Red Cat Ramen, episode 1

Our Human Girl gets hired as back-room support staff at a cross between a ramen shop and a cat café. That is, the cats run the place, and the customers are there as much to see them as to eat the food. The human’s primary job is grooming the cats to reduce the amount of hair that gets into the food.

Not much to it, really, but it’s not angsty or shouty, and they’ve hired some familiar voices for the cats. Boss cat sounds exactly like gruff detective Kei Matoba from Cop Craft, which may be too distracting for me. The waitress is voiced by Rie Kugimiya, and the shy tiger by Saori Hayami, but neither performance does much to make the characters interesting, which I blame on the writing. Surprisingly, Our Human Girl’s voice is brand new to anime, and does a good job of making her appealing.

Verdict: I wasn’t expecting much, and it didn’t deliver much, but I made it all the way to the end.

Dungeon People, episode 1

Simplified Cute Girls Doing Simplified Cute Things In A Simplified Cute Dungeon. The minimal art style is straight from the manga, with the dungeon’s CG nature mostly being revealed by the camera movements. In a twist from the usual formula, Our Thief-Class Heroine is the emotionless one, while Our Legal-Loli Dungeon Boss is ultra-perky. Their voice actresses are also subverting expectations, with their most recent visible roles being Shuna/Marcille/Animalia and Lavine/Romantica/Lady Black, respectively. M.A.O will be along soon, along with some very familiar male voices (1, 2, 3, 4).

Verdict: off to a good start.

(…not necessarily in a good way…)

Shy 2, episode 1

(please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck…)

There’s a faint whiff of Kufufu at the end, but this episode is so full of reminders of who Our Heroes are and what they do that the only thing that actually happens is Shy shying shyly to a shy reporter. Also, An Ambiguous Katana Girl walks on stage, and a previously-unmentioned American bull-themed hero gets stirred in as if he’d been there all along.

Verdict: this week was pretty empty, and I keep looking at the action shots and thinking Shy could really improve her costume with a high-leg cut. Not optimistic, but I’ll give it a chance to actually do something next week.

(I stopped collecting Shy pics when the first season fell off the cliff, so here’s a reminder of seasons past)

The Spice Of Waifu, episode 14

New season, new OP and ED, and more active flirting between Our Partners. Dude, when your wolf-waifu says she’ll share a bed, you say yes; pay no attention to the food-budget excuse she makes.

Rest of week…

• Wednesday Thursday: Red Cat Ramen
• Friday: Dungeon People
• Saturday: Robo-Waifu
• Sunday: Pom-Pom Girls

How quickly will they fall?

Second biggest trainwreck of the season

The New Gate looked cheap and uninspired, but they failed to meet even my low expectations, as I checked out the final episode and found the laziest, sloppiest character art I’ve seen in years. Every face was drawn differently in every scene, and none of them were good. The story was terrible, and even the busty harem gals weren’t reliably appealing.

They apparently ripped through the source material at a ridiculous pace (covering at least 9 manga volumes; the light novels haven’t been licensed, so I don’t know how many of those, or which they used as their source), cutting deep into the bone, so whatever original thoughts went into the books were the first things to go.

(FJB’s debate performance was waaaaaay out in front on this award)

Found more Irish…

When I built the family tree years ago, there was a lot less data on Ancestry.com, so I hadn’t traced my Mom’s family as far. Looking into it now, with people having paid to get access to international records, it turns out that Thomas McGrath arrived in Maine about the same time the McCausland brothers did, and he was Catholic. And his emigration may not have been by choice (I’d need a premium membership to read those records). Or else they were all just fleeing the 1740 famine for literally greener pastures.

So I’ve got both regular and unleaded Irish in the tank, and both sides ended up moving from Maine to Ohio over 200 years ago. If my dad’s mom hadn’t been Manistee Polish, I’d be pretty exclusively Native Buckeye back to at least 1820.

