Crunchyroll reports that they’ll be simulcasting the Sword Art Online Extra Edition special episode, in which sister/cousin/haremette Leafa/Suguha learns to swim in the real world, so they can do an underwater quest in the virtual world.

No doubt the next special episode will send the girls to an onsen so Liz can overcome her fear of steam.

They could have animated the one-and-only story with Asuna as the protagonist, but no, they went for the fan-service.

A few Iron Men and Captains America, zombies male and female (including an undead prom queen), a pirate girl who could have been quite sexy if she’d been old enough for her taste in clothing, a lovely princess a few years shy of kissing her first frog, a teen witch who bought her stockings and heels at Fredericks of Hollywood and the rest of her costume at Toys R Us, and the usual assortment of ghosts, vampires, dinosaurs, ninjas, bears, cats, hungry teenagers, etc, many of them barely old enough to lisp out a “thank you”. The youngest were invariably accompanied by rather attractive mothers dressed up as Suburban MILFs.

[young teen girls with black-framed glasses in relatively normal clothing was a big thing this year; they looked to be dressed up as something, but beyond “cute nerd girl”, I couldn’t guess]

Since the neighbors at the end of the street started putting on a haunted house a few years ago, I’ve bumped up my candy supply. I give out large handfuls, so I figured 40 pounds wasn’t going to cut it this year, and bought 11 five-plus-pound bags at Costco. I had maybe a bag and a half left at 8:30. If they’d kept coming for another half-hour, I’d have been out.

Apparently the number one problem with the show was that there wasn’t enough fan-service in the opening and end credits.

They fixed that.

[Update: speaking of fan-service, Nova, Lore, Elza, and Lam are not in the novels. Lore is anime-original, and the other three were added in the manga. Actually, it looks like there are two different manga running, one a straight adaptation of the novels, and the other with extra service. Airi’s bunny-suit is straight from the books, though, and “somehow” Fino and Sara both end up in them as well.]

So, to hide my new Kindle behind a VPN that pretends to be in Japan (so it won’t trigger region-detection forced on the ebook market by publishers), I had to resurrect an old wireless access point and put it behind a machine that could NAT out through an OpenVPN tunnel. I grabbed a dusty old Shuttle from my closet, put a fresh distribution of OpenBSD on it, and then had it lose all of its BIOS settings when I moved it to a more convenient place in the house.

I’d forgotten about the joy of replacing CMOS backup batteries; we’re so spoiled today.

[note: it did not take me two weeks to read this chapter. Rather, it took two weeks of medical tests that failed to find the cause of my chronic fatigue, leaving little time and energy for reading. It’s surprisingly depressing to hear doctors and technicians keep telling you that every system’s in excellent shape, when just carrying your laundry upstairs has you breathing hard.]

So, the morning after the revelatory dinner party, Marika oversleeps and frantically bikes to school. To her surprise, Misa, in a conservative business suit, pulls up alongside and offers her a ride. Making a snap judgement to trust this near-stranger, Marika accepts, and without waiting for Misa to pull over, gets her bike close, opens the rear door, puts one foot up on the outside rail, and tumbles into the back seat, bike and all. A rather surprised Misa makes sure she’s okay, and as she drives, explains that with the piracy business on hold, she’s taken a side job as the school doctor (the current doctor suddenly took a long vacation…). Asked if she did it so she could persuade Marika to accept the captain job, Misa answers that no, she’s there to protect her.

So when Mami excitedly informs Marika that they have a new homeroom teacher, and he’s a good-looking young guy, Marika figures out that it will be Kane before he walks in. Transfer student Chiaki is still a surprise, and in another difference from the anime, she stumbles as she heads to her seat, with a quick-thinking Marika grabbing her sleeve and saving her from a nasty fall. Kane looks around to see if someone tripped her, but Chiaki straightens herself up and apologizes, explaining that she’s always had a problem with tripping over her own feet. As she continues to her seat, she whispers, “thank you, Marika-san”. Hey, wait, how did she know my name…

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This hurts my brain: a 200-page paperback book titled Kindle Paperwhite for Dummies. I’m not sure if it hurts more or less that it’s also available for the Kindle.

(via failblog)