Red Cat Ramen, episode 11

Kittens! First we flash back to the secret origin of our leader cats, and then Human-chan finds a stray and brings it to the experts, who fill her head with useful information. She won’t need it for long, though, because the kitten quickly finds a person. Then there’s a crisis of confidence as Our Noodle Tiger can’t seem to produce the new style adequately, until the boss walks by and spots her never-sharpened noodle cleaver.

Verdict: one more and we’re done. I’m going to miss it.

Cosplay Harem, episode 11

This week, The Big Payoff. Our Cuddly Noob and Our Reborn Pro share the crowd and A Good Time Was Had By All… until Nagomi got a good look at Our Suspiciously Similar Senpai. Now they’re rivals.

Our Hot Teacher gets paid off as well, first with a gut punch from Our Busty-Besty Elf Gal-Pal, and then with a look into just how oblivious Our Cosplay Couple is.

Verdict: At least three genuine LoL moments. Worth it.

Dungeon People, episode 10

Our Dungeon Wallflower Clay has no idea what to do on her day off, so she resumes her search for Her Missing Daddy by eavesdropping in the monster break room until she hears the voice that had earlier referred to her as “the wind-slicer’s daughter”. The new information she obtains muddies the waters, leaving her no closer to finding out what happened to him.

Also, goblins grow like weeds.

Dungeon Chibis, fin

As we wrap up, A Moment Of Clarity leads Our Chastened Hero to visit Crush-chan in the middle of the night to kneel before her pajama-clad cuteness and… apologize for being a thoughtless dick about the whole dungeon thing. As a bonus, he finally calls her by her first name, without even a -chan.

Anyway, after eight minutes of that, it’s back to the dungeon, and back to what Kaito finally realizes he should have been doing all along: hunting rare slimes on the noob levels, like the ones that got him the chibis in the first place. And after a montage of slaughter, they steal Our Dying Princess out of the hospital and…

By The Power Of Chibi, You Shall Be (Partially) Healed!

Verdict: fresh off their victory, Kaito finally tries to confess to Crush-chan, only to be cock-blocked by Her Hot Mom; note the train suggestively going into the station as they part. They kinda include The Quest For Daddy in the final scene, as a hint at their shared long-term goal.

(It’s been bothering me all season: why does Kaito have a safe next to his bed?)

Earth: Final Bye-Bye season 2?

Announced. I’m kind-of curious what they’ll put in the recap episode, and if it will make any sense at all.

There’s basically no fan-art of this one, so here’s some from the very tiny selection of Tama pics:

Okay, that’s a little over the top…

Not only do the weekly pages in Jibun Techō planners include phase of the moon, they color-code the hours by the approximate time of sunrise and sunset throughout the year. If you’re in Tokyo, anyway.

Combined with the weather, mood, and meals icons scattered across the columns, I think it makes the page much too busy.

(do they also sell night-planners for vampires, with the daylight hours colored red?)

Dungeon Chibis, episode 11

Famous. Last. Words. Our Hero And His Adventure Gals (Minus One) plunge deeper into the dungeon in search of the rumored elixir, but he overdoes it, and exhaustion and desperation lead to poor decision-making.

Pro tip: when even your semi-slave chibis tell you to take the day off, the correct response is not “we’ll just check out the next floor real quick”. Getting gang-banged-up by a stampede of wild porkers leaves him in Darwin’s Waiting Room, and if Our Chibi Heroines hadn’t leveled up and gobbled a bunch of crystals, he’d have pulled his last train. Even then, his survival depends on mouth-to-mouth delivery of healing potions, which Our Dismayed Slightly-Gay Chibi Devil Shota is not allowed to participate in. Of course it turns into a kissing competition, which Our Popular Hero’s in no condition to appreciate or be squicked out about.

