(🎶 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)

Catching up a week at a time…

A-Cup Alchemist 8

In which cute girls plot cute revenge, discovering and destroying a threat without even resorting to a two-parter. Also, our Darling Flat Protagonist demonstrates precisely why I’ve been calling this show ACA by “jokingly” threatening her more-endowed friends with Magically Induced Mastectomies.

(she did not, however, threaten her busty young assistant’s assets)

Flatcat & Sword 8

So, when a mustache-twirling villain is a catman, is that whisker-twirling? I ask purely for information, because as soon as Our Traumatized Kitten overcame her fear, his parts were no longer part of Our Story, and everything shifted back to slapstick and cuteness.

Hoe Harem 8

In which Prince Humperdink is marrying Buttercup in a little less than half an hour… oh, wait, wrong story. Let’s just say that the soundtrack for the successful rescue of Our Princess Bride was Yakety Sax, with Our Chicken Farmer running away from a confrontation between haremettes, and then throwing cold water on their wifely ambitions with a cliffhanger revelation that No, There Is Another. (and he’s not talking about Halfdragon Helen)

(no, it’s not Yor, either, although SxF is so popular right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if the characters start crossing over into other shows)

Beast Tamer 8

The special no-swimsuit beach episode, in which Our Taming Hero finally gets an eyeful of sweet, sweet waifu-flesh, while the audience just gets a full course of Buy-The-Bluray flare and steam.

For next week, they’ve set up a fight with another tamer, which if it goes like every other fight in this series, will be over before it starts.

Unrelated,

The landscapers are simultaneously building a new back patio, rebuilding the front porch, regrading the side yard, setting up proper drainage, and planting on all sides of the house. As a result, the only way in or out right now is the garage door, and the driveway is blocked by their equipment during the day. So it’s a good thing I work from home.

Monday, the interior contractor sent a guy to touch up all the wood stain, rip out the over-the-range microwave and prep for the new ducted range hood, and rip out the old second half-size burner so that space can be turned into something useful. I expected them to be back on Tuesday to continue, but they didn’t show until late in the afternoon, and then only to remove trash. Turns out the new range hood that was ordered six weeks ago still hasn’t arrived.

I can get by with a torn-up kitchen for a while (although I obviously won’t be hosting a family Christmas…), but gosh, wouldn’t it have been nice if they’d done that work while I was out of the country for three weeks, as originally planned?

[pictures are mostly unrelated, but vacation-y]

I took a sterile laptop with me, with nothing on it but a handful of applications with no saved credentials and a copy of 1Password (including the new ssh-agent functionality).

The most useful application was Docker, with a single container running Pi-hole, so that I had ad-blocking on the hotel wi-fi. I still had to deal with ads when looking things up on my phone, but I didn’t spend a lot of time surfing the web anyway.

Our first Tokyo hotel was the Hyatt Regency in Shinjuku. Decent place, but not really convenient to anything, including train and subway stations. We stayed there because my sister got it free with points.

Our Kyoto hotel was the Miyako, just across the street from Kyoto Station. The location was relatively convenient, but it’s on the south side of the station, and the train and subway lines are more accessible from the north side, as are most of the decent restaurants. We spent a lot of time walking through the station to get anywhere. The biggest two flaws of the Miyako are the number of large tour groups that use it (lots of bus traffic, and don’t even try to get into the breakfast buffet), and the incredibly stiff mattresses.

Oddly, despite being a 600-room tourist hotel adjacent to the main train station, most cab drivers didn’t seem to know about it.

Our second Tokyo hotel was the Aloft in Ginza. Terrific location, with lots of good restaurants and convenient train/subway lines, and decent-sized comfortable rooms (with very comfortable beds). The two notable flaws are that it has no tubs (just excellent showers) and the chain is self-consciously hip, with dim mood lighting everywhere, including the elevators and the rooms. Seriously, if you wanted to see yourself in the bathroom mirror, you had to sit down on the supplied stool.

As usual, we flew in and out of Haneda, which is much more convenient than Narita. There’s not much to do outside the secure area, and mostly high-end duty-free shopping inside, but it’s only 30 minutes from most hotels in Tokyo.

We used the SmartEx app to purchase our Shinkansen tickets. It’s improved since we used it in 2019, with the ability to generate QR codes that are directly readable by the gates, so you don’t need to pick up paper tickets any more.

Japanese taxis are small, and even the largest van we could get through Uber for the trip home required a round of Luggage Tetris for my 3 checked bags and my sister’s 4. Why, yes, we did do some shopping. Including luggage shopping.

