Realist Hero, episode 14

It’s very talky, recapping the first season and picking up all the plot threads, but it’s supposed to be, because the whole point of Our Hero’s success is that he thinks his way out of trouble and then kingsplains it all to his retainers and future wives (who are, of course, proxies for the audience). The OP promises that the rest of the wife harem will come online this season.

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, episode 1

AKA “Girl Genius & Wolfgirl versus The Red Tape”.

There’s a clear affection for classic tokusatsu/sentai tropes here, and some decent scenery-chewing performances. Also some Buy-The-Bluray censorship of Little Miss Wolfservice.

(wolfgirl is sadly unrelated; “Dear fan-artists, get to work”)

World’s End Harem, episode 1

This sounded pretty terrible last season, so the only reason I was interested in seeing the first episode was to find out why it got yanked and rescheduled as soon as it started to air.

Apart from making my brain hurt with a premise that makes even less sense than The White Plague, they managed to come up with the most obnoxious Buy-The-Bluray censorship ever. I don’t know if it was added since last season’s attempt to air the show, but it’s just ugly, a pixelated black scribble across the screen.

Episode TL/DR: it’s like they stole the script from a SQUEEZ game, but left out the zero-G jelloboob animations and the penetration-cam.

Long version: the busty flat-affect chick who behaves like an android but apparently isn’t tells Our Hero who’s conveniently a medical genius that he was woken up from a five-year cryo-nap because he needs to knock up as many women as possible to repopulate the world with boy babies who’ll inherit his immunity to Teh Virus that wiped out almost all the other men and hopefully they’ll all grow up to be scientists and engineers because not enough women majored in STEM so their post-scarcity economy has completely broken down and his insistence on saving himself for the missing childhood friend that it took him 20 years to almost confess to is stupid and wrong and nobody knows why artificial insemination doesn’t work but for some reason 5 billion desperate women aren’t willing to tie him down and force-feed him viagra and his little sister has grown up into a really tasty piece but I’m sure they won’t go there and by the way all the remaining frozen cocksickles including his big brother will expire in about a year so quit yer bitchin’ and get on with the shtupping.

It’s, um, not good.

(in the Big Mac of life, Our Hero is the special sauce)

…and if you go looking for SQUEEZ game promo videos, most of them are so censored that you can’t figure out what’s happening, but some of these mirrors still work for downloading the original Honou no Haramase Doukyuusei demo video. It’s from 2007, but I suspect their final games in 2016 weren’t much different.

It is hilarously NSFW.

Status: successfully appraised at a value that matches the (brief) mortgage. All I’ve got left to do in the next few days is submit a copy of my latest bank statement and the home-insurance policy info, and they can finish underwriting the loan.

Time to get serious about packing and pitching!

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘B’.”

“Boxes.”

“Right. I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘M’.”

“More boxes.”

“Two in a row.”

“And that’s when I shot him, your honor.”

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘E’.”

“I–I give up.”

“Oh come on.”

“This better not be what I–”

“Even more boxes!”

I can’t show you pictures of the new place, because all the ones I have at the moment are now on all of the real-estate sites, so it would be trivial for someone to figure out where I live. And then cross-reference with move-related blog posts that reveal when it’s full of stuff and unoccupied. Except by the seven half-starved rabid wolfhounds, of course.

(sadly, it’s unlikely that any wolfgirls will be streaming games from my new place, although there is a deadbolt on the basement door (“Daddy’s got a place for you, and the door locks from the outside”))

(okay, the deadbolt was actually to keep people out of the basement, because the former owner stored a quite extensive and valuable coin collection down there)

(and did I mention that the basement has a bit more square footage than my current house?)

Komi, season 1 final episode

Part two of the cultural festival went… okay, I guess. Some of the jokes went on a bit too long, and not all of them landed well, but at least some of Najimi’s antics helped advance the Komi. Overall, this show was worth my time, and I’ll be looking for the next season.

In The Land of Leadale, episode 1

• Premise: D
• Story: D
• Character art: D
• Animation: D
• CGI integration: D
• Infodumps: D

Honestly, it felt like there were three different animation teams, and the only one that was any good was the one that just panned over stills of the cast.

(artist is unrelated)

“By the way, did you know that space is big and empty? Would you like to hear more facts about astronomy?”

Astronaut: “Alexa, I said ‘tell NASA we’ve been hit by space junk and need help now’!”

Alexa: “Here’s ‘Space Oddity’, by David Bowie, on Amazon Music.”

Astronaut: “Alexa, stop. Call NASA in Houston now and tell them we’re spiraling out of orbit!”

Alexa: “Calling Bass Pro in Austin. By the way, I can automatically turn off lights at night if you usually turn them off and I have a hunch you forgot. Would you like me to do this?”

Astronaut: “No, no, for god’s sake, don’t turn anything off!”

Alexa: “Okay, I’ll turn everything off now.”

Astronaut: (silence)

(random picture is unrelated)

In other news…

Trying to wade through the mountain of CES press releases, so far I’ve spotted two completely different product categories promising something “quantum” (1a, 1b, 2). I guess that means they can’t be broken down any further when they reach the landfill.

(random picture is unrelated)

Faky McFakeHate

So it turns out that during one of the actual insurrections of 2020, the police-radio chatter about “right-wing violent hate group” Proud Boys was faked by the Seattle police.

The repeated attempts in 2020 to take over or burn down government buildings, usually with employees trapped inside, were not fake, and the left-wing violent hate groups responsible were not only not punished, they were actively supported by Democrats holding offices at the city, county, state, federal, media, and celebrity levels.

