(with varying degrees of success)

Of the various light novel and manga series I’ve been reading, most of the good ones are either released very slowly or just dead. So I look at Amazon and try out something new occasionally, and it’s increasingly full of fail and faux-Japanese “LitRPG” (a self-applied label that made my oh-hell-no list over five years ago).

• Mushoku Tensei (as Pixy put it, “reincarnation of a slime”): volume 1 is a tough slog, because the author went out of his way to make the protagonist repellent, and even his attempts to “do better” in his new life are hampered by his basic sociopathy. I’m told he gets better around book 3, which is approximately 1.5 books too late.

• In The Land Of Leadale: the books are more coherent than the anime, but still suffer from a fundamental lack of things for Our OP Heroine to actually do. It all comes crashing down when she’s reunited with her frenemy from the game era, who reveals what’s really going on, including the fact that the game was originally written specifically for her. And she kind of is the game now, even though the world is also real. Not going to lie here: that explanation did not make sense…

• Private Tutor To The Duke’s Daughter: I’m not sure who the audience is for a conflict-free story where the modest, handsome, insanely OP protagonist obliviously narrates his acquisition of an underaged currently-platonic harem of heiresses, all the while believing himself to be underpowered and not fit to marry any of them. It reminds me a lot of Littlewitch Romanesque without the sex scenes.

• Reborn To Master The Blade: Our OP Legendary King gets reborn as a girl (OP from infancy!) and quickly grows up into a lush-bodied teen hottie with twin appetites for food and combat, and a complete lack of a sex drive. Meanwhile, the world has gone to shit since now-her time, and plot coupons are doled out very slowly as she rampages across the land as a squire desperately trying to avoid responsibility so she can just beat up people and monsters. The cast quickly spirals out of control as very little progress is made towards uncovering What Went Wrong.

• Disciple Of The Lich: Our Hero is a gullible reincarnation from Japan who mouthed off to the gods and got dumped into the lowest level of a lethal dungeon, where he was rescued by an undead tsundere necromancer who power-levels him as an excuse to keep him with her longer, which he’s too dumb to figure out, even when he finally goes to the surface world and facerolls every enemy he meets. He’s so convinced that the world is super-dangerous that he inflicts the same training on the first girl he makes friends with, so they can faceroll together while his jealous teacher stalks them.

• The World’s Strongest Rearguard: this one is actually fun, with the harem antics kept under control by the fact that they have two clearly-defined missions they’ve been working on since book 1, and while they’re progressing through the dungeons at a blistering pace, they’re not completely OP, and must get better to deal with the challenges they face each book. Not high art, but consistently entertaining, although I wonder how long Our Back-Door Hero can remain oblivious to the fact that his always-on powers make the haremettes finger themselves to sleep every night (off-camera). Yes, I skip over the stat blocks.

• Solo Leveling: the translated comic is way overpriced for how much material you get in a volume (remember all those looooong vertical panels? they get broken up across multiple pages and end up as the primary constraint on how much story gets told); the novels have progressed well past what most people read online, and remain interesting.

• Gun Gale Online: I am so sick of Squad Jam.

• Banished From The Hero’s Party… (McPharmacist & Waifu, which I have to specify because there are a bunch of these now): this was a lot more coherent than the anime, but I’m losing interest as Our Slow-Living Couple keep getting dragged into big conflicts, and Our Recovering Sister Hero’s brocon trends more and more towards the sexual. But she’s willing to share with women she respects, which he’ll be horrified to eventually learn.

• Now I’m A Demon Lord!: there can be no conflict when Our Dungeon Lord is backed up by the power of the most insanely OP dragon in the world, who’s also his loli waifu.

• Reincarnated As A Sword: the manga oversexualizes Fran, and the “another wish” spinoff manga is at best adequate, but the novels are good stuff.

