shouting is particularly gratuitous this week, but at least the scantily-clad furry robber gal got some screen time.

Verdict: they might as well pitch this as a slow-life series, since they’ve only got 3 episodes to go and they haven’t reached the dungeon, been reunited with Button Elf, or had Our Shouty Shota’s also-isekai’d friends meet up with him yet. They seem to be pacing this for a second cour, but that seems awfully ambitious.

(Our Best Guild Catgirl only showed up for the credits again, sigh)

What could possibly go wrong?

OpenAI announced that their Mac app will allow you to remote-control your computer from anywhere, even when the screen is locked.

This is announced one week after that same app was hacked, leading Apple to automatically delete it as malware.

(better than Button Elf any day)

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 7

Y’know, usually when you finally reach the hot springs episode of a series, you don’t spend half the episode actually building a hot springs resort. This week is an attempt to catch up to the plot while scrubbing any traces of harem motivations from the adaptation. This also means that the audience is not rewarded with fan-service when a bunch of the gals strip down and go for a soak.

Verdict: sigh.

(no new fan-art from this series, because they haven’t really done anything new, and I used up pretty much everything from last season)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 8

We begin this week on a sinister note, as the shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions-ever enforcers of the magical world instantly decide that Coco is one of those witches, and move straight to the memory-wipe spell, only to discover that the element of surprise works both ways. The quite serious confrontation is defused when Our Scruffy Roommate points out that there are a bunch of civilians still in need of rescue.

The week also ends on a sinister note.

Verdict: the plot thickens when stirred.

(do not mess with Witch-Daddy’s daughters!)

Well that explains it!

When I updated the OS on my Mac Saturday, the first thing it did after rebooting was delete the ChatGPT app as malware. This was not negotiable.

Why? Hacked.

The Shout is strong in this one, with Our Not-Just-A-Slave-Dealer kicking it off, and even Our Lusty Busty Landlady gets in on the act, demanding a magical bubble bath in return for a peek at Milfy Muff that somehow doesn’t faze Our Hero in the slightest. Meanwhile, we get to see Our Best Guild Catgirl, but only fully dressed from neck to ankles. There is no justice in this shouty world.

Verdict: half-credit for milf-service.

(lack of catgirl-service is… Torture)

Schrödinger’s Delivery

Packages originally promised by 11 AM Friday:

1:15 PM Your package is out for delivery!
…
1:15 PM Now expected tomorrow by 6 PM

Clear as mud, thanks. Fortunately they arrived at 4:30 PM. Friday.

Just A Job To Do…

“It started out as a simple fender-bender, but then a case was filed with the WWWA and since the Central Computer chose to dispatch you two, the conflict was resolved by setting a city on fire, dropping a continent into the ocean, and then the entire planet’s atmosphere was contaminated with noxious gas.”
– The Dirty Pair Strike Again, 1985, chapter 1

(suddenly I have an idea for a New Dirty Pair series…)

“What’s the pretty lady going to do with that?”

(classical reference)

Waifu Wallpaper

For amusement, I used Sigal to generate a gallery of all the cheesecake wallpaper I generated for my 4K vertical monitor.

[Update: Sigal automatically handles sub-albums, so I used split to break it up into a bunch of 100-pic galleries. I had to delete the whole thing and re-upload it, because I'm low on disk space on this server...]

Download links are included for the full 4K images. Newest stuff is at the end.

Waifupaper

[Reminder To Self: I've temporarily moved this to my new test machine, which I built with a bigger disk; eventually I'll move the IP address and generate a bunch of fresh certs, and it will take over for all my sites]

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 6

At this point, I have to conclude that they’re just taunting the audience. First we have Our Plowing Hero officially winning the right to bang angels, including Second Wife Tia, but not noticing that that’s what just happened. Then he mediates a marriage between Hakuren’s Wimpy Little Brother and His Stalker Fiancée, leading Hakuren’s Other Brother to hint that everyone knows she’s looking to ride the divine tool, and the dragon lady herself to openly state her intentions, both of which fly right over his head.

Verdict: sanitized for your (over-) protection.

(dragon princess is unrelated)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 7

In which many lessons are learned, and the animation budget is once again well-spent.

Verdict: gosh, it’s like someone’s out there pulling the strings!

Mythos Mostly Mastered Marketing

According to the author of curl, the AI model “too dangerous to release” not only ain’t much to write home about, but the people invited to try it were only allowed to watch someone else use it on their behalf.

Last week ended with Our Shouty Hero being given a seriously over-powered bow. This week, he uses it (and the power of Our Shouty Loli Sage) to rush back to the rescue of Our Shouty Furry Knight. With incredibly convenient timing, he temporarily restores Furry’s Full Power, making quick work of the undeafeatable silver wolf that had just defeated them all. Meanwhile, Our Shouty Button Elf is squeezed into a strapless magical dress; it has to be magical, because it held up far better than her usual buttons. Upon discovering that she was called home to become the wife of someone with even less common sense than she has, she promptly fled back to a life of adventure, but not before giving her lesbian maid one last free show.

