Cosplay Harem, episode 18

“Mom said Daddy’s dead! But I’m okay now! But I wasn’t okay enough to ask her WTF!” Fortunately Our 2D-Lovin’ Hero has a nose for ears, and he’ll whiplash this mess into shape!

Anyway, the psychological trauma is resolved with a good cry and some hugging, and even an invitation to join the squeeze play doesn’t give Our Devoted Hero a stiffy (the camera actually checked). We got a brief cameo from Our Hot Teacher providing advice on dealing with Comiket announcements, but she was scooped by Our Eager Tsuntail, who took advantage of her modeling popularity to spread the word on TV.

Verdict: the fates are conspiring to reunite Daddy and Daughter through the power of cosplay, and they’ve made sure it will all work out by enlisting Our Universal Father Figure to voice him.

(Teacher ever-so-casually admitted that she’ll be there showing off alongside the other three “heavenly queens”, so next week should be full of eye candy)

Magical Working Girl, episode 5

I think they spent more money animating Our Wide-Eyed Cuddly Newbie’s karaoke dance scene than they did on last week’s fight scene. I suppose they could afford that because there’s no fight scene this week, just team-building and a chance for Kana to find out what life is like at one of the big MG corps. Which means we get to see a new gal doing… something next week.

GGO 2, episode 5

This week, half of the surviving players think the new twist sucks the fun out of the event, and the other half think it’s gonna be awesome to screw everyone over. In other words, half of them don’t get to play the game they signed up for. This can be considered a metaphor for recent anime seasons.

Verdict: so far, the running battle in episode 3 between two side characters who killed each other off is the high point of the show.

Election spam

I have received more mail in the past month than in the previous two years, all of it political spam for offices other than the president. I have received no SMS or MMS political spam, but I have (company-confidential) reason to believe that there’s a double fuckton of it being sent to other people. Possibly a triple fuckton.

As for The Big Race, some of the wealthier neighborhoods around Dayton have some Commie-Waltz signs up, but the working-class areas I drive through every day are swimming in Trump/Vance signs, many quite large, and unlike when I lived in California, they don’t get torn down.

Have Catgirl, Will Travel

Last week I linked to Jacob Holo’s Freelancers of Neptune, due to the presence of a sexy catgirl on the cover. How’s the actual book? Fun. The world-building gives the reader enough to work with while hinting at future possibilities, the heroes are good people with actual motives, there’s a complete absence of preachy woke bullshit, and the story moves along at a decent clip. The Big Bad does twirl his mustache a bit, but you can’t have everything, and you can have a catgirl. (well, somebody can have a catgirl; Our Captain doesn’t want this one)

(most of my saved catgirl pics are more “M appeal” than Emma Peel, but some of them are at least armed)

Loner Harem, episode 6

Our Local Noble’s Exasperated Daughter rewards Our Hero with the three things he desires most: cash, meat, and a ticket out of town. This frees him up to finally confront the One True Class Villain, a mustache-twirling bloodthirsty math nerd. Meanwhile, the girls are doing what they do best: shopping, killing monsters, and worrying about Haruka.

Verdict: less shouty than last week.

Super Dragon Balls, episode 5

A large group of nameless wood elves (fortunately all male) get chomped by CG spiders to set up the stakes, and then threaten Our Future Threesome as they escort pigs on a truffle hunt. Our Draco-Adjacent Hero casually lies his way out of trouble after he not only recognizes the never-before-seen demon attacker but names the species. After escorting what’s left of the pigs and the other escorts back to town, they return to… lunch with monsters and flirt.

The planning for their polygamous wedding night is interrupted by even more CG demon spiders, which pose no real threat as they team up to… Oh, come on! Bad enough small-town dragon-boy is throwing around advanced combat spells like there’s no tomorrow, but he casually whips out a fucking dragon arm mid-fight without even worrying that his girlfriends might notice?!?

Verdict: is there no end to Dolan’s I-Win buttons? Excuse me while I go ogle a proper dragon:

Kabuki Magic Looniér, episodes 1-4

(…or something like that…)

Mauser’s suggesting this one, and the lead voice actress deserves a win after slogging through Earth: Final Bye-Bye, so I gave it a shot while checking the porch for little monsters. Speaking of voices, one of them should be very familiar to anyone who’s watched pretty much any anime made in the past 25 years. Okay, two. Maybe even three. Actually, the casting budget probably explains cutting a few corners elsewhere; they didn’t hire a bunch of noobs.

