Frieren, episode 15

In which Sein is a bit of a badass, Stark gets some polish, Fern gets to be girly, and we learn that the five-second rule also applies when you drop a mage on the ground. Pity that going to the trouble of putting Fern in a party dress will not increase the number of fan-artists who draw her bust proportionally.

Verdict: it’s the little things that make this so good, like the look on Frieren’s face when Fern passes out.

Tearmoon, episode 11

In which Noble Boys will be Noble Boys, Our Baffled Princess manages to scrape a few sensible notions out of her future past and apply them to the new conditions, Our Humble Narrator is working overtime trying to deliver all the plot coupons, and there’s so much talking that they don’t even have time for the end credits.

Verdict: rushed. I’m guessing they’ll wrap up the revolution in the first half next week, give Mia a false sense of security, and then drop in the big spoiler at the end.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 11

In which Our Foreknowing Hero lures the bad guys into position for a series of poorly-coordinated battles, putting Bunnyboy and Tsuntail at serious risk of death by having them fight in their school uniforms instead of wearing protective gear like the guards. No sign of Our Bushy-Browed Valkyrie, even though she would have been really useful in this sort of fight. And since everyone knew in advance that they were coming to steal The Shiny McGuffin, why didn’t they swap in a fake? Or did they?

Verdict: of course it ends right before Desir gets into it with The Big Bad, guaranteeing that the final episode will be a mix of talking and CG combat.

(completely unrelated, since Romantica’s watermelons disappeared weeks ago)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 11

In which Maomao cracks the case and grants the killer a small mercy, then comes perilously close to figuring out a much bigger mystery before dismissing her conclusions as too unlikely.

Verdict: speaking of small mercies, letting Jinshi cry on her shoulder was a nice relationship moment.

(in vino veritas!)

Hungry Hungry Heroes, episodes 1-11

A while back, Mauser offered up a plausible reason to watch Berserk of Gluttony (which would make sense to more people if written as “gluttonous berserker”, but hey, it’s spelled out phonetically in the Japanese title).

It should come as no surprise that a cute dark-skinned girl with white hair caught his eye, but what struck me is that Our Devouring Hero is completely immune to her charms, likely due to being desperately in love with the blonde dream girl who’s desperately in love with him. Seriously, does Roxy even own dry panties? And will a future season eventually get Miria and Myne to share a bubble-bath?

Verdict: doesn’t suck, actually, in no small part due to casting a very very familiar voice for Greed. Final episode Sunday.

(Myne and Rory Mercury: separated at birth?)

Worst LLM results yet…

I asked it to “write a sex scene between a witch and a catgirl”. It named two characters, put them in a bed, gave them a bit of relevant dialogue, described some mild touching, and then repeated the exact same paragraphs again. And again. And again. And again. It was the Groundhog Day of soft-core foreplay. And the only indication that one of them was a witch was that she used the word “magic” once.

I also asked Stable Diffusion to illustrate the scene:

Most of the episode was spent on dressing and showing off Our Honored Daughter before her awards ceremony, most of the rest on introducing Our Traveling Daddy to the town (with a bit of scolding over Ange’s wife search), and the only thing suggestive of a wrap-up is next week’s title, “I’m home, dad”. It’s paced as if they’re going right into a second cour, which I’ve seen nothing about (but would be happy to see).

On the bright side, lots of fun interactions between Bel and all of Ange’s friends in town, and some amusing bits with Our Uncultured Tomboy Elf Princess. Honestly, someone should tell her not to sit like a man while wearing hot pants. Or not, I’m fine with it, although I wish they’d finally get around to putting her in the ED animation to replace The Maltese Doughball (deceased).

Next week, they’ve got to fit in an awards ceremony for Ange, another duel for Bel, three princes and a loli princess, a prison-break for Kasim, a family reunion, “my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it”. Will they even make it back to the village to bring in Graham and Mit?

Verdict: good grief, if there were any more balls in the air, this would be a gay porn flick. Or the Cats movie.

(unrelated cheerful elf maid supplied as an antidote to the mental picture invoked by the mention of gay porn and the Cats movie)

New trailer for McPharmacist & Waifu

Includes lots of bathing and a shot of Mr. Crawly-Wawly, so they at least understand how to rebuild audience interest.

Safety note:

When a recipe calls for “jarred hot cherry peppers”, do not use a brand imported from South Africa. 🔥 🤯 🔥

(this was a Cook’s Country recipe that they described as an “Ohio favorite”, which no one here has ever heard of; apparently they think the one restaurant their staff visited represents the entire state)

Wow, they really dragged that out. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to watch it after the past few weeks of melodramatic dreck and Kufufu, but I needed something to do while waiting for the pizza to arrive, and it was there.

