Farm Harem episode 7

In which Our Mayor Of HaremVille acquires three friendly neighbors, an open-door policy, a town drunk, a genre-savvy busty virgin (for now) wolfgirl and 19 junior-high wolfgirls, and a trio of wolfboys to feed to the army of busty elf cheerleaders… in 5-10 years when they hit puberty. Seems fair; it would probably take them that long to get to the front of the line for the divine tool anyway.

Verdict: focusing on a smaller number of haremettes allowed them to be animated occasionally rather than just panned stills, and the reminder that everyone living there is ridiculously OP produced some amusing reactions in the visitors. And part of his monologing is even out loud, to other people.

(Crossover: the “how to die a happy man” starter set)

NieR My Covid To Thee episode 4

The story-telling is a bit pretentious, and definitely being slow-played, but they actually have a story to tell (thanks to a large quantity of source material), and Our Warrior Princess remains both decorative and functional.

Verdict: 2B, continued.

Twin Peaks episode 7

Our Lady Hero Lady is a very silly person, quite at odds with her public image, and I’m grateful for her taste in disguises. She’s also a decent sort who is capable of realizing what she really needs, as well as the depth of what Our Husbandly Hero reveals to her. Meanwhile, Our Demon General Swimsuit Model and Our Demon General Wholesome Maiden are on the move. I won’t say that I’m looking forward to the plot thickening, but I’m starting to fear it less.

Verdict: the kid accepts no substitutes; go thou and do likewise.

Back to the yard!

With the weather improving, I was wondering when the landscapers would pick up where they left off, so I was about to call them on Monday morning, when I heard their trucks pull up outside. First up: grading the side yard to eliminate the impromptu pond created by melting snow.

Half-bricked!

The last time I tried to update my iPad Mini, it got bricked, apparently by a bad (Apple-made) cable. The cable was good enough for backups and data sync, but somehow not for installing an update. Guess what happened when I went to install the update today that fixes a known active exploit?

If you guessed “bricked by a cable”, you’re almost correct. This time the Mac running the update hadn’t timed out yet, and I was able to swap in a different cable before it was completely hosed, so that the update proceeded. This time the bad one was an Anker cable, and I swapped in another Anker cable and USB-A to USB-C adapter.

Oh, and the release was so solidly tested that it broke the Google Photos app for many users.

Speaking of Apple,

The iOS music experience is all about displaying cover art, to the point that if you don’t have it for almost all of your songs, it’s significantly harder to navigate. So it’s rather annoying that they’ve had an unfixed bug for years where music downloaded from your computer is assigned the wrong album art when you upgrade/replace your phone/tablet.

The fix: shut off sync, delete all music from your phone, and then sync it again. There are other methods that sometime work for some people on some platforms, but it’s all voodoo; the only sure fix is to start over, which is annoying when you have 60+ gig of songs to sync.

NieR Antivirus!

2B is supposed to be back in the saddle this Saturday, after a run-in with Deus Ex Covid.

Tears Of The Kingdom Wallet

Lots of Zelda fans are upset that the sequel to Breath Of The Wild will cost $10 more when it (finally) releases in May. Given how many hours I’ve played the first game, and I’m likely well below the average, I can’t see a reason to complain. It would have to be riddled with bugs and save-deleting crashes to not be worth it.

Speaking of sequels…

I just watched the trailer for Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. It was remarkably tedious, and included nothing that would make me want to watch the movie. Ugly costumes, forced melodrama, jokes that didn’t land, and a muddled story. The second one wasn’t terribly good, but it wasn’t actively terrible like this.

Farm Harem episode 6

In which at least sixty more busty young women move in, most of whom are eager to have their fertile fields plowed by the divine tool (the rest will no doubt come later, so to speak). If they had the budget to animate all those breasts at once, it’d be like an earthquake. Tasty, tasty earthquake.

Despite all the low-cut tops and miniskirts, shown off this week in a grape-stomping dance, the show remains fundamentally innocent about the harem dynamics, with all the waifu-plowing kept completely offscreen and out of the narrative. I don’t think they’ve even shown anything that confirms that Tia’s a bouncy bedmate.

