Two weeks ago, they gave us a special filler episode to remind us of the supporting cast. Last week, they gave us the theatrical movie cut of season one. So this week they can just jump right in and start with the new stuff?

Almost. Our Monsterized Hero has a combination nightmare/flashback to remind us of his personal goal, and then everyone heads off to their new post-graduation assignments. Our Mighty Tsuntail gets to watch her new team take out a fairly generic kaiju, in a way that’s both sloppy and messy, then finds out that Kafka will be on the same team. As the trailers promised, her backstory is foreshadowed in several quick scenes, and it looks to be a major part of this story arc.

Verdict: well somebody got an animation budget this season. I’m still not seeing much point to most of the goofballs in the supporting cast, but Kafka, Kikoru, Reno, and Mina are all interesting characters that I want to see more of.

(3,644 clean pics on Pixiv, 241 dirty ones; this is for the best, really, since most of the pics are guys and kaiju…)

[simulcast not simul, today; this seems to be the new normal]

We have a plot! It’s thickening! Our Hot Killer Detective is on the case! And even the characters are moving! Okay, sometimes; there’s still a lot of “nighttime is dreamy so lets pan stills and cover them with effects”, and some moments that stood out for finding ways not to animate lip flaps.

Verdict: the story is advancing, with Our Bite-Seeking Hero spending some quality time with His Jealous Best Girl, while all the other local vamps react to an existential threat.

Way overdue for a photo-oriented trip…

Not around here at the moment, given the near-constant rain, humidity, and highs above 90° American (32° French). It’s just that thinking about being on my own in Tokyo next Spring for a week led me to check over my camera gear, which meant finding my camera gear.

I’ve “tidied the house” so many times since I moved in that it took me nearly two hours to find my good cameras and almost all of their accessories (still a few little bits to find, like the power hose for one of the chargers). The upside of the search is that I finally located the boxes containing the rest of my marudai, which were cleverly concealed under a bunch of books in a box at the back of one of the closets.

Finding the cameras led me to finally follow up on an email from B&H Photo letting me know that there was a major firmware update for the A7SIII (the big full-frame camera with insanely good low-light capability). The email was for version 3.0.1, but when I clicked the link, 4.0 was also available, and I was all the way back at 2.11.

First, I had to upgrade from 2.11 to 2.15, which required installing a kernel extension on my Mac. Which required allowing kernel extensions. Which required rebooting while holding down the power button and navigating through the maintenance menus (this, admittedly, is better than the old system of memorizing half a dozen magic key combinations). Two more reboots later, and I could run the updater. Then the other updater to get it to 3.01.

Going to 4.0 was trivial by comparison: copy a file onto an SD card and tell it to update itself. So, kudos to Sony for removing a bunch of useless pain from the process, although they really want you to switch to their new Cloud app with bonus subscription AI features…

The downside of getting everything checked out and charged up was that I discovered that Sony recently released what may be their sexiest lens ever: FE 50-150mm F2 GM.

Okay, so it’s 8 inches long, 4 inches thick, and weighs 3 pounds (coughcough). And costs $3,900. But it’s pro-grade glass with reach-out-and-touch-someone range at f/2! Combined with the A7SIII’s ISO 102,400 (or 409,600 when you’re short on candles), it would be perfect for dimly-lit temples, museums, etc.

I lust for it, but I think I can hold out until early Spring. I definitely don’t need it right now.

Speaking of lust…

Baiser hits the beach:

Well, at least they’ve finally committed to the serious st… oh, never mind, whiplashed it in the final scene. Honestly, I’d have been much happier if they’d done it the other way around and spent only two minutes on The Big Mission, and the rest on Lammis reacting to Our Vending Hero’s accidental proposal.

Verdict: they tried to force a “character development” scene for Lammis, but the only actual character development this season has been promoting Our Neighborhood Hospitality Officer to “former adventurer who’s rather handy with a whip”.

(adventure gals gotta adventure)

DFC Chick On Porno Island ultimate censored edition

One network will only air the audio of this upcoming show. (which has been licensed by Oceanveil, Yet Another Streaming Service that seems to exist only to announce licenses like this)

This timely announcement has been brought to you by VividPink Operation:

NSFW

Contrary to previous reports, there was no special episode this week. Instead, Crunchyroll put up the two-hour season one compilation movie that was released in theaters in Japan.

(monster-girl maid is unrelated)

Found my new ringtone…

The jaunty opening synths from the Genesis song Illegal Alien.

🎶 🎶 🎶
Over the border,
    there lies the promised land.
Where everything comes easy,
    you just hold out your hand.
🎶 🎶 🎶

The music video and radio edit leave out the line where he pimps out his sister…

Raise your hand if you think Miss Sweet Sucker has Our Best Friend’s best interests in mind? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, we’re off to the races, with Our Sexy Killer Detective on the scene at the bathhouse. Sadly, she’s not dressed for the occasion, and they didn’t invite Our Remarkably Stacked Childhood Friend along, so the only bathing beauty is a trap.

Verdict: they are animating this story, sometimes, but also covering up a lot of stills with video effects. The voice performances are solid, though.

Netflix Leveling

I kind of wonder how diverse Netflix will make the cast of their live-action Solo Leveling series. Not enough for me to watch it, of course. Even if they made it far enough into the story before the inevitable Netflix cancellation, they couldn’t possibly find a cute-enough Esil.

