Every time I look at the weekly anime listings, I read the title of a particular long-running series wrong. Instead of “Ninjaboy Rantaro”, my eyes always see “Ninja Rentboy”. Wouldn’t watch it either way. 😁

(unrelated, the Solo Leveling: Ragnarok manwha translation is out, and in the second volume… A Wild Best Girl Appears! Esil has a recurring role in this series, which is enough to justify its existence. When she teams up with Our Second-Generation Hero, she’s the last of her kind, and he promises to help her rebuild her race. I don’t think he’s thought through the implications of that…)

Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, episode 7

Assassins, catfishing, and piracy, all wrapped in adorableness.

Verdict: yes.

Rerun’s Special Magic 2, episode 6

A really big battle scene, mostly not involving the giant monster that was summoned last week. As is required by the genre, the villain stood around and waited for Our Heroes to get their shit together and exchange information. Repeatedly.

Verdict: well, it’s better than a tournament arc, but would someone please tell this guy that Our Hero Team’s whole deal is not being a bunch of nobles. Given how long he waits for them to say everything else, there’s been plenty of time for this one sentence.

(unrelated adventure hottie is from that other hero-party-reject-is-actually-OP show, which has some nice-looking healthy gals but holy fuck is it shouty and terrible, with the shouting accompanied by “funny” art-style shifts where the louder it is, the less effort goes into the character art; it’s so bad that I didn’t think the male lead was even vaguely competent, and then I checked and he’s best known as MHA’s Deku)

Microsoft: finally!

Coming soon to Windows 11, the feature that people have wanted for the past 31 years: you can finally turn off the sticky-keys pop-up warning.

Fun with AI customer service

Called the dealership to change a car service appointment (because the web site I created it on had no record of it), and got an AI-assisted call tree. It asked me what day I wanted to reschedule to, and I asked what their hours were. The answer:

“The service department is open seven days a week. On Saturday and Sunday, from none to none. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, from 7:30 AM to 6 PM.”

State secrets

“Why did you give the kingdom’s secret defense plans to a tiefling?”

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(classical reference)

Isekai Goblin Mayor, clip episode

Remember what’s happened so far in this show? Good, you can skip this week.

(L’il Blue Donut Fiend is unrelated)

Priorities

Apple shifts dev process, promising more features, less integration testing, which is pretty much the exact opposite of a good idea. Not mentioned: QA.

The recent SSH exploit: 42 years in the making, then wide open for 4 (or maybe 10; there’s some ambiguity discussed in the comments). The one thing I object to is the characterization that “every individual change was reasonable”. No.

MUSL libc deliberately breaking POSIX compatibility by returning ‘*’ instead of a null pointer was mind-bogglingly stupid; they could have chosen almost any other string in the universe and they’d have been safe, but they deliberately chose the one character that they knew had a documented meaning in the context of password-hashing. Personally, if I’d been required to do this, I’d have chosen something like _INVALID_INPUT_CHECK_ERRNO_. Over strenuous objections.

(and it really was stupid; the rationale was that returning null could cause a segfault because people don’t check return codes, but a segfault would have failed safe, and would have triggered failures and log messages that would make the failure easy to diagnose, and would be trivially spotted by standard tools. Always returning a string produced code that would silently do the wrong thing, which it eventually did)

Isekai Space Merc Harem, episode 6

Our underrim-and-underwire-wearing mad scientist in a miniskirt medical researcher is a glorious nerd. We’ll be seeing more of her, but not, y’know, more of her. For quite a while. And they went with the light-novel version of the scene, but skipped the followup.

Then a more familiar source of trouble shows up, inciting jealously in Our Two Waifus as she declares her intention to make Our Hero Hiro hers. Not necessarily that way, but she’s definitely trying to tie him down.

Verdict: lots of fun character interaction, including an unexpected and quite revealing result in Flat-Elf Waifu’s medical check-up.

(in the light novel, after the exam, Elma taunts Hiro in bed about the doctor’s anal probe, so he bends her over and shares the experience)

Isekai Solo Worshipper, episode 5

Our Worshipping Hero takes His Half-Elf Waifu on a dungeon crawl with Best Friend and Bunny Gal. I’m sorry, but there’s just something wrong with Bunny Gal’s face. Makes me want her out of the story, even if she is half-naked and girl-shaped. Our Noob Party can be forgiven for assuming that a giant boss monster who says “I hunger” was planning to munch on adventurer chow, but once a bit of divine intervention clears everything up, they all gain nice bonuses. Then Our Pouty Goddess reveals a few hidden truths and delivers a brief titty-rub.

