“The fact is, guns do more for female empowerment than modern feminism which prefers government as their protector. But legal ownership gives you real power, equalizing the battle between you and evil. Ask any girl: The confidence from learning to shoot a pistol is far superior to any gender studies course, and a stalker is less likely to stalk if you can ventilate his groin. Which is why a whirring bullet is the ideal rape whistle and the real feminist icon should be Annie Oakley, not Sandra Fluke.”

— Greg Gutfeld

Weekend Service


Molesting Magical Girls season 2 has (finally) been announced for 2027. The only thing that could make the news better is if they added Malfoid to the cast.

Wild Last Boss 2, episode 8

Well, you can’t accuse them of not bringing the gang back together. We picked up another one this week, and next week they’ve promised two more, with fight scenes. Our Isekai’d Junior Hero is once again paired up with His Cuddly L’il Angel Future Waifu, with some extra muscle backing her up. The exposition gets a bit dense, though, especially the public as-you-know-Bob from Our Mysterious Catalyst Gal.

Verdict: I wanted to reach through the screen and bitchslap Castor and Lufas over the elixir thing. First he waits until they’ve pointlessly wasted the precious item they just spent two episodes acquiring before pulling out his own even-more-precious one, then she thinks, “oh, yeah, I’ve got tons of that stuff in storage that I could give them to replace their doomed-but-noble effort, but I won’t”.

Vortex Farce, episode 7

Every time they sit around discussing the plot, I’m sad that the staff think this is more interesting than gainaxing and bathing. And then we get an expository flashback of Military Gal’s mystical background and stubborn foolishness. I won’t call it character development so much as trope abuse.

On the bright side, with her obviously-false victory, Our Heroines feel relaxed enough to finally get into bikinis. Next week. Maybe Evil Energy Gal can join them for some fun in the sun; her costume’s already halfway there.

Verdict: another episode where half the characters do something stupid for no good reason.

(unrelated, but willing to put in the work)

Isekai Kinky Porn Game Cheat Harem, episode 8

Our Giant Boob Teacher With Giant Boobs lures our hero into testing out a sketchy machine in return for exposing her deep dark secret. Which sadly does not involve lingerie or nudity. Then A Boy And His Maid go dungeon-crawling, followed by a maid-driven comic-relief panty-flashing scene. Cute, but quite tame.

Verdict: I remember a lot more kinky dungeon time in the source. Seemed kinda the point.

MP Repo Fairy MP, episode 7

Last week’s berserker cliffhanger was resolved almost instantly, and Our Lending Hero didn’t even get his face sandwiched between armored boobs. As partial recompense, the mage from the non-jackass party shows off her impressive mana batteries and then smothers him with them. Twice. And she’s really got it bad for him.

And then the Jackass Party shows up and jackasses publicly, resulting in a confrontation and a duel. Next week.

Verdict: please put Busty Crush Gal into an even-skimpier outfit next week and have her serve as Our Hero’s cheerleader. Also, nice touch having Roger be honestly concerned that predatory lending might lead his friend to a bad place, providing a moral counterweight to Our Increasingly Dubious Fairy’s influence.

Isekai Space Merc Harem, episode 7

Our Noble Blonde Officer baits the trap, while Our Harem Hero Hiro evades capture with the help of his crew. This is not about piracy. They do feel a bit more sympathetic toward her after she lets her hair down and gets plastered.

After a final raid so easy they skipped right over it, it’s time for a relaxing vacation. Not; the instant they return to base, there’s a new kind of trouble to deal with. It’s a bug hunt, with Our Busty Nerdy Medical Researcher in the middle of it.

Sadly, this took up so much time that we didn’t get to the teased beachplay. Next week: waking up sleeping jailbait without a kiss. Hopefully followed by that beach scene.

Verdict: nice relationship-building.

Isekai Solo Worshipper, episode 6

First, a quick reminder that our hero had another friend on the bus, and we finally get to see that her awakening on this world was… different. Reborn as a lamia, deep in a dungeon, but that’s okay, because she’s in the OP as second waifu, so we know things will eventually work out.

Our Hero and His Half-Elf Waifu get a luxury cruise to the new dungeon town, courtesy of Merchant Pal and His Oddfaced Bunny Gal, which passes without incident, and then Our Lonely Goddess tries her hand at a bit of matchmaking.

The dungeon is easy until it isn’t, and after falling out of the frying pan and into the fire, we get the promised fated encounter with Second Waifu. Expect flashbacks of her story next week.

Verdict: Noah is heading for Second-Best Best Girl of the season. She should show up more to improve her position.

(some Best Girls are eternal, even without being goddesses)

Dear Apple,

Who sprayed Skittles all over my desktop?

I bit the bullet and upgraded from MacOS 15.8.3 to 27.2.1, and the second most annoying thing it did was make all folders bright blue except for the ones that had tags, which were changed to that color instead (both “features” can be disabled, but in completely different places). Files with tags still only get the little colored dot in the margin, which was a huge downgrade several major releases ago.

The most annoying thing it did was reset the font in every Terminal profile to Apple’s preferred font and size, because they hate legibility. I could understand resetting the standard profile to a font that’s guaranteed to be installed, but resetting manually-created profiles? Rude.

Oh, and the new icons are utter crap, especially the generic file-type icons that use very-low-contrast gray text, so you can’t tell what file type they represent.

(0xB6 on 0xF5, by the way, which looks okay when you’re designing an icon, but not when it’s reduced to 64x64)

The Apothecary Diaries 3.1, episode 7


This week, Maomao finds a perfectly good reason to indulge her taste for strong alcohol.

(been a long week; I need a Grea)

Outlook: poor

The global Microsoft outage impacting uncountable millions of people sounds very much like a self-inflicted DDOS. Every customer device was attempting to reconnect and download email, without any kind of backoff, so as soon as they brought something up, it was pounded into submission by client traffic.

Experienced network engineers know how to deal with that before it overwhelms your recovery capacity. Microsoft laid them all off and replaced them with cheap H1Bs and offshore contractors, to save money.

I’m guessing they’re going to lose all that saved money today, and a whole lot more.

(okay, maybe two Greas)

Amazon: logistics is job 10

  1. Placed order for two in-stock items, shipped directly from Amazon warehouses with next-day shipping.

  2. Items immediately switch to 2-day shipping.

  3. 12 hours later, one item is delayed by 1 day.

  4. 12 hours later, email arrives, insisting the other item is delayed indefinitely. I can either wait an entire month for it to ship, or cancel now, reorder, and have it tomorrow.

  5. 6 hours later, first item is no longer delayed a day, and will arrive only one day late instead of two.

  6. Update: the item that arrived only one day late was obviously used goods being sold as new. Shipped directly from Amazon.

Loving the customer experience.

In other news, they’ve replaced the recommendations page with a new design that does not allow you to say “I’m not interested in this squishy toy for autistic toddlers who chug Red Bull”. Now it’s just a bunch of random add-to-cart buttons, and a dialog option at the top where you can type “here’s what I want you to show me more of”.

Why it thinks I need four more espresso machines, five more WDT devices, three more coffee scales, another RDT sprayer, three more tamping stations, four more Nintendo Switch 2’s, and eleven more pasta drying racks, I can’t imagine.

The six ebooks that don’t come out until Spring are consistent with the old “recommendations” behavior, at least.

Not-so-sticky keys


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?”

more...

“Ok guys, it's Filler Time”


(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.

Mad Scientist Wanted: Apply Within


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?

Service Saturday hits the halfway point


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)

The Apothecary Diaries 3.1, episode 6


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)

...if you can keep it


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.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”