“Not that I would lech in your case, no, I got incest repellent. But the sight is nice.”
— Nicholas van Rijn, wishing his granddaughter would go toplessDear Apple,
Bricking my iPad Mini during a software update does not inspire confidence. I eventually got it to reset to factory settings and restore from a backup (by rebooting my Mac and swapping cables and changing ports and force-rebooting the iPad several times), but that only worked because I’m absolutely paranoid about running a manual backup before any of your QAless updates, and it still took most of a day and lost data and login credentials from a lot of apps (iOS backups ignore a whole lot of app data).
What really annoys me is that the same port/cable/Mac combination was successfully able to back up and sync two iPhones and an iPad right before the upgrade failed.
Naturally, reloading from the backup somehow reset all my iCloud and sharing options to Maximum Nonsense and set up Apple Pay on one of my credit cards.
Old Apple: “how can we make this feature usable by people who don’t know anything about computers?”
New Apple: “how can we monetize this pixel?”
Home update!
Good news: my new range hood has arrived at the contractor.
Bad news: they'll install it two weeks from now.
Meanwhile, the landscapers are coming by every non-rainy day and making progress.
Shoveling the slush pile of winter anime
First, the important news: DM Of The Rings is being remastered and re-released by Shamus Young’s family. New episodes are available a week early for their Patreon supporters.
Second, PixyVerse Problems this morning:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cprequest.py", line 630, in respond
self._do_respond(path_info)
File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cprequest.py", line 689, in _do_respond
response.body = self.handler()
File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/lib/encoding.py", line 221, in __call__
self.body = self.oldhandler(*args, **kwargs)
File "/opt/pypy2/site-packages/cherrypy/_cpdispatch.py", line 54, in __call__
return self.callable(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
File "Test.py", line 157, in index
return go(cherrypy)
File "Test.py", line 107, in go
print 'Blew a gasket - reconnecting and retrying!'
IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device: '<fdopen>'
People Suck, Let’s Save The World!
By the way, did you know that this dysfunctional adventuring party is going to save the world? In case the title didn’t tip you off, the narrator makes it explicit at the end of the lengthy exposition of (almost) everyone’s backstory. This is all setup, so there’s not a lot to decide if the show is going anywhere, but the two girls in the party are attractive apart from the wonky eyes, so there’s that.
Verdict: maybe
(dragon girls are apparently the new catgirls)
Manic Pixie Dream Girl And Her Pet Sorceress
This was surprisingly watchable. Surprising because the description was “less than promising”: non-magical princess with magitech based on her past life in Japan teams up with disgraced magical-genius noble lady to make her (the second one) queen. It sounded like the sort of convoluted shojo manga story where everyone is really skinny, has pointy chins, and is slightly gay.
Instead, Princess Lunatic Fan-service crashes into that story and kidnaps the heroine. Wacky Hijinks Will Ensue™. All the girls are cute, so there’s that.
Verdict: yes for now
(note that the source material is apparently quite yuri, which one would hope results in more fan-service down the road)
Spy Class For Dummies
The good news: seven pretty girls carefully separated by hair color, speech pattern, and bust size move into a mansion with a large shared bathtub, which they put to use in this episode. Our PoV gal is the bustiest, and with the names Lily/Flowergarden reeks of fan-service and yuri.
The bad news: they’re all spy-school losers shipped off to be trained for a suicide mission by an autistic superspy who talks way too much without showing a shred of emotion or inflection. Also, the tub is afflicted with buy-the-bluray steam.
Verdict: maybe
Iceblade Exposition Will Bore The World
They’ve telegraphed that this show will include a powerful sexy
sorceress who walks around in naughty lingerie, and that’s not enough
to save it. Seriously, the moment Our Clark Kent arrives at Military
Hogwarts, they tell you who the bad kids are by drawing them badly.
Those kids take turns trashing the Muggle Ordinary just to make
sure we haven’t forgotten that he doesn’t fit in here, mixed with
flashbacks clarifying that he’s The Boy Who Lived, and exposition
gushing about just how awesome the mystery Superboy was that no knows
is right in front of them.
I gave up halfway, and that’s despite being able to watch a full episode of all these other shows.
Verdict: nope
Super Minecraft Farming Powers, Go!
“
ConanHiraku, what is best in life?”“To plow fertile fields, see crops ripen before you, and collect a huge multispecies harem.”
Hopefully this one has a giant shared bathtub, too; the cute girls are the primary draw. Good thing they started with a flash-forward to show them all off, and then bounced them onscreen again in the OP, because the rest of the episode is Farming Sim Tutorial 1, narrated inside Our Magic-Hoe-User’s head.
Verdict: maybe
Giant Ars Beasts
“Wonder Twin Powers, Activate! Shape of… a super loli!”
“Form of… a burned-out mercenary!”
I’m surprised it took so long for someone to rip off the whole Attack On Titan vibe, but I’m definitely not surprised that they made the heroine an expressive super-powered loli who explodes when you shoot her full of arrows.
Verdict: yes for now
(Pokemon Scarlet/Violet Best Girl is unrelated; there is literally only one piece of fan-art for this show on Pixiv right now, and it’s a full-frontal nude of the loli)
Slow Life With Twin Peaks
(aka “kicked out of the demon lord’s army…”)
Our Fallen Demon Hero states that the only difference between humans and demons is that humans can’t use magic. This is while he’s in the middle of being kicked out of the demon king’s army for… not being able to use magic. He then meet-cutes Our Generous Scoops Of Mouthwatering Flesh in the forest and has time to check out the color of her panties before rescuing her from a giant monkey, and promptly freaks out when he realizes he’s in enemy territory and would be killed out of hand if they realized he’s a demon.