Verdict: one more week to save the princess, and they really keep making a fuss about Crush-chan’s Missing Daddy…

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 10

What if they gave a beach episode and nobody dressed for the occasion? Sure, they were there to cheer for a beach volleyball team, but we’re not watching this for the NPCs. Ditto for the advancing drama involving characters who’ve basically shown up twice all season.

Verdict: they didn’t put in the work to make me care about NPC Mean Girl’s confession or penance. Besides, whatever’s gone wrong, it’ll get fixed next episode; that’s just how they roll.

Fun with packages

That Amazon package that was delayed six days by UPS, then retroactively delivered to someone’s loading dock by FedEx? Showed up Saturday morning with the original UPS sticker, but Amazon tracking’s still loading data from another universe. Explains a lot about their logistics problems, really.

NSFW

This is why we can’t have nice things…

I was tinkering with my PDF::Cairo continuous-calendar script with an eye to porting it to Python to use my updated box/paper libraries and Reportlab (even though that’s a regression for font support), so I tested out various options, and none of the Japanese fonts worked.

They were fine a few days ago, and “nothing’s changed”… except that Homebrew upgraded Cairo from 1.18.0 to 1.18.2, and the PDF file size dropped from ~14K to ~4K. Which means that CJK font embedding broke. This is probably the fault of the person who updated the Homebrew recipe without reading the updated dependencies, but I reverted to 1.18.0 (which is now quite annoying to do) and pinned it there for now.

Wait, what was I doing again?

By the way, this is a cool little JavaScript app that puts a dynamic continuous calendar in your browser. It’s not really useful, since it stores your annotations in browser local storage, but it’s fast and stable.

And the reason I was stealing calendar code…

…was to make these: Jibun Techō B6 Slim monthly and project pages.

Because my shiny new Japanese day-planner doesn’t start until November, so I cloned the design with PDF::Cairo and made pages for September and October. I haven’t made the weekly page layout yet, because it’s less useful to me; outside of work I don’t have a lot of appointments, and at work it’s all in Outlook.

The basic idea is that there are three separate booklets: Idea, which is just graph paper; Diary, which you replace every year; and Life, which is filled with hopes and dreams and stories and family and pets and a whole bunch of other shit I’d never use. I’m going to replace it with another graph-paper booklet.

I’m actually surprised that they release the first-time-customer kit in August, but make you wait until November to start using it. I can understand that for recurring customers, but why not just print a few extra pages that can be manually slipped into place? So I did it myself; the paper’s not as good, but the layout matches.

(to no great surprise, Utsutsu-chan is by far the most popular character for fan-art; sorry, Hajime)

Red Cat Ramen, episode 10

There’s hints of a very slow-burn romance between Human-chan and Our Allergic Handyman, but that’s not going to go anywhere this season. Instead, we get a look into the skritchable underbelly of the idol industry, as Waitress Kitty’s deep dark secret is finally revealed. Extra credit for making the plastic-surgery victim look just wrong.

(this is not her secret…)

Cosplay Harem, episode 10

I like Nagomi’s instincts. When faced with a loss of audience to Her One True Rival, she immediately reaches for a powerful weapon: the zipper on her skirt. Despite the bountiful cheesecake on display, most of the battle is actually in their heads, with both she and Our Hot Teacher reviewing their shared history and rediscovering The Joy Of (Busty) Cosplay. The whiplash of being faced with two goddesses holds the crowd long enough for Our Cuddly Noob to get fully dressed and make her (busty) debut, as Teacher rushes to get back into her civvies so she can watch. A brief reaction shot suggests that she’s going to get cornered by her former partner, Our Helpful (busty) Elf Maiden, for showing up out of nowhere like that.

Verdict: good clean fun, and hopefully now we can work the (not-busty) tsuntail back into the story.

Dungeon People, episode 9

It’s cosplay week in the dungeon, as Our Dungeon Mistress renegotiates her contract with the kingdom and convinces Our Dress-Up Darling Clay to wear a maid costume. Not having much non-dungeon life experience, she thoroughly misunderstands the king’s reaction to the sight of a strong cute maid.

