“She danced like one of those things they put outside of carwashes, the tubes with faces and arms attached to a fan. She had no mystery, no allure, no skill, no art, and her lunatic visage was so off-putting you were heartened by a sudden new-found certainty: an entire culture had realized that keeping your tongue extended like a basset hound with heat stroke was unbecoming, and unlikely to be repeated except as a sarcastic reference in Instagram selfies.”
— James Lileks reviews Miley CyrusBounty Hunting in Endless Sky
The pirates you’re hunting can be three systems away from the planet where you got the mission, not two. And it appears their location is pre-generated and they don’t move, so if you never enter the correct system, you’ll never find them. This also means that if you load up on bounty missions, the odds that you’ll run into multiple pirate fleets simultaneously goes way up. When that happens in a system that already has a high chance of random pirates, like Shaula, even a fleet of Shield Beetles can be overwhelmed unless you draw them far, far away from the planet and the incoming hyperspace routes. (pro tip: the “hold position” key can be applied to single ships by selecting them, not just your entire fleet)
[Mac version 0.9.6, based on a small Perl script that does a crude scan of the save file; haven’t figured out how they mark missions as completed yet, though]
The game is free, fun, and desperately in need of a nicely-designed PDF with all the obscure keyboard shortcuts (scattered documentation here, here, and here). You can also get it on Steam for convenience (no DRM applied, because GPLv3).
It’s moddable, replayable, and regularly updated, and doesn’t chew up a lot of resources when paused, so you can easily hop in for a few quick turns while waiting for other tasks to complete. It auto-saves every time you land, and it’s quite stable.
Speaking of free games on Steam, the ancient MMO Anarchy Online showed up there recently. They’ve been trying to get me to come back for about 15 years, and this time I decided to give it a shot. I managed a successful password reset on my old account and created a new character (the old ones were still there but marked “inactive”), and got the dubious pleasure of remembering what it was like before MMOs settled on some basic user interface conventions. I could adjust to the low-res models and textures, but the controls are another story.
With a song in her heart...
Demi-chans can come back and visit any time
As expected, they dodged the usual solution. It is a pool episode with the girls in swimsuits, but it’s not a fan-service filler afterthought.
No barnacles here!
Ahiru-taichou performs a thorough inspection to ensure that the Yuudachi is sea-worthy… (NSFW)
Dear Amazon,
I think you’re using the wrong definition of “hard” here…
(the category is actually broken, since it only has 7 obsolete WD drives sold by Marketplace dealers, and you have to go up a level to find anything that’s current and available with Prime shipping)
Speaking of healthy franchises...
Not only does the DanMachi Sword Oratoria spinoff anime start in a few weeks, but there’s another spinoff series starting, Familia Chronicle, in both light novel and manga formats.
The first volume focuses on the enigmatic Ryū, and to make sure everyone takes notice, her bustline is considerably more impressive than in the anime. Apparently the Protagonist package includes upgrades.
Land of Remakes
New Kino’s Journey series coming, with the voice of Madoka as Kino. They also just launched a manga adaptation, so apparently the franchise is still pretty healthy.
In other anime news, DanMachi is getting a deluxe Bluray US release in a few weeks, complete with dub and ribbon. Cute, but I’m thinking $80 is a bit steep. (standard BD release half that price available next week)
