Tearmoon, episode 9

In which Our Surviving Princess is running without a script, and is so shocked by unpredicted events that her inner monologue reverts to her grown-up voice. Last week, it was revealed that it hasn’t just been Bad Luck sending her to the guillotine, but the work of shadowy figures shadowing around in the shadows, and that she’d frustrated them enough to force a change of target. This week we find out what the new target is: Mia’s Boytoy’s Kingdom.

Verdict: they crammed a lot into this one, to the point that it felt like a double-length episode. I expect they’ll finish out the season with the Renmo Revolution, and then airdrop The Big Surprise in during the final scene of episode 12.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 9

The good news is that the tournament ended, with Our Smirking Hero’s Smirk narrowly defeating Our Ice Princess’ Absolute Territory. Meanwhile, Our Dastardly Duo kept delaying their attacks long enough for Tsuntail And Bunnyboy to sleaze a victory. In other news, foreshadowing of doom!

Verdict: Romantica escaped from her cursed school blouse, and they promise to let her play dress-up next week as well, so I won’t drop the show yet. Even if she’s not the girl I’m looking for.

(Princess Stompyboots is once again standing in for Our Missing Redheaded Senpai)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 9

If you’d asked me for a list of things not to expect in this show, an insert song playing over a montage of suicides and murders would be pretty close to the top. But it happened anyway.

Maomao being a secret lush would be up there, too. And that also happened.

Verdict: interesting change in the relationship dynamics between Jinshi and Maomao, with her speaking truth to power (sober!) and him acknowledging the gulf between them. This is also the first time they’ve really revealed the scope of his job.

Unrelated,

I named the M2 MacBook Air Maomao. After all, it’s built on top of Eunuchs.

(no, not that one)

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 10

Our Self-Proclaimed Big Sister got a little carried away and lost track of the basics, while Our Repentant Little Sister learned that not everyone in the clergy is corrupt and horrible. Meanwhile, Our Mystery Villain black-pills the town and Our Coughing Granny tosses spells like there’s no tomorrow. Our Favorite Dad? He’s busy with domestic duties and suddenly remembering His One True Love, thanks to a timely question from Our Daisy-Dukes-Equipped Elf Princess.

Verdict: ran out of money for the character art, did we? Decent material, just drawn… differently. On the bright side, they set the hook for a second season: reuniting Bel with his old adventuring party.

(two true loves are unrelated)

Frieren, episode 13

In which Our Heroes suck at recruitment, and Frieren fails her Seduction roll.

Verdict: I’m with Himmel on this one…

(rare fan-art of Fern where the burger is bigger than her head…)

Promised sequels

So in January we get at least a dozen Nth seasons of various shows (including McPharmacist And Waifu 2), but what about all of these?

• Tanya The Evil 2
• Slime-Killing Witch 2
• Flatcat And Sword 2
• Gun Gale Online 2
• Vending Machine 2

In other news, let’s do the Spice Wolf again!.

Shy, episode 9

Well, that was a steaming pile of Kufufu, mixing lumpy exposition with constantly-interrupted fight scenes, ending in Yet Another Cliffhanger, while Our Shy Heroine Shy is pretty much left watching from the sidelines.

Verdict: one more like this and I’m out. I don’t care how many times they frame the shot with boobs; it’s not working.

(fun with upgrades: my Pixiv-blogging Python script ran successfully in both Python 2 and 3, but produced different output due to a feature that was removed in Py3 but is still syntactically valid for no good reason)

How bad is the new-new-new-Who special?

This bad:

Last time we saw Donna, the Doctor handed her a winning lottery ticket as a gift to celebrate her marriage to Shaun. But beyond paying for the house they live in, she gave the rest of her £160 million windfall to good causes, leaving them on the poverty line. Rose, her daughter, has set up a sewing business selling handmade toys to rich people in Dubai, to help earn some extra money. And as they walk home Rose, who is trans, is deadnamed by a bunch of kids from her school, much to Donna’s ire.

Frieren, episode 12

In which it’s Stark’s birthday, but Frieren ends up in the birthday suit. Fern-fan fan-artists hardest hit.

Verdict: some nice character-building for Stark and Himmel, and even Eisen and Heiter get rounded out a bit.

Tearmoon, episode 8

In which Our Shotacon Princess gives two little boys a happy ending, finishing off the book. Not “light novel volume one”, that book, so she has officially changed her fate. Along the way, she acquires more converts to The Church Of The Accidental Genius, while narrowly avoiding losing the first one due to a sudden attack of common sense.

