(…with the exception of the show Pixy found that doesn’t premiere for another two weeks, for some reason)

Shut-in Vampire Princess

The girls are well-drawn. That is the only draw. If it weren’t for the maid’s pleasant-but-affectless voice, I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did; Our Blood-Hating Vampire Princess’ whining grates on my ears. Honestly, the only thing I liked about her was the dolphin plushie.

Verdict: I might check back in a few weeks to see if they tone down the slapstick and whining, and maybe get the empress and the maid into a bath scene together.

(this had an unpleasant aftertaste, kind of like the “Caramel Cold Brew” M&M’s I just made the mistake of trying…)

Tearmoon Empire, episode 1

A lot of reviewers are categorizing this as a “repenting villainess” story, but that doesn’t quite fit, even setting aside the dubious nature of the whole “villainess” genre (which appears to be a trope without an origin). In her first life, the crime Tia was executed for was being a clueless self-centered teenager. She wasn’t responsible for any of the misery that led to revolution, she was just the last member of the royal family, hated as a symbol.

In any case, this is not Realist Hero with his endless quotes from Machiavelli. This is a romp, in which Our Nearly-Headless Heroine’s greatest fear is being chased down by a cute chibi guillotine. There is a very real guillotine in her memories of what was, but her future past is being filtered through the mind of a spoiled 12-year-old.

Verdict: a little shouty, but she did just have her head chopped off, so it can be forgiven for now. I’d prefer to hear more of the adult-Mia voice, at least for her inner monologue, but oh well. Speaking of voices, chibi-guillotine is a former NGT48 idol singer, so that’s… something, I suppose.

(not fan-art; the official cover artist is on Pixiv, which is good, because pretty much everything else for this series is badly-drawn porn, and not even much of that)

Potion Loli, episode 1

Speaking of romps, Our Genre-Savvy Heroine rips through the isekai starter tropes at record speed, aided and abetted by some rather inept and stupid gods, only to be dropped in a world that isn’t quite the genre she expected. Armed only with OP cheat skills and evil-chibi eyes, Kaoru sets out for a life of adventure.

Verdict: my (pretty low) expectations were exceeded. Art and animation quality, not so much.

(there’s even less fan-art of this series than of Tearmoon, but even odder is that none of it is porn. yet)

Y’know, it can be hard to tell the difference between Frieren allowing her apprentice to learn a valuable lesson, and Frieren being an idiot.

Verdict: more of the same, in a good way.

Dear Bethesda,

In Starfield, please disable all animation and interaction with and between members of the crew when the player is in the cockpit. It’s bad enough that Cora composes haiku and tells dad jokes as soon as you warp into a system and get jumped by pirates, but when you’re in the special post-spoiler ship, they all casually stroll in front of the cockpit, blocking your view of attacking ships.

More Pixiv jargon…

Saw this one for the first time today, while looking for something else: 茶巾 (read “chakin”). I immediately recognized the characters for “tea” and “cloth”, and indeed I’d run into it earlier in the week while looking up my cast iron tea kettle: a chakin is used to safely handle a hot lid and wipe drips off the spout.

To me, it had no obvious connection to “skirt tied overhead”. The answer lies in the baking world, with chakin-shibori, a method of tightly wrapping mashed ingredients before baking, either with a literal tea cloth that doesn’t go into the oven, or with a wrapper that does.

Dear Emacs,

Please stop line-wrapping URLs that contain CJK characters. That is all.

(pretty-please with kittens on top)

There’s a great deal of sweetness to this show, and I’m not just talking about the cute little merchant girl. To quote an underrated movie, Our Daddy-Loving Heroine suffers from a romanticism which is completely incurable, and even worse, highly contagious.

Not that they don’t find room for a big chunk of exposition and worldbuilding in between introducing Our Single Dad to Our Talent-Scout Countess, Her Hero-Worshipping Adventurer Sister, and The Brains Of The Family (our previously-rescued damsel-in-red-underrims).

Recognizing that the Ange-can’t-get-home joke has just about worn itself out, the next-episode title reassures the audience that they’re about done with that. The bit about her inventing an adventurer title for her beloved dad, however, is the gift that keeps on giving.