• Survival In Another World With My Mistress: Our Hero is not only OP, he is a certified miracle from the gods, and if it weren’t for the massive stamina boosts he gets from leveling up his skills, he would be dead after a single night spent satisfying his ever-growing harem. Seriously, he’s fathering an empire with girls of over half a dozen species, and I don’t think the author even keeps an accurate count of how many bedmates there are after a while. And they keep facerolling all opposition, to the point that he’ll probably end up ruling the world, or at least servicing all the women in it.

• The Executioner And Her Way Of Life: I abandoned the anime, and this too after a while. TL/DR: everything you’re told about the world at the beginning was a lie, and the reveal is way too long and tedious.

• The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter, or as I think of it, The Dungeon Harem Only I Can Enter But Never Seem To Get Around To: the anime had some squicky bits about him basically training his already-obsessed little sister into being a Dom, but after N books, nothing has really changed in the harem dynamics. All the girls want him, none of them have put out yet, and little sister is the girl most likely to be the first to make a serious play for his dick.

• A Late-Start Tamer’s Laid-Back Life: I can’t remember anything that happened in this, except that everyone in the game squees over how cute his pets are.

Unrelated,

I just had a refrigerator moment and realized there is a significant plot hole in the final episode of Hoe Harem. No, seriously; stop laughing. Yes, in a story that was already falling apart every time they stopped to explain things, the ending has a real whopper.

(also unrelated, in recognition of the end of Ash’s decades of on-screen Pokemon battles, we celebrate the Original Best Girl of the series)

Another double batch of 3D cheesecake, this time picking through everything downloaded in 2016 and 2017. 2018 will either require severe editing or multiple posts (5000+ pics).

Certain young ladies were working very hard those years, so they turn up more than once a lot.

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In which Our Divine Fox Loli’s application for Waifuhood is formally accepted, but we don’t find out if her powers made Our Taming Hero even more OP, because what’s important is being recognized by the guild and the town as The Real Heroes, leading Our Top-Heavy Guild Receptionist to offer them a great deal on a house with room for the full harem and any future expansion packs.

With one catch: it’s haunted. Good news, though, because not only is the cranky poltergeist a gorgeous maid with a bustline second only to Our Dragon Waifu, her battle to expel the intruders is quickly ended by a brand-new power that’s never been mentioned before. Because of course Rein just happened to spend an afternoon learning ghost taming when he was a little boy in The Village Of Infinite Taming.

Our Luscious Ghost Maid doesn’t get the full waifu treatment, but he can force her to obey, which in a better world would result in some naughty fan-art.

Wrapping up, Team DickHero is run out of town without even a sandwich, further cementing their leader’s desire to destroy Our Taming Hero and the girls he rode in on.

And so we bid a not-terribly-fond farewell to the fall season, and stare into the bleak abyss that is the winter season. For anime, I mean; it’s supposed to be back up to 55°F by Thursday, although it’s going to rain every day for a week. Gives me time to seal the front door, buy a shovel, and sign up for snow removal service. 😁

Bonus Christmas Cheer!

NSFW

Since I’m stuck inside for a few days (fun fact! I missed that my comprehensive landscape-maintenance plan did not include snow removal, and of course no one’s in the office until the 27th, by which time it should have finally started to melt), I’m scrubbing through 3D cheesecake archives going back to at least 2008.

Therefore, today’s theme is “oldies but goodies”, in which the girls aren’t any older than usual, but the date I saved them to disk is. That said, it’s been nice to see a number of glamour models still working into their thirties in an industry that usually discards them much younger (I’m looking at you, Ai Shinozaki, and by that I mean I’m looking at you! Yum).

For both 3D and 2D, my archives are kept de-duped with pdq, but they’ve been accumulating faster than I’ve been blogging, so the plan is to browse by date, and anything that doesn’t make the cut gets dumped onto the NAS, where it won’t be picked up by future runs of my shuffle scripts.

This double batch gets me caught up through the end of 2015, with lots of familiar faces well-represented. Next one should get me to mid-2018, and then it starts to get crowded; either I do multiple posts for each month, or start applying my deathmatch rules.

Bonus Christmas Cheer!

