“I felt a great disturbance in Hyrule, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly delayed until Spring 2023.”

CrunchyCashGrab

Crunchyroll’s free-with-ads anime tier is basically going away. The (shrinking!) backlog will still be available for now, but nothing for continuing shows, and only the first three episodes of new shows.

(gotta crunch ’em all!)

Coming in October…

The Flatcat and Her Humungous Sword.

No idea if it’s going to be a good time-killer. There shouldn’t be any A-cup angst, at least, since Our Catgirl Heroine is only 12, and apparently completely oblivious to adult topics.

Before and After

Looking at the averages for my current city versus my new one, violent crime “score” (not rate) from 38 to 8, property crime “score” from 45 to 28. This is a pretty vague comparison, since crime is not uniformly distributed around cities, but it at least suggests that I’m moving from the good part of a city with some problems to the good part of a city with less problems. That also has 1/8th the population.

And since the only problems on my block in the past 20 years were one car being broken into (that had an electronics equipment visible on the back seat) and one empty house being taken over by just-graduated teens for a mildly-destructive party (which ended when the cop across the street came home in his squad car), I’m feeling pretty good about it.

(my preferred form of personal protection is unrelated)

Nth Party

It has been 2 days since I argued
with an idiot on a forum.

There is a very chatty Discord loosely associated with the Nespresso subreddit. It’s generally pretty friendly, but if you turn your back on it for a few hours, it’s not worth trying to respond to the hundreds of on-and-off-topic messages that showed up in your absence.

But sometimes you catch something right away, like the person who wanted to draw a distinction between Nespresso-branded pods, pods “manufactured for another company by Nespresso” like Starbucks, and clone pods that vary in their compatibility. He said about the Starbucks and Nescafe pods, “we call those 2nd-party pods”, and I questioned both the “we” and the novel and confusing use of “second party”, a term that has a well-defined meaning in everyday use.

I think he’s about 19, so he was quite certain that his construct made sense, and that it was pointlessly pedantic to disagree. Sorry, kiddo, but if your goal is to communicate, don’t choose a term that you have to explain to everyone you use it in front of, every single time.

I don’t know if he continued arguing about it. Discord has basic killfile functionality, although you still see a “message blocked” placeholder every time they post.

My archives are strongly biased toward smiles and other lively expressions, so consider this a Minority Report. Also, I was at the dentist twice this week, and I’m going back Tuesday, so I’m kind of burned out on teeth right now. 😁

This is a long set, so if you want to skip directly to the naughty ones, I won’t judge you.

Bonus Sukabu:

(picture is related, and also the first thing Sukabu has posted to Pixiv in over a year)

more...

Breaking News!

…and I mean “breaking the promise they just made to be ‘all your anime in one place’”, in which Crunchyroll is dropping a whole bunch of shows after adding a whole bunch of others that were on Funimation.

Um, thanks?

How A Naughty Duchess Gave The Queens Realistic Training, episode 25

In which a 500-year-old great-grand-milf blackmails the waifu harem into attending Bride Skills 101, while Our Realist Hero is off tasting yakisoba sauce.

One more to go. Will they get another season to bring on waifu #5, make some babies, and finally hold a wedding? The team doesn’t seem to be feeling any pressure to force a wrap-up.

(bunny/mummy is unrelated, but wrapped up!)

Kuroitsu, episode 11

In which the OP finally gains classic sound effects, Our Kuroitsu boldly goes where no peon has gone before, Our Executive Staff retreats, Our Wolfservice Girl faces a fate worse than death, and Our Temp’s fate is sealed. Oh, and whoever makes the bubble-bath soap at that hot spring apparently works for the buy-the-bluray department.

This is really a world-building episode for the upper echelons of Agastia, so most of the regular cast is absent, which is an odd choice for the next-to-last episode. Honestly, it feels like it was strung together from the sort of short gag comic that typically fills a few pages at the back of a manga collection, with an art budget to match. Lots of off-model close-ups and panned stills, even for a show that was already a budget production. This may be the only episode that I feel no real urge to rewatch.