Verdict: Ange’s not the only one with daddy issues, but at least Helvetica has a keeper.

(after their introduction this week, you could forgive the villagers for thinking the wrong sister became Countess…)

Meanwhile…

I’m waiting for the glue to dry on the replacement AP board for my Bambu Lab X1C. It arrived Wednesday night, and I carefully removed the old board, then put off installing the new one until morning. Which became afternoon, trending into evening, and then I got busy. Presumably because of all the vibration, they use silicone glue to hold all the connectors in place, and they have you wait a full hour after attaching the new ribbon cable before attaching the others.

The instructions are clear, but it would be nice if they made the thumbnails links, since the embedded pictures are actually a decent size if you right-click and open them in another tab.

(yeah, as if Lammis wouldn’t send Boxxo to the moon if she caught him changing into the dirty-magazine machine again…)

Tea for two

After re-seasoning the interior of my new old iron tea kettle, I made some actual tea. I used the same cheapest-on-amazon oolong loose-leaf tea that I bought for seasoning, and it was actually pretty good.

I made the mistake of using the correct amount of leaves for the full water capacity of the kettle, and there was barely enough room for the lid after they expanded. I also didn’t really need nearly a quart of tea, so I only drank half of it and left the rest (sans infuser) to see how long it would stay drinkably hot. (quite a while…)

Meet Our Shy Heroine Shy, who is both shy and Shy. Gifted with generic superpowers and crippling social anxiety, this newbie superhero is… less of a goofball than the more established heroes in her world. They skipped the origin story and dropped you right into her daily life, but also managed to cram in an entire crisis-of-confidence arc, set up Our Busty Drunken Popular Russian Heroine as a big sister figure, have Kikuko Inoue show up to announce a future conflict that’s worse than war, put Our Creepy Lurker Boy in the background, and still have time to airdrop Our Future Best Friend in at the end.

No idea where this is going, but it follows the same Western superhero tropes as My Hero Academia, including the first thing that All Might pointed out to his protégé: the heroes are the ones who run toward danger.

Verdict: if they can keep the shy/Shy thing from making her a one-trick pony girl (as opposed to a trick-turning pony-girl, which would liven up that other show…), I think I’ll like it. Lots of well-known voice actors in this one as well, including a few favorites. Bonus points for the lead actress not sounding anything like her vampire waifu from Hoe Harem or her desert princess from Restaurant To Another World.

Fan-art note: searching for the official title シャイ is useless, because it’s a substring match for the far-more-popular Idolmaster: Shiny Colors series. Hashtag SHY works better, excluding 99%+ of the irrelevant results, leaving you with a small number of SFW pics where the characters are at least recognizable (and the usual porn).

(the rest of the new shows I’ll try to watch won’t be until Saturday, when I expect to be disappointed by Shut-in Vampire, and hope to not be disappointed by Tearmoon and Potion Loli)

Officially, Dekoboko Majo no Oyako Jijou (“The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch”). I’ve always thought dekoboko (bumpiness, roughness; imbalance, inequality) was an interesting word, largely because of how it’s written: 凸凹. There aren’t a lot of Tetris kanji.

Anyway, this is a show about Our Legal Loli Witch Mama and Her Voluptuous Witchy Adopted Daughter. Cons: it’s a four-koma gag comedy. Pros: voluptuous witchy adopted daughter.

Verdict: I lasted 4.5 minutes, and that includes the opening credits. Too shouty, and there’s something off about the faces. This was not unexpected, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

Time to wash the memory of this away with a Komi/Yor crossover:

(this is the second “found a baby in the woods” show of the season; how many more will there be?)

Someday, my (3d) prints will come

Looks like the latest firmware update bricked my Bambu Lab X1C. Customer support should will be mailing a new AP board out to me in a day or so.

Update: While the initial response from customer service took a few days, once it was in someone's queue, I got responses on both Saturday and Sunday. So, yes, they still need to staff up (the cloud hasn't been their only difficulty adjusting to success), but once you reach someone, they're good.

The one snag is that there's a final handshake when you replace the AP board, and that's sending them the old and new serial numbers so they can update your registration in their system, so you can re-bind your printer to your account. For The Cloud, of course.