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(🎶 fins to the left, fins to the right, … 🎶)

A-Cup Alchemist 12 (fin)

In which Our Little Orphan Alchemist grapples with an obvious decision, in order to generate uncertainty and set up the telegraphed happy ending. Group hug!

Flatcat & Sword 12 (fin)

A satisfying finish to the spider-dungeon story, as well as the expected revelation that Our Cleavage Elf has a past connection to Our Triumphant Kitten. The only real surprise was the gainaxing action by Big Bad Mama Spider. I really would have preferred to see that animation applied to Nell and/or Amanda.

Post-credits, they went right into a teaser for the next story arc, so hopefully they’ll get the second season onto the schedule soon.

(I’m running out of Fran-art that isn’t a little heavy on the Fran-service)

Hoe Harem 12 (fin)

Exposition that raises more questions than it answers, literal divine intervention that hurts as much as it helps, a big fight that ends because the villain kinda lost interest, and a haremette hangout. The ending is written as if they expect to get another season, which is highly unlikely.

Case in point: Our Hoe-hum Hero meets up with his childhood buddy, and after muddying the plot, invites him to visit the capitol. As he walks away, the guy darkly mumbles, “I can never leave this village”. Yeah, it’s probably true to the source material, but why even spend the time to bring it up unless you think you’ll be able to animate that arc someday?

(Our Latest Loli is stunned that her story was wrapped up so abruptly and incompletely, with no guarantee that Our Evil Twintailed Mysterious Murder Maiden won’t just come back and wipe out her home again tomorrow; it’s not like there’s anyone capable of stopping her)

Beast Tamer 12

“There’s no way we can possibly defeat this foe, unless we suddenly gained the ability to repeatedly cast Instant Teleport, which… Our Freshly Tamed Divine Fox Loli Waifu can do!”

Meanwhile, Team DickHero asks their boss if they should intervene, since, y’know, we’re all about defeating the demon lord, and there’s a, y’know, demon horde wiping out the town we’re currently in. Which he naturally refuses because he’s directly responsible for the mess and knows it. Are we actually sure he’s the Chosen Hero? Maybe we’ll find out in episode 13!

Meanwhile…

Snow! Wind! Ice! Temperature dropping like dangling plot threads in a single-cour anime series! Me, not wanting to go out there for any reason!

(okay, that would be a pretty good reason; I could at least open the door long enough to let her in…)

Frigid Update!

It turns out that the one opening in the house that does not have weatherstripping is the front door. This message brought to me by 25 mile-per-hour winds and -4°F temperatures. Good thing I have all sorts of bubble wrap from unpacking my Japan goodies to stuff into the gap until it warms up enough for me to attach some; it's supposed to be back up to 40° by Wednesday, and 58° (!!) by next Saturday.

Fortunately, I've gotten used to not using the front door while they were rebuilding the porch and steps...

Winter Watch?

So far, I’m mildly interested in the second season of Bofuri (the lather-rinse-repeat powering-up of Maple gets old after a while, and I think the first season stopped at a good point), and will at least give the first episode of Nier:Automata a shot because y’know, her. Most of the rest are second-to-Nth seasons of things I didn’t watch before, or the usual beaten-to-death isekai themes, or just lame. I mean, what can you say about a season where the big fan-service comedy is about being turned into a puppy and adopted by a busty high-school girl, guaranteeing plenty of low-angle camera work?

A-Cup Alchemist 11

According to Sarasa Feed’s Art Of War, preparation is the key to defeating a powerful foe. Therefore, the first half of this episode is devoted to gathering materials and making weapons and protective gear suitable for taking on a Salamander that’s triggering earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. After preparation comes execution, and by now it should come as no surprise that Our Alchemical Wonder Girl is an ace at executing things, even if she does need a little boost to Give Her All.

Amusing cameo by Our Mysterious Masked Mistress. Clearly, great alchemical minds think alike, at least when it comes to pointless domino masks.