[The Tenka Seiha season rundown is out; it’s not late, half the shows premiered early…]

Robo-Waifu, episode 1

The good news is that they skip straight to the premise, with Our Lonesome Loser having already adapted to the presence of Our Kitchen Appliance, and jokingly commenting that she’d make a great wife. The better news is that when she deviates from programmed behavior in a way that convinces him she’s taken him up on the offer, it does not devolve into complete cringe. It would be, if in the light of day it had turned out that he’d imagined the whole thing and was clearly losing it from loneliness, but her behavior continues to change in more obvious ways that are not covered in her manual.

Verdict: this could go either way, heartwarming or suck. But at least she’s drawn in a way that discourages it from turning into straight-up robo-porn. The trouble with Chobits was that Chii and the other persocoms were so realistic that they could fuck, turning the story into a half-baked allegory about pure love; Mina’s obviously artificial body (with non-sexy attachments) doesn’t even speak through the mouth. Also, he bought her used, so keep dodging that bullet…

(Nobody does robo-waifus like Sukabu; also witch-waifus, engineer-waifus, …)

I Eat Kaiju, fin

In the end, it comes down to the power of heart. And a hot childhood friend. To no great surprise, Our Cored Hero wins in the battle against his other self, and is allowed to live to fight another day. Which will be soon, because we close with Naughty Number Nine abusing his Roomba and monologing about his next goal.

PS: everyone wants to get stronger. Junior to protect him, Tsuntail to stop him if he loses it.

Verdict: well-done, even if the team is still filled with people I don’t care about. And it did well enough to continue. Eventually.

I will not be watching this…

“What the world really needs right now is a new Ranma 1/2 series”. And yes, there are people in the various forums looking forward to claiming it as “trans representation”, sigh. Yeah, if you think Ranma is trans, you’re definitely a few springs short of Jusenkyo.

Shame I’m not in Japan…

Okay, that’s usually the case, but the frequent promotions for Molesting Magical Girls bode well for the future.

Train’s Last Stop, fin

Dirty little secret revealed: Reimi is not a natural blonde. This was not a carpet/drapes revelation, simply a flashback to their childhood. The dark skin’s real, though.

The CG-heavy train chase filled with oddly-whistled deus ex zombie had me worried, but getting the band back together for an emotion-driven teenage-girl reconciliation worked for me. And it didn’t hurt that Our Tiny Hot Doctor grew as well…

Level 2 Cheat Boy, fin

The Big Battle was, as they say, Super Easy Barely An Inconvenience, between Our Retired Demon Lord’s secret weapon and the hot-springs staff’s gimmicked yukata, freeing up the rest of the episode for everyone to hold hands and bathe in the most Bluray-proof nude scene of the season.

Here’s how it should be done:

NSFW

How To Raise a Wolf-Waifu, episode 13

Epilogue to the gold-smuggling story, and a fond farewell to Our Cuddly Shepherd, who ends up bonding with an under-the-weather Holo over their shared opinion of Lawrence. Next week should get new credits for a new story arc.

Won’t get a chance to visit…

They’re trying to swing the travel budget at work to get me a week on-site at my team’s office in Belfast, probably in September. Out of curiosity, I reviewed the work I did years ago on Ancestry.com to see where my Irish ancestors lived. It looks like Andrew McCausland was in the vicinity of Carnteel Parish, County Tyrone in the mid-1600s, and his pregnant widow Sarah moved to Derry, where son Robert was born. Robert went back to Carnteel to find wife Hannah, but they lived out their lives in Derry (there was apparently land involved). Their son Henry emigrated and found wife Elizabeth in Kennebec, Maine. Their daughter Jane married Seth Greeley, and after raising their children, they lived out their lives in Maineville, Ohio.

This, by the way, makes them Planters aka Scots-Irish, which even centuries later is “problematic”.

Nut Salad, fin

Choco-blocked, pachinko-blocked, and cop-blocked; the days are just packed. Our Magical Daughter’s school life turned out to be just as ridiculous off-camera as on, and Her Best Friend found a place for herself as well. Our Girl Band made a good showing, but Noa’s sketchy past caught up with them in the end, ruining what could have been the finest scene of the season…

Verdict: worth it, and worth a rewatch if the upcoming season ends up being as dismal as it looks right now. More on that at the end.