The A.L.I Edge suitcases are really nice, by the way. Made in Japan, nicely designed, strong and light. We each bought one, her at the Kyoto Yodobashi Camera, me at the Shinjuku Bic Camera. (they don’t have A.L.I luggage at all their stores, and we didn’t find them at any other stores, mostly because the majority of department-store luggage stores are single-brand)

A lot of places that had been on my planning page for 2+ years didn’t survive Covid, or did so in extremely reduced form. Basically, the more a place relied on tourist traffic, the worse off it was after more than two years of lockdown. In some cases, their web sites still made it look like they had a substantial retail presence, when they’d actually shifted most of the merchandise to their online stores.

This included one of the kumihimo suppliers on my list, who no longer had a real Kyoto location, just a small gift shop. Fortunately, I found one in Uji and another in Kyoto that had plenty of pre-cut silk bundles in stock, so I’m set for all sorts of braiding… when I finally set up the stands again. (they’re almost done with the interior work on the house)

The masks are slowly coming off. They’re held in place by social pressure rather than mandates, and it’s starting to fray. Subways will probably be the last place to maintain 100% compliance, but by the end of the trip we could see more faces than at the start.

We never got properly adjusted to Japan time. We were pretty much up by 3 AM every day and ready to crash by 9 PM. The masks did a lot to reduce our energy during the day, making it hard to stay up later; I went through three different types of mask, finally finding some on Amazon that were large enough to be relatively comfortable and that didn’t fog my glasses too badly. The “anti-fog” wipes for your glasses were useless, since the moisture that would have turned into fog instead collected on the inside as liquid, making things blurry.

Felbinac, elastic knee braces, and hot baths kept my knees mostly functional, but the constant stairs were a literal pain. Tokyo was a lot worse than Kyoto, because the subways are so much farther underground. By the end of the trip, pretty much anything that had stairs lost our business. Probably for the best, since otherwise we’d have spent even more money on our final visit to the Kappabashi kitchen/restaurant district.

The folks at Hanaroku were amused the first time we showed up and skipped the course meals to order just the A5 wagyu and the Kagura saké. By the third visit, they were giving us a private room. 😁 Sadly for our plan to show up early for our reservations, the first-floor bar hasn’t reopened yet. Sadly for our wallets, it’s currently being used to show off quality ceramics and other nice products.

We had dinner with two of my sister’s co-workers, both great people. She had tasked them with picking a good restaurant (because they were sick of taking people to the Kill Bill place), specifying “sushi or steak”. They chose an izakaya in Ginza that was easy for them to get to from work, but we arrived first, and were baffled by their choice. The main draw was their selection of saké, which was fine, but the English menu was full of squid balls and other weird shit. There was literally nothing that we were willing to eat… on the English menu. They had all kinds of normal izakaya food, but only on the Japanese menu, which really made it feel like they didn’t want foreigners there.

Closer to home, it turns out the first cable cut is free, so the landscapers won’t have to pay for reconnecting my Internet unless they cut it again. Which, given that it runs across an area they’re actively grading and planting, isn’t impossible. A least they’re now actively working with the cable company on getting the new line clearly marked when it’s buried later this week.

Early in the week, the Internet went down at my house, which I knew about because my security cameras stopped being remotely accessible. I asked my stepdad to go over and check things out, since there had been some storm-related outages in the area. He reported that everything seemed fine, and that the landscapers had started work on the patio.

When I got home from Japan last night, my connection was still down, but all the gear seemed functional, so I called for service. This morning, I took a look outside, and I think I see the problem: the buried cable isn’t completely buried any more, and the service box on the side of the house is open. Apparently someone on the landscaping crew fucked things up, so this will not be a free service, and will have to come out of their bill.

Catching up on anime and uploading some vacation pictures will have to wait until I’m connected through something better than my phone.

This was aligned with my interests:

Despite the enticingly-bound Cutie Honey just inside the entrance, let’s just say that the reality of Nakano Broadway is not as exciting or interesting as the version in Asobi Ni Iku Yo!. A lot of storefronts are empty, a lot of the rest are Mandarake specialty shops these days, and nothing really opens until noon.

I bought some collected capsule-toy cats, a Girls Und Panzer tank with the girls riding it, and an Onsa-chan with bike. I was strongly tempted by the large Rory Mercury figure, but it didn’t have a box to protect her polearm, so it would have been “fun” to pack.

Also, it was over $150.

Most of the figures were from recent shows I don’t follow; nothing was as old as the Happy Lesson figure I found earlier, except for some major collectibles with matching prices. Lots of raunchy porn, including a sex-toy shop.

This, also, was aligned with my interests:

I was quite surprised to see a framed print of the cover of one of the original Dirty Pair novels displayed in a bookstore that was half art gallery in Ginza Six. “Oh, that would be cool”, I said, and then saw that it was signed, from a limited edition of 30, and cost ¥880,000.

This was not the most expensive artsy thing on display, by several orders of magnitude…