Everything else is just filler.

Frieren, episode 18

Note to fan-artists: they only blot out half the sky.

Cast expansion was relatively light this week, with only a few of the exam candidates getting fleshed out. This included the cute redhead in hot pants, who got some actual fan-service poses in. Nice cameos by Kraft and the old gang.

Verdict: the art style doesn’t really lend itself to fan-service; fortunately that’s not the point.

Dawdling In Dungeon, episode 2

This week, the highlight is the OP animation and original song, on which they spent more money than the rest of the show. The actual episode settles into its tropes, accomplishing very little in the way of making the characters interesting. Also, SHOUTING IS COMEDY!

Verdict: snore. Maybe they should add a dramatic countdown timer, “days until Falin is fewmets”.

Pon-Pon Girls, episode 2

[not licensed for streaming]

In which Girl#4 does-not-bounce into the story, which is pretty impressive for a gal packing a pair of Death Stars. You can understand why she’s reluctant to visit other mahjong parlors with mostly male customers:

It seems a bit bait-and-switchy to make a fuss about how the OP song features a former member of Nogizaka 46 and current professional mahjong player, when her voice is so distorted by autotune that she barely sounds human. Nothing wrong with the tune, or the pon-pon girls singing the pon-pon parts, but it’s pretty clear that Kana Nakada’s career was never based on her vocal talents.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Verdict: the trailers promised bikinis; maybe that’s what they’re saving the 2D animation budget for. (the 3D budget is going into rendering the automated game table)

Metallic Rouge, episode 1

The trailers and OP made it look like a Dirty Pair/Bubblegum Crisis mashup, but after watching it, I’m leaning toward a Kiddy Grade trainwreck. The buddy-cop lead girls are cute, the mechsuit battles are flashy and not entirely incoherent, and it’s generally well-drawn and animated, but the slave android thing is either poorly explained or utter bullshit.

We’re shown a vast underclass of android slaves who are considered completely disposable, each one of which requires a daily shot of juice that also acts as a spiffy drug for humans and has a massive black-market value. Each android is issued (?) one shot a day, which they carry around until they need a hit, or maybe store in an unguarded locker room at work. We’re also shown a massive hijacked truckload of the stuff, which suggests that thousands of workers are going to be tossed in the garbage when they can’t get juiced tomorrow, which would surely disrupt their ability to provide a functional and safe environment on Mars.

Verdict: mysterious pasts and secret agendas, sigh.

(Our Low-Affect Transforming Heroine would be more interesting if her mechsuit looked like this)

Molesting Magical Girls, episode 2

I decided to see how they’d follow up the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Hentai debut, and it opens with all three magical girls completely naked. Subtle, it ain’t.

(Our Increasingly Aroused Villainess wishes her costume were this conservative…)

Speaking of trailers…

Netflix has a full-length trailer for their production of 3 Body Problem, which is filled with scenes that have nothing to do with the book. The only two skiffy technologies present in the first book are something capable of projecting strings onto an individual’s field of vision (countdowns and childish insults), and a monomolecular cable capable of slicing a ship in half as it passes through the Panama Canal. The former is allegedly alien tech, the latter is the main character’s tech. Not the main character of the show; that seems to be Benedict Wong playing the gruff middle-aged detective.

If they never explain anything (especially The Two Protons), then it might succeed as a visually spectacular shallow SciFi experience. If they do, then it’s just another chapter in the ongoing pity fuck for Chinese SF fans who can’t get their hands on the good stuff.

Unrelated,

Every contract recruiter in India is now calling me from phony US VoIP numbers, with really bad connections. After being informed that I wasn’t interested in contract work, as he should have known from my profile, one of them even had his manager call back to explain that it was a long-term contract, and that the company typically converted to perm.

Anyway, my phone is once again set to send unknown callers straight to voicemail.

First we’re introduced to Our Fanatical New Hero and his party, viewed through the eyes of the latest member, Mask Gal. Then the OP goes all-in on Our Brocon Heroine’s transformation from unstoppable emotionless technically-alive Chosen Hero to slow-living fan-service object, with a side-order of Tisse-service; Red and Rit are barely in it.

