Sing, O Muse, Of Tanya The Twisty 2, episode 4

I’ve been whimsically varying the title because I’ve never liked calling it “Tanya The Evil”, but it occurs to me that Our Heroine is in fact the plaything of the gods, kept far from home by unkind fate, wandering the world with her loyal companions, facing grave peril with her wits and martial prowess.

Anyway, this week, the war is over! Until it isn’t! Thanks to people far removed from the front lines, who don’t have to see their young men dying by the thousands. When The Historian (remember the framing device from the very first episode?) asks, “where did the Empire go wrong?”, it’s going to be a picture of these guys, sitting around a conference table with blood on their hands.

Verdict: this is a turning point, but not one that anyone wanted.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 4

This week, Our Country Swordsman returns home for an annual boar-bashing, bringing Our Adopted Daughter along, as well as the vice-captain and Our Almost Forgotten Short-Stack Haremette, who is promptly “mistaken” for a bride candidate. Lots of slow character time.

Verdict: no action, just letting the story breathe.

(no new fan-art, either…)

Ass-Guardian pacing

I did a quick re-read of the manga, and that appears to be the source they’re using, but it’s not a scene-for-scene copy. They’ve already rearranged a few scenes and breezed through some others, so I expect them to use up all of the manga volumes this season. Hopefully well, but it would be nice if they also fleshed things out with some of the material from the light novels. I think the manga strips out a lot of what made the novels more interesting than the usual isekai. Pity the licensee hasn’t translated book 9 yet.

🎶 Every day is now Patch Tuesday… 🎶

Microsoft is releasing security updates on an almost daily basis. On the one hand, they’re taking the threats seriously and responding quickly. On the other hand, they’ve laid off so many engineers that you really, really wonder who’s writing and testing all this new code. On the gripping hand, what does this tell us about how bad their code’s been for decades?

(I ran all my old 4K vertical wallpaper through a vision model to create new JSON prompts, then fed them to Krea 2 Turbo; not only is it producing results much faster than Qwen or Klein did, Krea can actually render things that look like guns!)

Flash, a-aaaaaaaah!

I went through the poorly-laid-out documentation for my new little flashlight (officially, the OLIGHT Oclip Pro S), extracted the full suite of clicks and holds, and sorted them consistently across modes:

Lock/Unlock: [OFF] hold 2+ seconds

White-light setting
Moonlight: [OFF] hold 1+ seconds
Brightness: [ON] hold
Turbo: double-click
Strobe: [OFF] triple-click
Beacon: [ON] triple-click

UV-light setting
Brightness: [ON] hold

RGB-light setting
Brightness: [ON] hold
Red flashing: [OFF] double-click
R/G/B: [ON] double-click
Multi-color flashing: [ON] triple-click

Magilumiere 2, episode 4

I could do with fewer flashbacks, but Our Magical Gals got the job done, and did a little light bonding with Our Cuddly Magical Engineer and Our Emotionless Magical Hottie.

Verdict: better than last week.

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 4

…and now you know why Theresia is Best Lizard Gal. And we get to see Our Platonic-As-Far-As-He-Knows Harem take their first step into a larger world.

Verdict: still a bit of a speedrun (especially the handwave on acquiring enough mercenary tickets to buy out Theresia’s contract), but it didn’t feel as rushed as last week, giving the core party time to talk about goals and ambitions, making Theresia a full member, introducing another future member, setting up multiple story lines, and expanding on The Rearguard Effect.

Skeleton Knight 2, episode 4

The secret is water. Our Titty Elf and Her Equally Endowed Big Sister go through a sword fight without so much as the tiniest jiggle, but a magical water bubble produces proper Gainaxing. Ordinary bathing is not sufficient, as the sisters demonstrate later.

As for the plot, it starts out as another side quest, although we do get a tiny bit of motion on the princess-killing conspiracy from the previous season, enough to at least reintroduce the players and their motives. It ends up tying into the hints they’ve been dropping, and next week may advance the central plot.