I’m expecting a sappy happy-ending finale next episode, with just a hint of yuri.

(Sarasa’s not the first heroine who needs to be carried home after casting a big spell…)

Flatcat & Sword 11

So She’s Fighting A Spider, So What?, in which Our Depowered Kitten refuses to give in to despair, poison, and pulverized internal organs, holding out long enough for Sword-Dad to come to the rescue. Woof. Special bonus elf-cleavage as Our Mothering A-Ranker breaks out the big guns. Woof.

However they wrap it up in episode 12, there will be… Flatcat Season 2! (date unknown)

Hoe Harem 11

Happiness is a warm hoe, with two haremettes bent over… to pick vegetables! Then a series of random events leads to meeting Our Latest Loli, who lures Our Heroic Hoe-er away from some Really Important Weeding for an Overseas Solo Adventure that starts to get grim, until A Sudden Twist explains why they wasted an entire episode killing off Our Childhood Girlfriend.

Unexplained is how You’re-Not-My-Real-Mom knew to use Reaks’ name to explain her presence. Also the whole dead-and-buried thing, but I’m sure that’s going to feature prominently in the next episode’s exposition. Now, as for Our Mystery Angel who’s been hanging out in the opening credits waiting for someone to bonk Al over the head, will there really be enough time in the final episode to explain her as well as everything else that’s going on? I vote “no”.

(because there’s still basically no fan-art for this show, we’ve secretly replaced the key characters from this episode with Folger’s Crystals GGO battle lolis)

Beast Tamer 11

In which Team Harem rescues the hostages and wipes the floor with the bad guys, while Our Taming Hero uses last week’s new power to free Our Fox Loli from captivity by… taming her! Then the evil plot backfires because of course he’s now immune to instant-death and all other negative status effects; that’s just what Ultimate Girl Power does for a guy.

But wait, there’s more! The backlash from Asshat #2’s failed ass(hat)ass(hat)ination attempt summons a giant cliffhanger! Team Harem, Fight-o!

This one goes to 13, by the way, so if I manage to catch up before Saturday, I can watch the big finish Christmas Eve. Because I have no intention of driving anywhere when it’s 1°F after days of mixed rain and snow, and it’s a major drinking holiday.

Vacationally-speaking,

Higashi Honganji, the temple pretty much everyone sees in Kyoto because it’s just up the street from the station, had a special night-time event while we were there where they turned the Shosei-en garden into a moonlit book store. My sister looked up the English version of their site to see what it was about, and was immediately turned off when she saw that they’d be serving hot cow piss.

The folks at Calpis really need to contact all the online translation sites and get them on the same page.

(speaking of vending-machine drinks, I found the Georgia Emerald Mountain “special blend” canned coffee (blue can) to be quite drinkable, hot or cold; this is of course because the “blend” refers to milk and sugar, while most of them are quite bitter black coffee)

Unrelated,

Homebrew doesn’t seem to notice or care that I upgraded my Mac to Monterey, other than that it’s stopped complaining about Catalina being old and stable. None of the installed packages were altered in any way.

MacPorts, on the other hand, simply refuses to run until you go through a convoluted upgrade reinstall process. This clearly could be scripted, but the closest they get is having a TCL (!) script for the package reinstallation step.

Homeward-bound

I can haz front steps! After the cement and mortar finishes curing for 48 hours, anyway. They spent today scrambling to get plants into the ground before the upcoming storm and freeze. For their own benefit as well as mine: they need their trucks and equipment back to prep for the fallout. Snow removal is a big part of their business this season.

A-Cup Alchemist 10

In which everything happens all at once: Our Klutzy Gather Girl turns out to be the daughter of an impoverished noble house served by the family of Our Busty Gather Elf, and they’re so deep in debt their best offer is an arranged wedding, but the prospective groom is the son of the SoB that Team Alchemy just bankrupted so clearly there’s some kind of scam involved, and then Our A-Team sets out to solve The Mystery Of Giant Flaming Rage Bear Mountain while quickly making a bundle to help with the family debt(s), which leads to a nearly-fatal encounter with Tougher Monsters, and when Our Overpowered Alchemigal chops them into stew meat, there’s a sudden volcanic eruption that releases An Even Tougher Monster.

