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)

Quick preliminary test of the new camera body’s low-light capability (double-sized if you open it in another tab):

This is the view of the neighbor’s house from my back yard, with no streetlights or other lighting, at midnight with no moon. It’s soft and quite noisy, but it’s clear and in-focus.

It’s also about three stops overexposed, because this is what the scene looked like to the naked eye:

In other words, it was able to successfully meter and auto-focus (admittedly with help from the built-in focus lamp) in conditions where I couldn’t even see that there were fences. Exposure was 1/30 at f/1.2, hand-held at ISO 204,800. By comparison, the latest and greatest iPhone tops out at ISO 12,768 with an f/1.78 lens, which would give a ~1.2-second exposure, if it could meter the scene at all.

Here’s a crop showing what the noise looks like on the full-sized image. Rough, but there’s still some good detail, and it can be cleaned up and sharpened.

No temple, castle, or museum is even close to this dark inside, and I haven’t even tried the built-in HDR features or adjustable Dynamic-Range Optimization yet, so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting clear, crisp pictures of anything I can see. The zoom I’m taking has a constant f/4 aperture, so there may be conditions where it has to use a noisier ISO setting, but I don’t think I’ll need to crank it up to even 100K, much less this setting.

And, of course, I’ll be carrying my small LitraPro color-corrected USB-powered LED light. Which is sadly discontinued now that Logitech owns Litra and just used their IP to build a clip-on light for streamers. It looks like the Luxli Fiddle is the current hotness for pocketable LED lighting, although it’s only half as bright as the LitraPro.

Metering digression: the Sony A7S III’s meter sensitivity is EV -3 with an f/2.0 lens; with the 50mm f/1.2 that’s still only EV -4.5, and this exposure computes to EV -5.5, so it got a little help from the focus lamp, even though it was half-blocked by the lens hood.

Juxtaposition, Twitter style

66% No Yuuwaku revisited

So, quite some time ago I posted the cover art for the Japanese release of Meatloaf’s Two out of three ain’t bad single, which translated the title as “Two-thirds of Temptation”. Randomly, I found two things recently: a fan translation of the English lyrics, and the actual lyrics that were included with the single:

一晩中話し合ってもいいけど、
どうにもならないさ
言うことはすべて言ったよ、
もう何も残ってないさ

一晩中でも泣くがいいさ、
僕の気持は変わらないよ
外には雪が積っている、
僕に行かさないでおくれ

僕は努力した、
君を大切にしてる事を示そうとした
僕は言葉に疲れ、声も出なかった
僕の目からは涙でなく、 つららが下がった

僕に出来ることはこう言い続けるだけ
“君が欲しいんだ、君が必要なんだ”　とね
でももう君を愛することは出来ないよ
さあ悲しまないで
３人の内、
２人が出て行くってのは悪い事じゃないさ

TL/DR: it’s just the first verse, simplified but pretty much on target until you reach the last two lines, which are as far off as the title but in a completely different direction: (roughly) “out of three people, it’s not a bad thing when two of them leave”.

Props to the big G for Google Lens; when I fed it this JPG in the hopes of finding a higher-resolution source (because no one had ever transcribed these lyrics), it couldn’t find one but still managed to OCR almost all of the kanji correctly. The few errors were easily caught and corrected.

Call Of The Night 13 (fin)

In Which Our Animators resist the temptation to wrap it all up and take the high road, continuing the story at a reasonable pace in the full faith that they’ll get a second season, thus allowing Our Surprisingly Sophisticated Hero to calmly refuse Domestication, Death, and the D, and Our Rebellious Heroine to step up to the plate. While I wanted to see more of Our Smoking Nemesis, they chose not to ruin their chance of being able to tell a coherent story when/if they get another season.

Anko Encore:

Dry weekend

I count 11 anime premieres this weekend. I plan to watch 0.

Monday is A-Cup Alchemist, Wednesday is Flatcat & Sword, and nothing else is on my list yet.

Garff!

I’ve had a lot of shipments coming in recently, and I’m used to some of them coming from company names that don’t match the web site. Some of them warn you about this up front, but some don’t, so I didn’t really pay attention when I saw a UPS notification from “Garff Enterprises”.

When I checked the notification, though, it was being delivered to an address in Arizona, and then I googled the company and found out it’s coming from a car dealership in Utah. And then I noticed that it was going to an iCloud email address, and realized that I must have another Evil Twin who thinks his email address is “jgreely@…”.

This time it appears to be a man slightly my senior named “James J Greely”, with addresses in Salt Lake and Chandler. If a really detailed “family tree now” site can be believed.

Switch mounting!

As I mentioned earlier, I lost the rack-mounting kit for my 24-port managed switch somewhere in the move, and the only people selling them, even on eBay, are in Australia, and while TP-Link’s knowledgebase directs you to their online store, they don’t actually sell it. So I sent email to their tech support address asking how to get one, and they’re shipping it to me for free.

Should be here Wednesday.