(random picture is unrelated)

Unrelated,

I guess I’ll have to go to another grocery store in a day or two, since the one I was just at was “less than fully stocked” in multiple departments. Almost as if there were something wrong with the way things are being run…

Nothing that another month of mask-wearing won’t fix.

This time for sure!

Upcoming as in “they both start on Saturday”…

Realist Hero 2

Unlike some other recent series I could name, this one did a reasonable job of adapting the light novels without degrading into randomly-selected scenes and highly-compressed infodumps.

(picture is unrelated but ducky)

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department

Giving it a chance for four reasons:

4. Director: Testament of Sister New Devil

3. Series Composition: Cat Planet Cuties

2. Art Director: Astra: Lost in Space

1. half-naked wolf-girl

Sadly, she doesn’t always dress like Liru, but the promo picture has promise.

The return of Best Girl Beelzebub!

Eventually, as a second season of Killin’ Slimes and Collectin’ Cuties has been greenlit.

アヒル隊長 is a better search term than ラバーダック. Just sayin’.

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A year ago, I spotted the trailer for a Japanese live-action adaptation of the Heinlein novel The Door Into Summer. Today, I discovered that it’s on Netflix, so I just watched it.

It hasn’t been that long since I read the book, so I think I can fairly say that they did a surprisingly good job of keeping the bones of the story intact. Perhaps the most interesting change was that they removed the whiff of “grooming a 12-year-old girl into becoming your future wife” that was in the original, and made Our Heroine Riko a 17-year-old who inherited a full set of brains from her inventor father, Our Hero’s mentor. Honestly, I figured they’d have kept that bit, because Japan.

Heavily streamlined, of course, and updated with self-aware humanoid robots. They couldn’t have Dan Soichiro spend months figuring out what had happened and how to fix it, and modern technology has long since passed the point where the novel’s inventions would look impressive on screen. In a nice touch, however, Our Hero does use a very nice drafting board to put the final touches on the patent drawings for his inventions.

Spoiler: while there are robo-girls, they do not look like this, at least not while they’re working:

Unrelated, Dear Dominos,

I think you intended this to be reassuring, but it has the opposite effect on me:

Two layers of pepperoni sandwiched between provolone, Parmesan-Asiago and cheese made with 100% real mozzarella then sprinkled with oregano.

This is one of those ambiguous phrases that leaves you wondering precisely what legal landmines they’re navigating around.

In Komi we trust

Naturally, Komi’s class chooses to run a maid cafe for the school festival. Naturally, new weirdos come out of the woodwork. Naturally, Tadano ends up in drag as one of the maids. Fortunately, there are some small moments of progress in communication, with just a hint of relationship-advancement.

This will apparently be a two-parter.

When I say that this has been the second-best show of the season, it counts even though I only watched three. The best, of course, was Restaurant To Another World 2.

Girls und Ponies

Girls:

Pony Girls:

Why you pay for house inspections…

1. Half a dozen corroded water-pipe joints in basement.
2. Dishwasher leaks.
3. Jacuzzi tub drain leaks.
4. Utility sink drain leaks.
5. Repair & recharge needed for HVAC system.
6. Visible evidence of termites in basement.
7. Radon mitigation required.
8. Secondary cooktop not fully-functional.

Since the sellers are motivated, we don’t anticipate any problem getting them to pay for items 1-7. We didn’t bother including #8 on the defect notice, since the cost of fixing an ancient 12-inch Jenn-air electric cooktop likely approaches the cost of replacing it, and honestly, I’m not sure why there’s a secondary cooktop at the far end of the kitchen anyway.

Since my plan is to upgrade the current range to something like this, I don’t really see a need to have a second small cooktop. I’d rather use that space for a coffee bar and under-counter pullout trash/recycling bins.

Related, for the rental-truck portion of the move, I’m thinking that I can easily arrange things so the back of the truck has heavy and bulky low-value items that block access to more valuable stuff, lock it with an Abus padlock, and lock a heavy-duty chain around the gas pedal and steering column. And carefully pick our hotels based on well-lit parking in front of the lobby, of course.

J: “Alexa, three minute timer.”

A: “3 minutes, starting now.”

A: “Would you like to begin your day with a guided meditation from the Real Simple Relax skill?”

J: “Alexa, shut the fuck up.”

…

J: “Alexa, play the song ‘the house of marcus lycus’”

A: “Capital Og from iheart radio.”

J: “Alexa, stop.”

And yes, it reports that she heard it as “alexa play the song the house of marcus like us”; this was 100% repeatable.

Adding the name of the album A Collector’s Sondheim to the request resulted in a complete failure, rather than playing something completely unrelated, because it heard the name as “sometime” or “sundheim”.

The album is available, and I can select it in the Amazon Music app on my phone and send it to the nearest Echo. But that wasn’t enough for it to find the song on its own. It turns out that “iheart radio” was one of more than a dozen skills that were enabled for my account without me ever asking for them. That list included such gems as “cat raiser”, “alexa prize taskbot”, “audacy”, “white noise”, “rain sounds”, “ocean sounds”, and others.

After disabling all of those unwanted and unrequested skills:

J: “Alexa, play the song ‘the house of marcus lycus’.”

A: “I can’t find the song the house of marcus like this.”

J: “Alexa, play the song ‘the house of marcus’.”

A: “The House of Marcus Lycus (From A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), by Bob Gunton, George Hearn & others, on Amazon Music.”

(song plays, followed by a lengthy uninterruptible “just so you know” that offered to let me switch her voice out for Samuel L. Jackson’s; maybe because I keep swearing at her for her bullshit)