Verdict: making steady progress, and we should be coming up on Second Waifu soon, which will probably require an extensive flashback. What can ya do?

Wild Last Boss 2, episode 7

Turns out The Little Big Bad Water Devil’s real motive was a long-standing unrequited crush on Cute L’il Devil Gal from four episodes back, and he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save her from the sad fate of all devils. Meanwhile, Our Underpowered Hero watches His Cute Little Angel Crush vanquish something that’s way out of his league, but shows his worth by having the guts to man up and talk to Our Friendly Neighborhood Supervillainess. Lots of random plot droppings are scattered throughout.

Verdict: I think “scattered” is the right word for this episode. It’s all over the place in tone and setting.

(Cute L’il Big Devil Gal is unrelated)

Vortex Farce, episode 6

Our Mild-Service Heroines are really turning out to be not particularly bright. They’ve met the enemy, learned her nature and her goals, and their problem-solving consists of “if we can’t punch her in the face, let’s find a way to punch her in the face!”.

On the bright side, Our Guardian Shota has now found His Backup Future Waifu. A bit young at the moment, which is probably the only thing that kept her from pinning him down and making him a man, right there on the beach.

Verdict: they really, really shouldn’t rely on the storytelling to carry this show. They managed to reach an island full of supplies and restock on food and water, but what they really needed was a change of clothes and a long, lingering bath scene.

Isekai Kinky Porn Game Cheat Harem, episode 7

A: “You got your character development in my fan-service.”

B: “You got your fan-service in my character development.”

AB: “Heeeeeeeey!”

This week, Our Cheating Hero spends some quality time with His Jiggling Angel Maid, and unlike last week, we get to see more of her body than his. Fortunately.

Verdict: M.A.O is good casting for busty maid gal, and the show continues to have better art and animation than expected. Most of the other gals are missing this week, though, except for Naughty Step-Mama.

MP Repo Fairy MP, episode 6

Give a gal some mana, and she goes all berserker on ya. Next week, Our Lending Hero needs to learn how to talk her down when the battle’s done.

In other news, Our Jackass Party continues their ignominous slide into oblivion and irrelevance, in front of another team of adventurers who turn out to have quite a high opinion of Our Boy. Refreshing that not everyone in this world is a jackass.

Verdict: Our Much-Rejected Samurai Gal somehow manages to gainax a bit while wearing a steel breastplate, but I don’t mind. She’s at least wearing sensible armor for a frontline fighter, and she can stand upright without the back pain that surely afflicts the two Jackass Gals. Bonus points for adding new cute gals who like Our Hero and resent the way he was treated.

(unrelated busty half-naked elf would fit right in)

Is it a side quest or a secret mission? Only the next episode can tell for sure!

RTX Spark laptop: Windows-only

Developers working with AI like Linux. Nvidia built an AI PC platform, mostly released as laptops. Developers successfully put Linux on it. Everything works great, including AI, unless you plug it in. The power management subsystem is Windows-only.

Amazon Eats

A while back, Amazon bought a stake in Grubhub, and eventually added it to the Prime perks. Thursday they switched over to Uber Eats. (I found out in email before this story was up)

Grubhub sucked, so I don’t mind, but I never liked Uber Eats, either, so I doubt I’ll be taking advantage of this benefit.

(I also didn’t know that Amazon is invested in Deliveroo in the UK; I have an account for that, in case I ever visit my office again)

Magic 8 Ball says: two years of complete suck.

Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, episode 6

This week, Blue Cat slavers make the worst, and last, mistake of their lives. But first, Fran in a swimsuit!

Our Adorable Warrior Kitten might be the cutest murderhobo in the business, but in her mind, slavers are no better than monsters, and she treats them accordingly. Then she rescues the victims, who include some visiting royals around her age.

Verdict: there’s enough meat in this story arc to finish out the season. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…

Rerun’s Special Magic 2, episode 5

Our Tied-Up Sidekicks quickly demonstrate that they let that happen, so Our Returning Hero arrived just in time to discover that they didn’t need his help. Pity, I was hoping someone would gag Tsuntail and Bunnyboy and then spend a few minutes forcing Ice Princess into erotic poses and taking pictures. Oh, well.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to remember who the people were who showed up to help clean up the streets, but they didn’t do anything that would make me want to see more of them. Guess that was just to fill some screen time before the trope fight. Once that’s over, we get a hastily-conjured macguffin and a sudden world-ending event. Or is it?

