Okay, “thin veneer of isekai”, but…

Flatcat for the win!

Reincarnated as a sword book 11 is currently the #1 light novel on Amazon US. It comes out a month from now.

Renai Failure 1

Love Flops is worse than I thought it would be. I made it as far as the dog scene, but did not enjoy anything that happened before that point, either. Honestly, I wish they’d have licensed Futoku no Guild instead; it would be less painful to watch, and that’s really saying something.

Urusei Yatsura 1

No. Not even with earplugs to mute the screams (theirs).

(Vermeil would look good in Lum’s outfit…)

Reborn as a mimic with amazing legs

No, seriously, this is a thing that exists. I have to admit, a mimic makes more sense than a slime.

In which Our Catgirl Heroine makes it to town, joins the Adventurer’s Guild, and acquires enough money for a room. I’d say that we’re moving really slow, but if this were the light novel, Fran wouldn’t even be in the story yet.

Our Spunky Receptionist provides most of the exposition and non-combat action this week, having squeezed herself into a uniform several sizes too small.

Floors incoming!

They’re officially showing up Monday morning to start replacing my floors.

They’re officially showing up Friday morning to move everything out of the way for the first stage, including the washer and dryer.

Which means I’ll be spending tonight and Thursday night boxing things back up that I want to be able to find again in a hurry after the work is all done, carrying them all down to the basement, and then packing to spend a few days in a hotel so I can work while they work.

Tactical Bib!

Why, yes, I did buy an “executive shirt protector” to keep my PS90 from covering me with burned powder. I also bought the snap-on brass catcher (which is less intrusive than the ones for side-ejecting guns), but that doesn’t arrive until Friday.

And, no, I don’t intend to reload the brass (I sold my old single-stage press in California, and the PS90 magazine requires special handling), I just want to be able to let friends shoot it at the range without bringing along a spare shirt.

In which Our Plucky Heroine cleans house, meets the neighbors, duels her master, picks up a girl and envies her bustline, and finally opens shop just in time to deal with a crisis! (next episode)

(still pretty much no fan-art, so this is by the light novel artist)

Router woes

Looks like both of my old Shuttle DS61 firewall routers have failing memory. I swapped the original out a while back because the SSD was failing after 8 years, but on Sunday the second box failed while I was downloading a bunch of Windows patches and game updates, limped along for a while after I rebooted it, and then failed again.

Meanwhile, I’d rebuilt the original on a new SSD, so I swapped back, and it promptly failed after a few minutes. Since each crash involved me going down to the basement, I went ahead and built a brand new one on a Protectli Vault 6 Port firewall appliance that I bought earlier this year and had just never gotten around to setting up. So far it’s been rock solid.

With the new rack in the basement, I’m thinking of buying another one and finally setting up OpenBSD’s CARP failover system. Easier than constant trips to the basement. 😁

(and this is where I praise OpenBSD for making it so quick and easy to configure new machines; I was up and running again in about five minutes on brand new hardware, since all I had to do was install the OS from USB, copy /etc from the old machine, and edit the configs to reflect the different NIC type (s/re/em/g); everything else I could do later)

Beast Tamer 2

Our Catgirl-Waifu’s rapid personality shifts would make a personal-injury lawyer cream his pants imagining all the whiplash lawsuits he could file.

Meanwhile, Our Mild-Mannered Hero had no idea that taming a member of a supreme species would grant him a full share of her super-duper physical powers, so now he’s a fucking superman in a fight. Naturally, this gets his pet pussy purring.

In other news, The Hero-Party Bitch Witch gets a clear explanation of just how special he always was, but refuses to believe it.

New haremette next week! As you can see from her fashion sense, Our Red-hot Dragon-waifu won’t settle for light petting.

Breaking bread

I’m not sure how I ended up with too much salt in my dough, but a single taste explained why the loaf didn’t look right coming out of the machine.

Fast service

I ordered a brick of 5.7x28 from LuckyGunner at 2:30 PM Friday. It arrived at 1:30 PM Saturday. Pity the extra PS90 mags I ordered last week (from somewhere else) aren’t here yet.

Related,

This is a very silly pistol. I like the idea of building a pistol around a 50-round PS90 mag, and at least they made it fully ambidextrous, but inverting the magazine puts the barrel way above your hand, as you can see in this NRA quick look video.

It’s apparently on the third or fourth hardware revision already, due to problems discovered (and apparently fixed under warranty) in the early shipments. But you wouldn’t know that unless you went looking on gun forums, because it’s not mentioned anywhere on their web site.

Also, it comes with a custom-fitted hard case, which you’ll have to either throw away or cut new foam for, because while the gun is specifically designed to use with add-on optical sights, the case has no room for them.

Unrelated,

They dressed up Lum’s new voice actress to promote the series. I hope her voice is more enthusiastic than her cosplay; modeling is clearly not her chosen career path, and she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed the experience.

