A-Cup Alchemist 9

In which Our Intrepid Adventurers make a run on honey in order to get flush, and discover that Our Alchemical Genius is kind of shitty at providing important safety tips, but everything comes out in the end, and they paper over the cracks in their relationship.

Then their parents show up!

Flatcat & Sword 9

In which Our Combatative Kitten whips a whiner and gets whipped by a whipper, undercutting the rumors that her promotion was less about the sword and more about the tail.

No curries were harmed in the creation of this episode.

Hoe Harem 9

The Tale Of The Feral Loli, in which First Girl doesn’t live long enough to become Best Girl, and the reason Our Hoe Lord sticks to farming is revealed to be heartbreak (figuratively and literally). Real downer after all the slapstick comedy and harem antics.

(unrelated kitties to lighten the mood…)

Beast Tamer 9

I know you’re thinking, “what this show really needs is more time spent with The Asshat Hero And His Terrible Party, and maybe another Completely Unrelated Asshat to harass the girls and try to break up Our Taming Hero’s party”. No, wait, no one was thinking that.

As expected, the tamer-on-tamer fight was brief and resolved with a completely new power that’s never been mentioned before. A slight twist is that the thieves weren’t entirely in the wrong, and the person who hired Our Harem Heroes wasn’t entirely in the right, giving off a faint whiff of Very Special Episode, complete with Moral Lessons Learned.

In the end, though, the things that really matter (at least to Our Twin Fairy Loli Waifus) are headpats and hotdogs.

(unrelated headpat-receiving ponygirl is unrelated)

Unrelated,

I finally bit the bullet and ‘upgraded’ my Macbook Air from Catalina to Monterey (after testing it extensively on my work-supplied Mac for months). The #1 annoyance is the reduced contrast everywhere, with small gray fonts and minimal separation between window content and decoration. So I turned on the ‘accessibility’ option to increase contrast, which broke the menus in Edge’s InPrivate mode by significantly reducing their contrast (now black text on a dark gray background). Sadly, Edge doesn’t let you customize the theme for InPrivate mode; there are a number of unresolved support discussions about how the way the current visual separation between normal/private works is really stupid, going back to before Covid was just a line item in Fauci’s research funding.

It looks like I’ll have to upgrade my phone and ipad to 16.2 this week as well, since the latest zero-day security patch to 15.x is only available if your device can’t run 16. Fuck you with a toaster, Apple. Actually, these days, perhaps an air fryer would get the point across better…

My motive for the upgrade? Too busy to finish migrating off the Mac before New Years, and Microsoft has stopped upgrading the version of Office that runs on Catalina. Adobe is still providing updates for the working version of CC, but the latest version of their core apps doesn’t run, so that was a consideration as well.

(Apple of course would prefer that I upgrade to Ventura, which is still in early Beta)

Catching up a week at a time…

A-Cup Alchemist 8

In which cute girls plot cute revenge, discovering and destroying a threat without even resorting to a two-parter. Also, our Darling Flat Protagonist demonstrates precisely why I’ve been calling this show ACA by “jokingly” threatening her more-endowed friends with Magically Induced Mastectomies.

(she did not, however, threaten her busty young assistant’s assets)

Flatcat & Sword 8

So, when a mustache-twirling villain is a catman, is that whisker-twirling? I ask purely for information, because as soon as Our Traumatized Kitten overcame her fear, his parts were no longer part of Our Story, and everything shifted back to slapstick and cuteness.

Hoe Harem 8

In which Prince Humperdink is marrying Buttercup in a little less than half an hour… oh, wait, wrong story. Let’s just say that the soundtrack for the successful rescue of Our Princess Bride was Yakety Sax, with Our Chicken Farmer running away from a confrontation between haremettes, and then throwing cold water on their wifely ambitions with a cliffhanger revelation that No, There Is Another. (and he’s not talking about Halfdragon Helen)

(no, it’s not Yor, either, although SxF is so popular right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if the characters start crossing over into other shows)

Beast Tamer 8

The special no-swimsuit beach episode, in which Our Taming Hero finally gets an eyeful of sweet, sweet waifu-flesh, while the audience just gets a full course of Buy-The-Bluray flare and steam.

For next week, they’ve set up a fight with another tamer, which if it goes like every other fight in this series, will be over before it starts.

Unrelated,

The landscapers are simultaneously building a new back patio, rebuilding the front porch, regrading the side yard, setting up proper drainage, and planting on all sides of the house. As a result, the only way in or out right now is the garage door, and the driveway is blocked by their equipment during the day. So it’s a good thing I work from home.