Verdict: they’re really enjoying the just-missed-it fan-service dodges. I’d be annoyed if it weren’t otherwise fun to watch.

Dear Amazon,

First you told me that my guaranteed-Friday package would not arrive until the 12th, and was “delayed in transit” (somewhere; it had not yet been handed off to a non-Amazon carrier). Then you rewrote history and declared that it was “left on the dock” at 9:30 AM and signed for by “L. Keil”. Two claims that come as quite a surprise to me, since I have neither a dock nor a Keil.

The original Friday notice had a UPS tracking ID, but the replacement timeline has it delivered by FedEx. What will reality be tomorrow?

Dungeon Chibis, episode 10

This week, we get the backstory of Our Junior Adventure Gals, with a dramatic reveal of a typical anime vaguely-described fatal illness where everything looks fine right up to the end. There is no cure, but there are Internet rumors about a Very Rare Dungeon Drop, an elixir that can cure anything, so that’s why they became adventurers. Now the gang has a mission and the clock is ticking, since she’s supposed to be dead by New Years and we got a shot of cute girls wearing Santa suits. Also, we only have two more episodes.

Verdict: will they find it in time, even with Our Hero’s power to stumble over rare drops? Will Crush-chan’s Missing Daddy be involved? Will they do it all next week and spend the last episode on fan-service? Let’s find out!

Pom-Pom Gals, episode 9

As has become typical for this show, last week’s cliffhanger crisis was resolved effortlessly, like cheers in the rain. But first we had to spend most of the episode watching them stumble around sadly, wondering if they’d ever get the band back together.

Verdict: the cuteness of the character designs is really all that’s holding the show together at this point.

In other news,

Cosplay Harem: The Mobile Game launches Tuesday.

In other other news,

Senko-san is also getting a game this week. Pretty sure this one won’t be always-online with micro-transactions. Pretty sure. Okay, mostly sure.

UC2P best intentions…

I tried to see how much work it would be to run the script under older versions of Python. I’ve identified at least three syntax changes and an API change, and the way the Python interpreter works, I can’t be sure those are all the bad spots unless I build a full test suite that exercises all the code. Which is another project epicycle.

Oh, well. Maybe move that idea down the to-do list.

(and have I mentioned just how much I enjoy searching multiple web pages to find clear module explanations and example code? and how much more fun it is when the language and libraries are moving targets with changing APIs?)

Red Cat Ramen, episode 9

Human-chan has broken through the last barrier to full acceptance at the shop: Waitress Kitty not only called her by her first name, but shortened it and added a -chan.

Cosplay Harem, episode 9

I wasn’t sure how they were going to set it up, but I fully expected Our Hot Teacher to end up in her sexy succubus costume this week, and not only does she deliver, she mentors Our Crushed Heroine as both teacher and idol, learning a few things about herself in the process. Meanwhile, Our Goofball Mean-Girl Pro struts her stuff and works the crowd, but it turns out her 2D crush bears a striking resemblance to someone we know…

With the costume and confidence crises resolved, it’s time for Our Heroine to suit up and start the show, but how can they keep the crowd from leaving while she’s changing? Next week, Battle Of The Legendary Cosplay Queens.

Verdict: this is better than it has any right to be. And I’m not just talking about Teacher’s barely-there succubus outfit.

Molesting Magical Girls continues to have a lot of success running promotions at cafés with themed drinks and snacks. I think this show should should do the same, and their first offering should be the Lust-A-Latte, in honor of Our Hot Teacher’s favorite character.

Earth: Final Bye-Bye, episode 8

I’m not sure whether I lost the plot or they did. The lengthy revelation about the local god seemed utterly out of place in the middle of a battle where dozens of spear-carriers have already died and Our Boring-Bath Catgirl was barely rescued in time.

Verdict: this is either a highlight reel from a book that explains everything in immense detail, or a faithful adaptation of a complete clusterfuck.