As usual, here are screenshots from last week’s episode:

Bonus: Our Blader can’t fight this feeling any more…

Very Expensive Toaster,

Very Cheap Translation. Seriously, if you’re going to import a $333 single-slice toaster, you really ought to spring for something better than Google Translate. Especially since it requires an external transformer to keep it from catching fire when used in the US.

Highlander: Demon Warrior

Today I Learned that the Japanese sub-title for the first (and of course only) Highlander movie was “Akuma no Senshi” (悪魔の戦士).

I’m idly curious what changes they might have made to the story…

Skills: Death Metal Voice

This is exactly what I want to see on the CV of the lead voice actress in an isekai show. I’m not sure I’m kidding.

Also half-Japanese/half-Egyptian, but prone to terrible makeup that makes it unclear if she’s blessed with hybrid vigor.

She hasn’t had any significant roles in a show I’ve watched, so I have no idea if she’s any good. The flatcat in this show, on the other hand, was Emma in Hidden Dungeon, Crim in Interspecies Reviewers, Melty in Kuroitsu, and Rizu in We Never Learn.

Oh, that slave-harem isekai anime!

In which Our Hero ends up in a fantasy world with cheat powers and buys an adventuring party of slave girls of different races. And, yes, the original web-novel had “slave harem” in the title, and removing one word doesn’t change the… “thrust” of the story. I gave this one a quick skim a while back when it was originally announced, and his girls are so thrilled to serve that they even train and discipline his newest acquisitions for him. From what I saw, it quickly degraded into an internal monolog that was equal parts “how can we become more OP” and “which one(s) will I fuck tonight”.

This one’s scheduled for summer, and between the concept, the character art of first-slave-girl Roxanne, the fact that I can only find one familiar performance for one of the two lead voice actors, and the director’s less-than-stellar track record, I’m not interested.

(picture is far too wholesome to be related)

Coffee vs coffee

Nespresso has sued Peet’s over their compatible pods. What makes this interesting is that they’re suing over trade dress, which is a “creates confusion in the marketplace” handwave. But Nespresso doesn’t sell pods at any retail outlets but their own, and the packaging of the Peet’s pods stresses their brand, with “compatible with Nespresso original” in much smaller print. And they’re generally stocked right next to house-brand clone pods, so if you go after Peet’s without also going after Target and Safeway, you’re clearly not really upset about “confusion in the marketplace”. (Starbucks-branded pods are actually manufactured by Nespresso, by the way)

What’s really going on is that Peet’s merged with competing coffee megacorp Jacobs Douwe Egberts in 2020, which also owns things like Gevalia, Maxwell House, L’OR, Senseo, Tassimo, and tons of other coffee companies around the world in markets where Nestle would no doubt love to increase their market share.

Eldritch, ho!

This picture is not the result of an accidental encounter between an innocent fan-artist and an ancient horror from beyond space, time, charm, spin, and good taste. It is in fact the official mascot of the Osaka Expo 2025.

[Update: yes, Rule 34 kicked in real fast for this one]

Season-enders

Lots of shows have their final episode this week, and a few Spring shows are having their debuts. Fortunately, it’s not over yet for the two shows I’ve been watching. Unfortunately, the shows starting this week aren’t ones I want to watch.

I didn’t even put these on my NO list, but yeah, not a chance: Thermae Romae Novae, in which an ancient Roman bath designer ends up immersed in modern Japanese bath culture; Shin Ikkitousen, the show that constantly gets beat up but never dies; Estab-Life, in which the future is a furry theme park run by AI, with a story that’s part of a multi-media made-for-microtransactions franchise.

Fuck you, paypal.

I’m making another pass through all my online accounts, updating addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards (if they don’t automatically pick up the billing address change)..

Paypal won’t let allow me to delete my primary home number (which is an Ooma VoIP line), or change it to my new home number (which is an Ooma VoIP line), because your home number can’t be VoIP. I had to set my mandatory home number to be exactly the same as my mandatory mobile number, set it to be primary, and then delete the old home (VoIP) number.

“How about ‘no’, Atlassian support guy?”

So there seem to be (at least) three completely different circumstances that trigger the Atlassian clusterfail that bit me in our Jira upgrade testing. The first, where a brand-new node is starting up for the first time to run the upgrade; the second, where a new node is attempting to join a cluster so it can perform the upgrade; and now a third, where the simple act of restarting the application on one of the nodes after the upgrade has a chance of failing.