Verdict: the first appearance of Our Royal Daddy explains a lot about how Mia got into this mess in the first place.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 8

I will not comment on the quality of the swordplay, because there wasn’t any. Quality, that is. And I truly “enjoyed” the way the guy who was so enraged that his eyes were popping repeatedly stood still and waited for conversations to finish. As one does when confronted with enemies one’s vowed to murder to death. Never mind that one’s in a sim where people can’t actually, y’know, die, making the dramatic moment kinda pointless.

Verdict: utter crap, and they’re convinced it tastes so good that we need another helping next week.

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 8

The return of Great Detective Maomao, The Holmes Of The Whorehouse. Also of the poorhouse, since the price she paid for the escort home will leave her indentured again, one way or another. In addition to escort service, we get a bit of fan-service, not so much from Maomao herself as from her big-big-sister Meimei.

Verdict: plausible deniability. And a heart attack for poor Shinji.

Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving dinner was at my house, with my parents and my brother’s family, for seven total. Mom brought turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, corn salad, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, etc, so I could have gotten away with just setting the table, but I made mashed potatoes, tangzhong dinner rolls, and a less-spicy version of Those Potatoes (replacing our usual mix of powdered chiles with slightly less of the original Chef Paul spice mix).

Given how rich and filling Those Potatoes are, it’s a recipe I hadn’t made since before Covid, and I had managed to forget that while I can chop onions all day long, grating them really fills the air with tear gas.

Random MacOS Sonoma incompatibility

A while back I finally worked out the correct incantation to restore the long-since-removed window-cascade feature to MacOS (at least for Terminal.app, which is the one I most cared about).

Upgrading to MacOS 14.x broke it in a non-obvious way. TL/DR: Terminal.app now has a mystery invisible window that has to be excluded by changing every window to every window whose visible is true. I updated the script in the original post, since it’s backward-compatible.

Random M2 Mac performance note

Tinkering with an M2 Mac, the supplied Rosetta2 transcoder is pretty awful. Transcoded x86_64 binaries range from “twice as slow as a 3-year-old Macbook Air” to “completely unusable”. Sadly, Homebrew’s decision to move from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew makes it difficult to build things that don’t look there, and MacOS has no real support for alternate lib-dirs. Looks like there’s also a fair amount of software out there that has hard-coded ifdefs for MacOS that assume Intel, and won’t build without hackery.

NSFW

(perlbrew’s giving me grief about installing anything less than the bleeding-edge dev release, and that one can’t install XS modules, so I’m stuck with the version installed by Homebrew)

(oh, and the asshole who wrote PDF::Cairo needs to fix his tests so it installs cleanly in recent Perl/Cairo/Pango releases; oh wait, that’s me (SVG import lost its transparency, and rotated text is mis-kerned, so technically the tests work and the underlying libraries are broken))

“Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational Best Dad.” This week, Bel-Daddy deftly handles two problem children, while Our Vengeful Daughter calms down enough to ask herself WWDD and adopts the Junior Villains instead of punishing them. Fortunately this non-traditional family can handle the oddness.

Verdict: the character animators should really get together and agree to draw Our Tomboy Elf Princess at a consistent level of hotness. Other than that, no complaints.

(tomboy elf princess is unrelated)

Well, that was… talky.

Fortunately, Our Drunken Russian Heroine (who’s healed up enough to fall off the wagon again) sports another hairstyle that’s more flattering than her usual look, likely because Our Left-Behind Best Friend stole the ponytail (which looks good on her, too). This week we’re in Russia investigating Our Mysterious Look-Alike Villainess, who conveniently shows up just as Our Heroines find An Important Clue to Her True Identity. Our Shy Heroine Shy is there mostly just to react to the goings-on, so I guess this qualifies as character development for Pepesha, although it’s pretty thin.

Verdict: Eye-catching new looks for Pepesha and Iko are welcome, but this is the second exposition-heavy episode in a row, and even after they suit up, it just leads to more exposition. This is a bit odd, given the series composition, script, and director credits; oh, wait, the director was also responsible for the talk-to-death ending of Astra Lost In Space.

Tearmoon, episode 7

I am shocked, shocked, to learn that a random selfish action by Our Vacationing Princess has world-shaking consequences. Which will continue next week as Our Sickly Orphan’s gift keeps on giving. Meanwhile, a blast from future-past has Mia passing out in terror, but fortunately Our Ex-Executioner’s already starting to convert to The Church Of The Accidental Genius.