First up, let’s just pretend that there are no OP or ED credits for this show. I certainly plan to never watch or listen to them again.

I’m not going to go episode-by-episode, I’ll just say that I appreciate a heroine with the power of R.T.F.M., and point out that I binged four episodes in one evening without suffering.

Verdict: episode 4 brings it all together.

(bonus magical girl shows a lot more skin than Our Venturing Heroines, but if we’re lucky, those full-body transformation sparkles are called “Buy-The-Bluray”)

Speaking of little monsters…

Between the sidewalk ending at my house and the driveway being 75 feet long and steep, I felt the need to decorate the front windows with silhouette bats and cats and tombstones with witch hats, and the front door with silhouette ghosts, all cut out on a Silhouette (Curio 2, a recent crafting toy).

First trick-or-treater was my Amazon driver. He thought he was kidding, but I gave him a big handful of candy. Over the next hour, I got… 16. Nothing like my place in California, but better than last year, despite the fact that it was raining half the night (sigh). I’ll have to find something to do with the leftover candy that doesn’t involve eating it myself…like give a few pounds to the pizza driver, who not only has a store full of people to share with, but a kid.

Has this one been done yet?

“A Portal From Another World Spawned In My Basement, So I Turned It Into A Dungeon (But Not The Kind With Monsters) And Now I Train Sexy Elf Chicks And Sell Them On Etsy”

Killer Maid, episode 4

Okay, so Our Emotionless Hot Maid shows up at school as a new transfer student claiming to be Our Hapless Hero’s cousin, gets assigned the seat right in front of him, and calls him by his first name with a -sama attached, and after a single reaction shot, the only other thing that happens at school is the well-worn trope of students stampeding for the lunch special, which doesn’t interest her until she finds out that it’s all about her special sauce, and then she performs multiple super-human feats to cut in line.

Verdict: when Our Manic Pixie Little Sister decided to push for maid/master matrimony, I stopped watching and went off to do laundry. I don’t plan to come back.

(how well-worn is the trope? well, this week is apparently also Ryoga’s intro in the new Ranma show, and school-cafeteria-food-fight is the origin of their rivalry…)

(oh, and while she was technically wearing less as a student than as a maid, this amounted to a few square inches of skin exposed below her neck)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 3

This week, Our Heroes steal a page from That Slime Show and spend the entire episode sitting around a table telling us how good it’s going to be when they get back to actually playing the game. It’s well-drawn but drawn-out, with comic relief coming from Our Animal-Loving Animalia molesting Our Formerly-Pure White Rabbit into a catatonic state.

Verdict: basically an entire episode of exposition and plotting, filled with reaction shots of characters reacting to said exposition.

(admittedly, I am curiously attracted to Animalia, and unlike Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, she’s at least in the ED animation, so she should be showing up more this season)

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The late Shamus Young often ranted about his hatred of “do it again stupid” game design, something I share. This game is full of it, with many of the puzzles forcing you to figure out a solution while dodging bullets, and Zelda is very squishy while most of the enemies are decidedly not. It’s notable that Breath of the Wild had only one major puzzle that had to be restarted from the beginning if you made a single mistake, and that’s in the DLC.

New Mac failure mode

Something I hadn’t seen on any Mac before: the mouse stopped hovering. In every app where there’s some kind of mouse-hover support (including Finder), it just… didn’t. Elements in apps were no longer being informed that the mouse was hovering over them. No tooltips, no scrollbars, no pop-ups, no menus, no video controls, no full file names, nothing. I had to reboot to clear it up. In fairness, I doubt that there’s anyone in “QA” any more who tests how the system behaves after being up for a full month.

(elf-hover > mouse-hover)

This Is Magia Country!

This may be the most accurate depiction of an anime heroine ever committed to 3D, courtesy of the Molesting Magical Girls xTwitter account:

NSFW

This one definitely does not belong on the shelf behind my work computer that shows up in Zoom meetings. I can explain HoiHoi-san, Totoro, Jiji, The Tick, and an assortment of Funko Pops, but not Magia Baiser riding her crop.