(there are no busty catgirl waitresses with heterochromia in this show, but there could be one just off-screen; it’s that kind of town)

The Never-Ending Slime 3, episode 12

Based on the new, less-annoying credits (badly-integrated CG in the OP, slightly off (but still cute) design for Shuna in the ED), this is the first episode of the second cour. And to mark the transition, they talk in multiple locations about things that haven’t happened yet. And they even promise to do things soon.

Verdict: how many episodes will it take them to actually deliver the promised festival? With Milim. I don’t know that I can take another round.

Kaiju’s Got A Posse, episode 11

…but they’d better work fast. Our Transmonster Hero peacefully submits to confinement, but while everyone who knows him is on his side, they’re all constrained by orders. And the man giving the orders is as powerful as he is unreasonable. Which leads us to a cliffhanger ending in which Kafka struggles to save his Hyde.

Verdict: with one episode to go, can they wrap it up well?

(not a kaiju, but those giant monsters are about to escape…)

How did I not know about this?!?

Puppies At The End Of The World. Our Chibi Train Gals doing quick gags in doggie drag.

(speaking of giant monsters trying to escape…)

Next season?

New shows are already appearing, but are they watchable? Setting aside all the continuations and sequels to things I didn’t watch before, here’s my take based on descriptions and trailers, in the order they’re supposed to debut:

• Gonna Be The Golfer (“Rising Impact”): little boy is instantly OP at golf. NO

• Human Mage In Demon King’s Army: I liked this better when it involved shacking up with a giant-breasted village girl. NO.

• Shy 2: there’s a hint of Kufufu in the trailer, which is a bad sign, but everything else points to a focus on the heroes, which is a good sign, and there’s a real crisis that’s not halfway around the world away from the rest of the cast. Maybe

• Mid-Life Adventuring Crisis (“The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party…”): I mention this only to inform Mauser that there’s a white-haired dark-skinned elf maid in it. Based on the trailer, the music alone is enough to make it unwatchable. NO

• Robo-Waifu (“My wife has no emotion”): this is going to end up being as accidentally predictive of the future as Demolition Man, isn’t it? Maybe

• Tokyo Death Game (“Fate Of The Majority”): yeah, NO.

• Russian Princess (“Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings In Russian”): the school goddess mutters in Russian, believing that nobody understands her, but Potato-kun does! NO

• Banging My Stepsister: oh, wait, did I give away the ending? NO

• Red Cat Ramen: human girl working in a food-porn restaurant run by talking cats. Maybe

• I Parry Everything… Except My Harem: over-specialized adventurer wins fame and fortune. I liked this better when her name was Maple. NO

• Fake Harem: Potato-kun’s new girlfriend changes personalities more often than Fletch. NO

• Twilight Out Of Focus: gay high school romance. NO, NO, NO

• Cross-dressing Senpai: bisexual high school love triangle. NO, NO, NO

• Isekai Cheat Yada-Yada (“Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells”). NO

• My Cosplay Girlfriend (“2.5-Dimensional Seduction”): this is one of those shows Steven would download only to add cheesecake to his site header rotation. NO

• NieR 1.1A 2B||!2B: I could never get back into it after the sweatshop caught Covid the third time, and a lot of it was actually pretty annoying before that, even with the fan-service. NO

• Dungeon People: adventurer joins the staff of the dungeon. Maybe

• Fantasy Adventure QA: Shouty McShoutFace’s Big Adventure In Shoutyland. NO

• Isekai Toolsmith (“Dahlia In Bloom”): looks like a typical isekai that’s been gender-flipped into a shoujo romance show. NO

• Potato-kun’s Dungeon Harem Adventure (“A Nobody’s Way Up to an Exploration Hero”): yeah, what it says on the tin. NO

• Harvest Goddess’ Island Adventure (“Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin”): shouty video game adaptation. NO

• The Elusive Main Character (“The Elusive Samurai”): honestly, I can’t tell from the trailer if the main character is supposed to be a boy or a girl. Anyway, NO

• Plus-Sized Elf: reverse-isekai chunky elf chick meets dietician; Wacky Hijinks Ensue. NO