The symptom is exactly the same in all cases: core plugins fail to start within the 5-minute timeout. When we hit failure type #3 today, I opened a fresh support ticket, and the immediate response from support was “y’know, starting plugins is expensive, so try increasing the timeout to ten minutes”. I managed to be polite in my rejection of this “workaround”.

I am quite certain that that would not solve the problem, because the logs I sent them clearly showed that the same node that had timed out succeeded on a subsequent startup, without even one minute of delay, and that three other nodes also started up quickly.

Despite having included this information in the initial ticket, we’ve now had three back-and-forths where the tech is still hung up on increasing the timeout. As I commented to a co-worker, this is a perfect example of “how to fail J’s troubleshooting interview”.

Meanwhile, when I opened the ticket, their system auto-recommended a likely-related issue, in which the workaround was “fall back from Java 11 to Java 8”. Given that we’re using the Java included in Atlassian’s own installer, if that really does fix it, it’s an Apple-worthy QA fail spanning at least 5 minor releases.

Hey, Apple, you’re holding it wrong!

Most Apple sites and services, internal and external, went down yesterday for several hours.

(it’s, like, apples and oranges!)

…and Microsoft’s holding it wrong, too!

Github is down right now. Before my first cup of coffee.

Locks!

I don’t know how many times I’ll need premium padlocks after the move, but I have no intention of making it easy for someone to crack open my POD or my truck, so I went to Taylor Security and Lock and ordered a set of keyed-alike ABUS Granit locks. They had to order from the factory in Germany, so it took a few weeks, but arrived in plenty of time for the move.

I also bought a matching ABUS security chain on Amazon, figuring I can make it harder to just steal the entire truck at night if the gas pedal is obviously chained to the steering column and the door.

Edge, lord

Microsoft Edge has some quirks. The one that’s been annoying me recently is where I visit an HTTPS URL full of pictures that are also loaded via HTTPS and everything displays correctly, but when I right-click to download one of those pictures, it sits in the download queue until I manually click and agree that this file will not harm my computer. The default in the dialog box is to delete it, of course.

Yeah, if they really thought that JPEG was going to harm my computer, they shouldn’t have displayed it in the browser in the first place. It appears this is tied to a mixed-content-blocking feature, but everything’s HTTPS, so I’m guessing there’s an edge case (no pun intended) that they’ve failed to test adequately. Perhaps they outsourced QA to Apple…

“edgelord”

Apparently, a bunch of light-novel translators have decided this bit of internet slang (which I had to look up) is the correct word to use to translate chuunibyou. Related, someone on Wikipedia decided that “edgelord” should just be redirected to their page for “poseur”, which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it…

Realist Hero, episode 24

In which are delivered: 1 infodump, 1 ultimatum, 1 baby. Each advances the story in different ways, with Our Tomboy Princess using the last to propose going into production herself. Also, I think this episode had the most on-screen blood in the entire series.

Note that Our Injun Princess will not be joining the royal waifu-harem.

(picture is actually related, for once)

Kuroitsu, episode 10

In which versatility is a mixed blessing, Our Vampire Executive takes action, and Our Chief Of Staff reveals a shocking secret. Our Temp Minion, however, is absent.

Screenshots from last week:

Shang-chi

Finally watched this. IMHO, this was the best Marvel movie since Doctor Strange, and not just because Wong is in it. I was pleased that the hip-hop that features prominently in the trailer is less present in the film.

Disclaimer: I should note that for a variety of reasons, it’s also one of the few I’ve bothered seeing since then. I am cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Multiverse of Madness film, but not so much that I plan to see it in a theater as soon as it comes out.

(picture is as unrelated as I could make it…)

Spring anime

I don’t know that I’ll be watching things right away, between work and moving, but the season has a few things of interest.

Yes

• Shield Hero 2

• Komi-san 2

• Demon Girl Next Door 2

Maybe

• Skeleton Knight - the trailers do not appeal to me, but some people seem to like the source material, so I’ll give it a shot.

• RPG Real Estate Agency - this looks… fluffy. I might need some relaxing fluff at some point.