Loner Harem, episode 5

This week, Classmates Without Benefits, as Our Harried Loner is henpecked into submission. He also reluctantly rescues Our Local Noble’s Daughter and destroys her mind. And Our Class President accidentally makes him even more over-powered, despite his inability to level up and officially become an adventurer.

Verdict: fluffy, but shouty. I have to cut the volume to enjoy the lite cheesecake.

(well-eared schoolgirls are loosely related)

Super Dragon Balls, episode 4

Story-telling pro tip: when you’ve already established that your hero is ridiculously powerful and basically unstoppable, it takes more than melodramatic music and villain monologing to establish a credible threat. That is, this week’s episode was complete horseshit. Also a real tonal whiplash, with a side order of “what’s wrong with that guy’s face?”.

(well-equipped dragon gal is unrelated)

Cosplay Harem, episode 17

I love it when a plan comes together… in lingerie. Gal Gal has a tendency to start stripping before remembering that Our 2D-Loving Hero is in the room, while Tsuntail would be delighted to show him anything he wants. Awkward Gal is rapidly filling in her social-butterfly bucket list, while Our Cuddly Heroine takes charge of team building to get ready for the big game. And then A Wild Cliffhanger Appears, which should send us off into trauma-land next week, sigh.

Verdict: the only thing missing this week, and it’s a big thing, is the support of Our Hot Teacher. Okay, two big things.

GGO 2, episode 4

This week, we spend time being reminded that the other teams from last season have some skills, too, before The Big Twist is revealed as a cliffhanger.

Verdict: paint-by-numbers stuff, really; I got far enough into the light novels that I know everything that will happen this season, but even if I didn’t, I doubt it would be much more than filler.

(original SAO Second-Best Girl never got nearly enough screen time)

Ero-Zelda…

All Zelda emotes from Echoes Of Wisdom.

(this is basically a reskin of Link’s Adventure with a Zelda PoV and the sort of powers he got in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom; she gains the ability to fight occasionally, but the primary focus is on summoning monsters and objects to solve puzzles)

Good, fast, and cheap

I’ve had good results with Zenni Optical in the past, but my latest order looks like the best yet. First, they’ve improved their frame-preview system that uses your webcam to overlay the frames on your head in 3D, allowing some amount of movement to check style and apparent size. It didn’t work on Safari and it can show some frames comically oversized if you don’t manually enter pupil distance, but it does work, whether you’re wearing your current glasses or not.

Second, I ordered two pairs on Tuesday night, and FedEx delivered them on Friday by noon. That was much faster than I expected, and it turns out their lab is about a 90-minute drive away.

Anyway, I’ll have to go to the range this weekend to see how the split-prescription shooting glasses work out.

No Longer Catgirl

I recently joined my parents for a wine dinner at their favorite restaurant (TL/DR: I don’t care much for wine, but I actually liked the Zilliken Rausch Riesling). We were joined by three family friends, including a couple whose daughter had just turned eighteen. While her dad picked my brains over where to take her in Japan for her graduation present, her mom shared one of her recent papers with my mom. Mostly to show that she’d survived a modern public school education and learned to read and write coherently.

Later, Mom shared the title of the book with me, and I had to laugh: No Longer Human (Ningen Shikkaku). I told her I was pretty sure I knew how an 18-year-old interested in Japan and anime had discovered that book…

(side note: my mother has an interesting relationship with the chef; he’s young and ambitious, but has learned to respect her knowledge, and sits at her knee after these dinners to learn what he got right and wrong)

(classical reference)

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 3

So, the “clumsy” part seems to have evaporated into a generic “has no housekeeping skills”, but thanks to the arrival of Our Surprisingly Accepting Super-Genki Little Sister (who lives with the parents that I thought were out of the country or some such; I don’t care enough to rewatch the explanation of why Our Trashy Hero lives alone), Our Withdrawn Maid is coaxed a bit more out of her shell.

Verdict: well, at least next week she’ll finally be wearing less…

Since Maid isn’t a simulcast…

…and my brother and his kids had just left, I killed some time by watching the first episode of the new Ranma. As expected, I was left with no desire to watch the second or third. The only thing notable is that at some point in the past 35 years, the voice actress for middle daughter Nabiki lost the ability to sound like a teenage girl.