This season is definitely all about the girls, with Our Devoted Waifu getting more bouncing in the brief goblin fight than all four Pon-pon girls got in an entire episode. And the camera enjoys panning up and down the girls, and framing conversations with sideboob. I suppose if they’re going to hose the story again, they should at least make it easy on the eyes.

Verdict: cheesecake sampler.

(Leafa-chan would fit right in, although she’d probably have to fight the busty elf druid; preferably in a bath scene)

Finally!

Frieren, episode 17

Yeah, right there with you, Sein. New OP song isn’t as off-genre as the previous one, but still doesn’t grab me. ED song is just new lyrics for the previous song.

Verdict: mildly worried about massive cast expansion next week, but they’ve earned my trust.

Solo Leveling, episode 1

Welcome to The Tutorial. We’ll be providing flashbacks, exposition, and cameos of characters you’ll learn to care about later, as well as a chance to see the consequences of poor decision-making in a dungeon.

On the bright side, despite the trailers and previews, the original Korean character names are used, which leaves me wondering if they’re producing two versions of the Japanese audio, with some lines re-recorded for the international audience. If so, I imagine they picked the Japanese names to match the lip flaps.

Verdict: showing several side characters early is a good choice, despite how random those scenes will look to people who haven’t read the source material.

(okay, I’m really just here for Esil; if they get that far…)

The Apothecary Diaries, episode 13

There are significant tone shifts in the new OP and ED, but the show itself is picking up right where it left off, with Jinshi and Maomao seeing each other a little differently.

Verdict: yes please.

Watching Paint Dry In Another World

(officially, Sasaki & Peeps)

They made a double-length episode that delivers an entire novel’s worth of exposition. One would hope this is so that every future episode can consist exclusively of magic, action, and cute psychic girls doing cute psychic things, but I kind of doubt it.

Verdict: he’s a magical girl and a crossworld trader and a newly-minted secret agent. And probably other things that I’m unlikely to stay awake long enough to find out.

Pon Pon-pon-pon Pon-pon Pon-pon

[not to be confused with Pon-pon-pon Pon-pon-pon-pon Pon-pon]

(officially, Pon no Michi; no one’s licensed this one)

The only active torrent seems to have multi-language machine-translated subs, which offends the folks on Reddit who know something about mahjong.

The “This Is Comedy!” background music is mixed way too loud, the exterior background art is obviously just a bunch of traced photos, and the character art is only occasionally attractive, and not terribly fan-serviceable. Except in the OP/ED animations and the trailers, which apparently used up all the money.

The girls are slightly more animated than cardboard cutouts, but their giant breasts are firmly glued in place. I might have seen one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bounce on Girl#4 as she got excited about the chance to join the cast; the rest of the breast physics are restricted to the OP/ED.

The less said about the “humorous” deformed faces and inside-baseball reference jokes, the better. And of course there’s mahjong exposition. I’m sure there will be a lot more, especially with a magical talking bird hanging around, with a very familiar voice.

Speaking of voices, I did not recognize Our Loud Speed-Reading Heroine as Miss Kuroitsu. Then again, I didn’t recognize her as Magia Magenta from Gushing, either.

(unrelated gaming girl is not this stacked in-game)

Note on Molesting Magical Girls

Apparently, Our Sadistic Heroine and Her Magical Playthings are officially middle-school girls. Which will come as a real shock to anyone who actually looks at them. I mean, the last time I saw a fourteen-year-old girl who was that stacked, her name was Sakura Ando [1, 2] (Ai Shinozaki was doing busty bikini work at 14, but she still had a lot of baby fat in her face, which made her look her age; Saaya Irie was of course famous for having huge boobs at 11, but it took years for the rest of her figure to catch up; Erika Yazawa’s boobs made a good living, but she was at least 15 when she bounced into Idoling!!!).

Meanwhile, the season-preview thread on the ANN forums is full of people throwing around the word “pedophilia”, with no grasp of the meaning of the word (hint: an actual pedophile would be repulsed by the sight of a teenager with the body of a Penthouse model).

One correction: I initially described the junior member of the bad-girl team as A, based on her brief appearance in the credits. Looking ahead, she’s an actual little girl who looks her age, but she doesn’t seem to get lewded. The other girls lewd overtime to make up for that.

