Tokusatsu Lovers

Despite the premise, I may have to try out Love After World Domination, just because so many of the voice actors are familiar. Souma, Aisha, Maria, Roroa, and Hakuya from Realist Hero, plus Chiaki and Grunhilde from Bodacious Space Pirates, plus Stunk, Zel, Zelzel, and Maydry from Interspecies Reviewers, etc. Admittedly, most of those are the same people in multiple shows…

The director and series composition credits are a bit concerning, since it’s only the second time for both of them in those roles, and their previous effort together was an ONA called “Cute Executive Officer” that I’ve never heard of. And of course the original manga creators were new at it as well, so I’m… not hopeful. I certainly don’t expect it to be as good as Kuroitsu, although the promo suggests it got a bigger animation budget.

(picture is unrelated)

I have a ton of books

That’s not just an expression. A 12x12x16 box filled with hardbacks weighs in at 45-50 pounds, and one filled with paperbacks at 30-35 pounds. If you figure an average of 40 pounds, the 70 book-filled boxes staged inside my front door come to roughly 2,800 pounds. That’s 1.4 US tons or 1.27 metric tons, but either way, I clearly have a fuck-ton of books.

The weight limit on the 16ft POD is 4200 pounds, and the weight limit on the 16ft truck is 4300 pounds, so I need to carefully divide up my books between the two, so that there’s room for the furniture and non-book boxes (which should be under 25 pounds, since I carefully separated all the cast iron cookware, and packed comics and magazines into banker boxes that are shorter than the moving boxes).

I’m leaning towards putting 20 book-boxes at one end of the pod and 20 at the other end, to balance out the weight, and top them off with the 10 boxes of DVDs and Blurays, plus a bunch of the comics. Pretty sure the boxes of yarn can go anywhere.

The 600+ pounds of kettlebells will go on the truck.

In the back.

If someone manages to break in for a smash-and-grab, I want them to find large cardboard boxes full of bubble wrap and cast iron. (we won’t lift those boxes; they’re just to keep the bells from rolling around)

…and Guilder to frame for it

Saturday morning, my box-stacking was interrupted by the news that the loading crew I booked through a PODS partner wasn’t actually available that day. Or the next day. Or the next. Or the next. I gave the guy my drop-dead date for having the loaded POD picked up, and he managed to get two companies confirmed, just in case the first flaked again. I have a very busy week coming up soon where the POD shows up, I get a crown replaced, I get a haircut, the POD gets loaded, the POD gets picked up, I pick up my rental truck, I pick up my brother at the airport, we load the truck, and finally we start the drive to Ohio.

Somewhere in there will have to be some good restaurants. I haven’t been dining out much for two years…

House Facts

My new house is 940 feet above sea level. The neighbor 200+ feet behind me is at 950, the street 75 feet in front of me is at 930, and by the time you reach the river two miles NW, it’s down to 700 feet. So the view from my front porch is basically trees and rooftops, and the chance of flooding ever reaching my basement is pretty darn low.

When we had the place inspected, the radon report for the basement came in at 7.1 pCi/L. The units aren’t important, just the fact that the EPA considers 4.0 the maximum “safe” level, and strongly encourages you to consider remediation if it’s above 2.0. After remediation, the tests came back at 0.7, so sometime next year I can turn the ~2400-square-foot basement into useful living spaces.

Which means I eventually get to unpack my ton of books.

Of course, there are other possible uses for a large basement…

NSFW

Car Wars

Once we finish the 2,400-mile drive to the house, I’m going to need a new car. In any other year, I’d be confident that there’d be hundreds of brand-new cars on the lots, with a variety of option packages, and dealers willing to make deals to keep you from walking away, but Everything’s Different Now. I’m probably going to do a 3-year, 12,000-mile/yr lease, so I don’t drop too much cash on a car that isn’t exactly what I want, and can easily replace it once the world recovers from, y’know, the thing. It’s not like I have a commute any more…

Hey, look, a real girl on the Internet!

Shield Hero 2, episode 1

Welcome back to The Grooming Of The Raccoon Child-Bride, AKA Banished From The Bow Hero’s Party, The Insecure Cutie Joined The Other Guy’s Platonic Slave Harem To Become Strong Enough To Impress Her Crush.

In which Our Shield Hero gets roped into a side quest and the stakes quickly escalate from “train the noob girl” to “take on a giant army of monsters”. They don’t waste a lot of time recapping anything, assuming that if you’re watching this you pretty much remember the story and all the players.

RPG Real Estate, episode 1

Crunchyroll delayed announcing their license of this show until Tuesday, one day before the premiere. It didn’t actually get a series page until Wednesday morning.

How is it? Cute girlsmoeblobs doing cute thingsfan-service.