Monday, the interior contractor sent a guy to touch up all the wood stain, rip out the over-the-range microwave and prep for the new ducted range hood, and rip out the old second half-size burner so that space can be turned into something useful. I expected them to be back on Tuesday to continue, but they didn’t show until late in the afternoon, and then only to remove trash. Turns out the new range hood that was ordered six weeks ago still hasn’t arrived.

I can get by with a torn-up kitchen for a while (although I obviously won’t be hosting a family Christmas…), but gosh, wouldn’t it have been nice if they’d done that work while I was out of the country for three weeks, as originally planned?

Another little item I had to explain to my sister.

Wandering through an anime shop, I was surprised to find a figurine from, of all things, Happy Lesson. They had the two sisters as well, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the snoopy, besotted, glasses-wearing classmate Fumitsuki. Pity they wiped her memory at the end of the season…

(actual figure is cuter than the picture; the plastic box and the lighting don’t flatter it)

A-cup Alchemist 7

Last week’s crisis is this week’s double flashback, as Our Overpowered Underblessed Heroine struggles to live without her special pendant while remembering how she got it in the first place. I couldn’t help but think that scene would have ended very differently in many shows, as the young schoolgirl was lured into the shop and led downstairs to the dungeon…

(not an alchemist shop, but just as fluffy…)

Flatcat & Sword 7

In which The Jerkface (he’s certainly not one of Ours) gets a first helping of what’s coming to him, and Our Cute Cuddly Kitten gets the first of many helpings of Curry. Followed by the appearance of two new characters, one of whom won’t last very long.

(I wouldn’t object to some fan-art of hot-curry grownup Fran…)

GGO light novels 1-10

As some among you may have guessed, I’ve been revisiting the Gun Gale Online series, first the anime, then the translated light novels. It was an excellent show, and the books are pretty decent as well, although I don’t think the later ones would have made for a good second season.

Some of it is simply that it isn’t as fresh, with the author keeping to a fairly narrow formula for the in-game sections rather than exploring the possibilities of what would actually be a pretty cool game. He really only had one idea, Squad Jam, and beats it to death; when he tries to do something else, it doesn’t work in the context of the game.

Perhaps a bigger problem is the time spent on characters I don’t have any reason to care about. Basically, pretty much all the significant characters who appear in the anime become at least loosely allied, forcing him to build up new rivals, and they’re just not developed enough to be interesting. A good example is the girl who takes over the team of comic-relief machine-gunners and turns them into a formidable force: the hook for her is that she’s one of Fuka’s rivals in Alfheim Online, but after thirty seconds of banter, it never matters again.

Kinda related,

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve cleaned a 1911. I’d forgotten how involved the field-stripping process is when you’ve got a compensator and a full-length guide rod. I’d also forgotten how filthy all those nooks and crannies get; designers have learned a few things in the 100+ years since JMB invented most modern firearms.

(mine started life as a basic blued Springfield M1911A1 over 30 years ago, and I gradually added mostly-drop-in third-party parts that typically come standard now, although ambi thumb safeties are still as uncommon as left-handed holsters; I hadn’t shot it in about five years, between work and Wuflu)

Unrelated,

Despite the scary warning, Homebrew continues to function perfectly on Catalina, providing compatible updates to packages. Catalina-specific binary packages continue to be built, so the end is not yet nigh.

Hoe Harem 7

In which obvious plot is obvious, as is the cliffhanger ending. On the bright side, there’s enough Ruri to keep it from bogging down. On the infodump side, The Secret History Of Our Clingy Mom is revealed, as well as The Mystery Of Mister Mailman.

Best moment not involving Ruri: Our Farming Hero is sitting at home at night polishing his hoe (not a euphemism) when Our Dutiful Princess shows up unannounced, dumps him, and rides off without explaining.

Beast Tamer 7

In which Fairy Loli Twin Waifu #2 is rescued, to the surprise of no one, Our Obnoxious Hero Party is snidely astonished at getting what they demanded, to the surprise of no one, and a lengthy infodump is dropped explaining the whole hero-vs-demon-king thing, to the surprise of no one.

Then FLTW2 points out that Our Taming Harem Lord fits the bill just as well as Our Nasty Chosen Hero, to the surprise of no one.

In other news, they won the fight against the Big Bad Demon Knight because of a special power that he had all along but had never mentioned before, which even Our Dragon Waifu calls shenanigans on.