• Ordinary Romance (“How To Become Ordinary”): boy meets girl, stuff keeps happening to both of them. NO

• Rune Soldier Willie (“Wistoria: Wand And Sword”): a swordsman in a school for magic. He must get stronger. NO

• Isekai Cheat Daughter (“Head Start At Birth”): I can’t even keep track of these any more. NO

• Antler Girl: NO, NO, NO

• Drunken VTuber Gone Wild: um, way to jump on the bandwagon several years late. NO

• Pom-Pom Girls (“Narenare -Cheer For You!-”): not to be confused with Pon-Pon girls. Maybe

• Isekai Child-Rearing: yeah, NO

• Kicked Out Of The Vtuber Agency, I Went Indie With A Real-Life Vampire And Her Wacky Friends: did I miss anything? NO

• Magical Girl & Villain In Love: didn’t we do this a few seasons ago? NO

• Isekai Harem Novelist (“No Longer Allowed In Another World”): suicidal pre-WWII writer ends up in fantasy world with busty catgirls and elves, remains suicidal. NO

• Every Boy’s Dream (“Love Is Indivisible By Twins”): Potato-kun has twin babes begging for the D. NO

• Human Swordsbabe In Furry World (“Bye, Bye Earth”): I think I’ve OD’d on trailers now. NO

• Isekai’d To A Nearly-Identical World (“Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World?”): NO

• Robot Leg (“ATRI -My Dear Moments-”): I’m not feeling it. NO

• Secondhand Haremettes (“Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!”): the music in the trailer immediately put me off. NO

(better find a good book (or 20) to curl up with…)

New Game+

I’d last bought a gaming PC in 2015. It was pretty well-specced for the time, with a Core i7-6700, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, 2 TB hybrid HD and 256GB SSD, and a GTX 980. Over the years I upgraded to newer SSDs, more RAM, and a GTX 2060 (best I could fit into the power budget), and it’s still able to play most games decently if I’m careful with the settings.

But things do bog down sometimes, and nine years is a pretty good run, so I ordered something significantly faster from Corsair, with a Ryzen 9 7950X, 64 GB DDR5 RAM, two 2 TB SSDs, and an RTX 4090. And a 2.5Gbit NIC, which will be useful if I connect it to the NAS for photo processing.

UPS was scheduled to deliver it Wednesday between 5:15 PM and 7:15 PM, with signature required. I had the day off, so I was out running errands when the driver showed up at 12:15 PM and left a sticky note promising they’d try again the next day.

I was not happy.

UPS has online customer support; it’s a chatbot that has no actual functionality except scheduling a callback. The callback came from an Indian call center that was completely unable to assist me in any way, claiming their system was down. They didn’t even have basic information about UPS.

Fortunately the local UPS depot is literally down the street from me, and I got there within five minutes. They called the dispatcher and instructed her to tell the driver to bring the package to the front as soon as he finished his route, and I picked it up just after 3 PM.

It took about four hours to install all the available updates and transfer everything over with PC Mover Pro (which mostly worked, but did not reliably register Game Pass games; re-downloading 134 GB of Starfield was annoying).

By the way, I was happy to take the customer-service survey at the end of the useless time-wasting phone call.

And what did I name the new PC? Reimi.

Oh, and as soon as PC Mover Pro finished copying 1.3 TB over, OneDrive uploaded gigs of data to the cloud without asking, relocating everything from my Documents, Pictures, and Desktop folders. Fuck you with a claymore, Microsoft; this should not be opt-out.

Trainsplaining, episode 11.5

Usually the filler clip episode comes around the halfway mark, but putting it right before the end and trying to cram in all the highlights resulted in something spectacularly incoherent.

Tsuntail: The Game

Er, I mean Kaiju No.8. Although I’m hoping for a playable tsuntail.

Big Kaiju Fight, episode 10

Usually by this point, most shows have blown the animation budget and things are getting iffy, but Our Slashy Vice-Captain gets to cut loose without turning into a panned still with speed lines, and the rest of Our Gang gets to participate as well, although the observers in the control room just get to shout “oh yes!”, “oh no!”, etc at each turn in the battle. When things get out of hand, Our Transmonster Hero rushes to the scene to out himself and save the day, but gets interrupted by the sudden return of Our Hot Captain, who whips out the big one.

