Upcoming as in “they both start on Saturday”…

Realist Hero 2

Unlike some other recent series I could name, this one did a reasonable job of adapting the light novels without degrading into randomly-selected scenes and highly-compressed infodumps.

(picture is unrelated but ducky)

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department

Giving it a chance for four reasons:

4. Director: Testament of Sister New Devil

3. Series Composition: Cat Planet Cuties

2. Art Director: Astra: Lost in Space

1. half-naked wolf-girl

Sadly, she doesn’t always dress like Liru, but the promo picture has promise.

The return of Best Girl Beelzebub!

Eventually, as a second season of Killin’ Slimes and Collectin’ Cuties has been greenlit.

Current employer blessed us with a Friday off, extending the 3-day holiday weekend to 4. Naturally, both Jira and Confluence ran their log-scanners this morning and reported thousands of instances of never-before-seen potentially serious errors, and at the same time one of our contractors was horrified to discover what looked an awful lot like a potential admin-level hack against Jira. The hack wasn’t, and the log-scanner seems to have gone completely insane, for instance reporting hundreds of instances of three completely different Confluence errors on the same server, on the same log line, which matched precisely zero of the errors.

So that’s 2.5 hours of life I want back. Also, for the entire time, the Tanya The Evil OP song Jingo Jungle was running through my head, so I had to buy it on iTunes so that I can inflict it on the rest of the team the next time we have a surprise emergency Zoom debug session.

Best of the season!

Endro! Okay, it’s not from this season, but I did binge-watch it again over the weekend, and it remains charming and fresh.

Slime Diaries, episode 2

It delivered more cute monster girls. This is all I really needed it to do.

300 Slimy Years, episode 1

If it were any fluffier, it would float away. I’m okay with that for now.

Zombieland Saga: Revenge, episode 2

Don’t ask me why Crunchyroll rolled over to season 1 after I watched last week’s episode. This was briefly confusing, since I thought we’d already had the recap…

This episode continues the trend of being less wacky, more character-driven. Not at all what I was expecting based on the first season, but well-done.

If You Meet The Spider In The Forest Kill Her, episode 14

Yeah, Crunchyroll did the same rollover with this series, but I caught it before wasting any time rewatching the first episode. In German.

Given how much time was spent on the B Ark this time, though, that might have been preferable.

(arachne is unrelated)

The Socially-Awkward Demon Lord and His Ever-Growing Slave Harem, episodes 2.1 & 2.2

Episode 1: “Holy tentakoo wape!”

Episode 2: Good news: more sources of eye candy. Bad news: rapper in the OP and ED. At least with the ED, the dancing chibis take some of the sting out.

The story? Boobs.

I’m already looking forward to…

…next season. The end of it, anyway, because Fall is when we’re supposed to get another season of The Grooming Of The Raccoon Child Bride. Also a series about girls playing ice hockey, which would only be worthwhile if the games devolve into real hockey fights and they MCSA each other. Probably not going to happen, so that’s out.

Unrelated,

After I hit up the vaccine rodeo on Saturday, I should have time to finish cleaning up the current state of Virginia’s story and start working on more. This has become more urgent due to Jack drifting back into my brain and getting a first start at an opening scene.

And when I say “rodeo”, I mean that the only place I could get a vaccine appointment scheduled was the mass drive-in event at the Salinas Sports Complex, home of the California Rodeo.

Biodegradable, Dishwasher-safe

Why do I suspect that one of these claims is not true?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that Amazon had it as a front-page lightning deal, and yet clicking through shows it as: “This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location.”

Today I learned…

…that if you use the on-disk queueing feature in rsyslog to robustly deliver logs to a central server after a network outage, and the contents of any of those queues is corrupted by a bad server crash, rsyslogd will segfault at startup without even a tiny hint about what’s wrong, even if you turn on debug output or run it under strace.

Also, your monitoring system really ought to check that rsyslogd is not segfaulting at startup.

Continuous Exfiltration

Codecov compromised. In January, and they didn’t find out until April 1st.

What will I watch, out of all this?

1. Zombieland Saga: Revenge. I have no idea what’s going to happen. This is fine.

2. The Slime Diaries. I finally caught up with the main series, and while it suffers from that familiar “light-novel-highlight-reel” feeling, it’s been at least moderately entertaining. I’m hoping that this side series showcases the effect of Rimuru’s true power: evolving monster girls into smoking hotties. The main series apparently resumes in the summer season.

3. Um, that’s about it, really. There’s no step 3.

I watched a few trailers, but nothing else grabbed me. It sounds like any controversy over “I shaved and picked up a high school girl” (in that order) will be artificially generated for marketing purposes; should generate some decent fan-art of the girls, though.

