I tend to skip the OP and ED for most series after seeing it once or twice (or in the case of Noir, “frantically stabbing at the remote to escape that damn song”), but while watching the second season of My Hero Academia, I always watched the first ED. Great focus on the girls, with a matching song.

Between this and watching the two OVAs, though, it’s clear they haven’t thought much about Invisible Girl as more than comic relief. She’s always invisible, but objects touching her body are visible, so her hero costume is “full nudity with gloves and boots” (which she takes off for stealth). And there’s no hint that she has any sort of enhanced toughness as part of her quirk.

So, in the training scenes where they’ve all been running around and then an explosion raises a huge dust cloud, her sweaty naked body should collect a coat of dust. And when they’re getting bounced around by explosions or running through rough terrain, she should end up covered in (invisible) cuts and bruises.

Based on the condition of the other students at the end of the “Training of the Dead” OVA, she must look like a mummy from all the bandages they’d need to patch her up. I think she needs to have a chat with gadget-girl Mei about coming up with some transparent defensive gear; a sports bra and short-shorts, at the very least. That would also make her future hero career less of a gropefest.

After Shamus wrote up his one-year-later look at the ambitiously flawed No Man’s Sky, I decided to take another look myself. Before I’d even consider it, though, I made sure that I had workarounds for the most crippling of its misfeatures. The Pride of Euclid mod makes it possible to travel around planets at something other than a crawl, and nmssavetool allows editing save files to fix the ridiculous inventory limitations and reduce grinding by about 80%.

With the original nmssavetool, I had some canned jq scripts to do basic useful things: add cash, add an item to inventory, and report or change the current ship/multitool seed (a purely cosmetic cheat that changes their procedurally-generated appearance to something cooler).

The author has baked all those and much more into the new version, so that you can start a new game, save once, and then upgrade yourself to be capable of playing the parts of the game you like, whether that’s exploring new star systems, fighting pirates, or questing. There’s also a Java-based GUI save editor that makes it easier to do things like reorganize your technology in the inventory grid to maximize bonuses (a feature of the game that is still nearly impossible to use legitimately).

On that note, there are now two quest chains, and they’re not nearly as fragile as they were before (although one of them is broken in 1.38…); the new mission generator gives you some short-term goals, as long as you work around its bugs. They even turned the useless portal-ish items into a direct clone of Stargate’s stargates, complete with whoosh.

I can honestly say that, with mods and save tools, it’s now a decent $15 game. Unfortunately they still charge $60 for it, so unless you see a big sale, don’t buy it. And if you buy it, get some mods and a save tool, or you’ll find the fun parts separated by tall grindy mountains; Shamus’ articles cover a lot of that, and I agree with pretty much everything he said.

My Hero Academia didn’t sound like much when I first heard about it, so I kind of forgot it existed. Over the weekend, I was bored and it was available on Hulu, so I watched the first episode.

Then all the rest. It’s pretty good, well-drawn with some genuinely interesting characters, and despite the immensely tedious recaps that pad it out, the story doesn’t suck.

(tip: don’t marathon this show unless you have a convenient and reliable skip-forward button)

Classification errors galore.

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If the question is how to appeal to men, Mr. November is not the answer.

As usual, the presence of the kanji 歳 preceded by a number serves as a warning that the young lady in question is on the dangerous side of cute. Healthy, though.

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It’s been a while since I’ve bought anything you publish (your fault, not mine), but you still have Steven Brust, and despite how badly the “author connection” conceit intruded into Hawk, I’m still willing to buy the Vlad Taltos novels in hardback rather than your horribly overpriced ebooks. Vallista leans a bit too heavily on earlier, better novels in the series, but I did read it in one sitting, and while the claim that it answers Vlad’s long-asked questions is bullshit, it does address some things fans wanted to know about how his world works.

But, and I mean this advice constructively, please fire the fucking morons who write your blurbs. This little bit of prose from the book jacket is 300% bullshit: “full of swordplay, peril, and swashbuckling flair”. No, no it is not. Introspective gothic mystery set in a house on a hill, yes; swashbuckling and swordplay, not so much.

Admittedly, it’s not the worst I’ve seen from Tor. That distinction belongs to this ludicrous description of The Three-Body Problem:

“A covert military project. A secret war revealed as the worst fight that humanity has ever faced. Baffling mysteries. A series of ultra-science weapons, each more powerful and fantastic than the last, including one technology described as more important than nuclear bombs. Aliens that may be saviors, or invaders, or both.”