(I think it’s extremely unfair to start the OP with a gong and then go into a song that’s nothing like the original)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 2

Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny just met Our Hero’s Partners, but she’s a perfect match for their combat style. Pity the fight that takes up so much screen time is obviously going to be no challenge for them, but at least it gives us another chance to see her in action before she gets sidelined by the plot.

Verdict: I’d be up for a Bilac spinoff series.

Loner Harem, episode 4

Just to be clear, despite a crush so obvious it can be seen from space, Our Class President is not on the fast track to becoming Our Wacky Loner’s girlfriend. That role is reserved for a Very Special Native who’s probably 3-4 episodes away.

Verdict: I’m pretty sure now that they’re working from the manga, so the story will not degenerate to the point that you wonder if the author is working one-handed, as it has in the recent novels where Haruka’s internal narration consists of equal parts insanity and porn. His antics still lead to excessive shouting, though, which has to be weighed against the very mild fan-service.

(flying crazy person is… loosely related, come to think of it)

Super Dragon Balls, episode 3

“Well, hellooooooooo, Goddess! Please visit again soon!”

We’ll just gloss over the part where Our Totally-Not-OP Hero reveals another ridiculous power, and move on to the part where Our Cool Lady Knight duels Our Hot Village Guard with swords, then Our Rowdy Captain with… his wife’s freshly-squeezed milk, a story which is framed by the laziest hot-elf-in-underrim-glasses that I’ve ever seen.

Then Knight Gal gets to be the taste-tester for the fresh teen cowgirl, plants her tuber, summons the sylpheed, and testifies for the defense.

Verdict: The days are just packed. It made less sense than last week, but added more scenery, so we’ll call that a wash.

(pity the OP song sucks, because it has nice previews of the haremettes)

Cosplay Harem, episode 16

So, it turns out that the first rule of Cosplay Club is that you’re not really a member until you’ve gotten a squeeze of Ririsa’s boobs. When Tsuntail gets back into the story, she’s got to get a handful; it’s the law. As enticing as that sounds, this is a show where having three cute girls standing around in lingerie insisting that the other two have better bodies just kinda goes by without lots of closeups and lingering pans.

Anyway, this week is all about indoctrinating Gal Gal into otaku culture and how to dress up as more than “generic hot chick”. The brainwashing works just fine, but then Awkward Gal discovers her deepest, darkest secret, which fires Chekhov’s Gun so quickly your head will spin.

Verdict: getting too shouty, but still decorative.

GGO 2, episode 3

While Our Heroes are waiting for the tide to come in, Yes-I’m-A-Girl-Loving-Girl Clarence and I’m-Totally-Into-This-Now Shirley run wild, killing anyone who gets in their way. Until they get in each other’s way. Next week, Our Middle-School Rhythmic Killing Team takes the field.

Verdict: there’s really no emotional hook this season, no stakes beyond just watching familiar characters play the game. I mean, Shirley has a goal that’s led her to not just play the game but get really into it and have fun, but we just covered her entire story arc in one episode, and it’s done; we won’t see her again until Squad Jam 4.

Harem Ninja Team Gainaxin’

Coming in January to HiDive, I’m Living With An Otaku Neet Kunoichi.

Food for thought

Um, wha?

“order now on DoorDash and enjoy authentic Japanese cuisine, like their popular crab rangoon”

Clumsy Killer Maid, episode 2

Baby steps this week, as Our Emotionless Killer Maid is confronted with her induced trauma about vicious wild dogs, with the gentlest, squishiest trigger imaginable. I’ll give even odds that the person who left the puppy at their door was also responsible for sending her there, and that we’ll be seeing more surprise events that help her adjust to normal life.

As for her potential emotional range, the voice actress was also responsible for the super-genki lead in Bakuon!!, so there’s plenty of headroom there.

Verdict: she’s warmed up just a little, enough that I’ll give it another week.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 1

I could do without hearing the OP song ever again. Other than that, the recap is brief, and they quickly pick up where they left off, with Our Birdbrained Hero tackling a new area with two bunnies and a cat. Our Would-Be Romeo Cat clumsily woos Our Awesome Chocolate Bunny, but still contributes significant combat power. Our High-Strung White Rabbit mostly panics, but manages to take out a few exploding golems.

