If you skipped the pre-credits scene, you might think this was just another "Cute girl goes to her first job at a run-down maid cafe."

If you didn't skip the opening scene, which contains a mob-style hit between rival groups of Maids in a rainy Akihabara side-street, you'd be wondering "What's with all this cute stuff?"

The opening credits won't help you much, because it's a mix of the two (And one girl's face is covered in the credits, which I guess is a spoiler of some kind).

Well, the firearms are lovingly rendered, so I'll give it a chance.

---

Oh god, it ended with the funniest bloodbath I've ever seen. (if that's a possible thing). Yor Forger has a rival in Ranko Mannen.

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So I got two upgrades for my laptop, an old HP Envy 6 that used to be one of the most expensive at Office Depot when I bought it (My previous PC died, and I needed something to get online while I built a new one). It's actually been very handy - Three of my published or soon to be published shorts were written on it at conventions. It lives in the bedroom, where it mainly serves to keep me up instead of getting to sleep when I should.

My Desktop, Himawari, was one notch off top of the line when I built it. And I've added to it over time. It used to be a kick-ass gaming machine, but over the last few years it's become increasingly unstable, even with a fresh system install, a move to an SSD for the boot drive, and my homebrew water cooling system. Random bluescreens are frequently associated with viewing YouTube, or launching my browser, and sometimes they chain 2-4 together where it reboots during a reboot. Other times it goes days without a hiccough. BlueScreenView lets me see a summary of the last 50, but it offers no clues.

But I really wanted to get back into World of Warships, so I installed it on Etna, and at the low graphics settings, it ran okay. But loading and logon took forever, and sometimes it was late entering battle. It was also running a bit hot, so I went to see if I could take off the bottom and clean it out, but I couldn't find everything holding it together. But I did take off the panel in the bottom for the first time and I saw how easy it was to get at things in there. And so I hied off to Amazon to look for things I could stuff in Etna's holes. I got a WD Blue 1 TB SSD to replace the original 500 Gig 2.5" SATA internal, and a pair of memory modules to take it from 6 Gig internal to 16 Gig.

Since there's only one drive slot, I also bought the suggested SATA to USB3 adapter cable.

Western Digital "Includes" Acronis True Image as its preferred drive utility. It MAY be an okay backup program, but it was a failure as a drive cloning/migration tool. With only two drives to choose from, the select source drive and select destination drive operations each took over three minutes apiece. Adjusting the partition sizes was a counterintuitive nightmare, with the C partition becoming unresizeable, or even disappearing completely (Until you selected the option to clone with the OS for another computer instead of the option to clone for the same computer. There was no difference between those options save for the bugs.) When it finally got going, it eventually figured out it was going to take over a day to clone the drive, but it did finish overnight. But then it complained at the end it couldn't find some file, and the result was non-bootable, and didn't even show up in the file explorer until I went into Disk Manager and assigned it a letter. The data was there, but it couldn't boot.

Etna didn't come with a Windows DVD. (And that would have been 8.0 anyway). I downloaded the 8.1 ISO file, but I think my spindle of DVD-R disks has gotten too much sunlight over the decades (cough). It wrote, but didn't verify. It may have worked, but I didn't try.

While I was messing with that, I searched for the set of Restoration disks I had burned on Etna. I found those eventually right where I'd put them. The idea was to see if I could make a clean bootable drive out of the SSD just to be sure it worked. That failed.

Now I recalled the Samsung migration tool worked very well when I used it on Himawari. Unfortunately that turned out to be brand-locked. Another failure.

However, my regular back-up tool, Macrium Reflect, also has a clone function. Not only was it trivial to resize the C: partition, I was able to skip the fixed D: restore partition. And the whole clone process took less than two hours. And when I swapped the drives, it booted and ran like nothing happened.

And the memory swap? Yeah, that was trivial, and worked the first time. Now what can I do with a 2 and a 4 gig Laptop memory module? Any way to use those with a Raspberry Pi or something?

I still haven't played a round of WoWS yet, but it loaded a hell of a lot faster.

Posted by: Mauser at October 03, 2022 07:35 PM (BzEjn)

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Definite:

Spy x Family season 2. Because the first season was so awesome.

Peter Grill: Because you gotta balance all that goodness with a Trash Ecchi.