Verdict: meh, I suppose I’ll watch the last one next week just for whatever crumbs they throw at us. Maybe they’ll bring in the whole team, like they’re part of the show.

Latest Solo Leveling trailer

In which it is revealed that they’ve given all the characters Japanese names; if they actually transplant the setting as well, that’ll really fuck with the storyline. On the bright side, they actually show more of his post-upgrade look than the previous trailer. On the dark side, they’ve now revealed that the ED song sucks as much as the OP.

On the peculiar side, the previous credit ANN calls out for the director is Mother of the Goddess’ Dormitory, and for the head writer it’s Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!. Oh, dear.

No idea how this one’s going to turn out.

Too old for Elf On A Shelf?

Try Wench On A Winch. 😁

Tearmoon, episode 10

In which rabble are roused, cliffs are hung, and history doesn’t quite repeat itself but definitely rhymes. Our Wandering Princess manages to get herself delivered right to the spot where she can accidentally do the most good, while Our Undercover Angel is rescued from a fate worse than death by Our Maturing Love Interest, just in time for her to pigeon off both truth and lies.

Verdict: with two more episodes left, this smells like we’re in for a rushed wrapup.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 10

Wait, Our Gay Bunnyboy has started wearing thigh-highs now? Seriously? And Our Shaggy-Browed Valkyrie went out in public without them? Meanwhile, I’m not surprised that Our Domesticated Tsuntail has terrible fashion sense that restrains her Gainaxing, just disappointed. Add in air-hockey bonding, workout bonding, classroom bonding, and an out-of-the-blue reveal of Things Our Rewound Hero Should Definitely Not Know, and we’re setting up big plot events with two episodes to go.

Verdict: with no hope for fan-service or Her, I’m down to morbid curiousity about how they wrap this up in two more episodes.

(wrapping-up technique is definitely unrelated; they’d probably put Bunnyboy under Desir’s tree, or more likely the other way around)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 10

Gyokuyou continues to delight, catching Jinshi in the act as he tries to renegotiate his relationship with Maomao. It looks like it’s reached the point that poor Gaoshun has more respect for Maomao than for his master these days. Speaking of which, for all her talk about their relative statuses, she didn’t hesitate to smack his hand away when he grabbed her.

Verdict: unlike the other two shows, when the plot thickens in this one, we can relax and let it develop over the next season. Bonus for Maomao seriously considering kneeing Jinshi in the balls, before remembering he doesn’t have any. Pretty sure she’d have gotten a big shock if she’d tried it, though.

(I lol’d when she discovered her dad was a “former eunuch”; I knew what she meant, but…)

LLMs get the best drugs

Hallucinogenerators, you might say…

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S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 11

You’re not going to believe this, but Our Homesick Daughter was packing up for a fall visit home when suddenly guild business delayed her long enough for winter to completely cancel the trip. Unpossible, amiright?

For safety’s sake, she leaves The Trouble Twins with her gal-pals, which is sure to trip a few flags, but fortunately Our Haunted Dad has decided to finally face his past and seek out his old adventuring friends, so he wouldn’t have been home anyway.

Meanwhile, one of said friends is haunted by his own memories from those days, killing time in the county jail by cadging booze from little girls in exchange for adventuring stories.

Verdict: Our Best Catgirl in a clingy dress? Sold! The problem is, we’ve only got two episodes left, and there are a lot of balls in the air. Are they going to awkwardly wrap it up or try for a second cour?

(wrong catgirl, but she’ll do in a pinch)

Frieren, episode 14

In which love is in the air. Literally. Also, Himmel was a sly dog.

Verdict: Pouty Fern! Happy Fern! Sneaky Frieren! Smiley Frieren!

Gate manga, volumes 7-9

These (7, 8, 9) quietly slipped out on November 30, so they’ve slowed the release pace quite a bit, but haven’t stopped. Spiffy.

Unrelated,

Homebrew’s decision to move everything from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew got even more annoying when neither Perlbrew nor Plenv could successfully build XS modules with internally consistent libraries. When I started working through the issues with SVG and Pango in PDF::Cairo, I ended up with a busted install that would try to mix the libgtk from Homebrew with an older libglib that it found somewhere in the file system. Apparently instead of having predictable (if often insecure) library-path environment variables, MacOS has gone to a caching system where the first copy found wins, non-deterministically; the suggestions I’ve found mostly require scrubbing the disk of all duplicate libraries (I count at least 13 copies of libglib, most of them embedded in apps), deleting the cache, and rebooting.