Then it gets more out of hand, and he ends up transforming anyway, saving everyone when all the little monsters combine to form one giant boom. And getting caught at it. Oopsie.

Verdict: it was inevitable, and of course it had to be his childhood friend who took him into custody, but pointing a pistol at the guy who just punched out a nuke is basically a courtesy. Trope-y, but not unsalvageable.

Level 2 Cheat Boy, episode 11

Well, that little detail just turned the entire demon-human conflict into a deep pile of horseshit. If the fundamental problem is that many demons can’t suppress their “malicium”, and the new demon king and his generals are able to hide out at a human hot springs by wearing “malicium-suppressing amulets”, they just need to, y’know, make some more. They could even ask Our Infinite Craftsman to take up the task.

Anyway, both sides end up at the same hot springs resort, so Wacky Hijinks Ensue. And, stop me if you’ve heard this before, Our Idiot Former Hero shows up and accidentally activates a dangerous magic item. I know, I was shocked, too.

Verdict: Hila finally strapped down her witch for some experimental sexplay, so things are looking up. As soon as she figures out what this “consent” thing is about. And it ends next week.

(consent, how does that work?)

Wise Wolf Waifu Gone Wild, episode 12

This week, Our Merchant Couple takes their time hurrying to the rescue of Our Smuggly Shepherd; they have to work out the relationship dynamics first. Since they’re going straight into the next season, they pretty much wrap this up and don’t worry about damngling bait for a sequel.

Fingerprinting

I have never gotten reliable results out of a Windows fingerprint reader. I have never gotten unreliable results from Apple fingerprint readers. Once upon a time, I would have assumed that Apple simply used better hardware and wrote better software, but that hasn’t been a safe bet for years.

I’m left wondering if my experience on Windows is based on how well fingerprint readers actually work, and Apple’s just pretending it’s secure while accepting iffy scans.

(why use it in the first place? because while I have a Very Secure Passphrase on my 1password vault, I don’t want to type it every ten minutes when I’m the only one in the house and the doors are locked, and I don’t need to keep track of Yet Another Authenticator)

AI at the drive-thru

The perky young white girl who took my order and tried to upsell me three times was obviously not human, but got the order right. The adult human who took my money did not understand why I handed him $26.78 when the bill was $16.78, and it was like a revelation from the gods when I explained.

Today I Learned…

…that VMware Vcenter has no idea what to do when every attempt to move VMs onto a specific hypervisor fails. It’s the perfect destination because it has no VMs on it, so it’s always at the top of the list, and gets tried again and again and again. Infinite retries with no backoff.

(the fundamental problem seems to be that if you have two iSCSI interfaces which could be used to migrate a VM but one of them is down, live vmotion will always fail; if you shut down the VM, it will work, but it apparently insists on the redundant path for running VMs)

Delay of Train

We’ll have to wait an extra week for the last episode.

Nephy Life, fin

Since they ran out of plot and spent this episode wrapping things up, the goofy music wasn’t inappropriate, just at the usual excessive volume. Foll nailed it when she commented on how unlikely it is that Our Happy Couple will kiss any time soon (measured in decades).

Verdict: a decent time-waster of a show. I didn’t expect much, and I got surprisingly good voice acting and a decent ED song.

Nut Salad, episode 11

Finally, the debut of the finished cast-off Livia doll, complete with pubic hair so authentic that Our Magical Daughter’s remaining innocence took a mighty blow. We’ve skipped straight to Christmas, by the way, largely to get Livia into a Santa bikini. Then the Gifu tourist board solicited an ad for the aquarium, Our Bad Girls In Love discover that it’s not as easy as it looks, and finally we tie up the loose end of Our Helpful Homeless Guy, who provides a solution to Our Girl Band’s vocal conflict.

Verdict: I’m going to miss this one when it’s over.

Regression To The Slime 3, episode 11

You’ll never believe this, but this week they sit around a table and talk, filling in lots of little details of things that could have happened on-screen, but are instead just a list of tell-don’t-show checkboxes.