No

• Oni-pan - not a lot available about this original series, but the premise is three cute oni girls use the power of special panties to transfer to a human middle school and do… something.

• Annoying Healer - the trailer is too shouty, the healer is too loli.

• Virgin Road - what’s an executioner to do when her latest victim turns out to be an unkillable airhead who falls for her? The only thing I like about this is the concept of killing off overpowered Japanese teens who get summoned to another world.

• Dawn of the Witch - set in the world of Familiar of Zero, the trailer for this one has a strong smell of “loser gets a harem”.

• Love after World Domination - he’s a super-sentai hero, she’s the leader of the enemy mooks; together, they fight crime secretly date.

(picture is unrelated, but Wonderduck is getting closer…)

Fun with buttons

We’ve secretly replaced the Javascript-based spoiler/nsfw buttons with Folger’s Crystals pure CSS. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Speaking of Javascript, I’m using a small Edge extension called “JavaScript Toggle On and Off”, which does exactly what it sounds like, and includes both whitelists and blacklists, so that you could, say, permanently block JS on a site that has a lot of really sketchy ads embedded. Like certain cheesecake sites I link to…

Drawing, in perspective

This pose-book-style photoshoot (site NSFW! Disable Javascript!) of 15-year-old Ami Manabe is an excellent demonstration of terrible glamour photography that, if used for reference/tracing by an unwitting artist, creates even more horrible cheesecake.

It wouldn’t have been good even if the photographer hadn’t used a wide-angle lens for most of the shots, but it would have at least been useable for reference, if, y’know, you don’t know any actual teenage girls who’ll hold still long enough to let you draw them. 😁

not-safe-for-tracing

I still have to get a POD and some people to load/unload it for me, but I’ve booked the truck I’ll be filling with stuff that moving companies either won’t take or won’t adequately insure (or that I simply won’t risk with them), as well as worked out the route options. I’d like it to work out that my brother and I arrive in the truck around noon on one day, empty it into the house, and then have both the POD and the Internet installers show up the next day, but that part’s not firm yet.

In other news, I have been persuaded that there are multiple children who would be sad to see Mooch disappear from the neighborhood, so I won’t be stealing a porch cat when I go. This also simplifies the logistics of the final move, but he seems to be prepping himself for it. Or else the nicer weather has just increased his range of part-time homes.

I’ll just have to find a new catgirlkitten after I’m settled in.

(note to self: make sure the IP block at the new house geolocates outside of Russia…)

Review fatigue

It’s getting harder and harder for me to read anime commentary at ANN, because the kids writing it haven’t learned the simplest and most significant lesson of all. I have no interest whatsoever in examining anime through the lens of race/gender/politics as articulated by someone with the life experience of a freshly-graduated liberal-arts major.

Follow The Science!

Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science has a new exhibit featuring fossil pokemon. I am sympathetic to their goal of attracting more kids in a way that might actually get some of them interested in the sciences. I just find myself glad that it’s happening in Japan instead of the US, so it might not get polluted with leftist claptrap the way the “science” exhibits at the De Young were the last time I went there.

Not one of mine…

“Suddenly transported to a fantasy world I discovered that my obsession with Minecraft-ish games gave me super-crafting powers but everybody hates humans so the only way to survive was to become the slave of a gorgeous mega-busty dark-elf virgin who immediately gave it up for me and introduced me to all her sex-starved monster-gal-pals so I think I can make this work”

Apparently volume 2 comes out real soon now, and the blurb says he’ll be slipping it to all sorts of fantasy girls (mostly off-camera) while exploring his world-breakingly-OP crafting tree. Probably looking for the viagra potion, since a quick peek at a translation of the original web-novels revealed that his harem eventually grows to well over 20 girls, one of them lured to his bed by the power of hamburgers.

Amusing interview

We had a post-interview huddle recently for an opening in my group, and we all agreed that we liked the candidate and wanted to work with him, but that he’d be a better fit for a different group (and I hope they agree). A few people expressed a team-fit concern that he gave off a lone-wolf vibe where he considered himself the smartest guy in the room and preferred to work alone.

My response to that was that he reminded me of me about 20-25 years ago. 😁