Verdict: better pacing than some other shows this season, but they’re really skimping on the animation part of the animation, and not just failing to jiggle.

A little of the ol’ ultraviolet

I bought a small-but-featureful EDC flashlight recently, which has a spring clip, lanyard hole, and strong magnet for mounting options, a decently bright main LED, a perfectly reasonable red LED to protect your night vision, and an ultraviolet LED to convince you that you really need to scrub the bathroom. It’s from Olight, who also makes nice weapon-mount lights and offhand carry flashlights, and I like it. I have no use for the half-dozen rave blinking options (the red LED is actually R/G/B, and most of the modes blink the colors in sequence, which has no practical use), but it’s unobtrusive and hands-free for things like taking out the garbage at 2 AM, and bright enough to make it easier to search a room for something that’s gone missing.

The biggest drawback is one that it shares with almost all modern flashlights: features are accessed with a combination of press, press-and-hold, double-click, and triple-click, some of which do different things when the light is off versus on. And of course the power status is a single small light that has three states that are indistinguishable by anyone with even slightly color-deficient vision.

Could be worse, I suppose; it could have an app with mandatory cloud and AI integration. And a monthly subscription model to enable features.

(trick-and-treat little devil is unrelated but I like her prices)

Migrated

The Ubuntu Experience is still pretty shitty. Install upgrades? No more video card for you! Basically, every kernel patch comes with a Chinese Fire Drill to get the Nvidia drivers working again, without which the machine appears functional, but has terrible graphics and GenAI performance. How to fix it? Try this, then that, then the other thing, and if none of those work, upgrade to a newer release of Ubuntu! And that won’t work, either!

So, running the (final!) round of 25.x patches broke Nvidia support, and upgrading to 26.x and reinstalling the Nvidia drivers from scratch didn’t fix it, so I could not use this machine for running LLMs. LM Studio still ran, but in CPU-only mode, which is a good 50x slower, even on tiny models.

I could find no useful documentation for how to resolve this problem. I ended up manually removing every package that mentioned “nvidia” or “cuda” in the name, removed all leftover config files with those strings, deleted the nvidia repo config, rebooted, ran apt update and ubuntu-drivers install, and rebooted again. Now I have a graphics card, ho, ho, ho. (there used to be a GUI app to install drivers in 25.x; this is apparently gone in 26.x)

Clearly this is finally The Year Of Desktop Linux!

(what made this particularly annoying was that my workflow for publishing releases for my C1GA project involves using a lightweight LLM to convert JSON-format image prompts to natural-language paragraphs, 5,000 at a time; this is a lot more practical at 1.3 seconds/prompt than at 65+ s/p)

Migranted

I stopped at Costco on the way to visiting my mom at the (temporary) senior-living center. Thursday afternoon at 4 PM, and the store was full of people with strong African accents who gave the impression of being uninterested in assimilation to Western cultural norms (this is a polite euphemism). Expected population distribution? 85% white American, 5% black American, 10% second-generation Korean-American.

I had to stay with her fairly late, so on my way home I stopped at the new sports bar down the block from my house for some takeout (which replaced the local-boy-does-good sports bar that quickly bankrupted the guy who poured his savings into renovating a former Buffalo Wild Wings).

I thought it a bit odd that I was the only customer at 9 PM on a Thursday in a place that’s open until 2:30 AM, and they didn’t even have any Doordash pickups, but they are new, so maybe they just haven’t built up a crowd of regulars. The location is convenient, but the previous owner did go broke, and Covid had killed off the Buffalo Wild Wings. So, y’know, not out of the question.

The food was good and the staff was friendly, so I’ll certainly order food from them again (but only takeout; I hate sitting in sports bars), but what struck me was that everyone working there was a foreigner on a visa, each from a different country. I could hear chatter from the kitchen about friends having difficulty getting back into the US or having recently been deported.

My city’s demographics? 87% white, 4% black, 2% hispanic, 1% asian, 2% misc, 4% mixed. Those were the numbers before the migrants showed up, anyway.