It’s like they took a look at the episode count and suddenly rushed to cram it all in before the end of the series.

Flatcat & Sword 10

In which excessive exposition and physical comedy lead Our Dysfunctional Dungeon Delvers to drop their guard, only to be caught in a trap. Suddenly deprived of The Power Of Sword-Dad, Our Curry-Mad Catgirl is forced to fight… The Cliffhanger!

(unrelated, I’d be happy to see a naughty spinoff series about the girl who appears in the how-to-learn-water-magic portion of the exposition…)

Hoe Harem 10

In which it’s like the previous episode never happened and we’re back to the wacky harem hijinks, with Our Happy Hoemonger picking up a new girl in the woods and carrying her off to his bed, leading Best Girl Ruri to assume the worst (but still come to the rescue anyway). The actual wacky plot is the worst yet, resolved with the power of… asparagus.

On the bright side, Our New Girl cleans up nicely, but her promise to steal Al away from his harem as soon as she’s old enough is doomed to failure, since she has no idea just who she’s up against. I mean, she works in a pendant shop, and the opposition includes a magical princess, a half-dragon adventurer, and a hero-with-a-capital-H. Her only chance is if it’s a naked mud-wrestling match, in which case the winners will be everyone watching.

(unrelated Tsundere Elf is here to remind Netflix that they haven’t resumed running Uncle yet after its production woes)

Beast Tamer 10

In which Asshat #1 (Teh Hero) meets Asshat #2 (Loli Collector And FoxLoli Kicker), and joins forces to kill Our Taming Hero. Next episode. Also, we finally find out what special power he gets from Our Twin Fairy Loli Waifus, after they wondered why there didn’t seem to be one last week.

The Last Good Knight finally shows up and hires Team Harem to clean up the corrupt knights who enable Asshat #2 to get away with his crimes. Given the relative power levels, this takes about two minutes, and mostly happens offscreen. Our Good Lady Knight gets to take down her boss in a classic samurai-movie face-off, which ought to count for something.

IMHO, A#2’s villainy was a bit gratuitous. Seriously, he demands that Our Twin Fairy Loli Waifus be handed over to him as sex toys, orders his guards to kill Rein to get his way, orders his surviving guards to murder the innocent townsfolk if Rein doesn’t surrender them, and then pays the knights off to cover up their failure, and the rescued townies then reveal that he does this all the time, openly kidnapping women to abuse in his mansion. But that wasn’t enough for the writers, who then show him keeping an N-tailed loli foxgirl in chains and battering her with his boots to make himself feel better. Twice.

Seriously, just give him a mustache and have him twirl it. We get it, he’s a villain. And so is Teh Hero, who does his own clean-shaven mustache-twirling.

The mistake shared with Hoe Harem is someone thinking that light-hearted harem hijinks isn’t enough, and there has to be A Serious Subplot somewhere, which is like a rap break in a bouncy bubblegum k-pop tune.

Unrelated,

My sister and I both ordered yen from our banks before the trip, taking advantage of the excellent exchange rate, which the Japanese government has managed to reduce a bit since then.

Unexpectedly, both of our banks split the money into equal numbers of ¥10000, ¥5000, ¥2000, and ¥1000 bills. ¥2000 bills are a recent innovation that are actually quite rare in Japan, and sometimes difficult to use. Most machines accept them, but human clerks are usually surprised, and often briefly confused. They were, however, a huge hit at flea and craft markets, where vendors were excited to see them, and treated them as collectibles.

