Race: prum (halfling).
Height: 100cm.
Age: 15.
Ethics: situational.
Occupation: lifts and separates.
Kemonomimi: at-will.

Episode 6 of DanMachi finishes off the second light novel’s worth of story, focusing on the tiny, cheerful, mendacious Lili, who hides not only her motives, but a smoking-hot body. Sadly, every potential screenshot showing her without her snug-yet-concealing robe involves her being beaten up by large ugly male adventurers (seriously; you get lingering cheesecake shots of her as she’s smacked around, which is Not My Thing). This has somewhat soured her outlook on life, leading to the point of episodes 4-6: what happens when a genuinely nice person pets a whipped puppy.

Since Bell is Our Hero, and this is a harem comedy, it’s no great spoiler to say that things work out in the end, or that the next arc focuses on Bell’s primary fixation, the flat-affect blonde sword princess (who, by the way, apparently has her own spinoff novels now).

A better-than-expected translation of the first two light novels is available on Amazon (1, 2). That is, you can still see the Japanese grammar peeking through, but it’s not filled with the clumsy constructs common to fan translations on Baka-tsuki, etc. It succeeds in telling the story, and fills in a lot of details that make for some puzzling moments in the anime.

One thing of note is that the novels are very light on description, apart from breast size and hairstyles, so Hestia’s famous ribbon was definitely the work of the cover artist. Lili’s figure goes entirely unmentioned, largely because her dog-ear disguise convinced Bell that she was a beastman child rather than a halfling teen. I’m sure this attitude will survive the truth for a while, leading to a future Compromising Position that makes her an official haremette.

Or maybe if she wants him to notice, she’ll have to upgrade her wardrobe to one of the classics:

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Here, posted a week ago. The comment includes “see you next week”, but it’s a bit early to get your hopes up…

Our executive admin came by asking if there was anything she could use to convert some photos from color to black-and-white. Assorted people have Photoshop, but she didn’t want to take up anyone else’s time, she just needed something quick to paste into a slide/report/whatever.

Trivial with Preview.app on a Mac (in fact, hard to avoid, since the misnamed app autosaves even accidental changes made to any image or PDF you view…), but she couldn’t find anything in a stock Windows 7 install that would do it. I vaguely remembered having tripped over some image-modifying tools in Microsoft Word, so I pasted a work-safe sample photo into a new document, right-clicked, selected the obvious-looking “Format Picture…” item, and found tools for cropping, resizing, and recoloring. Ten seconds later, I right-clicked the photo again, selected “Save as Picture…”, and we were done.

It was the summer of 1981, and I was hanging out with my dad at a cottage in Bear Lake, Michigan. I was a little bored one afternoon, flipping through the latest issue of Omni magazine, and came across this:

Four pictures, a very small amount of text, and three tennis balls. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been standing at the top of a hill, though…

My first rings were carved from an old oil painting with a jigsaw, by a family friend; they were sort-of round. I think my first clubs were Jugglebug, picked up at a game shop in the Lane Ave Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio. I became a fair 3-ball trick juggler, but never really had the patience to get serious; in college I taught my friend Andrew the basics, and he later ran off to tour with a pro for a while. (this Andrew, I think; we fell out of contact decades ago, but it looks like the right guy. I should ping him)

Goddess of the Hearth
If you had to hang out with a Greek deity, I’d go with Hestia. She never married, just cooked food, lit fireplaces, took care of travelers, and basically just chilled out at home. All-around cool lady.
    -- The Greek God Family Tree

While the show is apparently ripping through the source material, it’s managing to do so in an entertaining and amusing way, and this Hestia is clearly the patron goddess of Tumblr, Pixiv, Yandere, and anywhere else that cheesecake fan-art is accepted.

In the past I’ve found Cory Doctorow vaguely amusing as a gullible technophile and leftist shill, but this is bald-faced lying. Also libel.

"The 'Puppies' are a coalition of right-wing and white-supremacist groups who pushed a slate of ideologically pure nominees onto the Hugo Award ballot, complaining that you could no longer judge books by their covers, and that science fiction had changed to reflect the world since the 1970s."
    --- Cory Doctorow, lying son-of-a-bitch

This is what he thinks of SF fans who like books he doesn’t like. It would cause me to stop buying his books if I’d ever started.

SFWA proposes a method for handling the orphan-works problem, and subtly knifes their customers:

A growing percentage of e-book licensing transactions (often erroneously referred to as "sales")...

When Tor offers a “potentially award-winning” (now that several people have withdrawn from this year’s Hugo nominations, anyway) ebook for $12.99, and the paperback for $13.50, I’d like to know exactly why I should settle for a DRM-laden “licensing transaction” instead of a good old-fashioned “sale”.

For that matter, $13.50 for the paperback? Fuck that. If we get a free copy in the Hugo voting packet, I’ll read it. Otherwise, there are plenty of other good SF books to read; I can wait until this one drops to a reasonable price.

Last time my sister and I were in Japan, one of her happiest discoveries was the nearby restaurant that served Katsu Curry Udon. Indeed, next time we’re in Kyoto, I suspect it will be at least a daily event. Sometime after, I casually suggested that one of our other mutual obsessions would work in this dish: Gyoza Curry Udon.

Oh yeah, that worked. I did cheat a bit, though:

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