Which would have to involve him coming right out and telling people he’s a demon, because as he just said, there’s no visible difference between the races. But giant boobs have their own logic, so he’s willing to stay in her village, and in fact, her house. And become an adventurer, because giant boobs; he stops and stares at them every time he needs to make a decision. Even when her parents are right there asking him questions.
And hey, guess what? He’s actually been a human all along without realizing it, and not only that, he’s got super adventurer powers right out of the box, so good that if it weren’t for the giant boobs, he could move to the city and become a big wheel!
She wears thigh-high stockings to bed, by the way. I’m sure this will come up again. As will the giant boobs.
Verdict: yes for now
NieR: Automata
Yup, that’s pretty much how the tutorial level went, except that on my PC it had better framerate than Crunchyroll. And more panty shots; they avoided them in a few obvious closeups, but once the action got rolling, she pretty much had to flash the camera, so she did.
Verdict: yes for now
Isekai Gold Digger
In which Our Underdeveloped Heroine is not quite killed off by pickup artists filling the role of Truck-kun, instead ending up with the power to freely go back and forth between another world and Japan, where a quick consulation with the memory of her dead brother gives her the idea of moving goods back and forth to make enough money to retire comfortably.
It doesn’t look like there are any hidden depths here. She can world-jump, heal really fast, and as a bonus she asked not-God to give her language powers as well so she can communicate, and the ED shows a large cast of friends and customers, as well as a squad of friendly mercenaries.
Verdict: maybe one more
(unrelated Touhou bunnygirl is unrelated; there are currently two pieces of fan-art for this show, both of them lesbian porn featuring the only two young girls in the episode)
Handyman Is Handy, Man
The good news is that they skip the usual tedious isekai origin story and go straight into Our Handy Hero helping his adventuring party in various ways. There’s no fan-art to speak of, just the original manga artist posting the entire story; the link below pretty much covers the exact events of episode 1, except for some unrelated character intros outside the core party. The characters are pretty much cast directly from TV Tropes: senile wizard, greedy fairy, shy warrior gal, exploding dwarf, etc.
Verdict: maybe one more
Cheesecake Vault, 2018 part 3
I finally have a ship date for the new range hood, which means that it may only be another week before my kitchen is fully functional again. I’ll have to celebrate by making a cheesecake!
DNS considered harmful...
(…by Google and Apple, at least)
I had a little problem where a bunch of web sites started displaying poorly at home (odd layout glitches, pulldown menus that rendered as lists, dynamic image-loading that didn’t load, etc). It happened on my Mac with Safari and Edge but not Chrome, but didn’t happen on my iPad or on a Windows box.
Coincidentally (not entirely…), I had recently upgraded from Catalina
to Monterey on that Mac. After too much poking around, I isolated the
problem to the browsers refusing to accept the SSL cert for
cdn.jsdelivr.net. Except that curl and wget accepted it just fine,
as did Chrome. The catch was that the ones that worked were getting
geolocated to Cloudfront, and the ones that failed were getting
geolocated to Fastly. On the same machine.
TL/DR, I switched my home network’s DNS from Google back to Quad9. That instantly fixed Edge, but Safari needed the extra step of disabling the “Google Safe Browsing” feature that had silently been turned on by the OS upgrade. Apparently whatever cert-based blacklisting they were doing to that specific Fastly node applied to that service as well.
(and, yes, geolocation for my static IP block is all over the place, with some sources thinking I’m in Texas, some in Virginia, and the rest scattered across Ohio but nowhere near Dayton)
Cheesecake Vault, 2018 part 2
The good news yesterday was that the last pieces of my new bedroom set from Handcrafted Amish Furniture Of Dayton arrived. The bad news was that there was a crack in the trim on one of the bookcases that wasn’t caught until they were unloading the truck, so it had to be taken back and fixed. It won’t take long to remove the trim piece, stain a new one, and attach it, but they don’t drive up the gravel back roads to Amish country every day, so getting it there and back again will account for the bulk of the time. And then I’ll finally be able to unpack some of my books. Probably the ones filled with cheesecake…
Speaking of, I split January through July 2018 into three sets, but after that, even at the current size I’ll have to edit pretty ruthlessly to keep it down to one per month.
What’s that rule about clutter? “Does this spark joy?” 😁
Found while browsing anime trailers...
Disillusioned Adventurers Accidentally Upgraded WordPress
Always test your site upgrades in Production!
Your server is running PHP version 5.3.3 but WordPress 6.0.2 requires at least 5.6.20.
This is another “kicked out of the party” fantasy series, where Our Hero bands together with other misfits to make a new, better party. It’s also airing one week early on one network, so raws and possibly even some fansubs may be out of sync with all the ‘simulcast’ streaming sites.
Since I know absolutely nothing about this show, and there’s no web site to tell me, I’ll just post a picture of a busty elf santa’s helper wearing red under-rim glasses.
(I think PHP 5.3.3 is probably older than much of the audience for this show…)
Pixiv: bunnies!
Apparently we’re heading into the Year Of The Bunnygirl, so I’ll do my part. Note that even a tame bunny suit is borderline NSFW when worn as directed, so I’ll lead off with shrine bunnies, cake-shop bunnies, and kimono bunnies before breaking out the big guns.
Cheesecake Vault, 2018 part 1
Happy New Years! I’m off to tidy up the house before family shows up tomorrow for some late Christmas/birthday celebrations. Then I have to tear it all apart again in the hopes that the contractor will be back to finish the interior work sometime next week. The exterior work is being held hostage by rain now that the snow has melted.
And yes, apparently every photographer in Japan had their calendars marked for the day Yuno Ohara turned 18, and she was booked solid for years. Prior to that, she was basically a backup dancer in an idol group, and given the usual career dynamics in Japan, it’s actually surprising that they didn’t get their hands on her (so to speak) years earlier.