Dear Discord,

Please stop starting at boot on Windows 11. You’re not supposed to, and both your settings and the OS startup settings agree that you’re not supposed to, and I’ve completely uninstalled you once just in case, but you keep doing it, and I can’t find the double-secret-probation startup method you’re using. Stop it or I’ll sic Yor on you.

(unless you’re into that, I mean…)

Desert Pimp

This is not an aftermarket job; Magnum Research sells it this way.

Playing possum

Had a possum scratching at my back door Monday night. I imagine he was attracted by the lingering odor of chicken in my smoker (27 brined and rubbed thighs that will be devoured by family and friends if I don’t beat them to it), but I thought it was interesting that he was scratching at the door, not the smoker, and that he held his ground when I turned on the lights, made noise, and even opened the door. It wasn’t until I started to step out that he ambled off to the far edge of the patio.

It was like he was expecting a handout, so I suppose I ought to ask the former owner’s son next time I see him, “did your dad feed the possums?”.

Unrelated,

I had half a dozen bird strikes on my front windows Wednesday. I kept thinking it was knocking by the FedEx driver I was waiting on for a signature-required package.

(the driver ended up just leaving the quite expensive package on the porch without bothering to ask for a signature, once again making me glad that my driveway is highly resistant to porch pirates)

Related,

As part of my prep for the (finally!) upcoming trip to Japan, I now have a Sony A7S III full-frame camera body that goes up to ISO 409,600, as well as a 50mm f/1.2 lens. If I can see it, I can take a picture.

No anime for you!

AnimeSchedule.net had Flatcat & Sword premiering yesterday, but apparently that’s only on one network in Japan, and it doesn’t even show up as “coming soon” on HiDive yet. Everyone else is airing episode 1 next Wednesday, sigh.

(non-flat sword-bearing catgirl is unrelated)

Related,

Coming soon, Cute Girls Doing Yuri Things In Front Of A Man Who’s Been Reincarnated As An ASMR Microphone. Not an isekai, but it definitely takes place in a fantasy world, or at least a world that men fantasize about…

(no, not that kind of microphone)

AI-powered laser turret that kills cockroaches

We’ve seen where this leads…

No-crunch streaming

Both of the shows I plan to try watching this season (Flatcat & Sword and A-cup Alchemist, er, “Management of Novice Alchemist”) are streaming on HiDive. Crunchyroll has some good shows on their (partial) announcement, but just not ones I plan to watch.

Three Bodies, One Cour

I had lost track of Amazon’s film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and just discovered that the deal fell through and it’s now being done by Netflix, to be released in 2023. They’re throwing a lot of money and talent at a frankly terrible thriller with a thin veneer of technobabble. Seriously, it’s like Battlefield Earth without the SF content. I mean, really bad.

(Expo 2025 mascot is probably unrelated, and better designed)

I broke the scammer!

I just got a scam call offering “supplemental Medicare assistance”. In response to the first question, I said “I am not eligibile for Medicare”. The computer (complete with phony call-center background noise) proceeded to congratulate me for thinking about my health insurance options, then asked if I had thought about supplemental Medicare insurance. I repeated my answer. It then asked how old I was, and I answered “twelve”.

Silence. Two minutes of silence, then it finally hung up.

“Trending” on Twitter

Saw this one in passing: “Roevember is coming”. My immediate response was, “…followed by Dobbsember”. 😁

Achievement unlocked: new house networked!

• 5U vertical rack in basement with PDU & 48-port patch panel
  • 1 coax cable routed from exterior Spectrum Cable box
  • 1 24-port managed gigabit switch
  • 1 vendor-managed cable modem
  • 1 vendor-managed wifi router with wifi disabled (because the cable modem wasn’t bright enough to bridge my static IP block)
  • 1 OpenBSD firewall router (Shuttle DS61)
• 12 drops spread across 8 rooms (each 2x Cat6a, 1x coax)
• 1 8+2-port managed 2.5/10-gig switch (office)
• 3 8-port managed gigabit switches (office, family room, living room)
• Orbi Quad-band Wifi 6E and 2 satellites, claiming “up to 10.8 Gbps”, but has 2.5-gig ports on the back, so they’ll all be moving to the 2.5/10 switch soon (office, family room, living room)

I seem to have lost the rack-mounting ears for the 24-port switch, and the only people selling replacements for that brand are in Australia, so I need to find a simple wire shelf that sits inside the rack, so I can organize the contents and still close the door/lid.

I hadn’t realized until they’d left for the day on Saturday that they ran the cable bundles directly adjacent to the main gas line that runs the length of the house. Not how I’d have done it.

They also ran speaker wire from one side of the living room to the other as requested, but I had to convince the guy that no, I did not want 6 feet of speaker wire just sticking straight out of the wall on both sides of the room. I wanted wallplates with screw/banana terminals, like every other AV install I’ve ever seen or heard of. Baffling.

Related, if I’d known that the rack was a top-opener with the patch panel at the top, I’d have asked for it to be mounted lower on the basement wall, so I didn’t have to use a stepladder to plug in ethernet cables.

(cat-sitting is different in the city)