I’d still have preferred to have most of the money in ¥10000 bills, just to reduce bulk, so next time I may ask for maybe 20 ¥2000 bills with the rest in ¥10000, and just break a few right away. (we both had credit cards with no foreign-transaction fees, but it’s still not unusual to run into cash-only stores, even for fairly expensive items; and of course the flea markets and craft markets run on cash)

Speaking of which, the best place I found to get change was the capsule-toy change machine in Akihabara Station, which would take a ¥10000 bill and give you 8 ¥1000 bills and 20 ¥100 coins. Other large banks of capsule-toy machines probably have similar machines, but the ones in Nakano Broadway looked kind of dubious, so I didn’t try them.

(bubble wrap wasn’t the only padding available at Don Quijote…)

In home-improvement news,

I’m kind of wondering about the progress of all the outdoor work, with the weather promising to drop by 30°F this weekend. They’re here with two crews every weekday, simultaneously doing the stonework and putting in the new plants, but none of it looks like they’re actually finishing. Particularly the steps leading to the front and back doors, although they made enough progress at it today that I at least know what they’ll look like. I’d kind of like to have a place for delivery drivers to drop off packages without keeping the garage door open.

Side note:

I found Musk’s “should I stop running Twitter” poll to be a hilarious bit of trolling. Obviously he has new executive candidates in mind, and the poll didn’t have a date on it, so he wins no matter how many bots stuff the ballot box. And also gets a nice list of active bots.

A-Cup Alchemist 9

In which Our Intrepid Adventurers make a run on honey in order to get flush, and discover that Our Alchemical Genius is kind of shitty at providing important safety tips, but everything comes out in the end, and they paper over the cracks in their relationship.

Then their parents show up!

Flatcat & Sword 9

In which Our Combatative Kitten whips a whiner and gets whipped by a whipper, undercutting the rumors that her promotion was less about the sword and more about the tail.

No curries were harmed in the creation of this episode.

Hoe Harem 9

The Tale Of The Feral Loli, in which First Girl doesn’t live long enough to become Best Girl, and the reason Our Hoe Lord sticks to farming is revealed to be heartbreak (figuratively and literally). Real downer after all the slapstick comedy and harem antics.

(unrelated kitties to lighten the mood…)

Beast Tamer 9

I know you’re thinking, “what this show really needs is more time spent with The Asshat Hero And His Terrible Party, and maybe another Completely Unrelated Asshat to harass the girls and try to break up Our Taming Hero’s party”. No, wait, no one was thinking that.

As expected, the tamer-on-tamer fight was brief and resolved with a completely new power that’s never been mentioned before. A slight twist is that the thieves weren’t entirely in the wrong, and the person who hired Our Harem Heroes wasn’t entirely in the right, giving off a faint whiff of Very Special Episode, complete with Moral Lessons Learned.

In the end, though, the things that really matter (at least to Our Twin Fairy Loli Waifus) are headpats and hotdogs.

(unrelated headpat-receiving ponygirl is unrelated)

Unrelated,

I finally bit the bullet and ‘upgraded’ my Macbook Air from Catalina to Monterey (after testing it extensively on my work-supplied Mac for months). The #1 annoyance is the reduced contrast everywhere, with small gray fonts and minimal separation between window content and decoration. So I turned on the ‘accessibility’ option to increase contrast, which broke the menus in Edge’s InPrivate mode by significantly reducing their contrast (now black text on a dark gray background). Sadly, Edge doesn’t let you customize the theme for InPrivate mode; there are a number of unresolved support discussions about how the way the current visual separation between normal/private works is really stupid, going back to before Covid was just a line item in Fauci’s research funding.

It looks like I’ll have to upgrade my phone and ipad to 16.2 this week as well, since the latest zero-day security patch to 15.x is only available if your device can’t run 16. Fuck you with a toaster, Apple. Actually, these days, perhaps an air fryer would get the point across better…

My motive for the upgrade? Too busy to finish migrating off the Mac before New Years, and Microsoft has stopped upgrading the version of Office that runs on Catalina. Adobe is still providing updates for the working version of CC, but the latest version of their core apps doesn’t run, so that was a consideration as well.

(Apple of course would prefer that I upgrade to Ventura, which is still in early Beta)