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 4

Our Mighty Hero is thoroughly whipped, unable to put up even a token struggle when Our Determined Waifu refuses to allow him to hedge by calling her “fiancée”, and then publicly announces her intention to have 10 kids. He wants to wait three years before bedding her, but it sounds like she’s planning on three weeks at most.

The real elephant in the room is Our Harem Lord Next Door. Contrary to rumor, he’s not an usurper with a slave harem, he’s a persecuted minority who freed his people from slavery and won the hearts of a small army of loving wives.

Verdict: a whole lot of talking this week, but in a good way, as Hero and Heroine advance their relationship, and the nearest neighbor turns out to be a Hero-worshipping friend.

10 Years A Harem Lord, episode 4

It’s nice to see that when the current haremettes age out, there’s a new generation waiting in the wings. Plenty of time for them to grow up, though. I mean, an entire generation has been groomed to view him as the real hero, so he can have his pick of the litter. It’s almost a shame he’s the good guy; there’s a whole other genre of story that could be told here.

Anyway, does it count as foreshadowing when it only takes about five minutes until the inevitable betrayal? At least it gave Our Cuddly Apprentice time to fight a desperate delaying action. And to learn the first rule of a gunfight: have a gun.

Verdict: good clean fun.

(unrelated, but they’ll do in a pinch)

Apple hates old people

The more I see my mother struggle with her iPhone, the more I’m convinced that the iOS engineering team not only doesn’t test with senior citizens, but actively hates them.

My mother hasn’t been home for several weeks after a trip to the emergency room. She’s currently in a local senior-care facility so she can get daily physical therapy and more active monitoring than her 94-year-old husband can provide. So her phone decided that it was not in a known place and started requiring Face ID every time she tried to make a phone call, even though she’d just unlocked it.

Try to turn this off, and because “stolen device protection” was somehow turned on (not by me), and it was not at a “recognized location” (despite having been in the same place for two weeks), restoring normal functionality required:

1. try to turn off “require face id for phone app” using secret hidden menu, rejected; must disable SDP first.
2. try to turn off SDP, requires Face ID only (which has been failing unless she has her glasses on, even though it’s configured to recognize her both with and without).
3. SDP imposes mandatory 60-minute delay, at which point it will send a notification.
4. You must click on the notification when it comes up; going back to the same settings screen doesn’t work.
5. Click notification, turn SDP off again, requiring her to put on her glasses for Face ID.
6. Click-and-hold iPhone app to pull up secret hidden menu with “require face id for phone app” option. Turn it off, and aim the phone camera at her again, with glasses on, for it to approve.

She could never have turned this off without help, and there was no useful information about what was going on or why the phone’s behavior changed in the first place. Morons.

(oh, and while she would have liked to use it with no passcode at all, since she’s barely able to leave the house on a good day any more, you can’t turn on the “find my phone” feature without one, and without Face ID, apps like MyChart won’t let you into your account without the ubiquitous “type in the 6-digit code we just texted you”, which is not easy for an old woman with Parkinson’s; and, no, the iPhone’s automatic “auto-paste code from text message” isn’t 100% reliable)

(sometimes they demand FaceID and a code as a bit of security theater)

The Odyssey Of Tanya The Scrupulous 2, episode 3

No plan survives contact with the enemy, but sometimes your worst enemies are pride and the sunk cost fallacy.

Verdict: Tanya should have learned by now that every time she sees a way to get a cushy job away from the front lines, she’s holding up a giant sign that says “kick me”.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 3

Our Swordmage Haremette shows that while she’s not much of a teacher, she’s a solid fighter even without her magic, and far more stacked than I gave her credit for. Nimble little minx, too.

Anyway, that pleasant-but-minor fan-service doesn’t distract from a well-constructed episode that gives everyone something to do. Our Hero fights monsters and buys time, Our Age-Appropriate Potential Love Interest defends the innocent, Our Swordmage Haremette fights and rescues and destroys the macguffin and looks good doing it, and Our Loner Daughter leads her friends to victory over a straggler, bringing her further out of her shell.

Verdict: more, please.