(…to the surprise of no one…)

Tsundere Linux…

In my upcoming trip to Japan, I was going to see if this had a new edition, and then I realized that tsundere linux is just systemd.

I wish to point out that in the brief montage where Fran thinks about the people she’s protecting in the town, they included the panty vendor. Combined with Fran’s post-battle reaction shots, this is sufficient for me to forgive Sword-Dad for geeking out over stats and skills.

Next week: Interview With The Jerkface.

(brief, but necessary for setting up something that happens later)

Voter ID

The first time I voted after moving to California in the Nineties, I naturally showed my ID at the polls, only to be told that I didn’t need to and they didn’t care. Now that I’m back in Ohio, I was pleasantly surprised that they still require ID.

So: paper ballot, at the Moose Lodge, with proper ID, and the poll workers were having a spirited discussion about preserving the chain of custody and getting the results delivered downtown as soon as the polls close.

Pity it’s not that way everywhere, especially today…

Speaking of Slime…

Reincarnated as a Slime the movie streams early next year, and season three of the show has been announced.

Home Stone

Pallets of Pavers for Patio have arrived. Looking forward to the upcoming work. The hardscaping should start Friday, and the landscaping should start next week (delayed by the supervisor’s wife’s early delivery).

Hopefully they can get a lot of work done before it gets too cold; the current extended forecast has it dropping well below freezing at night starting Saturday and lasting at least a week.

Also, they finished up the floors today (with the exception of one little stretch of shoe molding that can’t be installed until the main contractor finishes making the new shim to connect the shower insert to the floor; which won’t happen until he’s back from vacation). Time to unpack!

“You keep using that word…”

I was looking at tech accessories on Amazon, and came across the following delightful description:

“Made of high-quality organic silicone”

This week, bikini clam hunting. The jokes just write themselves, and that’s before the slimy tentacles came out to play…

Amusingly, Our Darling Flat Alchemist picked out an age-appropriate swimsuit for Our Young Shopgirl that just happened to mask her large chest. Fortunately, Our Clam-Diving Gather Girls went for tiny little string bikinis that the camera was happy to zoom in on.

Credit Space

Today I Learned that some previous version of 1Password inserted literal spaces into credit card numbers to break the number into groups. It always displays them this way, but you have to edit the item to find out if they were stored with spaces or without.

This is important because some Javascript validators only allow you to paste 16 characters into a CC field, even counting non-numbers that they ignore, but then don’t run the trivial checksum against the results before you hit submit. Took me a moment…

Roam, if you want to

Apparently there’s no point in renting a pocket wifi device while I’m in Japan, because they’re out of stock at all the vendors I’ve tried. Spectrum’s international roaming isn’t bad compared to ¥860/day, but the pocket wifi would support 10 devices at once, allowing us to freely use our tablets as well while out and about. Maybe they’ll have them at their airport kiosks when we get there.

Hoe Harem 6

In which Pure Farmer Power causes the Evil Plan to backfire, awakening Our One True Best Girl to her destinies, both professional and personal.

Very personal. Seriously, Ruri, “gochisōsama-deshita”?!? That little slip more than made up for the bad CGI on the giant worms. And the excessively talky fight scene.

Sadly, Our Worst Mom also gets some screen time, although she ends up acting her age in the end.

(unrelated heroine is unrelated)

Beast Tamer 6

Team Waifu demonstrates their loyalty and their susceptibility to light petting as they follow Our Taming Hero deep into the woods to run an errand for Our Dipshit Hero. After last week’s digression, we’re back on track for harem expansion, with Fairy Loli Twin #1 begging for help rescuing Fairy Loli Twin #2. Next week, that is, and I’m sure they’ll both officially be Waifu-broken by the end of it. Pretty safe bet, since they’re in the credits…

If they keep to the pattern, I expect another episode of dealing with the hero party and two that focus on Fox Loli Waifu, leaving three episodes to introduce Yet Another Girl (a human knight who doesn’t seem to be a tameable haremette) and have her recruit the party to clean up corruption in her order as some sort of series finale.

Covid/Customs QR Code

The Visit Japan Web site processes scanned passports in about five minutes (provided you actually rotate them, not just let an iphone flag them as landscape), but apparently the Covid certification is reviewed by hand, and takes a few days. Three, for me. But now I’m all set for the trip.

They want you to log into the site on your phone’s browser to display the QR code at the airport, warning you that showing up with a printed code might take longer. Oooooookay then.

What a guy!

Elon Musk just paid three months salary and benefits to thousands of struggling workers to give them the opportunity to Learn To Code.