Level 2 Cheat Boy

The only thing that really counts as a twist here is that Our Cheating Hero was summoned from one fantasy world to another. The fact that his ridiculous powers don’t appear until he kills a few slimes and levels up, not so much, and him being completely obtuse about being over-powered is just annoying.

FYI, he’s not a harem lord, he’s a harem landlord; once he acquires the more-than-telegraphed wolf-waifu, everyone else is just a housemate. And all but three of the female characters on the cast page eventually move in, find their own mates, and start producing offspring. That’s not in the first episode; I read ahead.

(not Our Wolf Waifu but a plausible stand-in)

Konosuba 3

Season two was kinda dull, to the point that I only vaguely recall something about Aqua’s church town. The Megumin spinoff was kinda stupid, and I stopped watching after the rubberband fight with the spider. As for the movie, I think I watched it, but can’t swear to it; something something Megumin’s home town.

So you could say my expectations for this were… low. It still failed to meet them; it spends the first several minutes on lots of unfunny posing and EVEN MORE SHOUTING, and I just gave up. Let me know if there’s a bunch of scenes featuring Darkness, Wiz, and Chris; I could watch those bits.

(did any of the anime ever expose Chris’ secret?)

Gate manga, volumes 10-12

Released at the end of March, finally.

(Rory Mercury is once again relevant)

Amazon Fallout, episode 1

The entire season is available, but the first episode runs for 75 minutes, so I’m only watching one today.

TL/DR: Vault Dweller searches Wasteland for Daddy; yup, that’s a Fallout main plot, all right. Except for that one time when it was Shauuuuun!.

Bad news: magic pronouns survived the apocalypse. Gratuitously.

Dear Amazon,

Creepy juxtaposition is creepy:

(the number of adult coloring books in the same recommendation list was creepy in a different way…)

Tease & Wolf, episode 2

It’s hard to build a working relationship with your wolf-waifu when she’s constantly teasing you with words and skin.

Holo

NSFLK

Not Holo

Eclipsed

Ohio weather is notoriously variable, but for Monday’s total eclipse, it was sunny and 75°F. Fun thing to do with my parents.

(solar-powered pony is unrelated)

Slime Time 3

The entire first episode was spent wrapping up loose ends from the last season. Which I barely remembered, and don’t care enough to learn more about. So the full-length recap episode they also released is not something I intend to watch.

I might watch next week to see if they do something vaguely interesting. Rimuru has always been OP to the point that there’s no tension in the frequent combat, and he just keeps leveling up, so I’m not feeling inspired.

Blue Archive

[apparently not licensed for streaming]

There’s something slightly off about the character art and animation despite the apparent smoothness, and the background music not only feels like it was lifted from a game (which it was), but is used exactly the way it would be in a visual novel.

TL/DR: it was paralyzingly stupid, and I gave up skipping forward after a while.

Mahjong Soul Kan!! trailer

TL/DR: looks terrible. Setting that aside, unless you’ve done a lot of gacha pulls, you won’t recognize any of the characters, except as “oh, yeah, I think a big-spender opponent used one of those in a match one time; I lost”.

Harry Pottymouth And The Slave Elf Waifu

He’s a powerful dark sorcerer with no social skills. She’s a gorgeous elven slave girl with no social skills. Together, they fight shy.

Several sites had it as a two-episode debut, but Crunchyroll only has the first one right now. It’s enough.

TL/DR: somewhere between Chobits and DearS, desperately crying out, “trust me, I’m funny!”.

[update: Crunchy added the second episode a few hours later; the pervy angel-wing clothing-shop owner is the good part]

(I wasn’t amused, either)

Nut Salad

He’s a solo detective barely making ends meet. She’s a spunky loli magical princess from another world. They live together and fight crime.

Meanwhile, other-she’s a stacked gorgeous knight from another world who enjoys homelessness, recycling, and convincing men to shove money into her cleavage.

TL/DR: Lots of shouting and THIS IS COMEDY music. M.A.O as the fan-service knight.

Futoku No Guild OP song video

The actual opening credits of Immoral Guild are decidedly NSFW, so when singer Sayaka Sasaki recorded a video for the song “Never The Fever!!”, she did, um, something different. More different even than Nacherry’s video for the Gushing OP, My Dream Girls.

(I was looking for the video of her Bakuon! OP song, which I’ve had on repeat when out at the grocery recently)

Bargain-basement Japanese spam email

I hadn’t seen Japanese spam in my junk folder for quite a while, but suddenly one appeared, and it was hilariously bad.

There exists a legitimate ebay-ish marketplace called Mercari (メルカ リ), which I’d never heard of before today. So naturally a customer-service email that claims to be from them is going to be fake. Especially when the sender email is from a random 5-letter .com domain name and the links in the message go to a different random 5-letter domain (which the plain-text content doesn’t even try to obscure). The icing on the cake is that it was sent to my CPAN-specific email address, which has never been used for any account anywhere.

It was such a poor attempt at getting me to click on the links that it actually makes me want to check out Mercari. 😁

(or not. first impression: endless scrolling is always bullshit, but to do it on potentially thousands of search results while hiding all the usual corporate/support links in the footer is double bullshit; they clearly are an app-first, browser-fifth shop)

Coming in October: The Last Dangerous Visions; Harlan Ellison’s estate managed to do what he never would. It’s only 350 pages, which suggests that the majority of the stories he acquired over the years have reverted to the authors or their estates.

Will it live up to the hype? No; Ellison blew his credibility with decades of delays and broken promises.