Possible:

Isekai Ojisan - Because folks have said it was good, but it was delayed.

Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita - Because Cat girls.

Yuusha Party wo Tsuihou Sareta Beast Tamer, Saikyoushu no Nekomimi Shoujo to Deau - Because Cat Girls.

Akiba Maid Sensou - Because Maid Girls. (Not always a sure fire thing, but the description suggests something more.)
Uchi no Shishou wa Shippo ga Nai - Because Tanuki Girl.

Any better suggestions?

If you wanna see where I'm getting this, check the anime chart link on the side.

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I'm trying to remember another anime I watched a number of years ago where a guy comes to the family homestead in rural Japan, and has a whole ton of computer equipment delivered so that he can take on some hacker in a virtual world - because Belle owes a lot to that show for the visual design of its virtual world. (Basically an infinite white space with cities and avatars floating around in it.) This VR world "U" is accessed through the improbable handwavium of a cellphone app and a pair of special earbuds that somehow link you to a biometrically generated avatar called an AS supposedly based on you, but customizable (which also limits you to only one account). Gotta wonder how mucked-up the biometrics are of some folks, given the avatars they appear with, but at least almost all of the main characters appear as human instead walking hands studded with eyeballs or something.

Suzu has one friend in school, Hiro, who is a really tech-savvy nerd. There are some minor plot points about high-school who likes who stuff that I won't go into. Hiro sends her an invite link to U. She sets up her character, and with a some reluctance, she logs in.

God damn those U programmers should work on their New User Experience. They just dump her into the middle of the space. No tutorials or anything!

So there are basically three plot threads.

1: Suzu/Belle's rise to fame. When she first arrived she was able to sing again, very pretty. A lot of folks found that annoying, but others were all "Who's that girl?" and she memetically rose to fame, partly thanks to social engineering and tech support from Hiro. Suzu is thankful for being able to sing again, but shys away from the attention, and desperately wants to keep her real identity secret, although when it's plot convenient for thread 3, everyone in the village knows its her and wants to help.

One funny sub-plot of this thread is Peggy Sue, the previous most famous VR singer celeb. By being bitchy about Belle, she begins to lose her fame. And at the end reveal, she lets slip that she too is just an ordinary schoolgirl.

2: The bad dragon. When one of Belle's concerts is crashed (literally) by a large dragon avatar, along with a large cadre of the U-niverse's self-appointed (?) protectors, whose ultimate weapon is revealing your true form (Officially sanctioned doxing?!). Belle goes on a Beauty and the Beast plotline to force herself on the guy, and is aided but a number of little AI bots that float around in the system.

3: Life reflects art. Suzu eventually discovers who the dragon is in reality, a 14 year old boy, with his younger brother who loves Belle's music, and his abusive single father. Hiro helps hack the webcam on their computer and everyone helps figure out the location from the view through the window. While the hack is going on, Belle is singing a concert for all 5 billion users, and because she is defending the Dragon, the vigilante squad zaps her so she appears as herself, but nobody in the audience cares. Once they know where the boys live, She gets rushed to a train to Tokyo where she goes towards the boy's house to do what exactly? The father goes to beat the older boy, and Suzu interposes herself between them, and the father ends up tearing her cheek. And through the power of a stoic staredown, the father breaks and slumps off back to the apartment. Is this a lasting fix? Who knows. The movie ends roughly here.

It's a very pretty animation, but probably better seen on a 4K movie screen because there is too much actively moving small detail work to avoid massive video compression artifacts.

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Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 08, 2022 11:46 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at September 10, 2022 10:19 AM (BzEjn)

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This surprised me by being better than it deserves to be.

The hero, Shu Ogata, lives on Bayron City, a floating city over the largest underwater Orgonium mine in the world. Orgonium (who remembers "Orgone Energy"?) is a powerful energy source that has made Bayron City insanely wealthy. Yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.

