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.]

Not off to a good start. The nicest thing I can say is that the characters are drawn well. Unfortunately, the episode rips through a rematch with the Big Bad they barely survived against at the end of last season, and in their moment of triumph, he starts monologing and explains in detail how they just fell into his trap.

Verdict: they worked the recap in tolerably well, but my problem is what they worked it into: a generic “let’s go fight the demon lord’s general again!” plot. Fighting CGI mooks and a cliché villain is not what I’m looking for in a show about a sentient vending machine and his adorable super-strong busty girlfriend.

(also, the subtitles were a bit sloppy, which seems to be a theme with Crunchyroll this season, who got caught leaving AI droppings in one of their subs)

Unrelated, LLM != ML

I say this for the benefit of anyone who might be subjected to corporate training that conflates “agentic AI” (LLMs that can make API calls) with more traditional (and proven useful) Machine Learning approaches, in order to claim their successes.

Slow-motion gut punch.

eBay abort/retry/fail?

The delayed delivery supposedly landed in the US on the 24th and was supposedly handed over to the last-mile carrier on the 26th. Who discovered its arrival on the 27th. What will happen to it next?

The last episode of Apothecary Diaries 2 will air right before the first episode of Call Of The Night 2. Coincidence? I think not.

Slime-Killing Witch 2, fin

This week, everyone who’s ever had a speaking role shows up for about a minute. Hopefully this will provide enough screenshots for a comprehensive LoRA. Or at least one for the busty undead shut-in gamer catgirl.

In-world, everyone seems to prefer the middle-school-aged red dragon, but I’d like some variety.

(fortunately the catgirl is the sort of “undead” that looks completely healthy and alive and just stops aging)

Bumpkin & Harem, fin

They put more effort into integrating the CGI for the fight scenes this week, so apparently they’d held back a little money in the budget. Our Teaching Hero defeats Our Traitorous Busty Blue-Hair without killing her, and of course it turns out she was blackmailed into it, as well as lied to about the reason the royal family punished the NecroCardinal earlier in the season. All the Not-Haremettes get cameos, and he goes home and has dinner with Our Adopted Daughter.

Verdict: the story wouldn’t have been as good if it had gone down the harem route, but they oversold the fan-service to get people to watch, which resulted in Thirsty McWhiteHair’s ridiculous outfit. Seriously, how does she get everyone to respect her authority when the men who aren’t staring at her cleavage are staring at her thong panties?

Also, Bumpkin 2 next year.

(when will we get season 2 of that other Sword Daddy?)

Why you shouldn’t get too clever naming your product

Headline: “Apple Intelligence is Down”

😁

Daily scam calls

Most common: skinsuited computers pretending to offer me improved Medicaire/Medicaid benefits, who refuse to parse the words “put me on your do-not-call list”, and just call again the next day from another random in-state phone number. Sadly, there are a certain number of unknown in-region numbers I have to accept calls from, so I can’t just lock out the scammers; fortunately it’s still only 2-3 a week.

The second most common scam is pseudo-people cold-calling and offering to buy my land. Because that’s what reputable realtors do.

I’ve gotten a few more ore-ore calls, but they’re a distant third.

How to respond to Science-by-press-release

“Thank you, Simone.”

(classical reference)