Verdict: (checks episode number) pretty sure next week will involve another major ass-pull. Meh.

Elder Dominated Busty Elf Gal’s secret weapon is slightly more subtle than her main batteries: pheromones. Her attempt to demonstrate them on Our Susceptible Mayor is quickly intercepted by Our Very Possessive Legal-Loli Demon Gal, though, and then Night-Knight Gal Karen slowplays her pocket aces. The road to a type 1 Tenchi solution is hard, it seems.

Next week, a new player enters the game, who is definitely not a haremette.

Verdict: still delivering on its promises.

(I can’t speak for her show, but I have to say that Amona deserves a lot more fan-art)

A Malfoid Movie…

Someone on X posted a Mr. & Mrs. Smith movie poster for Harry and Miss Malfoy, so I responded with something that seemed obvious:

What I learned was that neither Krea 2 nor Qwen 2.1 knew what to do with the Unicode “¾” fraction glyph, but both automatically composed it if you asked for “3/4”.

The Book Of Poses

I’ve been having good success using Strata’s more capable LLMs to generate random art styles, so I thought I’d see how it would do at generating sexy poses. I was careful with my wording, so I wasn’t getting too many refusals, but then I found out that there was a built-in uncensoring switch, documented but hidden under an obscure name, --experimental-speed-projection. Add that to the setup line, and refusals go way, way down. This is good, because you get to use a large LLM without having to deal with the issues often introduced when someone uses uncensoring and abliteration techniques to create a new model. As a bonus, the feature enables a switch in the GUI, so you can simply turn it off if you detect any issues with a particular request.

Anyway, I built a library of 608 distinct prompts that produced mostly distinct poses. I deduped them in my usual way, but I needed to actually render them to see if different text produced substantially identical results. Which it often did.

A bit of LLM-assisted tinkering produced a script that mostly clustered similar poses, but I have to tweak the variables to reduce the number of false associations. Meanwhile, here’s some of the test outputs.

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Isekai Space Merc Harem, episode 5

Our Heroes pull off their secret strategy, single-handedly turning the tide of battle in their favor while making a bundle. Then they get the hell out of Dodge while the getting’s good, to avoid Our Hot Blonde Officer’s relentless attempts to nail down Our Happy Harem Hero Hiro with a proper job.

Soon they’ll find out just how relentless she really is. Next week, a new star system, with new problems and new hot chicks. Shame they had to leave Hot Guild Gal behind.

Verdict: they trimmed down the crystal-entity stunt quite a bit, which I don’t think hurts the story at all. The battle scenes were animated but not terribly interesting; they got the job done, but without much in the way of flair. It was oddly trivial for them to take out actual warships compared to their usual pirates.

(definitely not a flat-elf!)

Isekai Solo Worshipper, episode 4

First Waifu, unlocked. Our Worshipping Hero pulls a skill out of his ass that not only defeats the out-of-their-league monster in a ridiculously flashy way, but warms up His Fiery Half-Elf Partner and sends him so close to the grave that he earns a scolding from His Personal Goddess and unlocks a new power. Thanks to an accidental confession that he doesn’t really regret, Half-Elf Waifu is now entitled to be jealous of Cute Guild Gal’s affectionate attention. Thanks to an accidental full-frontal exposure, though, I don’t think she really needs to worry about competition right now.

Verdict: Half-Elf in the streets, Half-Demon in the sheets! Forget the dungeon, son, and take her up on that room-sharing option, pronto!

Little Monsters, After-Action Report

Based on the last four years of data at the new house, I did not expect a lot of trick-or-treaters, so I bought a lot less candy (mainly stuff I’m willing to eat rather than the usual variety packs), and still had a lot left over.

Final count: 24. Interestingly, unlike the four previous years, every single kid was black. That’s not a criticism or complaint; they were exactly the same sort of cheerful middle-class American kids I’ve seen previously, with their parents watching from the street as they hit the houses. I suspect the shift comes not from any sudden change in neighborhood demographics, but from white parents being scared into doing only sponsored “trunk-or-treat” and other “safe” events. Shame, really; it was great weather for it.