Bayron City is also beset by Demons, something the local government is trying to keep secret. Classed A through D for their power levels, most of them Contract with and possess a human and, well, that generally doesn't work out too well for the human but they keep doing it anyway. Because of some international anti-weapons treaty, the cops are underpowered for dealing with the menace, so the mayor sends out contracts to the various PMCs, or Private Military Contractors to take out the demons when they appear (another part of why it generally doesn't work out too well for the human involved). One of the biggest is AAA. Shu used to work for AAA, and was dating Ayano, the daughter of the president of the company and a captain among the troops. But three years earlier he left the company and started his own PMC. And even though it's just Shu and Kisara, they are extremely successful and piss off all the other PMCs because they regularly underbid them, and they reluctantly admit he gets the job done. Yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.

Now Kisara appears to be a school-age girl with pink hair, but she's actually the only Class-A demon out there. And Shu made a different kind of contract with her where instead of trading his soul for one desire, he parcels off chunks of his memory (Typically a month at a time) and gives it to Kisara to power her up in the form of a kiss.

Ayano still carries a torch for Shu, but given her Tsundere nature, she must have traded her wooden rake to another villager for it. She's been bailing Shu out with money and information all the time (yet somehow Shu is broke all the time.) And at first she doesn't understand why Shu infuriatingly doesn't seem to remember how much they meant to each other. And all he can do is make empty apologies for the things he doesn't remember he did. But by the midpoint, she learns exactly what the contract with Kisara means, and she doesn't like it one bit.

Bit of background. When he was a child, Shu's dad was participating in a safety inspection of the mine, that was more of a PR outing. He and many dignitaries brought their families, including Shu and his little sister. Then there was a disaster, everyone but Shu died, and Bayron City covered up that it was Demons, and scapegoated Shu's dad. So one of his motivations is to restore the family name. Another is to get revenge on the demon who did it, and the third is that he believes his sister is somehow still alive and wants to save her.

It's kind of interesting because of the way the story and background slowly peel like the layers of an onion. It's a little annoying with the juvenility of Kisara and Ayano dueling over Shu's affection. Especially when it turns out that Shu was also fucking the nun-like demon hunter who shows up to try to kill Kisara about halfway through. (And how he gets out of that mess is just... you have to see it.) Apparently he was seducing his way through the demon-hunting ranks just to get to the point of accomplishing his goals, and that included capturing and contracting with Kisara.

It also reminds me a bit of takt op.Destiny in how the girl's power comes at a cost to the guy.

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In the market for a trash hentai isekai? We've got right what you're looking for here.

Hero McProtagonist blows right through the warning screen on this new VR game that says he won't be able to log out, and wakes up in his track suit in a barn. (Sheesh, even Al Sharpton eventually gave up his track suits). He's barefoot though, and he sees a pair of sandals in the corner of the barn, puts them on, and is rewarded with the Thief job class. (The game has multiple job classes that you can equip up to 5 of, in a ranked order). Fortunately he spent a lot of his character creation points on a hugely overpowered sword, and a few other skills he wasn't sure what they were for. Apparently there's no tutorial stage.

Bandits attack the village, and while the villagers try to fend them off, he debates entering the fray, but after identifying the leader, he jumps in and beheads him with his overpowered sword and proceeds to one-shot most of the other bandits, even as they're running away. The village elder puts him up for the night, and reveals a storehouse full of the loot from the bandits, although our hero notes that the special bandana the leader was wearing was replaced with a plain one. The Elder brings forth the culprit, and our hero finds out that regular justice is the guy is to be sold into slavery. He'll get half the proceeds as the victim, and the culprit's family gets the other half as compensation for their loss of a strong back.

Yikes!

The elder also shows him how they summon someone's character card from their left hand with a chant, but if you can't do that, well, chopping off the left hand and presenting that to the knight's guild will let them retrieve it and determine if there was a bounty on it.

Double yikes!

The elder gives him a lift to town with a wagon load of booty, which they sell off, and their thief, whom they also sell off. He warns him off the dangerous parts of town, and the Brothels. Although for a virgin gamer like him, the prospect sounds very enticing. After the Elder departs, McProtagonist gets invited back inside by the slave trader, who sees him as a pigeon ready to be plucked, er, as a potential customer. Figuring him for an adventurer, he tells him about two ways to make money. Either the labyrinth that recently sprung up outside of town, or hunting bounties. Bounties being possibly more profitable, but more dangerous, he suggests the labyrinth. Adventurers, he tells him, often buy slaves to fill out their party. Then the trap is baited by the pretty wolfkin slavegirl in a maid outfit named Roxanne who serves them tea. Then he springs it by pointing out that slaves can't betray their masters (As in they die with you unless you have a will that frees them), that since she's a wolfkin he can fuck her without her getting pregnant or any diseases, and that she's already consented to getting freaky with her master. This apparently pushes all of his buttons. She can be had for a mere 422,800 "Nars". Mind you, they only got 30,000 for the village thief - good thing nobody asked him where he got the sandals... That price also includes the maid outfit.... And he gives him 5 days to raise the money.

