This week, Our Flash Heroine makes a quick recovery from the effort of slaughtering the raging mob of giant flaming bears last week, enough so that she decides to visit the nearest big town and makes a three-day trip in half a day. There she meets a bad alchemist and a good alchemist, turns a profit on gooey bits, and heads home in time to invite Our Gatherer Girls to move in, get her house repaired, and make magic induction ranges for both herself and the local inn.

That sounds like a lot, but the pacing still feels like casual slice-of-life, mostly due to the time spent on Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

(spooky cute girl doing spooky cute things is unrelated but seasonal)

Late Floor Mold

Mold-ing, that is. The flooring was ordered back in July, and arrived at the warehouse well over a month ago. So it came as a surprise to me that the shoe molding wasn’t even ordered until Friday. The guy installing the floors was equally surprised, when he asked the contractor last Tuesday when it would be on-site so he could finish the front half of the house.

So when it came time to move everything from the back of the house onto the finished sections, we had to leave 2-3 feet for access to the walls, so now everything has to get moved an additional time to put it all back where it belongs on Thursday. sigh

On the bright side, my new custom bedroom set from the local Amish furniture store is ready, and will be delivered Thursday. By English truck, of course.

(pretty sure Kiki doesn’t do furniture deliveries…)

Hoe Harem 4

In which Our Feckless Farmer faces a legendary dragon, armed only with the power of… another legendary dragon. And his farmer’s soul, which is equally important. So, basically, just being insanely OP isn’t enough, and he gets even-more-powerful help for no good reason.

Does he manage to save Our Busty Guild Receptionist? Well, yeah, obviously, since she’s in the credits as a haremette. The experience not only cures her depression and survivor’s guilt, it makes her a little bonkers, as well as a suitably equipped Companion In Arms (and legs, and quite likely wings and a tail).

She doesn’t yet know that her new romantic rival is Our Besotted Princess, but I’m sure it will come up soon. Meanwhile, Our Hapless Hoe-master is inexplicably weak to being molested by orcs of both sexes, despite his ability to one-shot a dragon with a carrot.

Next week, Ruri!

(unrelated swordswoman is not Ruri, and, seriously, enough with the orc-rape running gag, please)

Beast Tamer 4

In which Our Thoroughly-tamed Dragon-Waifu learns important lessons about friendship, loyalty, and not wandering around in Condition White. Also, the underwhelming secret origin of Our Taming Hero!

Next week, Our Asshole Adventurers come back to mess with his peace of mind.

(and, yes, he gained super-fire-magic from last week’s taming)

Question of the day…

Has anyone written a “Reincarnated As Truck-kun” meta-isekai story yet?

Glorious typo!

In P.C. Hodgell’s latest Kencyr novel, Deathless Gods, a character is described as having a “scowling continence”. 😁

I had to stop and reread the line just in case, because in the previous book, there was an incident where a pair of abused twins used their powers to inflict explosive diarrhea on their tormenters. As one does.

(picture is definitely unrelated; you’re welcome)

In which Our Flat-Affect Flatcat lights up after acquiring Our Visionary Blacksmith’s conveniently cute armor, and Random Lingerie Shopkeep saves us from the perilous possibility of no-pantsu shots. The animators have so far expressed no interest in upskirting Our Underage Heroine, but best to avoid temptation.

Exposition and status screens are kept relatively low-key this week, continuing the trend of avoiding the stat-overdose present in the light novels. Other things are also nicely streamlined, with Garrus just handwaving away how he happened to have some cute armor on the ready-to-wear rack.

And cute is indeed the theme of this show, despite the jarring tone shift in the OP. Fran is an adorable engine of destruction, who’s happy just to have good food, a soft bed, and unlimited monsters to kill.

(I hope the show is successful enough to show her reaching her goal in a future season, and that it’s handled better than in the light novels, which spring it on the reader and then reveal the details in a flashback)

“Squeak, I tell you, squeak!”

Flooring guy hadn’t been told that some of the squeaks are not the usual sort of thing where the boards have come loose from the joists over the years, but are the result of metal cross-braces in the basement having worked themselves loose. Those aren’t something he’s equipped to fix, so he called the main contractor, who was already planning to handle them himself.

(classical reference)

Photoshop-be-gone!

The latest updates to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite are not compatible with macOS Catalina, although it looks like they’ll continue to do security updates and bug-fixes for a while. One more reason to finish migrating things to my Windows 11 laptop!

In which Our Glowing Alchemigal saves one life for money, and then saves everyone’s life for free, although she’s sure to make a tidy profit by harvesting gooey bits from the raging mob of giant flaming bears that she pretty much kills without any help and at no risk to herself. Clearly this is the same sort of “alchemy” that Edward Elric practiced…

Floor up, floor down

The front half of the house gets covered back up Wednesday. By the way, I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but this is the stuff we’re using. Today was spent smoothing, leveling, and de-squeaking, so the flooring guy is going to, um, “hit the ground running” in the morning. I won’t be hanging around and getting in the way; I’ve been in a hotel since Sunday, and I just show up in the morning and evening.

“Do you have a floor preference?”

    “Yeah, I would like a floor.”

“No, what level?”

    “How about… ‘Beginner’?”