(perhaps this episode will encourage someone to draw some decent fan-art of her…)

“I said unsubscribe, dammit!”

Sam’s Club spams members mercilessly, but if you click on the “unsubscribe” link in the email, it shows you as already not subscribed to marketing email. Then you get three more that week.

Turns out it’s not a proper “remove this email address” unsubcribe button, it’s just taking you to the account-management page for members, so it only works if you’re logged in on that browser.

Apple’s trust issues

Someday I’d like to connect my phone/tablet to my computer and have it say, “oh, hey, you’re logged into the same account, you’ve connected to this computer before, you’ve been using it for backups since the day you bought the device, and you’ve said “trust this computer” at least a dozen times. Maybe I don’t need to ask you again three times during a software update.”

Amusing spam email

“Your storage limit has been reached. Reactivate your cloud services today.”

Never mind that the message is completely generic and refers only to “cloud”, or that the link goes to a random googleapis.com page, I like the fact that the sender address is openly “support@wxc.edu.cn”, as if that would be persuasive. There’s no attempt to obfuscate the HTML or the links, either, making this the easiest-to-detect spam that’s landed in my junk folder in months.

I think the artist and the writer weren’t quite on the same page for this one, given that the kid says his sister is a mess of broken bones, and then we see her and it looks like she skinned her knee. In the exact same place her brother skinned his knee in the previous scene.

Naturally, we have to return to the mustache-twirling rapey slaver stock character, this time with a specific interest in the supposedly-crippled pre-teen girl. What we don’t see is if any of the slavers survived to be interrogated, or if Our Heroic Duo were even interested in following up on this slaver gang; it really felt like they’ve been killing some time before starting the main plot, which we get a tease of at the end.

Verdict: hopefully they make it to the magic spring soon, so we can get Our Titty Elf out of her surprisingly supportive dress. You wouldn’t guess from looking at it, but that outfit seems to be completely Gainax-proof.

(unrelated but well-equipped)

Ten Years A Harem Lord, episodes 1-3

(aka “I Became a Legend After My 10-Year-Long Last Stand”)

This wasn’t on my radar until Frank commented, but I’m always up for a Best Beast Girl, and she’s not the only cutie. It’s a straight-up fantasy world with no status screens, and doesn’t take itself too seriously, both major plusses this year. I’d say it feels a bit like Hammer Of The Guild Gal without the constant tonal whiplash.

(there is really no fan-art for this one, not even pr0n)

Chicken knife follies

One of the many social changes of the Meiji era was the rise of food stands, especially serving meat such as grilled chicken skewers (yakitori). Since they used pretty much every part of the bird, they needed to cut up a whole lot of chickens, quickly and precisely. Enter the honesuki (骨スキ), a distinctively-shaped specialty knife with a single-bevel edge.

Brief digression: half of the English-language sites discussing this knife are, to be kind, confused about the terminology. There are actually two distinctive shapes, one a triangle with no curve to the blade (like a French-style chef knife), and one with a curved blade (like a commercial butcher knife); both usually have blades just under six inches long. They are referred to as “kaku” (angle) and “maru” (round) styles, respectively. A number of sites claim these terms refer to whether the edge is ground double-bevel or single-bevel; as far as I can tell, they’re just wrong.

Anyway, unless you know how to hand-sharpen a single-bevel blade, you want the double-bevel version that works with standard knife sharpening tools. However, 90% of web shops do not include this information in their product listings.

…and that’s why I bought a Chinese knockoff on Amazon. Unlike all the listings for actual Japan-made knives, the vendor clearly describes the edge geometry. Since I’m left-handed, I’m not going to spend serious money on a right-hand-only knife, and that’s almost certainly what I’d get.

It arrived this morning, and it looks and feels quite nice. Next time we’re in Japan I’ll get a proper one, but this should handle all chicken-parsing duties for the foreseeable future.