Verdict: this is not the most contrived set of coincidences in Mia’s redemption, just the most contrived set so far. Bonus points for the real-life reference to the popularity of horse shampoo.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 7

Laziest. CG Rat Swarm. Ever.

In other news, Our Former Tsuntail can barely manage to keep up her non-dere cover personality. Pity she’s also stuck in her non-dairy school uniform. And if Our Gay Bunnyboy gets any more over-the-top, he’s going to bottom. Lastly, Our Bushy-Browed Valkyrie makes a brief cameo as this tournament heads into a third episode. The credits promise she’s a major character, but with only five episodes left, she’s going to have to harem up Real Soon Now.

Verdict: Our Cute Little Redheaded Senpai is never coming back, is she? By the way, what kind of dice game is the helium-snorting ED singer on about?

(Princess Stompyboots is about as unrelated as Our Cute Little Redheaded Senpai, sigh)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 7

The way to a man’s heart is through high-end prostitutes. The way to Maomao’s stomach is through dangerous poisons. It was refreshing that her use of fingerprints didn’t turn into a completely anachronistic great-detective moment, and simply supported fairly straightforward deductions. In other news, Our Motherly Concubine really enjoyed setting up Our Pretty-Boy Not-Eunuch; it’s not often that the harem gets to poke the manager.

Verdict: I enjoy the cultural explanations that most of the reviewers skip over completely in order to misread the show through the lens of 21st-century wokeist feminism.

Unrelated,

The latest Pixiv jargon I’ve come across is 胸膝位 (kyoushitsu-i, no relation to the “classroom” kyoushitsu), which is not in any of my dictionaries. It breaks down into breast + knees + position, but most of the time, 位 as a suffix is more of a rank than a position-position (“first place”, “social status”, etc). However,体位 (tai-i) is the generic “sexual position”, leading to:

• 側位 soku-i, “side position” = spooning
• 屈曲位 kukkyoku-i, “bending position” = “Viennese Oyster”
• 後背位 kouhai-i, “behind-back position” = doggy style (no relation to "junior" kouhai)
• 正常位 seijou-i, “normal position” = missionary
• 騎乗位 kijou-i, “horse-riding position” = cowgirl
• etc.

So the Pixiv-supplied translation of 胸膝位 is “face down ass up”, which will probably not make it into JMdict any time soon. And, no, I didn’t have much luck finding a work-safe fan-art of that one…

NSFW

(cowgirl gets ~75K hits on Pixiv, doggy gets ~30K, and the rest are rarely used)

Completely unrelated, a Starfield fridge thought

There’s an early conversation between Walter Stroud and his partner-wife where he gets insecure about their relationship and says maybe she should have married a Hope or a Taiyo, owners of two of the major ship-building companies, since she’s a powerhouse in the industry herself.

But there is no Hope family to marry into, it’s just Ron himself, a former freighter captain and throughly unpleasant person who wouldn’t survive an hour with Issa. And if you happen to kill him as part of a certain quest, the employees panic about the future of the company, because there’s no one to inherit the business.

(well, it’s likely Walter is the little spoon in their relationship, so it’s not completely unrelated…)

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 8

Enter The Elves. First another naggingly familiar voice joins the cast as Our Legendary Warrior (using something very similar to his Zelada voice from the glorious train-wreck Cop Craft), soon to be followed by Our Tomboy Princess (whose previous elven princess was much curvier). Meanwhile, a chance remark sets Our Dutiful Daughter off on a quest that could change her world!

Verdict: Oh, Miri, what have you done? 😁

(Leafa-chan is unrelated, but I couldn’t find any decent fan-art of previous-elf-princess Arianne that I haven’t already used)

Frieren, episode 11

There’s a fair amount of fan-porn for Aura The Guillotine. To no great surprise, all of it requires ignoring every aspect of the character except her cleavage. Clearly some people are going to miss her.

But not the town they just saved, which honors both their dead and Our Heroes, before the Graf gives them a grateful sendoff. And a warning that Frieren needs to renew her driver’s license mage certification in order to progress much further.

Speaking of new elves, we get yet another naggingly familiar voice as Koyasu himself turns up. It should come as no surprise that an elf is a touch eccentric, but they quickly warm up to him, literally in Stark’s case.

Verdict: lots of fun little character moments this week.

(only decent fan-art I’ve found of Flamme so far)