(and if you find that quote naggingly familiar, as I did, it’s from an early Paula Poundstone concert)

Beast Tamer 3

In which we answer the question, “what if someone remade Dog Days as a light-hearted slave-harem comedy without the isekai element?”.

Also apparently without the MCSAs. In fact, it’s pretty much a fan-service-free zone; Our Skirted Haremettes even possess powerful anti-upskirt magic.

Anyway, after two episodes with the catgirl-waifu, we apparently get two with the dragon-waifu. Note that after worrying last week that acquiring her powers might burn out Our Tamer’s nervous system, Our Catgirl doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about him doubling the amperage by adding a dragon; He’s Just That Good.

Hoe Harem 1-3

More officially, Raising my farming skills somehow made me powerful.

And by powerful, they mean “godlike”, because his perfectly ordinary fantasy world has status screens that everyone can use, and that give clear numbers showing him to be off the scale, enough so that within minutes of getting his DLC upgrade, he rescues the local princess in a way guaranteed to set fire to her panties. To which he is of course oblivious.

Why did I watch this? Because there was a lot of dead time in the Confluence upgrade I ran on Saturday (dumping and reloading the DB to upgrade from Postgres 9.6 to 14, rsyncing the shared-home content, running the upgrade, reindexing, etc, etc).

Also, the haremettes are cute, particularly short-haired heroine-wannabe Ruri, who hasn’t shown up yet, sadly.

Note that the one who glomps him in the OP is not a haremette. At least I hope not; she’s his mom.

(there’s hardly even any inept porn for this show, much less decent fan-art; then again, in the first two episodes, they really only introduced the first haremette, and episode three ends on a cliffhangerpigsticker)

When the sun’s juuuuuust right…

…I can’t close my garage door. At this time of year, that happens to be right about 5 PM.

Fortunately, I saw this twenty years ago at the old house, so I knew why the same remote control that was able to open the garage at a distance of 75 feet suddenly couldn’t close it from 6 feet away: the sun is striking the do-not-crush-things sensor. The quick fix is to tape a piece of cardboard next to it as a sunshade.

Or not leave the house while the sun’s up. 😁

Okay, “thin veneer of isekai”, but…

Flatcat for the win!

Reincarnated as a sword book 11 is currently the #1 light novel on Amazon US. It comes out a month from now.

Renai Failure 1

Love Flops is worse than I thought it would be. I made it as far as the dog scene, but did not enjoy anything that happened before that point, either. Honestly, I wish they’d have licensed Futoku no Guild instead; it would be less painful to watch, and that’s really saying something.

Urusei Yatsura 1

No. Not even with earplugs to mute the screams (theirs).

(Vermeil would look good in Lum’s outfit…)

Reborn as a mimic with amazing legs

No, seriously, this is a thing that exists. I have to admit, a mimic makes more sense than a slime.

In which Our Catgirl Heroine makes it to town, joins the Adventurer’s Guild, and acquires enough money for a room. I’d say that we’re moving really slow, but if this were the light novel, Fran wouldn’t even be in the story yet.

Our Spunky Receptionist provides most of the exposition and non-combat action this week, having squeezed herself into a uniform several sizes too small.

Floors incoming!

They’re officially showing up Monday morning to start replacing my floors.

They’re officially showing up Friday morning to move everything out of the way for the first stage, including the washer and dryer.

Which means I’ll be spending tonight and Thursday night boxing things back up that I want to be able to find again in a hurry after the work is all done, carrying them all down to the basement, and then packing to spend a few days in a hotel so I can work while they work.

Tactical Bib!

Why, yes, I did buy an “executive shirt protector” to keep my PS90 from covering me with burned powder. I also bought the snap-on brass catcher (which is less intrusive than the ones for side-ejecting guns), but that doesn’t arrive until Friday.

And, no, I don’t intend to reload the brass (I sold my old single-stage press in California, and the PS90 magazine requires special handling), I just want to be able to let friends shoot it at the range without bringing along a spare shirt.

In which Our Plucky Heroine cleans house, meets the neighbors, duels her master, picks up a girl and envies her bustline, and finally opens shop just in time to deal with a crisis! (next episode)

(still pretty much no fan-art, so this is by the light novel artist)

Router woes

Looks like both of my old Shuttle DS61 firewall routers have failing memory. I swapped the original out a while back because the SSD was failing after 8 years, but on Sunday the second box failed while I was downloading a bunch of Windows patches and game updates, limped along for a while after I rebooted it, and then failed again.

Meanwhile, I’d rebuilt the original on a new SSD, so I swapped back, and it promptly failed after a few minutes. Since each crash involved me going down to the basement, I went ahead and built a brand new one on a Protectli Vault 6 Port firewall appliance that I bought earlier this year and had just never gotten around to setting up. So far it’s been rock solid.

With the new rack in the basement, I’m thinking of buying another one and finally setting up OpenBSD’s CARP failover system. Easier than constant trips to the basement. 😁

(and this is where I praise OpenBSD for making it so quick and easy to configure new machines; I was up and running again in about five minutes on brand new hardware, since all I had to do was install the OS from USB, copy /etc from the old machine, and edit the configs to reflect the different NIC type (s/re/em/g); everything else I could do later)