(Strangely, the subtitles asterisk out the translation of "Onna Dorei" (Female slave) even in the supposedly uncut version I found.)

So he goes into the labyrinth, kills a bunch of 1st level tree monsters, retrieves the stick remains they drop, and turns them in for cash, and quickly figures out he'll never make the price at that rate. He does learn a bit about some of his skills and the costs of the game system. So he decides to go into the slums and kill some bandits. But first, he does some scouting.

One advantage McProtagonist has is that he is fully into "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" and has absolutely no moral compunctions brought with him from Japan. After all, he wants to buy himself a big-titty slave girl to bed and adventure with, so getting into the bandit gang's house and killing a bunch of them asleep in their beds and lopping off their hands is no big deal.

Needless to say, he makes enough cash, buys the girl, and is quite a bit nicer to her than she expects. He even asks her consent when he shifts from foreplay to the main event. And is only momentarily bothered when he wonders if that really counts when she can't refuse him as a slave.

She is useful in the dungeon. She's great at sniffing out monsters.

And that's about how far we get in 5 episodes. Which doesn't leave a lot of time to fill out the rest of the harem.

I have questions though....

Posted by: J Greely at August 06, 2022 07:43 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at August 07, 2022 12:05 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 08, 2022 08:19 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at August 20, 2022 05:33 PM (BzEjn)

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Although they don't say it out loud, Ko Yamori (14) must be an Aspie. He doesn't get people's emotions, and barely has any of his own. This comes to a head when a pretty (and busty for 14!) girl at school confesses to him, and he rejects her because he feels nothing. The other girls gang up on him and give him shit for rejecting her. He finds solace by sneaking out of his apartment late at night and enjoying the dark world with no people in it. He hints at wishing it could always be that way and quitting school. Severe insomnia doesn't hurt either.

He's not as alone as he thinks. Just as he works up the nerve to buy a beer from a vending machine because he read about alcohol helping one get to sleep, SHE appears. She promises to help him sleep, but as she leads him to her place, she expounds upon the philosophy of the world at night, the freedom from inhibitions. When she finally gets him to her apartment, it is completely barren but for a Futon - with two pillows.

He tries to bolt, but she assures him nothing dirty is going to happen. He decides to pretend to sleep so he can slip out later. He fakes it well enough that she does what anyone who has read a synopsis, or who has even an ounce of clue could tell (what with all the shots of her fangs) - she bites his neck and sucks his blood. And apparently his blood is particularly delicious. However the moment she stops to marvel at it, he gets up and gives her the calmest WTF ever. After a round of lame excuses, he outright asks her if she's a Vampire, and she admits it. Then he starts quizzing her about it, has she turned him? No, it's just eating to her, besides, it would suck to have new family members every time she ate. He agrees, that would suck. Eventually she explains that for her to make him a vampire, he would have to be in love with her when she feeds. This is a twist on Vampire myth I've never heard of. I guess that leaves him SOL since he is so passionless.

But he DOES find a passion, he wants to be a vampire, so he has to figure out how to fall in love with this strange girl, Nazuna Nanakusa. She just wants more of his delicious blood.

Artistically, I'm of two minds. It's well animated, and the settings are fantastic. But the character designs leave me pretty flat. It starts with the eyes, which are often very large but with tiny pupils, placed close together, giving them a cross-eyed look. Although Nazuna has larger purple irises, with circles on them. I thought I had seen that before, and so I checked and I was right, the same style was in Dagashi Kashi. And it turns out they have the same creator, "Kotoyama". Nazuna also has the oddest bosom found in Anime. It also bugs me that her outfit alternates between being thigh-high stockings or maybe thigh boots with wedge heels.