Seriously, this is our first sight of Our Wizard Heroine’s new city:

(that’s their boss, by the way)

And as soon as she walks into the agency, she finds Our Ambitious Priestess chasing Our Childlike Half-Dragon around trying to get her into some clothes. Not long after that, strategically placed soap bubbles protect the secrets of the women’s bath.

(picture is unrelated)

Skeleton Knight, episode 1

I never want to see or hear the OP for this show again. I also never want to hear the ED song again, but I’m willing to look at the CGI model of the busty elf chick until there’s some decent fan-art.

Apart from a few aspiring artists eager to gang-rape the entire female cast, there’s very little on Pixiv right now, which is surprising for a series that has 10 light novel volumes and 10 manga volumes. Of course, since the first episode opens with Our Skeleton thwarting a gang rape with inches to spare, and then shows the extended dance mix ten minutes later, it’s easy to see where they’re getting the idea.

So consider this shot of the ninja catgirl a unicorn chaser.

(don’t know what episode she’ll show up in)

Oh, what happens? Eh, guy wakes up in a fantasy world as his ridiculously-OP avatar, geeks out over it, slays monsters and bandits with insane ease, and cheerfully starts his career as an adventuring suit of armor hiding his skeleton-body. I know there’s more to it, but that’s what they led with.

Demon Girl Next Door 2, episode 1

Absolutely nothing unexpected happens in this episode.

That is, I expected it to pick up right where it left off and be just as good as the first season, and I got what I expected.

Goodwill hunting

The local Goodwill is doing home pickups again. Which is good, since the POD arrives in about a week and I need to stage all the things that are going into it, and figure out if everything else fits onto the truck. They showed up this morning and took everything I had out for them, including the elliptical. They said they’d even take the gun safe if they had advance notice to bring a pallet jack, so if I don’t find a local buyer who knows how to move it, I’ll schedule another pickup as soon as I clear a path.

On that note, it turns out that it cost me nothing to switch from a 12-foot truck to a 16-footer. Less convenient for gas, restaurants, and parking, but an extra ~6x4x6 for free is worth it.

I’m still counting on the cleverness of the packing company at using the entire volume (~7x15.5x7.5) of the 16-foot POD, primarily in not crushing the sectional sofa under a pile of boxes.

I don’t think I’ll need to take the half-dozen boxes of manga that I just found in a closet, though. 😁

Move-in necessities

I’ve got a confirmed installation date for a 600/35 business cable line with five static IP addresses after I arrive with the truck, so I can work from the new house as soon as I unpack my OpenBSD router and wireless. Which is good, since I’m doing a Jira upgrade the following weekend. I could have sprung for 1000/35 and still saved a great deal of money compared to my current Comcast Business line, but I’m actually thinking of getting a second line at some point through their residential service, so I can completely separate work and home traffic.

Upsell A Helper

One of the packing/unpacking partners PODS recommends is HireAHelper. I booked them for both, setting a reasonable unpacking date based on how long they say it should take to get the POD from California to Ohio. The selected sub-contractor contacted me through the site the next day asking if they could move it up a day. Um, no?

Then they called me today on a fairly bad line, saying they needed to review a few things, and proceeded to try to upsell me a handyman, a home warranty, a security system, and an Internet connection. All of which I’d already taken care of. I haven’t decided if I’m going to just cancel now and tell HireAHelper why, or think about it until I get the confirmed delivery date for the POD.

🎶 “I got keys that jingle-jangle-jingle” 🎶

I think I’ve finally switched gears from “I live in this house” to “this is where I store my boxes”. Now, if Goodwill would get out of their Covid mindset and start doing home pickups again, I could finish staging all the boxes for the truck and the PODs (I’ve decided on two, a 16-footer loaded and unloaded by hired help for the furniture, and an 8-footer loaded by me after I drive the good stuff to Ohio and fly back).

I still have to clean out the garage, but a lot of that stuff is already earmarked for a junk/e-waste truck, and the rest will end up in the second POD. I just have to sell off the stuff Goodwill won’t take, like the elliptical crosstrainer, the motorcycle, the grill, the smoker, and the gun safe (which is likely as annoying as getting rid of a pool table, but at least it’s still on the pallet it was delivered on twenty years ago). I’m hoping one of my neighbors will want some of that stuff.

Dear Youtube algorithmists,

I watched the trailer for RPG Real Estate, a show that’s about as clean as you can get in modern anime. 15 seconds in, there was a suggestion in the top-right corner: “HENTAI ANIME SEX”. This is because your search engine didn’t return the trailer posted by the production company, but a repost from some clowns who embedded their own ad links.

You(tube) are why we can’t have nice things.

Shutting my Pi-hole

I had to override the standard blocklists on my ad-blocking DNS proxy, because nespresso.com moved a lot of their main page to one of the CDNs that’s commonly used by advertisers (*.dynamicyield.com).

