…clearly you’ve never been in a Japanese video store.

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It’s porn, of course, so the youthful actresses are at least 18. Unfortunately, I can read the description at the bottom of the cover, and it’s basically a rape video (loosely, “‘Sparta’ training camp gang-bang of the flat-chested track team”). If it had just been three pretty young women in and/or out of their bikinis, I’d have been interested. Sadly, the product description on Amazon doesn’t even include their names, so I can’t find out if they’ve done any less-explicit work.

Okay, I confess: I finally watched the Endless Eight episodes of Haruhi. Dear Ghod, what were they thinking? There wasn’t nearly enough fan-service to justify that much repetition. For more “fun”, Crunchyroll clearly doesn’t have enough streaming servers, since I often can’t watch anything on the iOS or FireTV apps during prime evening hours, and for about half of these episodes, the streaming was interrupted in a way that caused the app to repeat lines of dialog until the video caught up.

In other news, I did some de-duping on the leftover folder, because I noticed some familiar images popping up. Somehow I’d managed to download the exact same images as part of different themes. I also caught a few that were re-uploads with slightly different hashes, and there are some that I’m pretty sure are alternate takes of the same image, but I can’t automate that cleanup, and it’s too much work to sort through the 2,000+ images I’ve already posted. So, just think of it as “the cheesecake so nice, I found it twice”.

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I’ve been out sick the past few days, with my head a bit foggy, so in my more lucid moments I’ve just been playing Death Road To Canada (on Windows; I got sick of the crashes in the Mac version) and watching anime. For reasons involving low-braincell-count, I just rewatched the first season of Haruhi in broadcast order.

I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years, and I still haven’t seen any of the newer stuff (‘Endless Eight’ sounded so immensely tedious that I didn’t even try). One of the many things I’d forgotten since it originally aired was how annoying Mikuru’s voice is. Other than that, it was decent enough.

Maybe if my brain unfogs, I’ll watch something new this weekend…

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If you like Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar novels, Stone Unturned is a good one. The only quibble I have with it is that I wish he had put just the year at the top of every change of PoV, not a full date, to make it obvious that the characters are separated by time. It rapidly becomes obvious, but why bother obfuscating?

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Foreigner, C.J. Cherryh

I got interested in the characters and situation, then it skipped forward a hundred years. I got interested in the new characters and situations, then it skipped forward two hundred years. At this point, I decided not to get too invested in the third protagonist, and of course that was the one who lasted the rest of the book. Unfortunately, his story was less interesting than the other two, and so was he. When it petered out, I took a look at reviews of the second one, and decided that I didn’t care enough about a thinly-disguised story of high-tech white colonialism backfiring because they just can’t understand the native black culture.

Od Magic, Harrowing The Dragon, Alphabet of Thorn, *The Book of

Atrix Wolfe*, Patricia A. McKillip

Always reliably entertaining, McKillip’s backlist is getting more reasonably priced on Amazon. None of these really jumped out at me as exceptional, but they’re all good. I have a few more on my ‘overpriced’ Kindle list, and if they ever drop below $10, I’ll buy them.

Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology

A bunch of good authors either writing their own stories in one of Zelazny’s worlds, or earnestly attempting to emulate his prose style in their own worlds. Honestly, it made me wish they’d just written their own worlds in their own styles. Especially Brust.

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction, Terry Pratchett

An oddball mix of material from across his career. For some of the early stuff, the commentary is better than the story.

Tfimes Three, Robert Silverberg

Three time-travel novels. Not his best, but well worth the cover price.

A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore

The last truly fresh Moore novel I read was Bloodsucking Fiends. Several years ago, I gave up on this one in the first chapter. This time I was more in the mood for it, but not enough that I’d pay $11+ for the sequel. Maybe $7 on a good day.

Northwest Smith, C.L. Moore

Classic SF short stories that I’d only ever seen a few of. Good stuff, but it made me wish she’d written at least one story where Smith didn’t run into some sort of Lovecraftian horror, and just dealt with the SFnal side of his universe.

The Planetary Adventures of Eric John Stark, Leigh Brackett

More classic shorts from another of the legendary women of SF that the current gatekeepers like to pretend never existed. Maybe because she wrote about strong men and feminine women…

Norstrilia, Cordwainer Smith

I’d only ever read The Ballad of Lost C’Mell, not realizing that she’s a major player in this novel. Good stuff, of the sort you just can’t get outside of indie any more.

I’m still waiting on the final Pennyverse novel, currently in small-press limbo. Meanwhile, I’ve got Poul Anderson’s The Corridors of Time and C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry downloaded and ready to go. In the queue to buy are Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! and Theodore Sturgeon’s Selected Stories.

Change of plans!

New Ethshar novel released three weeks ago.

Is it just me, or shouldn’t it be obvious to anyone capable of rubbing two brain cells together that “Initial Coin Offerings” are a total scam?

Seriously, in this latest one, the con artists actually responded to a request from a potential investor with the following:

“To benefit from our service you have to invest in our LoopX Coin. Already proofen by other successful coins guaranties this the stability of our system.”

Yeah, that just makes me want to invest my savings!

So, as the fleeced gather together to attempt a class-action lawsuit, I’d like to remind them that judges rarely get involved when Pokemon trades go bad.