And yet, it's different enough, that I find the character interesting. They're both fish out of water interacting, but they're both from very different bodies of water.

Obviously it won't continue to just be the two of them, based on the opening credits, so we shall see. This is the only new show I've started this season, although I'm also getting Overlord for the day I eventually get to watch it, or I lose everything on my video drive.... (There are a few other things I've tagged on the anime chart, but I haven't pursued them yet. There is SO much unwatched from last season.)

Posted by: J Greely at July 25, 2022 04:23 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at July 28, 2022 06:04 PM (BzEjn)

Posted by: J Greely at July 29, 2022 09:45 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at July 30, 2022 12:30 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: J Greely at July 31, 2022 09:47 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at August 02, 2022 08:41 PM (BzEjn)

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Well, I suppose if I want hits, I should provide some content, eh?

One show I'm watching this season was recommended by a Spanish cartoonist I follow on Twitter, Kukuruyo - best known for illustrating GamerGate, and who still tweaks the wokanistas in Gaming and Anime, and other would-be art police.

Kono Healer Mendokusai has an official English title of "Don't Hurt Me, My Healer," when it pretty obviously is really "This Healer is Troublesome." The story follows Alvin, who is a first level adventurer with really poor luck, in fact, his lack of advancement has made him a Veteran First Level adventurer. One day on a "Gather Medicinal Herbs" mission he gets into a fight with an ordinary "Mostly Bear" and is overmatched, when a small, flat-chested, dark elf in the uniform of a healer comes upon him. She accidentally curses him such that if he goes too far from her, he will die (At least, that's what she tells him).

One running gag is you never see his face without his helmet.

Carla is not much of a healer, but she is very dryly sarcastic, sardonic, and the master of the left-handed, no, back-handed compliment, and she is always degrading Alvin. On the other hand, she fails cringefully at trying to be hip, and can't even wink properly.

Yeah, that's not quite working....

The animation is not top tier. But it doesn't need to be for this kind of show.

I'm kind of hoping Kuku lewds Carla. He recently did a 20-year-old version of Anya from Spy x Family in order to explode some heads, which it did so beautifully that he followed it with a Loli version of Yor.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 08, 2022 05:27 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at June 08, 2022 10:00 PM (gVjvf)

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I got minorly miffed when I saw a blogroll link here titled "Mauser is Lonely", but hey, at least I've been linked. But maybe it's a little true. It seems that virtually every single form of social media I have, dating back to LiveJournal, is extremely poorly trafficed. In some cases, like Facebook and Twitter, it's malicious interference by the bluehairs. On various alternate outlets it's because the audience is so small. On my Wordpress, it's because I set my goals for that so high, it's a long road to make a new post. Although thanks to Sarah, when I do make a post, I get an Instalanche.

I like anime, and I like to share. But it feels hard to share when nobody's talking. It would be great to get back to the days of 80 image episode-by-episode reviews of shows, and actual discussions about them, but I'm not feeling any interest.

Maybe ever since SdB died, the energy has been off in the old gang. And everyone is dealing with their own health/aging/moving trials. Damn, am I the only one who hasn't grown up yet? :-)

Maybe it's because I throw stuff at so many outlets, my efforts are too diluted.

Maybe I'm just shouting secrets into holes in the ground all over the internet.

(I make that reference a lot. When I was a kid I saw an animation on TV about the Russian folklore story of a barber to the Czar. Many barbers before him had gotten the axe, literally, for commenting that the Czar had the ears of a goat. He held his tongue, and kept his head. But the pressure to say something was relentless, so he dug a hole in the ground, shouted "The Czar has the ears of a goat!" into it, and filled it back in. In this telling, some reeds grow on that spot, and someone (the barber?) makes a flute of them, and the tune has the same cadence as "The Czar has the ears of a goat." The Czar is infuriated but can't prove anything.)

Posted by: J Greely at May 26, 2022 04:22 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Mauser at May 27, 2022 08:53 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Mauser at May 27, 2022 08:54 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 01, 2022 09:13 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at June 02, 2022 09:07 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 08, 2022 02:08 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at June 08, 2022 10:04 PM (gVjvf)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 09, 2022 06:50 AM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Mauser at June 09, 2022 07:51 PM (gVjvf)

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