Also, god’s in the doghouse because he forgot to tell Our Plowing Hero that the god of agriculture that he carved a statue of is actually the goddess of agriculture, who does not appreciate being worshipped in the form of a crusty old man. The gods are completely hands-off, though, so there’s no correction incoming, but we do get a quick handwave of how the divine farming tool suddenly transformed into a Not Safe For Farming OP weapon when convenient.

Verdict: decorative, but the more girls there are to show off, the more the limitations of the animation budget show through. There’s only so much you can do with panned stills, no matter how pleasant the contents. At least with the original seven elf cheerleaders, they spent a few seconds giving them some personality, but adding fifty more without any animation is just posing cardboard cutouts around the village. The OP is still promising demon girls, dragon girls, dark-elf girls, and animal girls, plus some non-waifu characters; is there any money left to animate them?

Slap That Ars episode 6

The plot is now officially thick, with a large cast of people whose actions and motives I couldn’t care less about. About the only thing I liked in this episode was the orc princess turning out to be a proper shoulder loli.

Verdict: bye!

(happy fairy lolis are unrelated but tamed)

Twin Peaks episode 6

Okay, he’s human (Achievement Unlocked: The D!). Signals were sent and received, and Our Squeeze-Dried Hero scored a hole-in-one. Usually it’s the girl who has trouble walking the next morning, but Our Fertile Heroine took no prisoners. Offscreen, of course.

Verdict: LoL x 3. Also, the new Hero has talents sufficient for me to overlook the plot advancement back in DemonVille.

Saitou’s Last Stand episode 6

After another lengthy flashback comes another cliffhanger, as last week’s messy boss fight turns out to be a three-parter.

Verdict: screw this nonsense.

A simple, timeless theme: girls in and out of their school uniforms. For obvious reasons, many of them have glasses and/or animal ears.

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So I’m down to two shows on Friday, one on Saturday, and one on Sunday, and two of those are on their last chance. If you’re keeping track, yes, that means this one just got dropped:

Isekai Sausage Party episode 5

Divine blessings do not include fan-service. Also, Our Sweets-Greedy Goddess has an annoying voice and doesn’t actually show up in the world, because goddess. Worse, next week is Baby’s First Dungeon Crawl.

Verdict: yeah, I’m about done here.

(“Dear NieR staff, get well soon”)

QA Priorities…

The first listed feature on the iOS 16.3 update notice is:

introduces a new Unity wallpaper to honor Black history and culture in celebration of Black History Month

The second feature listed is:

Security Keys for Apple ID

I’m guessing the first one received more testing.

Best Practices

Starting in April, all new Amazon S3 buckets will block public access by default. You’ll have to deliberately share tons of personal and financial data with the entire world.

Farm Harem episode 5

This week, the elf cheerleaders show off the new house and escape-proof bedroom, Ru lets her hair down and shows off a bit of lingerie, the dogs confirm that cilantro tastes like soap, Our Kept Hero continues silently monologing instead of talking with his companions, and they all play Winter games together. However, what happens in the playroom stays in the playroom, as the animators continue to keep the waifuplay offscreen. If it weren’t for Ru’s lacy bit-of-nothing, you could pretend they’re just roommates.

Verdict: lite cheesecake.

Giant Ars episode 5

In which Our Fighting Paladin is happy to be cuddled by a pair of cute orc lolis until he’s told he can have one for the night, Our Jessica Rabbit continues to be about as sexy as stale toast despite being drawn that way, Our Kid Sidekick does something stupid again before making up for it with his first sensible idea, Our Cat In The Cat Hat nyas at a Cat In A Tiger Hat, a bunch of random side characters dribble out Incomplete Plot Coupons, and a lot of footage is recycled four or five times.

Verdict: can we put Our Exploding Loli into a different show where she gets to run around in wide-eyed wonder and eat like a pig? Those continue to be the best parts of the show.

(heavily-armed loli is unrelated)

In fairness, if they’d just quietly slipped an orc loli into his bed, he’d most likely have plowed her like an elf cheerleader and kept his mouth shut the next morning,

Twin Peaks episode 5

I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy the drama in this duel. How are we supposed to believe that “no D-rank adventurer could beat a B-ranker”, when we’ve already seen Our Mighty Hero one-shot a monster that his opponent’s entire party couldn’t take down?