Cascading Mac Terminal windows

Long ago, Apple decided that tiling and tabs were the only sort of window management anyone would ever want, and removed the menu item to cascade windows. Unfortunately, Terminal.app’s tab and split-window features are horrifically bad, and the start position of new windows is an inadequate offset from the position of the most-recently-opened window, saved on exit, so that the next time you open it you have no idea where the first window will appear.

Here’s a quick Applescript hack to reset the position of the first 9 terminal windows in a clean cascade. Why 9? Because the only way I could get them into the right order was to explicitly send the command-key shortcuts to switch the active window; otherwise they get cascaded based on their current stacking order.

set x to 64
set y to 42
set x_delta to 48
set y_delta to 32

# get the count of open windows
tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    set wList to every window whose visible is true
    set w_count to count of wList
end tell

# select the windows in reverse order, so they're stacked correctly
tell application "System Events"
    set i to w_count
    repeat until i = 0
        keystroke i as string using command down
        set i to i - 1
    end repeat
end tell

# wait until they finish arranging themselves
delay 0.5

# reposition them relative to top-left
tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    set wList to every window whose visible is true
    repeat with app_window in wList
        set position of app_window to {x, y}
        set x to x + x_delta
        set y to y + y_delta
    end repeat
end tell

The most convenient way to use this is to paste it into an Automator action and bind it to a key. I picked Command-Option-C. I didn’t bother with error-checking, so if you have more than 9 Terminal windows or you’ve closed one in the middle, it will beep at you and continue.

More MacFixing

CleanMyMacX was preventing my MacBook from finding software updates (including the occasional “required to support your iphone/ipad” update); I just got a spinning wheel that lasted forever. It took a while to track down the root cause, but since I could still get updates if I booted in safe mode, I wasn’t left exposed to security holes and Apple QA.

Except that my Mac wasn’t rebooting properly, either, so that rebooting into safe mode required shutting it down, waiting five minutes for it to give up on a clean shutdown, and then powering it up while holding down the shift key. That nonsense turned out to be caused by the kernel extension for my 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse.

So, two more reasons to move all of my workflows over to the HP Aero 13.

…after I finish the move. All my 3D stuff is boxed up to go onto the truck, and won’t see the light of day again for at least a month.

Or two.

Maybe three.

Start Dates

Netflix has Komi 2 set for a three-week delay, so the first episode will be April 27th. Shield Hero 2 starts Wednesday the 6th on Crunchyroll. Demon Girl Next Door 2 starts Thursday the 7th on HiDive. So the three shows I plan to watch require three different subscriptions.

Checking HiDive’s schedule revealed that Iroduku just moved over to that service, so if you have a subscription and haven’t watched that one yet, do. Recommended for international air travel, or maybe that was just me.

How A Magical Queen Saved The Kingdom With A ‘Days Of Future Past’ Gambit, episode 26

Inevitably, this was the talkiest episode in both seasons, as Our Retired King explains his reasons for handing over his kingdom and his daughter in the first episode. And this was the short version of the story, lightly skimming over the queen’s history leading up to Our Realist Hero’s arrival.

Surprisingly, they did not announce a third season, and left a bunch of threads dangling with a vague “we’ve come so far, let’s keep going” New Year’s closing scene.

(picture is unrelated due to lack of interest by fan-artists)

Kuroitsu, episode 12

In which Our Agastia fends off a hostile takeover with the aid of massive spoilers, Our Former Temp Minions prove that their promotion was not a mistake, Our Blader once again reveals his greatest weakness, and Our Kuroitsu blows her cover.

Here’s all of the decent fan-art I could find of Our (Evil) Heroine:

…and some screenshots from last week’s episode:

Side note: so far, merging Funimation into Crunchyroll has not resulted in an increase in streaming capacity. Trying to watch this on a Saturday afternoon was pretty painful, with frequent quality drops and pauses.

So the real April Fools joke here…

…is that people thought it was a joke. Yes, the company that makes the catgirl-paradise Nekopara games really is making the doggy-girl game Inupara, despite releasing the trailer on 4/1.

The power of the algorithm

Browsing through featured recently-added movies on Starz, I found Concussion, starring Will Smith. 😁

(demi-chan maid cafe is unrelated)

Fry the friendly skies…

Airbus successfully completed a three-hour flight powered by used cooking oil.

(picture is unrelated, except for the french fries)

The season’s hottest isekai show…

“Bitchslapped into another world by an angry cuckold for making a joke about the town bike”

Oh, wait, my mistake, that’s this week’s Hollywood news.

(picture is unrelated but fishy)

Apple QA, episode 15.4.1

If you upgraded your iPhone/iPad to 15.4, upgrade it again, to fix rapid battery drain and a critical security vulnerability in the “AI” library.

(Osaka Expo 2025 mascot is unrelated)

“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…