So for now I’m installing all modules directly into Homebrew’s perl, and re-installing all of them every time there’s a minor version update (local::lib currently isn’t playing well with Homebrew’s perl at the moment, either, sigh). I haven’t had the time to completely untangle everything yet, because Christmas prep and job interviews have first pick of my brain cells.

(Oh, have I failed to mention the job-hunting? Yeah, someone thinks half of my team can be replaced with new hires at the Prague office. Magic 8-Ball says “good luck with that”)

Dear Llama-2-7B-chat (MLX),

Don’t quit your day job:

“tell me a story about catgirls” (5000 tokens)

(note: the mlx-example script defaults to a constant seed, so that the output is repeatable; if you like what you get, you can simply repeat it with a larger number of tokens)

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Remember when there were other characters in this show? Nah, me neither. Anyway, with only two more episodes to go, it looks like this Russian winter will never end.

Verdict: honestly, all this episode really had to offer was a few ass-shots. And not flattering ones.

(I’m struggling to even remember the name of this character who used to be in the show)

Unrelated,

I just watched the trailer for the new GTA6 game. It is filled with exquisitely rendered ugly people. I’d have to downgrade my graphics card in order to play it without losing sanity points, perhaps all the way to the handful of polygons in Interstate ’76.

(I’d love to see an HD remaster of I76)

Tearmoon, episode 9

In which Our Surviving Princess is running without a script, and is so shocked by unpredicted events that her inner monologue reverts to her grown-up voice. Last week, it was revealed that it hasn’t just been Bad Luck sending her to the guillotine, but the work of shadowy figures shadowing around in the shadows, and that she’d frustrated them enough to force a change of target. This week we find out what the new target is: Mia’s Boytoy’s Kingdom.

Verdict: they crammed a lot into this one, to the point that it felt like a double-length episode. I expect they’ll finish out the season with the Renmo Revolution, and then airdrop The Big Surprise in during the final scene of episode 12.

Rerun’s Special Magic, episode 9

The good news is that the tournament ended, with Our Smirking Hero’s Smirk narrowly defeating Our Ice Princess’ Absolute Territory. Meanwhile, Our Dastardly Duo kept delaying their attacks long enough for Tsuntail And Bunnyboy to sleaze a victory. In other news, foreshadowing of doom!

Verdict: Romantica escaped from her cursed school blouse, and they promise to let her play dress-up next week as well, so I won’t drop the show yet. Even if she’s not the girl I’m looking for.

(Princess Stompyboots is once again standing in for Our Missing Redheaded Senpai)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 9

If you’d asked me for a list of things not to expect in this show, an insert song playing over a montage of suicides and murders would be pretty close to the top. But it happened anyway.

Maomao being a secret lush would be up there, too. And that also happened.

Verdict: interesting change in the relationship dynamics between Jinshi and Maomao, with her speaking truth to power (sober!) and him acknowledging the gulf between them. This is also the first time they’ve really revealed the scope of his job.

Unrelated,

I named the M2 MacBook Air Maomao. After all, it’s built on top of Eunuchs.

(no, not that one)

S-Rank Daddy’s Girl, episode 10

Our Self-Proclaimed Big Sister got a little carried away and lost track of the basics, while Our Repentant Little Sister learned that not everyone in the clergy is corrupt and horrible. Meanwhile, Our Mystery Villain black-pills the town and Our Coughing Granny tosses spells like there’s no tomorrow. Our Favorite Dad? He’s busy with domestic duties and suddenly remembering His One True Love, thanks to a timely question from Our Daisy-Dukes-Equipped Elf Princess.

Verdict: ran out of money for the character art, did we? Decent material, just drawn… differently. On the bright side, they set the hook for a second season: reuniting Bel with his old adventuring party.

(two true loves are unrelated)

Frieren, episode 13

In which Our Heroes suck at recruitment, and Frieren fails her Seduction roll.

Verdict: I’m with Himmel on this one…

(rare fan-art of Fern where the burger is bigger than her head…)

Promised sequels

So in January we get at least a dozen Nth seasons of various shows (including McPharmacist And Waifu 2), but what about all of these?

• Tanya The Evil 2
• Slime-Killing Witch 2
• Flatcat And Sword 2
• Gun Gale Online 2
• Vending Machine 2

In other news, let’s do the Spice Wolf again!.