[this was advertised as a two-hour-ish premiere, but Crunchyroll has it broken up into four normal-sized episodes, each with OP/ED. Since they’re continuing directly into the next season, it will either run longer than the usual 24-26 or finish up early]

Warning: autotune is a privilege, not a right. And that’s the last time I want to hear the OP song for this show. The ED song is listenable and fitting, at least.

With that out of the way, it’s a slow, quiet show, so the acting and the art style reflect that; the animation budget makes it feel a bit like a video game, getting choppy in scenes full of background characters, but smoother when focused on the story. The backgrounds are a more realistic style while characters are closer to the usual, which makes them pop without looking like they don’t belong. As a bonus, the lead voice actress does not use her Anya Forger voice!

The first two are tearjerkers, so unlike most anime, a box of tissues would have a wholesome use. Comic relief is provided by Frieren’s unusually close relationship with mimics. Things lighten up for the next two episodes, as she acquires an apprentice, lets her hair down, and begins to pay more attention to the lives of the mayflies around her.

Verdict: a solid start to an interesting story.

(…and this is the second most popular fan-picture that doesn’t involve cock; seriously, they barely made the top 20)

Turns out Crunchyroll isn’t on the one-week delay for this show that most networks in Japan are, so I got a pleasant surprise this morning.

The first episode is all setup, but it’s good setup. The Tenka Seiha preview is, to be kind, baffling, bearing no resemblance to this show. And I say that having read the 9 currently-translated light novels.

What there is is a grown man who reflexively shoulders responsibility, an adopted daughter who dearly loves him in a completely appropriate (if slightly obsessive) way, and a growing collection of people who fill in the gaps between his slow village life and her adventures.

The art style is distinctive and leans towards realism, in both characters and background, which goes a long way to compensate for the limited animation budget. And there’s basically no fan-service of the usual sort: female adventurers wear clothing and armor, and damsels in distress are rescued before they’re stripped for the camera (even the one with red under-rim glasses…).

Our Devoted Heroine is a 17-year-old adventurer who has spent five years building up an impressive reputation, and is a victim of her success, unable to get free time to visit her rural home town. Our Doting Dad is a 40-ish farmer who lost a leg during his brief adventuring career, but grew up into a solid, dependable grownup who raises his daughter to be caring as well as skilled, and is honorary uncle to every kid in the village.

Verdict: I was really looking forward to this one, and the first episode met my expectations.

(I give it the Rory Mercury seal of approval)

Amazon Fragile™

Looks like I’ve got another two-day Prime delivery that’s going to take more than a week, as the bamboo garden stand I ordered was rejected by the carrier for damage and sent back. Switching from reliable delivery to dirt-cheap delivery is not a great long-term strategy, but it must be giving someone a quarterly bonus.

To add insult to injury, the notice that “Unfortunately, a problem occurred during shipping” is accompanied by a “Buy again” button. They should replace that with a “Buy somewhere else” button.

Another day, another data breach

I’ve never done business with Progress Software or used their MOVEit Transfer software, and neither did the credit union holding my HSA account, but their banking-services vendor Sovos did, and therefore I’m one of the 60 million people whose personal and financial information were compromised.

I think this is the third of fourth time I’ve been given free credit monitoring and identity theft protection due to some asshole’s sloppy coding practices.

This week or next…

Crunchyroll hasn’t announced the start date for S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, but it turns out that the previews claiming it’s this week are for one specific “premium” network, and everyone else in Japan gets it next week. Which means that Crunchy probably gets it next week. Sigh.

If that’s the case, it looks like Frieren will be the season opener for me.

(note: this is the most popular fan-art of the title character that does not involve cock; seriously, Pixiv?)

Interviews With Monster Girls manga ends

In translation, that is; it ended in December in Japan. The anime was terrific, but I’ve always had trouble writing about it because I can’t help wishing Steven had lived to see it; I think it would have pushed all of his buttons, not just the one about the gorgeous virgin succubus wearing red under-rim glasses.

I don’t think the post-anime source material would have held together for a second season, but it did at least bring an appropriate conclusion to the growing feelings between Our Iron-Willed Hero and Our Age-Appropriate Heroine.