Complete tonal whiplash, as Our Duped Heroes rush back to town to find it half-destroyed, with most of the people dead or missing and the survivors wounded, exhausted, and hungry, then the scene switches to Boxxo making time with his two Best Girls.

Verdict: again, the character art is the only thing that’s working for me so far. Some of the individual scenes are fine, but they don’t fit together. Lacking any source material to draw on, the show is all over the place.

Prime + ads - ads = ads

Amazon folded Freevee (free-with-ads) into Prime Video, but kept the ads. I pay extra for Prime-without-ads, so naturally I am forced to watch ads for anything marked Prime that used to be on Freevee. For now. I have this sneaking suspicion that they’ll silently expand this new category of Semi Prime over time.

Time to find a new hotel…

For years now, our preferred hotel in Kyoto has been the Citadines. Great location (two subway stops up from Kyoto Station, grocery and dry cleaners down the block, easy walk to all sorts of shopping, kitchenettes, solid wifi, comfy beds, etc). Sadly, they recently shut down.

Top contender for next Spring trip is The Blossom, which is a block further away from the subway and a block closer to the grocery. I’ve got time to look around, but the last time we tried another place, it ended up being a lot less convenient, with the only major “pro” being that it was near a bigger, better grocery. It was very close to the station, but on the south side, so it took a lot longer to reach the trains, subways, and other shopping.

This trip will be an interesting variation on our usual, since it overlaps with my sister’s work events. I’ll be on my own for a week in Tokyo while she’s working, then we’ll have a week together in Kyoto, and then I fly home while she heads to her next conference.

With a week on my own, I might be able to set a big-camera-friendly pace…

X mars the sport

I don’t know what Elon’s Elves think they’re doing, but the end result is that the “for you” feed has turned into a complete disaster full of spam, scams, and an intense focus on English-language “news” from non-English-speaking countries.

I deselected all of the topics it insisted were based on my (nearly-nonexistent) activity, which included such gems as “Allstate”, “auto racing”, “Big Brother Brasil”, “Clay Travis”, “David Hogg”, “Ezra Miller”, “figure skating”, “Jill Biden”, “McNeil-PPC, Inc”, “NCAA Women’s Basketball”, “Other competition”, “Super Mario”, “The Home Depot”, “Zohran Mamdani”, etc. I unchecked every item on the list, and two days later most of them were back. And it had no effect on the garbage in the feed.

The only thing that seems to work is playing whack-a-mole with block-by-word, which currently looks something like this, and slightly reduces the amount of crypto crap:

binance bitcoin blockchain chain crypto dapp decentralization decentralized defi ecosystem eth ethereum fintech founder funds gm gn haters liquidity migration monad nft pumps stablecoin transaction transactions venture web3

What really works is… never checking the “for you” feed. This is probably not the desired result.

Kaiju No. 8 2 doesn’t premiere for two more weeks, but they’re filling the time slot with original side stories this week and next.

This week, a recap and a day off to re-introduce the cast.

And I’ll just throw in a little Frieren cheesecake.

The Apothecary Diaries 2, fin

Wait for it… Wait for it… Boom! Now for the agonizing wait until they make the next season.

Call Of The Night 2, episode 1

I appreciate a second season that respects the viewer and doesn’t waste half an episode on a lengthy recap. Or in this case, any time at all. The OP animation serves to remind you where we left off, and then it’s off to the races. Or at least the zoo.

The ED, on the other hand, has nothing to offer, visually or musically.

Verdict: solid start.

New GATE anime

Not more Rory Mercury and friends, though. It’s based on the spinoff.

(apparently they do show up at some point, but it’s not a continuation of the main story)

Finally!

When I moved back to Ohio three years ago, I kept my old iPhone with my California number, bought a new iPhone, and transferred over all the data, including my ~10,000 songs ripped from CD. This introduced the well-known problem where all the album covers were linked to the wrong albums. TL/DR: none of the recommended fixes worked, due to aggressive caching.

Today, I replaced it with a new iPhone (yes, I bought last year’s model, because new Apple hardware is a crapshoot with real crap). Before I set it up, though, I broke the sync connection, deleted all the music from it, and ran a backup. On the new phone, I restored the non-syncing backup and then synced the music over.

So I just had to burn the house down and build a new one.

(my iPhone history, coming from a work-paid Blackberry, is 4S to 6 Plus to XS to 13 Pro to 16 Pro. I still think the 4S was the best actual phone, but I don’t do much calling these days, and I’ve never really been much for receiving calls; these days, it’s mostly just email, texts, navigation, and PagerDuty alerts)

(3 years is basically how long it takes for Apple to lard up the OS and frameworks so that older devices are no longer viable)

Unrelated, Ai Shinozaki

Big Boobs Japan just went on a repost binge, adding back ~400 old photo shoots that got misplaced in one of its hosting changes. This includes over 40 shoots covering Ai’s entire career, from chubby-cheeked busty 14-year-old to still-got-it busty 33-year-old.

(shields up, Javascript down, as usual)

[Update: wow, either they just un-re-posted it all, or else went in and changed the dates to match their original uploads. The site went from having 30+ pages of stuff posted on the 4th to none at all.]