Dungeon People, episode 8

“Do you have a floor preference?”

"Yeah, I would like a floor."

“No, I mean, what level?”

"Beginner."

(classical reference)

This week, Our Intrepid Explorer is given the chance to design a new version of dungeon level five, which not only exposes her to some practical design issues, but to the secret of why they really lock the door to the boss room. She also learns that spirits do not respect your personal space; in another kind of show, that would have been a major buy-the-bluray scene. If we’re lucky, fan-artists will pick up the ball and run with it.

Verdict: low-key fun, as usual.

(Lily remains my favorite dungeon pick-up)

Wow, that’s actually novel

Typical Nigerian money-scam email, but the person seeking my assistance in “processing” the fund has an Arabic name in the body of the message and a Korean name in the headers (“트라피스트수녀원” = “Trappist Monastery”. It has also been stripped down to the essence of the scam, not bothering to mention the source of the money or even what country the bank is in that’s holding it. I particularly enjoyed this phrasing:

“I am reaching out to you for a sincere collaboration in partnership to actualize this potential.”

Totally legit, I’m telling you.

UC2P progress

I’ve cleaned up the code and documentation, added error-checking in all the useful places, tested a number of edge cases, embedded my font and set up a well-defined font search path, packaged it with Poetry, etc. What I haven’t done yet is implement any page styles other than the old Enscript Gaudy, or support for defining them.

Which isn’t a problem for me, since I’ve been using Gaudy since the Eighties, but the point of making this a real project was to make something useful for people other than just me. 😁

Enscript’s flexible page-layout system was based on template files written in raw PostScript, which doesn’t translate well into PDF, so I need to convert the box-splitting and text layout code into a mini-language that can be loaded from the config file, which is a classic project epicycle. For now, I’ll define a minimal framework for style code and just eval() it; that will let me make progress on supporting multiple styles without taking time out to write a parser.

The second priority on my to-do list is testing the actual version dependencies against what Poetry baked into the install. I think I used some 3.12-specific syntax for f-strings, but if I change those, it should run in a much older version of Python with a much older version of Reportlab. Which would be sociable of me.

Third priority is to flesh out the documentation for the included box-manipulation library, which I ported over from PDF::Cairo; this will be necessary for the box-related operators.

I miss Perl’s in-place POD documentation, which is so much nicer than the Python culture of API dumps that sometimes link to web pages; you can put real documentation into docstrings alongside your code, but for some reason almost nobody does.

(I think it’s the same mindset that led the NetPBM clowns to change --help output to say “go read the manpage, dipshit”, and then make the manpages a deprecated optional install that just contain “go read our website, you troglodyte”)

Dungeon Chibis, episode 9

This one has everything: Shota power! New skills! Rich-girl mansion! Jealous Crush-chan! Easily-distracted Adventure Girls! Soaking wet Crush-chan in clingy outfit! Girl bonding! Cold showers for boys who really need them! Insert song in implausible voice! Victory in battle! …and a payoff on last week’s foreshadowing, as Our Rich Mage Princess collapses. That didn’t take long.

Verdict: I’m pleased that Our Chibi Devil Shota did not get weird and gay this week. Also that Our Chibi Devil Devil is out for another taste of that sweet sweet life-drain that powers up her bustline, er, “powers”, yeah I meant to say “powers”.

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 8

In which Our Cheer Gals discover that turning your hobby into a job creates exhaustion, friction, conflict, and social-media haters. They still live in an idealized world where outcall cheer delivery does not result in being sex-trafficked to Saudi Arabia or Hollywood, and where the haters are mildly rude and don’t make a single lewd comment. But it’s not that kind of show.

Verdict: the summer slump continues.

Pete’s Adventures In MacLand…

I’m amused at the culture shock. I’m actually surprised that Safari isn’t remembering his tabs, since my usual problem is getting MacOS to not reopen everything I had open when I logged out, rebooted, or an app crashed; it’s done in a way that is not useful. The primary thing I remember about configuring Safari is uncheck ‘Open “safe” files after downloading’; this should never have been on by default.