Love Flops

Out of idle curiosity, I watched the trailer for one of the last shows to premier this season (the last appears to be Urusei Yatsura, which will run 2 cours, take a break, and then run 2 more), and the girls are cute. That’s the good news. Other than that, it looks like a real paint-by-numbers ecchi harem comedy with conveniently color-coded haremettes throwing themselves at a guy whose only attractive feature is Being The Protagonist.

(unrelated harem is unrelated)

Posted by a human…

“Stable Diffusion made this”.

Daring Fireball swings and misses

“Smartphones replaced everything Radio Shack sold 30 years ago: still cameras, video cameras, music players, radios, alarm clocks, calculators, tape recorders, and, yes, cellular dumbphones.”

Gruber clearly never set foot inside of a Radio Shack. Probably scared he’d catch something, like a clue.

Let’s take a look at some of the things sold in a 1992 Radio Shack catalog (that took five seconds to find with google):

• electronic keyboards
• police-band scanners
• intercoms
• baby monitors
• PA systems
• bullhorns
• strobe lights
• alarm systems
• air purifiers
• printers
• surge protectors
• RC cars
• electronics kits (not just for kids)
• soldering irons, multimeters, breadboards, ICs, semiconductors, tubes, crystals, LEDs, resistors, logic probes, diodes, transistors, cables, adapters, wire, crimping tools, relays, transformers, fans, motors, switches, fuses, etc

(those last items being the things people went to Radio Shack for long before 1992…)

(sadly, they never sold these)

Things I never expected to write…

Gunsite accepts TSA Pre and Global Entry as proof you’re trainable.

Unrelated,

I appreciate the way Engadget randomly serves up WEBP images to Safari users, the only major browser that has no idea what to do with them. It really speeds up their site.

The Ultimate FN PS90 Accessory

TP-Link delivered!

As promised, they sent the rack-mounting kit for my 24-port switch, so I can clean up the rack in the basement.

I think I’ll celebrate with a Coke…

NSFW

I’m always up for catgirls, but I didn’t put The beast tamer who was kicked out of the hero’s party and met a super cat girl on my watchlist because it sounded like a second-rate mashup of Pharmacist & Princess and Slime-killing Witch, complete with fight-happy red dragon girl.

I was, however, bored and sleepless due to a minor reaction to the bivalent booster and a flu shot, so I watched the first episode (“Dear Crunchyroll, buy some streaming bandwidth”), and Our Cheerful Loser gets one of the most contrived meet-cutes of recent years, jumping in to rescue a catgirl from a tiger, except he can’t fight it at all and she was capable of killing it with a single blow at any time. And then she begs him to tame her, without any explanation of why this is useful or beneficial to either of them, and goes on to praise his super-duper awesome taming power that he thought was nothing special.

Coming soon: Our Taming Hero collects a busty dragon-waifu, twin loli fairy-waifus, and a loli foxgirl-waifu, all extremely powerful and inexplicably susceptible to his super taming power. There’s also a lady knight who joins up to restore the reputation of her order, but it doesn’t sound like she’s on the taming list.

Voice notes: Catgirl = Senko-san, Dragon-girl = Lola from Hidden Dungeon (also the lead catgirl in Futoku no guild and the guild receptionist in Flatcat & Sword), Fairy#1 = Lily from Zombieland Saga, Foxgirl = Kaede Foxia from Realist Hero, Knight = Emilia & Megumin & Sagiri. Our Hero’s most notable role was as Yuito in Iroduku.

Reincarnated as a sword is definitely based more on the manga than the light novels, although it’s thankfully not a page-for-page adaptation. Not that I’ll object to seeing Our Guild Receptionist And Friends providing full-frontal nudity in the bath. Just keep the Fran-service to a minimum, please; she’s 12.

No idea how far they plan to go with the story in only 12 episodes, but there are plenty of long-winded RPG-mechanic discussions in the books that can be chopped. Sword-dad is really obsessed with the stuff, but you don’t really start to get any answers about his nature until around book 9 or 10.

I’m happy with the performances of Our Heroes, but I’m not sure how much of Amanda I’ll be able to take, based on the trailers.

(unrelated catgirl is waiting for better Fran-art)

Futoku No Streaming

The cheesy fan-service harem comedy Futoku No Guild (“Guild of Depravity”), whose first episode aired today, has not been picked up by any streaming service, and there don’t even seem to be any raws floating around yet. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign, given the crap that does get licensed.

I mean, I fully expect it to be absolutely terrible based on the trailer, but that doesn’t make it worse than, say, Dungeon Slave Harem.

Why refer to Management of a Novice Alchemist by this title? Because while it didn’t come up in this episode, once she makes friends with girls closer to her age (starting next episode), she develops a major case of a-cup angst.

This episode is all setup, as every element of Our DFC Prodigy’s backstory is touched on, so they can get on with the show in episode 2. Which, given they only have 12 episodes total, is going to have to move briskly. I’ve skimmed the fan-translation that’s available, and I have no idea what they’ve picked as a stopping point; it kinda just drifts along, with the occasional crisis that they never really have trouble resolving.

(there’s basically no fan-art of this show yet (this is from the cover artist), merchandise is limited to unlicensed shipped-from-China crap, and it doesn’t look like the source has been licensed)