If this sounds over-packed, it was, to the point that they finished wrapping up the plot threads over the ED music, denying us the wholesome sight of a dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

Verdict: no dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

(silver wolf is unrelated)

Wow, desktop Linux is catching up to Windows!

I ran apt upgrade last night on agott, and came back eight hours later to find it sitting at a screen demanding I set a Secure Boot password. No explanation of why this didn’t come up when I was installing the OS or during the two previous sets of upgrades. No option to not use it. Makes me feel all worn and fiery inside.

Pirate flags at half-mast

The director of Bodacious Space Pirates (and another show some folks might recognize, Martian Successor Nadesico) has died.

Claude Design hallucinated its own functionality

My sister’s in town, and she had a small graphic-design task she needed to do for what I’d describe as “bullshit corporate reasons”. Not really part of her job, just one more damn thing tossed onto her already-full plate. Her pal ChatGPT (which we now pronounce “chat-jippity” after someone said it that way in one of my meetings a while back) failed hard, and I remembered Anthropic’s recent announcement that Claude Design was A New Thing.

She went off and had a happy little session with it, and then asked for the results. It said they’re in /home/claude/projects/..., which of course doesn’t exist. It gave several sets of instructions on how to open and view the slideshow it created, none of which worked. It pretended to run commands with Claude Code to fire up a local web server, which did not happen. It offered to bundle everything up into a single file for her to download and click on, which to no surprise at this point, did not happen.

We went off to dinner, and when we got back, I took over. She had all the image files it had incorporated into the design, so all we really needed was the HTML/JS slideshow. The first time, it gave us just a stub file, but when we pointed that out, it supplied the complete file. With that, I was able to open Terminal, construct the directory tree it expected, and open the file so she could review the animation.

It looked nice. So, apart from the danger of it relying on the dubiously-secured Claude Code, “win”?

My co-workers had the day off. Kind of means that I get the day off, except not.

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 5

Random scenes were random. Vampire medical research, nut trees, slime parachutes, and tan elves in both adorable chibi and lovestruck adult form.

Verdict: if this were the source material, Our Eager Tan-Elf Maiden would no longer be a maiden, but at least somebody openly wants the D.

FYI, this is pretty much the only tan-elf fan-art from the show:

NSFW

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 6

This week, a wild man-witch appears! And quickly falls victim to the power of cuteness, against which no scruffy grumpy father figure can stand. Also, Our Main Father Figure demonstrates that he’s actually quite a good teacher. Also a good cook, the subject of the spinoff manga.

Verdict: the animators got to focus on charm instead of spectacle this week. Actually, they got the week off to recover from last week. That’s right, the B team is better than other shows’ A teams.

Omarchy Linux: oh, fuck no

Omarchy pitches itself as a “beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux”. After playing with it for a few days, I’d change that to “quirky, fragile, and retarded”.

Since I resurrected my old gaming PC on Ubuntu to run LLMs, I’ve been poking at the various recommended distros and installing them on an old Intel Macbook that I needed to wipe. It used to be my sterile international-travel laptop, but the last working version of MacOS made it run so slowly that I gave up and migrated that role to my other, not-quite-so-ancient Intel Macbook Air.

The old one predates Apple’s T1/T2 security chips, so it’s easier to install an alternative OS and get full hardware functionality. And indeed, everything worked just fine the second time I installed it.

Because the first install was unable to retrieve updated packages. Apparently, when it tells you that the installation is done and you should click the button to restart, it is not in fact done, and expects you to leave the installer USB stick inserted until the reboot finishes. Surprise!

The second install was fine, but not only did all of the supplied themes have low-contrast small text (and were mostly “dark”, blech), there was almost no ability to customize anything about the graphical UI. Pointer sensitivity and acceleration? No. UI font size? No. Custom font install? No. Pretty much everything you’d expect to find on a “control panel” of some sort simply wasn’t there. If the creators were aware of the concept of “accessibility”, I found no supporting evidence.

There is some customizability, but it involves just dumping you into a text editor with a config file that doesn’t have any useful documentation.

Two tiny little things led me to scrub the disk and try another distro:

1. There is a convenient and easy-to-press menu option to switch the wi-fi into AP mode. There is no button to switch back. I couldn’t undo what I accidentally did when the unchangeable over-sensitive trackpad settings clicked there while I was moving the pointer.

2. I opened the GUI file manager (which bafflingly doesn’t seem to support viewing any files outside of your home directory) and while moving the pointer with the trackpad, accidentally (see above) dragged one folder into another. Unfortunately, I had just made all folders visible (one of the only configuration options available), and since everything about the configuration is stored in ~/.local and ~/.config, moving either one of them instantly breaks the entire user interface. I couldn’t open the application menu to get into the terminal, I couldn’t get at the settings, I couldn’t even cleanly shut down the system.

I was already feeling pretty negative about the whole experience, but those two easy fails finished it off. Neither would have happened if the trackpad driver had any configurability, even just a checkbox to turn off tap-to-click, and that sort of “opinionated” design is at the core of the distro. Fail.