The Sunraku/Bilac dynamic gives me hope that we’ll see a lot of her this season, but I suspect this arc is the only time we’ll really get to see her shine. I was sad that she wasn’t in the ED animation.

Verdict: off to a good start, with Our Frenemies showing up at the end with mischief in mind.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

With all the classes overhauled and the loot rescaled, the seasonal content is fine, and fresh enough to be worth playing. As for the $60 DLC, the first problem is that you can’t skip the story quests on a new character until you’ve completed the whole thing at least once. Which is the second problem: the story is slow, boring, filled with unskippable gibberish (excuse me, “ancient language”), and padded out with tons of mindless mook fights. Spoiler alert:

In the base game, you only needed to get through the prologue once, and all future characters had a fully unlocked world. Here, they’re determined to make you sit through their writing and voice acting. There are some tedious scenes you can skip, but not enough. IMHO, if they wanted players to care enough about Neyrelle to make her the emotional core of the DLC, they shouldn’t have introduced her as an annoying omnicompetent snarky teen sidekick in the base game.

“As I was going to St. Ives…”

A group of researchers tested LLM solutions to grade-school math problems, and reached the obvious conclusion that they weren’t capable of mathematical reasoning, being trivially tripped up by injecting variety into straightforward word problems of the type used to train them. Simply changing up the numbers reduced the success rate, but adding irrelevant clauses really killed it. They basically stumped the “smartest” LLMs with MadLibs.

(via Language Log)

Loner Harem, episode 3

The mild fan-service compensates for the shouty freak-outs. Mostly. Our Hero shows off some very mild examples of his unsane view of the world, and proves his trustworthiness by not assaulting the girl who comes into his tent to announce that breakfast is served. (a low bar, sure, but one not cleared by Team Delinquent)

Verdict: decorative, but still very early in the first arc.

Super Dragon Balls, episode 2

I don’t know which is harder to believe, that the village women are happy with their men lustily drinking milk freshly squeezed from the local busty cowgirl (whose daughter looks ready to tap), or that Our Formerly-Draconic Hero has lived sixteen years as a human boy without getting slapped silly every day by the village girls for his clueless behavior. Fish-out-of-water comedy doesn’t really work when the fish is in the water.

Verdict: the premise is already wearing thin. Seriously, this can’t be the first time he’s seen a villager in danger and thought, “oh, no, I have to use my dragon speed to save him”, but they keep setting up situations where he behaves like a dragon disguised as a villager, Clark-Kenting his way through life.

(white-haired dark-skinned dragonette is unrelated, but easy on the eyes)

Cosplay Harem, episode 15

Good news! Gal Gal doesn’t unload her psychological baggage on us. Bad news! Because we spend half the episode dealing with Awkward Lass’s residual trauma. Super Cuddly’s just happy to embrace another cosplayer, while Busty Pro and Hot Teacher mentor the team. We’re also given a hint about The Secret Adventures of Soft Gay and Ambiguous Woman; he’s another teacher at their school who Looks That Way, and she(?)’s an old friend who runs a photo studio that is conveniently free for noob cosplayers.

Verdict: it ends right before we get to see Gal Gal strip down and suit up for photos, so we still have no idea what her costume is; also, no one remembered seeing her at last week’s event. I kinda wish they’d spent some time with Tsuntail before adding two more girls.

(I’m going with a League of SuperPlayers naming theme this week, because there’s a callout to The Avengers assembling)

GGO 2, episode 2

The OP animation needs a seizure warning. Also an explanation of why there’s a flash of LLENN in barely-there lingerie; not the service I was looking for. Now, if they’d swapped that with the tank-top-and-shorts outfit Karen’s wearing in the ED…

Anyway, on to the gun-service, as we jump right into the fight, with all the well-known teams separated to the far corners of the field, and nameless mooks sacrificed to the gods of bullet hell. Next week, two side characters get developed.

Verdict: a good chunk of this is wasted on a CG-heavy extended dance mix of last week’s “LLENN runs away while being shot at by everyone” sequence, which is also quite shouty. Meh.

(a few hours late showing up on Crunchy)