I did end up idly watching Hidden Dungeon, which felt like a relatively straight adaptation of the source material, right up to the point where they realized they’d never get a second cour and skipped to the end of book five. Meh, I didn’t expect much and I got what I expected. Shame none of the decent artists on Pixiv seem to be interested in drawing the harem girls, though.

At least Yui Horie got some scenery to chew on at the end.

Update:

The step 3 video I was really looking for…

Boonie Dungeon

Not watching, but spotted an interesting review of the original light novels, where someone commented that they found it rather offputting that the author kept laughing at his own jokes. That explains a lot, actually.

(and, no, most fan-artists aren’t watching this show, either)

Wet season, dry season

Yup, there’s nothing on. This season is so weak that I’ve started watching the uncensored version of High School DxD on Funimation. So far, the only two female characters without giant gag boobs are the kitten named “Kitten” and the white girl named Asia. Their figures would be spectacular for real-life high-school-age girls not named “Ai Shinozaki”, while the bowling balls the rest of the girls are attached to should leave them all crippled with pain, even with demonic powers keeping their permanently-stiff nipples at unnatural angles. Dunno how many episodes I can keep this up for…

(I had to go looking for this, because out of more than 25,000 saved Pixiv pics, I didn’t have a single one from this series)

Coming soon…

Next season, the only things that look watchable so far are That Slime Spinoff and the long-overdue Zombieland Saga: Revenge.

Unrelated, you’ll never guess what Apple did!

…unless you guess that they locked my account again with no explanation.

Surprisingly, I’ve only had to log in once on each device to restore functionality. So far.

Speaking of Evil

Remember when I canceled DirecTV in November and returned my equipment the same day, only to have them try to bill me for it at the beginning of January? Remember how I pulled out my carefully-saved receipt and read the confirmation number over the phone to a rep who confirmed that it was received and the bill would be canceled?

DirecTV doesn’t. They just tried again. Really, really glad I removed my credit card from the account before I called them last month.

30 frustrating minutes later…

It only took about five minutes of ads from a company that’s trying to rip me off for $150 to get through to a human, who agreed that yes, this should have been fixed last time, but I was talking to the wrong department, and needed to talk to the warehouse to confirm that the equipment I had a return receipt for actually arrived.

I pointed out that the fact of my receipt and its presence in her system made it Not My Problem, but she insisted that since it wasn’t a billing issue, she had to transfer me to the warehouse rep. She couldn’t give me a reference number or a direct phone number, but happily waited on hold with me to ensure I was correctly connected and the call was not dropped. Sweet time-waster for someone paid by the hour, says I.

After fifteen minutes of increasingly hard-to-understand ads, I was finally connected with someone who I could not understand at all. Not because of her accent, because approximately 50% of the voice packets were missing. Fortunately, she could hear me just fine, so I could give her my callback number. Unfortunately, it took another several minutes for her to convey the message that she couldn’t disconnect and call me back until I hung up. Yeah, whatever.

To my surprise, she actually did call me back right away on a clean line, confirm that the ticket was being escalated, and give me a reference number and approximate ETA: 10-15 business days.

Joy.

That Slime Show

Rimuru’s greatest power is Create Hot Chicks. Sadly, the animators really dropped the ball on showing the results of these racial upgrades. We only get a few brief shots of the upgraded goblin and lizard girls, and only one named-but-unnamed goblina gets to be in the swimsuit special episode. [ObOglaf (NSFW, of course)]

Crunchyroll has some interesting UI issues. On the good side, the FireTV client was finally upgraded to HD a while back (hadn’t used it in quite a while, because it was awful), and it hasn’t spontaneously logged me out yet the way it used to. On the bad side, it displays five separate “seasons” for this show: S1, S1, S2, S14, S23. The title is so long that you can’t tell that the first item on the list ends in “(German dub)”. The various special episodes are linked in an apparently random sequence, so I don’t actually know if I’ve watched them all yet. Not that it matters, because the swimsuit special is the only one that mattered.

Last Boonies

Watched the OP, which includes a nice look at Belt Princess in lingerie before she cuts her hair, then skipped to the ED, which includes all the girls, including one who wasn’t in the first episode. Looking forward to the fan-art, but not interested in the show.

That Spider Show

Episode 2 didn’t grab me, either.

Wandering Witch

Watched 2.5 episodes, I think. I don’t remember anything about them.

Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon and then never do anything with them?

I watched the first episode of season 3 when it came out, but I already know how things go for N books past this point, and I stopped reading those, too, and haven’t fired up the game in months, either. I’m kinda burned out on the entire franchise, although I did read the Freya Familia spinoff that gives some backstory on her disfunctional crew. Spoiler: meh.