(speaking of words that don’t mean what someone thinks they mean…)

Is It Okay To Eat Expository Lumps In A Dungeon?, episode 1

(officially, Delicious In Dungeon)

Y’know, for such a simple setup, it requires an awful lot of exposition up front. And the food-porn exposition inevitably leads to a shouty freakout by Our Not-Eaten Mage Girl.

Verdict: if it stays this talky, I’m out. Even the tentacles looked bored.

(dungeon take-home bag is unrelated)

Taking in the trash so you don’t have to!

Okay, I was a touch bored, so…

Molesting Magical Girls

(officially, Gushing Over Magical Girls)

Meet our cups cast: A, B, C, D, E, and F. Our Reluctantly Villainous Heroine is C, whose firmness is immediately displayed in her fully nude transformation scene. We only see Her Villainous Partners in the credits this episode, but they appear to be A and F. Our Briefly-Pure Magical Girls are B, D, and E, whose first encounter with the new villain on the block gets them thoroughly fondled by a summoned tentacle-gimp plant monster and then whipped so hard by C-sama that their asses are still beet-red the next day at school. Because of course they’re all in the same class, and we’re treated to expository lingerie close-ups as the girls change out of their gym clothes, plus a triple-titty transformation scene when they get the call to action. That covers about the first half of the episode.

It seems that Our Dark Mascot was correct when he intuited that Our Heroine’s obsession with the local MG team wasn’t admiration for their successes, but subconscious sadistic enjoyment of their suffering. Which she is now in a position to consciously inflict, and which makes her feel all tingly down there.

By the way, her name’s Utena (no relation); she doesn’t seem to have a villain name yet. HiDive is apparently airing the less-censored version, which includes perky nipples and closeup crotch-shots but silences some “sound effects”; those (and more detailed imagery) will be on the Bluray.

(unlucky magical girl is unrelated)

Combat Harem Dog

(officially, Chained Soldier)

In which peaches produce melons, according to the end credits. Anyway, Our Future Househusband is a loser who can’t get a girl despite being well-trained in the wifely arts, until the day he wanders into an expository lump and meets the F-cups of his dreams, which are attached to a sword-swinging supergal whose power is enslaving cannon fodder. She’d never tried it on a human before, so she’s surprised when he turns into super-dog and tears through slightly-animated target dummies. This also impresses her subordinates, who consist of two DD-cups and a loli.

TL/DR: they hire him as housekeeper and combat slave, and Wacky Hijinks are sure to ensue. Despite the huge boobs and the full-body french kissing, this was pretty tedious due to the exposition, power-kanji displays, and origin flashbacks, especially compared to how far C-sama got with her victims in the previous show.

(reasonable approximation of Our Dominating Heroine)

Just Die Already

(officially, My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me!)

In which Our Casually Evil Power Broker blows up the grownups, and Our Redheaded Twintail Leftover’s huge boobs act as life preservers. That pretty much covers it; the rest is mostly CGI, tedious exposition, and flashbacks.

(unrelated Christmas present is about the right size)

Unrelated,

Link pushed the wrong button.

(receptionist is Best Girl in Immoral Guild; can’t imagine what made me think of this show…)

…after getting her girlfriend’s permission first!

NSFW

Sasaki & Peeps: the voices

Despite the unpromising promo videos, I may have to watch the first episode due to the cast: Kyon, Tanya, Hestia, Rizu, Megumin, Momo, Boxxo, Ruti, and even Optimus Prime.

As for Pon No Michi…

The trailer somehow reminds me of another Pon video. Not as “animated”, of course.

Meanwhile, 44 years later…

Netflix remakes Shōgun. Honestly, my first cynical thought was to check to see how many characters they’d swapped the race and/or gender for.