(amusing note: they’re advertising a knife specifically designed for cutting around delicate chicken bones with a picture of a huge honkin’ beef bone that would wreck the thin blade)

Oh, this is gonna suck

Teaser trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. The #1 problem I see is that it’s overstuffed with characters from all the late-stage MCU films that I never bothered to see, in a shameless attempt to give each of their solo film series a transfusion.

Cue the Eight Deadly Words: I. Don’t. Care. What. Happens. To. These. People.

Amazon’s recommendation page is suggesting 40 different Kindle books to me. The first 20 are mostly-sequential volumes of the Komi Can’t Communicate manga.

(most of the allegedly-all-ages-safe fan-art of Komi is… not so safe, sigh)

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 3

This week, Our Retired Hero gains a dozen little old ladies and a pair of adopted daughters. Next week, an encounter with a harem lord. Or is he?

Verdict: Our Sweet Teen Waifu’s spidey-sense really undercuts a lot of possible sources of tension in the story, making it difficult for this to step outside the cozy realm of the slow-life genre. For now, though, they’re making the characters interesting enough for that to work.

(still no fan-art worth mentioning)

Magilumiere 2, episode 3

Four magical girls locked in a room, and we spend half the episode on a flashback. The other half is spent getting ready for next week’s fight.

Verdict: pacing just doesn’t seem to be a thing for shows this season.

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 3

Okay, this show is in desperate need of a fight choreographer. Because there’s going to be a lot of fighting, and this week’s exposition-heavy battle had them mostly standing around like a turn-based RPG. Also, could they have at least been walking around looking for the missing girl while they talked about working together to rescue her before it was too late? The formal introductions and handshakes kinda undercut any sense of urgency. On the bright side, all the gals clean up nicely at dinner.

Verdict: the feel so far is “speedrun”. They’ve got Guild Gal and Former Boss Babe acting like romantic rivals while Gambler Girl plays middle-school matchmaker, and it all comes out of nowhere, including Our Rear-Protecting Hero announcing his long-term goal to restore Our Best Lizard Gal to full humanity. All of this happens in the source material, but it involves a lot more character interaction and his extensive inner dialogue.

(not a lizard girl, but she’ll do)

Unsuspension of Disbelief

How to knock me out of your story: have a millenia-old immortal casually use the exact same words to express her political opinions that a drenched-in-Marxism college freshman would. I’m looking at you, Elliot Kay.

And no, you don’t get a pass by setting the story in Seattle.

(picture is unrelated, but has been gathering dust for too long)

(points Tanya at OpenAI; “Look! Over there! Commies!”)

The Legend Of Tanya The Pragmatic 2, episode 2

This week, Our Bilingual Adjutant quite possibly changes the course of the war by exposing a blind spot in Our Heroine’s assumptions (and pretty much everyone else’s as well).

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 2

In which two drunken haremettes squabble over who’s best positioned to give their master a leg up, while a third basks in what little praise he can offer up for her nonexistent teaching ability. Meanwhile, Our Only Age-Appropriate Potential Love Interest shows him that she can handle a firm squeeze, and Our Adopted Daughter comes ever-so-slightly out of her shell.

And then some plot happens.

Verdict: moving right along.

OpenIve’s Magic Box

It’s a portable speaker with a camera:

“The device will have a personality, and will be able to ‘connect on a humanlike level with users’. It has mechanical elements that can move on their own, to create a sense that the device is alive. There’s also a camera so it can understand a user’s surroundings. The AI product includes a rechargeable battery and it can be carried from room to room.”

No, Sam & Jony, I will not be installing a device that auto-feeds audio and video from inside my home to your data-scarfing datacenters. Not that I was particularly interested in the first place, other than in a “how much will he underdeliver this time” kinda way.

And the “mechanical elements that can move on their own” sound like an RMA just waiting to happen.

Related, “1Password For Claude” exists

How do I feel about the prospect of letting Claude use my secure password store to log agents into my accounts? First word rhymes with “duck”, second word with “blow”.

Well, that was new. I don’t typically leave my garage door open, but with the recent heat and humidity, it desperately needed airing out. More than could be accomplished just by leaving the screen door on the side open. So we walked in a few hours later and found a bunny exploring the place.