Incel Revenge Porn: The Series

After it came up in the comments and I looked at the wiki, I watched the first episode of Redo of Healer. It appears that starting with episode 2, they are going to faithfully adapt the torture, brainwashing, rape, and murder that defines the source material, which is almost as bad as the commenters who buy into the excuses for it. Not For Me, Thanks.

Actually, you could argue that the torture and brainwashing starts when Whatshisname forcibly overwrites his younger self’s memories and personality, destroying the sanity of an innocent 12-year-old.

Sleep, Princess

Finished episode 10, tried 11. Lost interest again.

Sleepy Princess Is Sleepy

I enjoyed the first eight episodes. Somewhere in #9, I turned it off. The next day, I finished that episode, started watching #10, and at some point turned it off. Then I checked the wiki and discovered that after 17 manga volumes covering several years, nothing much changes, including her apparent age.

Which, by the way, is “at least 16”, despite the lolicon-bait character design.

Last Boonie Kid Town Dungeon Maybe

Wow, they weren’t kidding about the screaming. If it weren’t for her constant ear-splittingly-loud freakouts, the witch would be quite attractive; perhaps if she toned it down to the level of her Darkness performance in Konosuba. My only other impression is that I found myself disappointed that mere moments after Belt Princess strips down to sexy lingerie and checks herself out in the mirror, she changes her hair to a much less flattering cut. And gets dressed again. Hopefully fan-artists will use that scene for reference and make better use of her belts than she does.

I won’t be watching more of it, but surely some Pixiv artists will.

The Hidden Cheat Code Only I Can Ogle

Our Hero receives the +20 Titty-Rub Of Omnipotence from a chained-up supermodel who seems quite happy to stay that way, and proceeds to charge it up by taking advantage of his giant-breasted childhood friend’s crush and his little sister’s bro-con. I’ll just watch the fan-art.

Easy Drider

It didn’t grab me. Some people seem to like it, though, so I’ll try the second episode in hopes that the worst of the setup fluff is done.

(note that much of the fan-art seems to spoil a major plot point)

Not anime, not watched

I noticed that Stargate Origins: Catherine was back on Prime, so I tried to watch it. Tried. Failed.

Even taking into account the fact that it’s based on just the movie and explicitly contradicts the events of SG-1, it’s just not good. Our Heroine is yet another ass-kicking Mistress Of Waif-Fu with 21st century attitudes in 1938, and all the other actors seem to be in slightly different shows.

1st the end trouble You studied many
Even tomorrow will make efforts
Day sets and the time of the under school
Stepping on the shadow that grew I will come back cheerfully
However, I wait a little bit I see the surroundings Is not it strange something?
The thing that attached to the head be what?
The thing that protruded prettily be what?
Be careful! fellows are coming to there
Escape early! fellows are next to you
Do it! Attach the ear of a cat!
Do it! Attach the ear of a cat!
Raise both hands! (highly toward the sky)
Raise both hands! (More highly toward the sky)

(Classical Reference)

(only known download link for full-quality AVI)

(only known reference to the creator, Kanden Chui)

Unrelated

MatterControl is a free 3D-printer manager/slicer/dicer from an online retailer that sells lots of filament, accessories, and printers (including their own models based on the open-source Prusa design).

I had a small part that required just a hint of support, and the Dremel version of Cura is all-or-nothing when it comes to generating supports. Since this software was next on my list to try, I fired it up, decrypted the user interface (universally foreign to all the platforms they support), loaded my part, selected from a library that included working settings for all of Dremel’s branded filaments, sliced, saved, and sent the gcode over the network with my little Bash script. Part came out clean and sturdy; “will slice again”.

I’ll get to try it out the next time I start loading up the baby takadai with bobbins, since it’s a small tool designed to make that process easier. The first version of the part was workable but clumsy, and I think the changes I’ve made in v3 will make it even easier. There might be a v4; still tinkering with how it attaches.

The braid in the middle is the PU/steel wire, in the same pattern as the one on the left. The one on the right is my first attempt at Sasanami reduced to 37 tama. You can see some tension and beating issues that I don’t know if I can solve on the babydai; the weighted bobbins (ezee-bob, bob-eez, whatever) are too light, and the frame is a bit small for me to really beat the weft in.

(that is, Sasanami is a warp-faced braid, where you shouldn’t be able to see the weft peeking out from underneath the thick ribs. The white threads should completely disappear instead of looking like a dotted line. The red isn’t as obvious against the background, but still peeks out)

Update

There will be a v4. Or maybe I’ll go back to v2. v3 was a bust.