(between badly-dubbed anime and the original mini-series, I think I can nail down the birth of my interest in Japan…)

The Lasagna Paradox

My mom loves spices but her stomach does not, so when I made lasagna yesterday, I tried to tone it down significantly, cutting the spices by half and replacing the Italian sausage with ground beef [(velveting 1, 2] the meat to improve the texture). Hopefully it mellowed overnight, because when I tried it fresh out of the oven, it was still inexplicably quite zippy. Anyway, I hope she can eat it today. 😁

[Update: it still had a spicy finish to it, so I went back to the original cookbook, Tough Guys Don't Dice by the late James A. Thorson, and discovered that he handwaved the quantities of everything, and the precise values in my recipe had been invented over time as my gaming group tinkered with what fit into a standard Pyrex lasagna pan. I'm going back to the drawing board with this one, and definitely including the velveted ground beef option, which had amazing texture.]

Charming Sharra

Or, The Adventures of Karen of Ethshar. This is the first time I’ve ever just stopped reading one of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ fantasy novels, and it is entirely due to the main character being annoying and stupid. I simply don’t want to spend time with her as she demands to see life’s manager until (hopefully) learning her lesson and growing into a better person.

Hey, look, Bing Copilot worked for me!

I had a very specific problem that was poorly served by the way Google and other search engines chop up your search string, normalize the words, and then match them to wildly irrelevant results. And ads.

What I was looking for was a very specific type of fruitcake that my mother makes, and that she used to receive as a Christmas gift from her aunt decades ago. The first way it differs from the most common variety is by not being a cake; the small amount of flour is present only to coat the fruit and nuts so that they stick together when the only other major ingredient is added: sweetened condensed milk.

I’m pretty good at Google incantations, but because it just breaks language into keywords, it can’t tell the difference between recipes that contain a few tablespoons of flour and ones that contain several cups. The thing LLMs do well, on the other hand, is retain the connection between adjacent words, so I could specify “no more than 1/2 cup of flour” and have it correctly limit the search results.

The first pass included recipes that contained eggs and sugar, so I added “and no eggs”, and ended up with four “Texas” fruitcakes that aren’t what you’ll get if you buy a “Texas fruitcake”:

1. Stella’s Texas Fruitcake
2. Texas Fruit Cake
3. Homesick Texan’s Pecan Date Fruitcake
4. Never-Fail Fruit Cake

If I asked Copilot for more recipes like these, it just repeated the same list, and I’m willing to believe that there just aren’t a lot out there. The good news is that it didn’t insist on padding out the results with false positives.

Fun fact: with no actual “cake” involved, the ingredients are self-preserving, so it can’t really go bad (which is the original point of the heavily-sweetened alcoholic English fruitcake), but it should still be baked right away. We learned that the hard way this year, when, while stirring the pounds of fruit and nuts together with the cans of condensed milk, Mom got interupted by visitors, and had to cover up the bowl and set it out in the passively-refrigerated garage. One thing led to another, and it was three days before she fetched it back inside to portion into bread pans and bake. And it was a rock, firmly stuck to the mixing bowl. It took several hours of warmth and prying to break it up, and then restoring the original texture required some more condensed milk.

DanMemo ends (outside Japan)

The phone/tablet gacha game based on Is It Okay To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon is finally ending service in February. I sank a fair amount of time into it, and bought enough tokens to compensate the developers for producing a decent game with all the voice actors from the anime and original stories by the author. It gets old after a while unless you’re into throwing money at it, but it did have some nice cheesecake of the vast female cast, and several of the original songs are pretty good.

It sould be nice if they followed up the end-of-service announcement with a client update that bumped the point recovery and free gacha rates, so people could spend the next two months exploring character stories they could never unlock before. Probably won’t happen, though; they have another game now. Hopefully there’s an archive of ripped art and music out there somewhere.

(the Japanese servers are staying up, because apparently there’s a very active “PvP” community that still spends money on gacha pulls)

JMB/GG meetup

Gaston Glock has died, after a very full and successful life. I picture him meeting up with John Moses Browning in the afterlife and getting along just fine. Unlike many of their fans in this life. 😁

Purah Explains It All

Maplestar has promised a sequel to that Purah video by the end of the year. Clock’s ticking… [Update: January 4th!]

McPharmacist & Waifu & Sister, Too

The new trailer for season two makes it clear that Ruti loves Red in a completely inappropriate way. So whatever happens with the new hero-dick, they’ve got that going for them.

(wrong waifu, but I doubt I’ll get complaints…)