The menubar follies were likely related to one of those settings I carefully disabled years ago and it’s followed me from Mac to Mac ever since. There’s a whole bunch of stuff hidden vaguely under “accessibility”, like not making things translucent to show the colors in your background screen.

I have no idea how he’s getting screencap to launch Photos, since I’ve been using Cmd-Shift 3 and Cmd-Shift-4 since before Macs ran Unix, and the most annoying thing they’ve done to that is put some stupid preview image in the lower right corner for several seconds before actually saving it to the Desktop like Tog intended. Tip: open /Applications/Utilities/Screenshot.app once, select the options menu, and disable “show floating thumbnail”.

As for dingus-click, I hesitated to google that one, but it sounds like Ctrl-Left-Click in Terminal.app. That’s another app where I’ve been using it for so long and copying config files around that I had no idea what the default behavior was like until I got my new work Mac.

(I think I spent about a week de-iPadding that machine and getting it to work sensibly; somewhere there’s a Github page that documents “Macs for Engineers” or some such, but I did it by hand again)

(Update: macOS Setup Guide, a subset of this github repo)

Meanwhile, in a dusty archive…

…I’ve discovered that I still have a double-fuckton of resource-fork Type 1 fonts, and while there are a number of “free” “converters”, they always seem to leave out the part about extracting the metrics files. Converting them to PFB format isn’t terribly useful unless you have the matching AFM or PFM files.

Anyway, I found an abandoned project on my NAS where I was trying to clean up the mess. The files have timestamps from 2002…

(“What’s that”, Frieren asks, “You think 22 years is a long time? Amateur.”)

Surprisingly, the resource forks have somehow not been deleted in all that copying around. Although some of them are in AppleDouble format, some are in the modern MacOS’ vestigial file/..namedfork/rsrc format, and I even found some BinHex and Stuffit files crufting up some directories. Blech. NextStep was the best thing ever to happen to Apple.

(why was I looking through old fonts? because the Adobe suite I pay for that lets me use a pornucopia of fonts for free does not include Barmeno, and Berthold wants $367.99 for the complete family, or $45.99 per weight. Not having won the lottery yet, I groveled over the NAS and managed to find a backup of a backup of a Windows box that had Adobe Type Basics installed on it, with four weights in PFB/AFM/PFM; it also had all the fonts from Illustrator 7 and Corel Draw 4 (the Bitstream/URW collection that replaced their earlier lower-quality pirated shovelware fonts).

“…you other coders can’t deny”

Red Cat Ramen, episode 8

I want the t-shirt. And the girl, although this isn’t that kind of show.

(this, on the other hand, is definitely that kind of show)

Cosplay Harem, episode 8

This week, Our Heroes take a stand, refusing to hide what they’re really up to just because everyone’s going to think they’re pervy freaks. This reignites the passion in Our Hot Teacher’s heart, and she backs them up as they head to the battlefield. But first, a good look at the competition, the lickable cosplay queen “753”, Nagomi.

Who promptly pounds Our Heroic Newbie’s confidence into the dust. Next week: drama at the event hall!

Verdict: Nagomi presents as Our First Mean Girl, but they soften the blow by showing what a giant nerd she is, in many ways Our Obsessed Hero’s evil twin. So we not only added more depth to Our Hot Teacher this week, we didn’t get a one-dimensional antagonist stereotype.

(relevant fan-art! and I want a copy of Teacher’s final cos-rom…)

Bye Bye, Bye Bye Earth?, episode 7

Yeah, I have no idea where this is going. Rather than tying up all the strings from last week, it tugs half-heartedly on a few of them and then throws out half a dozen more. And they managed to make a Belle/catgirl bath scene boring.

Verdict: please make sense next week.

Dungeon People, episode 7

I’ve decided that this is basically the same show as Red Cat Ramen. Except for, y’know, the magic. And the monsters. And the willingness to kill. They’re both just cozy.