Verdict: I expect to be too busy next season to even use this as background noise.

(still no explanation for why the nekkid vampire chick was rubbing herself against a cryo-coffin a few weeks back)

“Oh, I get it now”

Re-read a Terry Pratchett novel a few days ago. Just got one of the jokes as I was waking up this morning.

We’re starting to see final episodes this week, but of the ones I’m still watching, it’s only Nephy. Next week, Train Gals and Nut Salad end. Week after, it’s Level 2 and Kaiju 8. Slime Talk and Spicy Wolf both continue uninterrupted into next season.

Ah, My Train Goddesses!, episode 11

Everything’s falling into place. Or crashing into the end of the tracks. Or both. Our Train Gals finally see what Our MacGuffin Princess has become, but even with the help of Our Slightly Less Wibbly-Wobbly Conductor and Our Hot Little Doctor, they’re still missing a piece of the puzzle, and while Our Zombie Queen’s Army helps them find the magic button, the solution isn’t as simple as promised.

Verdict: well, here we go. Will the final episode wrap it up neatly or fall to pieces?

(hey, look, fan-art! and they’re not tied up or anatomically implausible!)

Level 2 Cheat Boy, episode 10

This week, “Kicking Myself Out Of The Demon King’s Army, I Took My Logistics Officer With Me To Live The Slow Life, Because That’s Kinda How That Trope Works, Right?”

Our Insecure Crush-Denying Knight Gal is of course opposed to letting them move in, but everyone else is down with the idea, so we spend time dealin’ with feelins’ before cutting to the miraculous offscreen escape of Our Idiot Former Hero And His Unsupported Support Gal.

Verdict: demon catgirl in civvies made up for a lot, and the promise of hot-springs cheesecake and hot genie-on-witch action next week have potential… if I didn’t already know what happens at the resort.

(not the new Demon Lord, sadly)

Spice Up The Wolf, episode 11

Did I say it was a bad plan? Yeah, and that was before they discovered Something in the forest. Our Little Blonde Smuggle-Bunny is being fed to the wolves, not the kind with four legs, and Our Desperate Merchant is helpless to help her, what with being fed to the four-legged variety himself. And Our Wise Wolf Waifu, who came up with this plan in the first place, has no idea what’s happening to either of them.

Verdict: cliff, meet hanger.

“Road rage”, huh?

Wednesday morning, well after rush hour, there was an incident on I-675 near Beavercreek (~17 miles away from my place) in which a still-unidentified male person driving a Ford hatchback shot at and injured a still-unidentified male person driving a Ford van, resulting in a treated-and-released injury. Person-of-Fordness #2 shot back, putting multiple holes in the first vehicle while apparently not injuring the driver, and then got off the highway and called 911.

Five days ago, and not a name, photo, vague description, political affiliation, group membership, known associate, or list of previous arrests for either party. And yet, the stories clearly state that the police interviewed both men, and they have 911 audio from one of them.

So we can be pretty sure that they’re not Trump voters or legal gun owners, three facts that would be prominently mentioned in every story.

Seriously, this story has holes big enough to drive a Ford through.

Direct quotes from the 911 call:

“I was just driving and this guy was flying up on my tail end, starts flipping me off in the mirror. I put my arm like ‘What I do?’ and he then gets on the side of me and points a gun at me.”

…

“I shot back at him and he hit me.”

This is the high-speed equivalent of “standing on a corner minding my own business”, and glosses over the whole “I had my gun where I could easily grab it while driving down the highway” (which, while technically legal in Ohio, is unusual for someone carrying legally, and especially unlikely at 10:20 AM). Also the part where his immediate response to being shot at while driving was to shoot back.

Unrelated,

Every time I restart my browser, xTwitter forgets that dark mode is ugly as fuck and a sin against legibility. I understand that privacy mode causes the browser to forget local storage between sessions, but when xTwitter themselves calls black-text-on-white the “default”, it should not do the exact opposite every time, especially since dank mode is disabled everywhere. And when the appropriate setting is filed under “Accessibility”, why is it browser-specific instead of account-wide? Do they think your vision changes when you look at other screens?