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)

Banished to a single cour, we botched the pacing and totally handwaved the ending and it really shows, final episode

They skipped the OP so they could quickly and implausibly end the big fight, then spent several minutes talking their way through the philosophical and ethical issues of the divinely-chosen-hero business while ignoring the high-tech elephant in the room. The rest of the episode was a crash course in slow living, which sounds like a contradiction and pretty much is; honestly, it feels like the director really wishes he could have completely handwaved the conflict away and just cut to the good (slow) parts.

This includes completely leaving out the hooks for future conflict with Shisandan’s faction of demons.

(final roundup of the best attempts at fan-art for this show)

Wingnasty

Wing Stop’s “spicy korean bbq sauce” is horrific, and lingers in a way that made it impossible to enjoy the other flavor in my order. Related, how did they manage to completely dry out chicken thighs?

(tasty food is unrelated)

The Witcher, 2.5-2.8

Good stuff, with decent rewatch value. This apparently covers material from the first novel, where the previous season was mostly background material written later as short stories. That was a good choice, because they’d have had a much harder time drawing in a large audience with this material. The first season gives you reasons to give a damn what happens to these people.

I don’t know what fans of the books or games think of the changes made for this adaptation, and I know better than to go looking. I also still have no interest in reading the books. It really does sound like it mixes all the tropes of epic fantasy with every fairy tale ever.

(Jahy-sama is unrelated. probably)

Good Eats, season 17

I didn’t notice that this had come out a while back, but then again, it doesn’t seem to be streaming on any of the common subscription services, so I had to buy the full season on Amazon. As usual, lots of fun to watch, with only a few things I’d ever make.

Free Guy

One of the many movies whose release dates caught a bad case of Covid, the end result only vaguely resembled the first trailer. I finally picked it up as part of my four-day-weekend holiday streaming binge. I wouldn’t have gone to see it in a theater anyway, since it didn’t strike me as the sort of film that would benefit from that, but it would have been nice to watch last year during the endless lockdowns.

The original trailer very strongly suggested “Grand Theft Auto NPC comes to life”, but didn’t really show that Our Guy had any sort of goal beyond that, even in his scenes with Our Hot Chick (where the “big joke” bit didn’t even make sense without context). It was only later that they showed the real-world interactions that provide the plot hooks. The end result is a shallower take on The Truman Show; well executed, but without as much replay value, so to speak.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard

Yeah, I picked this one up, too. Not as good as the first, and suffers from the recent tendency of Ryan Reynolds characters to start channeling Deadpool at random moments. And I don’t enjoy Salma Hayek’s character nearly as much as she does; it didn’t work well in the first movie, and more is not better.

The San Francisco Treat

I was listening to a bunch of random singles by Korean singer Younha, taken from soundtracks, TV shows, and collaborations with other singers, and was rather forcefully reminded of something I’ve thought for some time:

A rap break in a pop song is like a steaming turd in a supermarket.

…or in a high-rent shopping district in one of California’s major cities, if you know what I mean.

(picture is definitely unrelated)

Pack, pitch, and haul

As my realtor and lender work through the appraisals and inspections and underwriting, I get to start the process of boxing up most of my stuff, selling or giving away what other people want, and tossing out the rest. Since I have stuff that I can’t and won’t entrust to movers, I have to figure out how much truck to rent and what to fill it with, with the goal of leaving nothing but large furniture and low-value boxes for the moving service (which is apparently going to be a hidden cost freebie from my lender).

When I moved to California in December, 1993, I made a solo drive across the country in a 15-foot-truck pulling a car, but this time I think I can sell the car and get by with 10 or 12 feet, and I’m planning to fly my brother out so we can drive back together. Tentatively, I’m thinking: Salinas to Kingman, Arizona; Kingman to Santa Rosa, New Mexico; Santa Rosa to Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tulsa to Terre Haute, Indiana; and Terre Haute to Dayton, Ohio. With rest stops, gas, and food, that should be four 10-hour days plus a 4-hour day, so we wouldn’t be driving at night, and we’d arrive at my new house in reasonably good condition.

Then I’d have to fly back to California, deal with the movers and the cleaners, put the old house on the market, fly back to Ohio, and get a new car.

Fun fact: thanks to Covid, a lot of car dealers are offering a zero-contact experience where you can do everything online and have the car delivered to your home with the final paperwork. Hopefully they’ll still be doing that 4-5 months from now. Also, hopefully there will be cars available.

Excessive security in Hugo, part 2

In addition to adding an array of regular expressions that whitelists the applications Hugo can execute, they added a whitelist of environment variables to pass to them (documented, but not the part about affecting the --editor option). Which by default does not include LANG or LC_ALL, so your editor (and anything else) may launch with the wrong character set. Joy.

Ho, ho, ho!

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Running short of time to wrap up book 4, we skipped the OP and ED and bulldozed our way through the key plot points, episode 12

This all makes sense to me, but I read the books. What ended up on screen was a rather exposition-heavy fight scene, handwaving away all sorts of things while ensuring there were some very service-y shots of the girls. It kind of undercuts the drama to find yourself thinking about how being flattened by a summoned beast really emphasizes Rit’s boobs, how getting KO’d shows off Tisse’s cute little ass, or how nice the view is of Theodora after she’s MCSA’d. The key problem is that in all of these shots, the girls are being hurt, something that doesn’t go well with cheesecake.

Speaking of service, someone finally did a decent job of drawing one of the minor supporting characters:

One more to go to wrap it up. Save the cheerleader Chosen Hero, save the world?

Komis just want to have fun, episode 10

I could have done with less sports festival, but the rest was nice.

There will be Komi

Second season, that is.

Don’t drink and drive, BMW Edition

…because if any liquid spills from your cup-holders, it may set off the airbags.

Housebuying saga

My realtor was surprised that he has to explain to my lender that the property I’m buying, listed as “$address and vacant lot $streetname” is just one thing, on one deed, and doesn’t need to be appraised as two separate things with values to be added together. They’re selling a house with 1.37 acres, not a house with 0.67 acres and a lot with 0.7.

In fairness, this is also why Zillow is wrong about its location, lot size, and estimated value, although the records from the new sale have corrected many of their other errors.

(maid is unrelated, although there’s plenty of Christmas Rain here)

Hugo 0.91.x super-duper secure

I was not expecting the --editor option to suddenly stop working as part of a recently-added security feature whitelisting applications for execution from inside hugo. I consider this a bug. They do not. The only workaround is to copy-paste an array of regular expressions from the error message into the config file for each of your sites and then append every editor you might ever use.

Why yes, that is bullshit.

(picture is unrelated)