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 2

In which Our Manly Hero learns that “husband-high” comes a little earlier among his new neighbors, putting His Insistent Oni Bride a full year shy of Sweet, Sweet Sixteen. Cue the music. Given how over-the-top awful the ANN reviews of episode 1 were, I have no desire to read their historically illiterate hysterical ranting on the genduhhh power dynamics of a 35/15 relationship. $10 he doesn’t manage to hold out the 3 years he thinks is proper. The sheep know the score.

Verdict: good clean fun.

(unrelated, but in the ballpark)

Magilumiere 2, episode 2

It’s a good thing Our Magical Engineer Gal is hot, because damn that exposition went on for too long. Anyway, nothing really happened, but next week we’ll have four magical girls locked in a room with a bunch of giant mouths, so what could go wrong?

Verdict: I know why they’re explaining all of this, but it still doesn’t make for a well-paced story.

(honorary magical girl…)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 2

Despite the expected Brand New World exposition, we get some good story building, including some time with three future party members (okay, two and a quick silent cameo of the third), as well as Our Enthusiastic And Decorative Guild Gal. The red menace that bloodied Our Well-Equipped Valkyrie did manage to pull off an MCSA, but the camera didn’t linger on her lingerie, and she didn’t Gainax as gratuitously as last week, either. And going forward, she’s got real armor to help with support.

We also got the first hint that Our Experienced Twintail has a story to tell, one that would require several seasons to resolve.

Now, as to how “Recovery Support” feels when you’re already at full health…

Verdict: okay, the bloody injuries looked like a splash of flat red paint; we’re getting just-good-enough art and animation here, not the premium stuff, but it will do.

(not a lizard girl, but still a Best Girl)

Skeleton Knight 2, episode 2

Our Titty Elf is definitely the brains of this operation. Our Boney Hero is still a lovable goofball tourist.

Verdict: who knew that interspecies romance caused diabetes?

(Nagi would make an excellent dark elf…)

The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau

It appears there are only two ways to watch the complete series:

1. overpriced out-of-print import DVD

2. Youtube

Microsoft promises to finally unfuck Windows search

Pinky-swear!

The only question is whether they’ll hand the task to an H1B or to an Animatronic Intern. Because those are pretty much the only two options they’ve left themselves with.

(unrelated, I’m playing with a summer-vacation-that-never-happened retro slide-film style, feeding it upcycled subsets of my currently-at-55,000 1girl dataset)

Gun company Twitter ads

1. Still-life of random gun.

2. Trite one-line slogan.

3. Profit?

They’re just throwing the brand out there as if it sells itself. Mossberg, SIG, Smith&Wesson, HK, etc; I’m getting them all this week.

Yes, I have heard of you. No, you’ve provided nothing that would make me like your tweet, follow your account, or click on your ad.

Why I switched to Japanese cheesecake…

I skimmed a random subset of the old paysite archives I found on my NAS, and was reminded why I shifted to primarily viewing Japanese glamour and idol products about 25 years ago: Japan still has a pretty-girl photo/video industry, while the US and Europe just have hardcore porn.

In the Euro-centric photosets I just looked at from 2001-2005, the models were relatively untainted by tattoos and random piercings, but not only did the majority have boob jobs and shaved pubes, the posing instructions given to the models ranged from “bluntly gynecological” to “pretentiously gynecological”. The photographers who felt they were aaahhhhtists focused on unnatural lighting and ridiculous stiff posing, while the meat-market shutterbugs barely acknowledged that there was a healthy and maybe-kinda-decent-looking gal attached to the tits and pussy. Neither group wasted much effort on encouraging signs of life or emotion in their subjects; any personality that made it through was accidental.

The site’s still up. I took a quick look at their ~500 most recent models, and ~95% were straight-up dogs. I looked at close-up photos of their faces with professional lighting in what passes for “glamour makeup”, and I have never had enough beer to find these women pretty; I doubt the photographers ever looked above the neck at all. Meanwhile, random AI jailbait is 10x: