This was pretty good. It certainly makes me want to watch more of it.

Our Hero was named "Justice Akazuka" by his parents, a name he really doesn't like. His nickname is Seigi, which is the Japanese word for "justice".

His parents aren't around anymore though we don't know why or what happened to them. It doesn't appear to have been unexpected, however, since Seigi's mom asked his childhood friend Touko to take care of him.

She is ridiculously well built and the first time we see her it's a closeup of her boobs jiggling. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. She surely isn't the only girl in this show and it's sending up "harem" smoke signals like mad.

The other main girl, so far, is an American named Izzy (or "Easy"?) who is a lieutenant in the US Army. The Americans have developed a super weapon and made a bunch of copies of it, but a fair chunk of them got stolen and sold to the Yakuza. Izzy has been sent to recover all the ones that got away.

The super weapons look like black drawings and when installed they sit on the inside of the person's hand. Such a person is known as "Sealed" and they become faster and stronger than any normal person. They also gain some sort of special power which they can activate if they have the proper trigger.

Izzy's extra power is to create air bombs by concentrating high pressure air and then releasing it all at once. To do that, she has to hold a piece of chalk, which she absorbs. So she has a holster on her thigh full of pieces of chalk.

Back to Seigi: his family runs a dojo. Now that his parents are gone, his grandfather runs it. Seigi has been training all his life and by this point he's really good. He's walking home one night and sees two thugs trying to mug an old man, so he gets involved and stops them.

The old man thanks him and rewards him by putting something on his hand, which gets absorbed. He now has a tattoo. Then the old man walks away.

So we get a bunch of fighting, and eventually Seigi takes on a big guy from Los Angeles who has a tattoo and tries to fight him -- and loses, and is about to get his head pulped, and then his tattoo activates.

Izzy recognizes the effect. It's called Void Maker, and it looks like it killed the guy. It's also a "triggerless tattoo" which means that he doesn't need a piece of chalk or whatever else; it just happens when he wants it.

The next ep teaser says that Izzy is going to recruit Seigi for a special team. Presumably it's to hunt those who have tattoos and shouldn't. And it looks like it's all young good looking women.

The ED is nothing but women, starting with Touko and Izzy and going from there. According to the series web site there are four others, and three of them have tattoos.

The director previously directed Aria the Scarlet Ammo which was really dumb -- but it had good action scenes, and so does this one. This director isn't responsible for the story, because it's based on a manga. The Studio is J.C. Staff and one thing they're good at is drawing good looking women.

Touko, the childhood friend, lives with Seigi because Seigi's mother made Touko promise to take care of him. She does his cooking and takes care of him and that sounds exactly like Kaede from Shuffle and let's hope not. This show is going to have enough action without her becoming yandere and going after him with a knife.

There's plenty of opportunity for this to turn to crap, but it isn't inevitable. Here's hoping it stays good.

UPDATE: Touko is not as stacked in the manga.

UPDATE: Actually, she is too. That picture was not typical. I just read up to chapter 12 in the manga and...

...it's really stupid.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 685 words, total size 4 kb.

Bettie Page is a legendary cheescake model who remains popular despite the fact that she did her modeling more than 50 years ago. She was good looking and had a nice figure but there have been many models before and since who did, too. What made Page stand out was the fact that she seemed to be completely comfortable doing what she was doing. She looked like she was having fun.

Too many models look bored, or look intimidated, or look outright terrified, and I gather that some men find that sexy. Not me; it just makes me uncomfortable. I want the model to look like she is enjoying herself, like she's happy to be there, happy to be doing the things she's doing, in the (lack of) clothing she is (not) wearing. I like looking at women but I don't want it to be something that they hate.

Of course, when it's fan art we don't have to worry about that, I suppose. They're just drawings. But that's still how I feel about it. So today's search term is "happy".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 07:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Thieves grab 20,000 pounds of cheese in Wisconsin

Now, what do you do with it? How do you fence ten tons of cheese? Who do you sell it to?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 04:43 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Until now I've been using IE to do most of my posting around here, but it looks as if I'm going to have to use Firefox from now on.

I compose my articles using a dusty copy of Frontpage (from 2001, which Microsoft doesn't sell or support any more) and cut-and-pasting into the "new page" area using IE. But that doesn't work any more. The paste does nothing.

And I can compose directly in the IE windows (though that's risky) but I can't enter any links. The "add link" tool no longer works in IE under Win 10. It works in Firefox, though, so I guess that's where I go now.

I tried "Edge" because I was curious but it only took me a couple of minutes to decide I didn't want any part of it. Being able to add notations to web pages is an interesting idea but that's not enough to make me put up with all the things I didn't like.

It isn't a new idea, anyway. I used to have a program I bought that allowed me to do that for myself, and it was handy. It was also private; my notations didn't get shared. I no longer remember the name of the thing, and in any case the real problem with it is that it didn't scale well. As my total number of notes climbed, performance went into the toilet when I tried to load a page.

There was also something I vaguely remember about that same time that involved notes that were shared. If you accessed someone's site directly, that's all you got. But if you went to it through a proxy server (IIRC) then you saw the original page and you saw all the garbage that every other user left. It didn't last long, probably for the same reason a lot of other bright ideas of the time didn't last: no revenue. (This was during the Dot-Com era when the motto was "We'll figure out how to make money off it after the IPO.")

Nowadays there would be other reasons for it to fail: spam, hate comments, and so on.

Regardless, Microsoft has now revived the idea with Edge, and I assume they are going to have a huge spam problem with it, even if no other issues arise.

The Microsoft store also doesn't impress. Nearly all the games are Free* which means you can download and run them without paying but in-game there will be plenty of opportunities for you to shell out hard cash for in-game advantages. Screw that.

Microsoft Solitaire is installed on here but it doesn't run. It's in the store, too, but the store tells me I already have it. Maybe I'll try deleting it and reinstalling it. Or maybe I don't care.

Next on the list is to go find my installations of Master of Orion and Master of Magic and get shortcuts to them onto my desktop.

It would also be nice if I could figure out a way to disable the damned touchpad, but so far I haven't been able to figure one out. The best way would be to uninstall the device but the first place I looked to do that wouldn't let me. (The button is there but it's grayed out.)

Any transition this drastic is going to have hiccups. (Ooooh, hiccups. That's what caused my stroke.) These hiccups are nowhere near that deadly, at least so far.

On another subject, I added Bakuon! to the top rotation but it seems to me like I really should do something else, too. Netoge would probably be a good series to plunder but, sorry, I just can't work up any enthusiasm for it. I think Haifuri might be pretty good, as long as you all don't mind the fact that it isn't really a fanservice show. And I probably won't plunder the whole thing because I don't want to watch the whole thing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:08 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 662 words, total size 4 kb.

Today's search term is "serafuku", i.e. "sailor suit", the standard (usually) school uniform for high school girls. Not too surprisingly, a lot of Kancolle, but also a lot of Haifuri.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 05:41 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Random Curiousity has posted their Summer 2016 preview.

UPDATE: And here's Metanorn.

UPDATE: And Tenka Seiha.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 03:32 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

Phoenix:

Josh Van Winkle, 29, one of the horse-carriage drivers at the hotel,saw a dog he thought was posinga threat to one of his horsesand pulled out his .357 pistol, Nixon said.

"The weapon was cocked, and when he put it back into his holster, the gun went off, hitting a 6-year-old male right in the leg just above the knee," Nixon said. The bullet went straight through his leg,Nixon said. ...

Van Winkle was taken to Coconino County Jail and held on suspicion ofaggravated assault, child endangerment and disorderly conduct with a weapon.

I hope so! I hope the kid doesn't lose his leg because of this...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:16 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
Post contains 119 words, total size 1 kb.

My second computer is an HP notebook I picked up several years ago for the sole purpose of running uTorrent. And it works fine for that. In fact, it's kind of overpowered.

Anyway, it's running Win 7 Home Premium. I never upgraded it to Win7Pro since it didn't seem to justify that. Starting a couple of weeks ago, however, Windows Update stopped working. When I try to run it, it wedges and goes CPU bound. Task Manager shows it burning CPU in one of the system helper tasks, so there's no telling whats happening. I let it run for several hours one time just to see if it might finally clear and get on with it, but it didn't. Closing Windows Update didn't make that task stop; only rebooting the computer would do it.

So today I decided maybe it was time for me to upgrade to Win 7 Pro, and I ran the "Windows Anytime Upgrade" applet from the control panel. Surprise! You can't upgrade to Win 7 pro any longer.

The Borg have me. The Win 10 upgrade is running as I write this. Pixy did the upgrade recently and said it was pretty painless, so I'm finally willing to take the chance, and we'll see how it goes. More later.

(Please note this this is not a request for advice or suggestions.)

UPDATE: The download is complete and verified and the upgrade just started, and here's hoping we don't get a power blip in the middle.

UPDATE: And the second phase of the upgrade begins...

UPDATE: And complete! That was a lot less painful than I thought it would be. And the good news is that uTorrent works fine. And so does Pingplotter, which I usually keep running just as a check on whether my internet connection is working properly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 04:27 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 310 words, total size 2 kb.

Making a statue of one of the Great Old Ones strikes me as being rather fraught with peril, don't you think? (from here)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

You'd think Spielberg would know better. You'd think someone at Disney would have noticed.

There's a story about a Japanese company who wanted to compete in the broadband market against Road Runner, so they licensed Woody Woodpecker for their competing mascot, and their advertising slogan was going to be "Get Woody, the Internet Pecker". According to the story (almost certain apocryphal) one of their American employees had to explain to them the slang meaning of "woody" and "pecker".

So Disney is bringing out Spielberg's movie, "The BFG". And even I, about as un-hip a person as you'll find, had as a first thought, "Wow! How fast does it fire?"

Probably not fast at all since it stands for "Big Friendly Giant", not "Big Fucking Gun".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Entertainment at 08:13 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 126 words, total size 1 kb.