Fear the cute ones!

Besides the sheer cuteness, this picture is notable for including an amusing conceptual tag, 伊丹ホイホイ = “Itami (Our Hero) trap”, from the popular “Gokiburi Hoi-hoi” cockroach trap.

This is the only acceptable kind of trap in anime.

(previously…)

…it would set scenes of Rory Mercury to Biyuden’s Jajauma Paradise:

The lyrics translation is iffy (particularly handling attributive verbs and te-form), but it should suffice to know that, in context, jajauma means “spirited filly”.

I’m finally caught up on 狸の幼妻の育ち上がり, er, “The Rising of the Shield Hero”. I like it, but it helped that I went into it with fair warning about the infodumps and enough episodes out that I could watch two at a time. And that I ignored the fan-wanking about how it was just awful compared to the manga and the light novels and the web novels, etc, etc.

(original image by yodane, here; titling by me; click for full-sized image upscaled with (appropriately) waifu2x)

Hopefully it will do well enough for a second season, because they can’t possibly wrap up even a highly-condensed adaption of the main story, currently spread across 20+ novels and not yet finished. Unless they blitz through the waves to a Type 1 Tenchi Solution in the last few episodes. 😁

Now all I have to do is come up with something else to watch while on the elliptical…

This is a block. Not a great block, since it’s a little low, and too close to your head, but an incoming strike will at least hit the blade before it hits your head:

This is not a block. Honestly, you’re about five seconds away from re-enacting Ben Kenobi’s final scene in Star Wars:

Unrelated, my shins, calves, and ankles are still complaining about the stairs to the top of Himeji Castle…