“I remind you: everything you say will be held against you.”

"Well, in that case: 'Marlene Dietrich!'"

— Crazy House, 1943

Trimming the season


Dropped!

Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?. Episodes 2 and 3 confirm that this is a steaming pile. The problem isn’t that it’s a poor adaptation (although it is); the problem is that they think it’s a comedy, and they don’t know how to write one of those.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World. Let me be clear that the giant breasts were the only thing this show had going for it; episode 3 was so bad that their barely-delivered promise is no longer enough.

I’m willing to pretend that Business Hero’s takedown of Snidely Whiplash wasn’t suspiciously-contrived nonsense. I’m willing to play along with the genre clichés that are samurai girl, ninja reporter, and loli mad scientist. I’ll even give you Politics Hero With A Pistol, despite him being the most boring one in the group. But super-surgeon gal snapped my willing suspension of disbelief like a dry twig, and the wrap-up of the loli catgirl story combined with The Confrontation exposed what little story they have as an exercise in pointless plot twists. Seriously, I felt like watching an episode of Dokuro-chan to regain IQ points.

Was it just me...


…or did anyone else see the links for “Final Star Wars Trailer” and think, “oh thank goodness it’s over”.

Dear Amazon,


Your cat’s an asshole:

Speaking of cats, I haven’t had any hanging out on my porch for quite a while, but walking up to the house Friday night, I heard a series of loud, distressed-sounding meows coming from near my porch. I looked over and found a large, rather attractive kitty walking along the fence. To my surprise, he responded to my kissy noises by coming over to say hello, and I rewarded this behavior with a package of the leftover wet food from when I had regular visitors.

He was healthy, well-groomed, and wore a collar, so it wasn’t too surprising that he let me pet him. He hasn’t come back for skritches or handouts, so I’m guessing he’s a mostly-indoor cat who got away from his wranglers for a little while.

Dice, Bookworm, Azur, Average, Prodigy


[catching up after finishing off the main story in Cat Quest and surviving the run to Zora’s Domain in BotW…]

(cover of the next Average book)

After School Dice Club: Ep 2, Enter The Crush, with game Cockroach Poker. Really didn’t need a boy in my gamer-girls-doing-gaming-things show. Ep 3: Incan Gold subtracts the boy, adds two older girls, and actually has a plot twist.

Ascendance Of A Bookworm 2 & 3: after the first one, I ended up reading the first two light novels, and it’s tracking pretty closely. This seems to be a rare case where they realize they have good source material and are actively trying to use it well. No complaints.

Azur Lane: dropped; due in large part to the giant (tee-hee) cast, the story is incomprehensible, and the fan-service is being done better by fans on Pixiv.

Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life? Ep 1: “Ain’t no ‘Adele’ here!” I presume Mile’s first 2.x years in her new world will be told in convenient flashbacks. This is another case where I took a look at the light novels, and the anime team has jumped over several chapters and made some significant changes to what they’re using. It looks like the manga started in the same place as the novels, so this one has a whiff of trainwreck about it. Also, the novels quickly turn into girl-power-power-fantasy, with Mile not only being able to do anything while pretending to be “normal”, but also power-level her friends with a few quick tips. It gets old fast, even with her finally starting to figure out that she was sold a bill of goods by her reincarnation advisor.

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World : Ep 2, Enter The Loli Catgirl. Our Business-Hero proves his worth to the village skeptic, and acquires his future waifu. Side note: Business Hero’s voice sounded familiar, and while his DanMachi character Takemikazuchi doesn’t get a lot of lines in the anime, I hear him a lot in the DanMemo game.

tcc tee-hee


How to convince Mac users to switch to Windows, courtesy of Jeff Johnson:

A good practical joke to play on someone running Catalina:

$ tccutil reset All

Just in case they didn’t suffer enough the first time

Zelda: Break of the Weapon


In order to make Breath of the Wild less painful, after finishing the first two zones I followed a detailed FAQ to locate all of the currency (“korok seeds”) needed to upgrade the number of weapons/shields I can carry in my inventory, then followed another set of instructions to reach the place(s) where you turn them in. I can now carry 15 melee weapons, 10 bows, and 8 shields, which reduces the chance that I’ll have to fall back to torches, tree branches, and skeleton arms when everything else breaks. I immediately fast-traveled back to the place where I found a bunch of brand-new Traveler’s Claymores stuck in the ground and hoovered them all up.

I’m low on bows at the moment, though, from having to shoot parasitic eyes off of a dragon in flight at the top of a mountain in the freezing cold. As one does. Sadly, there are no weapon shops, so to restock, I need to go out and find things to kill that shoot at me, then loot their corpses. Also, the shops won’t restock arrows because I have “enough”, so it’s a good thing you can usually scrounge a half-dozen or so after you kill something that shoots at you.

I should also learn some decent recipes for healing and buffs, and take pictures of a variety of loot for my new scanner.

Eventually I’ll make it back to the upgrade place and get a few more slots (4/5 melee, 3 bow, 12(!) shield). By then I should also have at least 4x the health and stamina, making it easier to hunt for korok seeds. (I’ll need 4x health in order to survive acquiring the best weapon in the game; best meaning “unbreakable and gets its own inventory slot”)

3D Cheesecake: girls gone goofy


The best part about photographing pretty girls in and out of their clothing is when they relax enough to get playful in front of the camera. In the later years, Playboy had a habit of cutting out any signs of personality that didn’t fit the image they wanted to project of a model, but back when they still had photographers and editors who knew what they were doing, a lot shone through.

One of the reasons I like Japanese glamour photography is that they like to show personality. The idol industry is pretty much driven by creating “characters” for them to play when working, usually based on exaggerating aspects of their real personalities.

That said, when it comes to goofing around in photos, it’s not enough to be dressed up by the Hello!Project costume designers…

more...

For want of a hyphen...


The person responsible is probably also a serial comma killer…

In other news, sugar daddies the world over were seen converging on Pratt, Kansas.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”