“As a prosecutor, I was taught that when a witness looks down & to the right as they answer, it’s a signal they are not being truthful.”
“As a warlock, I was taught that when a child coughs, it means his soul is trying to escape and will be easy to capture.”
— Trump Derangement Syndrome claims federal prosecutor Joyce AleneHey kids, comics!
He’s an orc warrior tired of rapine and slaughter.
She’s a busty knight who can’t handle emotional conflict.
They fight crime make manga!
In random isekai news, I just stumbled across the first two translated volumes of The Knight Cartoonist And Her Orc Editor on Amazon. The gimmick is that the knight’s armor frequently shatters under the stress of emotional damage, exposing the goods.
DanMachi 2.12
…and…done. With a post-credits scene setting up the next season, whenever that will be.
A quiet, warm finish, with Hestia having a rare moment of serious goddesshood before reverting to her wacky self.
New character in game? Peasant wench Ais. I’ve already got eight versions of her (and way too many Bells and Hestias, most of them useless), and the only one I’ve maxed out is Summer Princess, which was the first character I was able to max-limit-break, and still a reliable front-line fighter.
Haruhime is my only other maxed-out character, who more than doubled my high score in the current RecordBuster, allowing me to finally finish off the last of the Expert Adventurer missions and get a guaranteed 4-star pull (which, sadly, ended up being that asshole Hyakinthos; good for a fire team, if I were to pull him five more times and invest a lot of resources, but honestly, I’d rather sell him for Dulb).
Dear Amazon,
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest they used the wrong picture for this product listing:
Dear Apple,
Oh, hell no!
Good news, Apple users! The mothership has released critical security updates this week for all platforms.
Bad news, iOS users! If your device supports iOS 13, you can’t get the update to 12.4.2, and have to accept all the new bugs and brokenness in 13.1.
iOS 12.4.2
Released September 26, 2019
Available for: iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch 6th generationImpact: A remote attacker may be able to cause unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1
Released September 24, 2019
Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Air 2 and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch 7th generationImpact: A person with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access contacts from the lock screen
The watch updates are similarly fucked.
Update
If you update your iOS devices to 13.1.1 (yes, 13.1 lasted only a few days before they figured out it sucked, too), not all of the iCloud functionality is compatible with Macs running Mojave. You must upgrade to Catalina (which hasn’t been released yet, and which is likely buggy as hell; the betas certainly were) to get everything to sync cleanly again.
9/30 Update
…and here’s iOS 13.1.2, fixing Even More Bugs. It’s almost like they knew they were inflicting buggy crap on millions of customers and didn’t care.
No, wait, it’s exactly like they inflicted buggy crap on millions of customers and didn’t care.
If you give an Apple an app...
The publishers of the DanMemo mobile game learned an important lesson Wednesday: never update your servers until you’re sure Apple has approved the new version of your app for download. The resulting lengthy “unscheduled outage” could be painful when your business model is based on convincing people to constantly buy imaginary coins to trade in to collect imaginary toys.
Up next, a Halloween Hogwarts event:
"Hey, I know that voice!"
Finished watching Kanata No Astra (which really needed 18 episodes, but got 12, with 2 of them double-length), and when Ulgar’s brother got some screen time, I immediately recognized his voice as a very different character: Dennis Elbaji, from the first story arc in Cop Craft.
What didn’t hit me while watching either show was that it was the same voice actor as Kane McDougal from Mouretsu Pirates. Also Dionysus from Sword Oratoria and the DanMemo mobile game (a character who admittedly doesn’t get a lot of lines).
Kanata, of course, is another voice I hear a lot of, as Welf Crozzo. And Aries is Hestia, Yunhua is Ryu, Polina is Tsubaki (Sword Oratoria), and Ulgar was Soma (DanMachi 2).
Another interesting note: the primary scriptwriter for the series was the creator of the School Live! manga.
Sadly, fan-art of this series is pretty limited. There’s some inept porn, some awkward attempts at drawing something that resembles one of the characters, and maybe five decent pics of the girls. Nothing like, say, an extended remix of the bikini paradise scene.
The thing that makes episode 12 so unsatisfying is that they wrapped everything up by telling, not showing. Laying it out all at once as talking-heads scenes highlighted every weakness in the backstory, drawing attention to elements that frankly don’t work. Playing it out over, say, 4 more episodes would have improved the story by letting them reveal less about the universe.
Seriously, “we established a world government that abolished guns, religions, nations, languages, and the history of the world, and all of the survivors went along with it for the rest of their lives. Also, abolishing guns (except the world government’s, who never lets them fall into the wrong hands or abuses their monopoly on force), religions (nobody cares enough about those to ever, y’know, worship in secret and have their faith strengthened by persecution), nations (trivial!), and languages (even more trivial!) created lasting world peace.”
“And we all agreed to hide the secret of wormhole technology by leaving it in the hands of the company who invented it and made themselves royalty, despite the fact that they somehow let it fall into the hands of random terrorists and criminals who were responsible for accelerating the fall of Earth.”
…and that’s just the parts I noticed while they were plotsplaining. If I actually went over episode 12 and compared it with what we were shown at the start of the series, I think it would come off a hell of a lot worse. I just don’t want to, because I liked the parts leading up to that point.
Weasels gotta weasel
It is indisputable that the Google Chrome updater crashed thousands of Macs, primarily those used by video production studios. FFS, the smoking gun is right there in their updater logs:
GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent[1213/0x7fffc9d683c0] [lvl=3] -[KSLockFile(PrivateMethods) deletePathIfSymlink: except: ] Found and deleted symlink at path /var
And it logs an error message if it can’t delete /var, which means nobody in Google QA reviews log errors before saying “ship it!”.
But how did they spin it? (emphasis mine)
“a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled”
There are reports that it has affected people who have SIP enabled, which seems to be due to them having gone through multiple OS upgrades, starting from a version that didn’t have SIP, with permissions somehow getting changed from the defaults over the years.
The reason it hit video studios so hard is that they were all running external Thunderbolt 2 GPUs to accelerate Avid, and to run the required unsigned kernel drivers, they had to turn off SIP.
Pixiv Champloo 8
A little something to stir up my Pixiv recommendations, which are a bit heavy on foxgirls after that last post.