Will it suck? Probably not, because Ellison’s estate is in the hands of J Michael Straczynski.

Holo, Live, episode 1

Rebooting Spice & Wolf still seems like an odd choice to me, given that it didn’t suck the first time. But the 24th volume of the novels was released last year, and the 10th volume of the spinoff novels comes out next week in Japan, so there’s clearly still interest.

First impression: they have a budget, and they’re putting it to good use.

(spicy wolf is unrelated)

Rewatch: Astra Lost In Space

The Clarissa-Explains-It-All infodump was as painfully stupid as I remembered, and the supervillain roundtable made no sense, but almost everything else about the show works well. In many ways, it’s a modern Heinlein juvenile, not just because of the early resemblance to Tunnel In The Sky.

Flashback: winmail.dat

I just got the first invoice of the year from my landscaping company. The PDF was wrapped in the Windows-specific non-standard TNEF-encoded winmail.dat. Fortunately, there’s a CLI tool for that.

Apparently a recent Win10/11 update managed to reset that Outlook setting for some people. Joy.

Solo: A Leveling Story, fin

Yes, there will be season 2. Which is both unsurprising and good, because half of the recent episodes have been setup for it. Including a good chunk of this one, where The Big Reveal is that the big bad bugs are getting better. The actual fight that continues from last week is resolved in the obvious way, leading to a prestige-class “choice” that even Our Self-Admonishing Hero can figure out was a setup.

Meanwhile, if this is not a fan-service show, maybe don’t shove the camera up his little sister’s crotch? Sure, she wears more to bed than most anime gals wear as street clothes, but come on.

Verdict: a good setup for a second season, as long as they don’t waste several episodes recapping what we just watched. Hopefully it’s already in production, so it’s not two years out.

(using up more Frieren leftovers, because most of the fan-art is of Our Hero, not the girls)

Choco, Bunny, Good-Good, fin

(NSFW classical reference)

First, second two-cour season announced for October. Maybe someone will finally license the light novels (the manga is currently well ahead of the anime).

Second, Chocolate Bunny’s Got A Posse Pussy.

Third, Sailor Goon asks, “is that a cat-sith under your robes, or are you just happy to see me?”.

Verdict: Our Cocoa-Colored Craftsbunny continues to impress, although her interactions with Our Freakish Hero inevitably bring all the shouty. 8/10, would grind again.

Twittering Over Magical Girls

The official TwitX account for Gushing Over Magical Girls has lots of nice preview pics and action/reaction GIFs. I’m just following it hoping for an eventual season 2 announcement…

Publisher oopsie!

I had a light novel ebook on preorder, and when it auto-downloaded, it was just a 19-page preview. The book is currently in the top 50 of the “Fantasy Adventure Fiction” category, but it’s getting pummeled with 1-star reviews, because it’s short a few hundred pages and you can’t get a refund. (likely because Amazon thinks you read it all the way through…)

It came out on Friday, so it probably will take until at least Monday to get a corrected version uploaded and approved.

(Update: customer support on publisher's forum, Monday morning: "This will be a process to fix, it always is with Amazon and they have no incentive to not make it a long process, they are Amazon.")

Today’s forecast: hot and sunny with scattered perversity. Naturally all of our girls end up at the beach together, and we get a lot of fun character interaction before it all goes south. Or should I say “down under”, because the indiscriminate naughty tentacles are in it to win it until they’re interrupted by the revealed power of Super Sentai Azure, whose true form is an ice maiden with a heart of oh-don’t-stop. Special bonus points for NeroAlice clearing the screen for the showdown.

On that note, now that she knows what a dedicated fangirl Utena is, do you think Azure will offer her a special five-finger discount on merch? And I don’t mean shoplifting. Just the fact that she shyly approached Utena while wearing that nosebleed-inducing bikini suggests they’ll become Very Good Friends in the future.

Verdict: if you grade a show on being true to its premise, this was easily in the top five this season. The characters are wonderfully developed (and I don’t just mean 14-going-on-Penthouse) and well used, and they never forgot to bring the funny.

(“please, sir, I want some more”)

Shangri-La Frontier, episode 24

Extra-shouty with extra-shiny CGI, as Our Overambitious Hero comes up with a way to farm mobs he can’t kill in a fair fight. Some fun reaction shots from Vanilla Bunny, with the promise of Chocolate Bunny reactions next week.

Verdict: one more to go; will Our Overarmored Heroine manage to squeeze in a scene?

Van Interrupted, fin

Van fight. Lavender fight. Instant redemption. All is forgiven. No bath scene.

Verdict: technically, this was better paced than the first season, in that it didn’t suddenly accelerate over a cliff. It was just faithful to a source that isn’t faithful to the slow-life theme. Meh.

(the tag “Frieren eaten by a mimic” (ミミックに食われかけフリーレン) has more fan-art than this show; just sayin’)

This week’s endings:

1. Wednesday, Gushing Over Magical Girls
2. Saturday, Solo Leveling
3. Sunday, Shangri-La Frontier

(took me a moment to remember the actual title of the first one…)

This week’s premieres:

None for me, thanks. If you’re also not up for Angel Meets Potato-kun or a new Saint Seiya season, have some Loco Musica to forcibly reset your preferences.

Note that I did not say “cleanse your palate”. Eye candy, yes, but she's more ear candling than ear candy.

Next Monday’s premieres:

Shouty Train, God Game, Re-Monster, 7th Shota, Spicy Wolf, Regurgitated Hero (double episode, no less). So, that’s one.

Most of the season starts next weekend. I will not be catching them all.