Fun fact

If you use sort -n -u, it will only consider the first field when deciding if lines are “unique”. That is:

% cat sample.txt
3 pony
1 cat
2 fish
2 dog

% sort -u sample.txt 
1 cat
2 dog
2 fish
3 pony

% sort -n -u sample.txt 
1 cat
2 fish
3 pony

I was not expecting it to eat the dog. Basically, I’ve always thought of sort -u as shorthand for sort | uniq, but that ain’t quite so. -n is actually shorthand for -k1n, and when you specify a key field, -u only considers uniqueness of that field; it doesn’t matter if the rest of the line differs.

“You are my density!”

Major progress on analyzing font color.

more...

Chibis-A-Go-Go, episode 8

Our Severely Chibi-Whipped Hero almost loses a chance at another rare slime while negotiating with appeasing his mistresses. Then Our Hot Adventure Gals show up, putting him right back in the doghouse, and Hot Naginata Gal offers private tutoring. Gosh, she seems a bit disappointed when he invites Crush-chan, and then her pals want in as well, even the one who isn’t taking the entrance exam.

As if that weren’t dangerous enough, they run into a helldoggie that shouldn’t be on this level, and as soon as they barely manage a victory, its master shows up and curb-stomps them. With everyone about to die in a slow-motion overtalky battle, Our Hero frantically reviews everything he’s got left and finds a trump card: Chibi Devil True Form (powered by his rapidly-dwindling HP).

Our Cute Chibi Hot Busty Devil’s life-draining accelerated puberty unlocks powers well beyond her official rank, leaving the villain baffled. And dead. Her personality hasn’t changed, though, so she demands praise before reverting to chibi form and letting Our Hero live to sub another day.

The helldoggie drops a premium crystal that Our Rich Mage-Maiden quietly states isn’t the one she’s looking for, so we’ll call that something like foreshadowing. Being all Rich Gals, they don’t care about the money from the crystal, and they award the big prize to Our Hero as well: a servant card of the defeated villain.

This should be worth orders of magnitude more than the crystal, but the girls don’t care about that either, and, impulsive as ever, he summons the mighty villain from the card and gets…

Verdict: so much for getting any info on Crush-chan’s missing Dad, and now the villain from the credits has become Our Kinda-Gay Chibi Devil Shota. Yeah, Our Hero regrets the summons.

(maybe he could hand off Snatch-cleaning duties to his new shota)

Cheer Gals, episode 7

Our Cheer Mercenaries are bummed about not getting any orders, until they receive a special request: join the cheerleaders for a losing high school baseball team as they take on Their Rivals, who just happen to be the team from Genki & Wheels’ school. Tropes go wild in this infodump-heavy cheer battle that impresses the roving reporter more than it does the crowd. (note: it must suck to have games scheduled during summer vacation)

Verdict: let’s just call this the summer slump episode, and hope it gets better next week, when Wheels tries out her legs.

Font-manager update

FontBase (even with an “awesome” subscription) is limited to very basic functionality. Worse, it has a two-years-and-counting bug where it will just stop working on a Mac until you completely wipe its configuration and start over (rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/FontBase"). So that’s a big no-can-do.

Typeface, the Mac-only app that directly imports from FontExplorer X Pro, makes extensive use of tiny gray fonts, with the sidebar putting them on a slightly-lighter-gray background, so a giant go-fuck-yourself from 20-year-old app designers with perfect vision. It also uses tiny low-saturation color dots to indicate font-activation status, so that’s a double go-fuck-yourself.

And its focus is very visual as opposed to technical. The only view option is to see large numbers of fonts presented as rendered preview strings. Not, say, a nice tabular layout containing useful information about the fonts you have. And if the font doesn’t have the characters you ask it to preview, it renders them in a default font in (wait for it…) gray. That isn’t even a “preview”.

Sigh. I really, really miss FontExplorer X Pro…