Instead, we get an overlong fight scene they clearly didn’t have the budget for, because they had to farm out this episode’s character art to a D-rank studio.

Meanwhile, after suffering the indignity of having the wrong man touch her boob, Our DDD-Rank Heroine drops her broadest hint yet, climbing into the sauna with Her Future Husband while wearing only a poorly-secured towel.

Verdict: if she doesn’t get the D-for-Dariel next episode, he’s not human.

Saitou Knows Jack episode 5

What’s the exact opposite of what I wanted out of this show? If you guessed “giant clusterfuck of a boss fight filled with side characters, flashbacks, and exposition, ending in a cliffhanger”, you’re spot-on.

Verdict: fail.

(2B is not happy that her show is on indefinite hold)

Amazon Hokey-Pokey

I ordered something on Wednesday with delivery promised on Friday. Here’s what the tracking status looks like on Saturday, allegedly from UPS:

Wednesday

Carrier picked up the package.

Thursday

11:16 AM Package arrived at a carrier facility.
1:10 PM Package left the carrier facility.

Friday

6:58 AM Package arrived at a carrier facility.
4:14 PM Package left the carrier facility.
6:36 PM Package arrived at a carrier facility.

Saturday

1:11 AM Package left the carrier facility.
1:53 AM Package arrived at a carrier facility.
2:24 AM Package left the carrier facility.
3:09 AM Package arrived at a carrier facility.
4:24 AM Package arrived at a carrier facility.

Note the lack of city/state names, which usually show up in UPS tracking, so this is all inside Amazon. UPS’ own tracking site has a very different view of the progress:

Wed 6:26 PM label created (United States).
Sat 7:24 AM on the way (West Carrollton, OH).
Estimated delivery: Sunday.

Simulated package handoff in Amazon facilities:

Time to break out the .25 ACP!

I had a crown fall out over New Years, found an open dentist 45 miles away that could squeeze me in, and went in to have it re-cemented. In the lobby, I saw something that’s actually pretty rare here, and accidentally amusing:

I guess the good news is that the person who made the sign was able to spell ordnance correctly. 😁

Time to break out the 12 Gauge!

Apple broke DVD compatibility in the latest MacOS Ventura update. I’m guessing nobody in QA even has a USB DVD drive to test against.

So, it seems that Plowing The Fantasy Harem is being adapted from the light novels (14 in print, none translated) rather than from the manga (10 in print, 7 translated so far). So it’s not fair to say that the anime art is better than the source, just better than another adaptation; the handful of illustrations in the light novel are definitely better than the manga.

Either the story was improved for the print version, or the anime is merging in material from later to round out the girls before planting seeds; in the manga & webnovel he bangs them right away without any real character development, or, for that matter, consent (he jumps Ru immediately after seeing her adult-sized nude body, and then she pins Tia down and tells him to take her for a spin). (webnovel: 1, 2)

(Ru & Tia are the only two Official Wives for quite a while, but he knocks up several others along the way (including the pictured elf cheerleader and oni maid), although they don’t seem to be terribly fertile, so it takes a lot of trying (offscreen). Consent issues are inverted with all subsequent waifus by them installing a lock on the outside of his bedroom door)

Speaking of which,

The translated manga are over my usual price limit of $10, but a while back Amazon introduced a beta “points” system for ebook purchases. Since it’s a beta, the link is buried, but it’s $3 off for 300 points, and I had something like 2,500 points in the system.

Full-Trust Dungeoneering episode 5

I enjoyed the roughly four minutes of dragon time, and would have liked to see more. The rest did nothing for me. Next week promises to do nothing for me.

Verdict: maybe I’ll skim through at the end of the season.

Isekai Sausage Party episode 4

They did a nice job on the tavern wench, for the 10 seconds that you see her, and apparently next week finally introduces the first goddess, but Our Helpless Hero also gets his first lesson in combat magic, and discussion of dungeons hints toward the eventual direction of the story. Oh, and the slime shows up after the ED, but hasn’t joined the party yet.

Verdict: goddess-service or bust.

(bust is unrelated, but impressive)

Bofuri 2 episode 4

A series of boss fights, with some minor character interaction.

Verdict: yeah, the first season stopped at the right point; I’m losing interest, because there’s nothing genuinely new or fresh going on.