…except I work from home, and the house is stocked with food and drink, and I have electricity, gas, and Internet. Still, not going anywhere until they thoroughly shovel the streets and I feel up to scraping a full foot of white stuff off my 75-foot-long steep driveway (I measured while carving a narrow path down to the street). Fortunately the trash company texted me a “lol, no, not Monday” message, so I didn’t struggle through taking it down to the curb last night.

On the other hand, a crown popped off last night, and I’ll need to get it re-cemented. On the gripping hand, it’s intact and the tooth isn’t painful or sensitive, so I made an appointment for later in the week when the roads are clear.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 13

Just when they need it most, A Wild Ninja Appears! Unfortunately for Our Nearly-Crushed Crusher With A Crush, it’s a ninja gal, whose connection to Our Half-Clad Hero is as suspicious as her cheery cuddlyness. Fortunately Rei manages to get her head mostly back into the game, although if she knew that Cuddle Ninja actually looked like that in real life she’d be a mess for sure. File under peculiar that Cuddle Ninja’s vorpal-bunny escort is a samurai with moob armor.

With all the pieces in place, and Emul back in her place on Sunraku’s shoulder, the fight intensifies, and the animation team is so into it that it’s not going to finish until next week.

Verdict: fired-up Sunraku is shouty Sunraku, and Emul is, well, behaving like you’d expect when she finds herself in the middle of a huge boss fight strapped to a maniac, so you might want to turn the volume down this week.

Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army, episode 2

[Turns out it’s actually going to be a Monday show, with last week’s premiere being shuffled around by New Years stuff.]

I really thought the reveal of Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal would take longer than the opening credits. Fortunately Our Administrative Hero is thick as a brick and doesn’t figure it out when she snubs him. He also has no idea whatsoever that Our Fiery Demon Tsundere Maiden is about two degrees away from full dere-dere meltdown.

Or was, anyway, until Our Absolutely Delicious Dream-Girl Ogress first throws herself at him with a marriage proposal and then eagerly joins his staff. Er, “becomes his secretary”. Maybe both.

Somewhere in the middle of all that is a cold-blooded catgirl whose rivalry with TsunDemon cuts her appearance short.

Verdict: yes, the mystery-of-the-week is once again contrived as hell and able to be resolved offscreen without much effort after a brief dream-visit to A Very Special Bar. The show still needs some bounce, but I’ll go with it for now.

(sorry, Shuna, but there’s a new sheriff in town, and you’ve been demoted to #2 Best-Gal Ogress; fan-art or well-made LoRa soon, please)

The rest of the premieres

All on Crunchyroll:

• Isekai Prime, Thursday

• Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, Friday

• The Apothecary Diaries 2, Friday

• Hammer Of The Guild Gal, Friday

• A-Rank Adventure Harem, Saturday

Slime Witch 2 in April

But the video doesn’t have nearly enough Best Girl Beelzebub.

Practicing for Esil’s debut…

All but one of the SDXL Esil LoRas are trained on the Pony side of the family. My usual 2D model is on the Illustrious side, however, so I started with that one. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to explode badly with all but a few 2D models. And by explode I mean the right side of her face was consistently a twisted mass of gore, teeth, and triangles, often with additional deformities elsewhere.

So, yeah, wrong book. I tried out the Pony-based ones, and got the best results with this; and yes, if you click through, pretty much all the sample pictures are NSFW, most with a more bountiful figure than the source. On the bright side, this one works well with most 2D models (not all, and none of the 3D ones; her facial features and proportions do not render as cute in 3D; think Nosferatu).

I had fun using her as a dress-up-dolly to test my new MadLibs wildcard file for sexy lingerie (trying to create a wide variety of little bits of nothing for imaginary gals to wear), but then I got an idea: what would happen if I loaded the Jin-ah LoRa as well and borrowed Our Hero’s Cute Little Sister’s school uniform? First try:

(“Hey, Jinwoo,” she said, completely ignoring canon, “I borrowed your sister’s clothes so I could fit in on Earth! Wait ’til you see the panties I found!”)

Amusing note: there’s also a LoRa for the general art style of the Solo Leveling manwha, also trained on Pony, and if you load all three of them on top of a Pony-derived base model, you suddenly get partial speech bubbles at the edges of the picture, “as if” they were trained using cropped images from the manwha where nobody took the time to clean up the edges.

Also, Today I Learned™ that there’s a sequel novel and manwha set 20 years later. Actually, I kind of vaguely knew about it, but not that it includes the return of Esil in a more significant role. It’s written by someone authorized by the original novelist, and the manwha is drawn by members of the same studio as the deceased artist.

Unrelated, I swear…

I’ve been playing with “uncensored” text-generation LLMs, to see if any of the ones I can run on my gaming PC are capable of producing prose at the same (still pretty basic) level as my experiment with ChatGPT, without enforcing the woke bullshit and censorship.

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The Three Behemoths, episode 2

In which Our Ample Heroine parties with Our Braless Catgirl Blacksmith-nya, goes full Bobbitt and gets spunky, while Our Experienced Monster Kitten imagines a much worse ending to the fight. Note that taking a bite out of crime grants him both tentacles and cross-breeding, powers that are sure to support the narrative. And where she might have appeared mildly catsexual last episode due to the booze, she has now confirmed that she is eager to give it up as soon as he can get it up. And a little life-saving action by Our Mighty Kitten gives the catgirl a tingle as well.

Yes, this is faithful to the source material.

You won’t believe this, but when the third party gal shows up (which requires a bit of plot advancement first), she’s going to be even more catsexual, although unlike the other two she has an excellent reason for it.

Verdict: exactly what it says on the tin. Except the part about the guild-receptionist “person”.

(unrelated blonde-elf with maybe a quarter of the volume possessed by Our Weapons-Of-Mass-Distraction Heroine)

Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal, one and done

Cheap art and animation, weird shading, shouty, self-consciously THIS IS WACKY, with a narrator to point out things you definitely didn’t miss.

(five minutes of that and I need a cocktail with a catgirl chaser)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 1

The new OP is surprisingly non-horrible, and even includes a quick glimpse of Esil and a full backal shot of Our Telegraphed Girlfriend. Pity about the ED and the fight music. This week, a brief recap of the plot, then not nearly enough time spent admiring Our Plucky Little Sister and her insta-crushing schoolgirl friends. The only schoolgirl we have time for is the wannabe hunter from last season who made money padding out Our OP Hero’s group so he could raid a bunch of dungeons with His Rich Kid Sidekick.

He takes Schoolgirl Hunter on a field trip in what should have been an easy dungeon raid. Operative word being “should”. It doesn’t go well for the officially-highest-rank members of the raid, leaving the noobs and A Clever Babe We’ll Never See Again safe in the woods under Our Hero’s protection.

Next week, part two of Behind The Red Gate.

Verdict: look up “overpowered hero”, and you’ll find a picture of Jinwoo strolling casually through an army of humongous ice bears.

(I already used up most of the decent cheesecake for season one, including this pic, so unless the fan-artists get cracking or someone makes an Esil LoRa, I’ll probably have to fill in with random leftovers; they’re fighting elves next week, so maybe Frieren…)

Update: should have checked first. There are seven LoRas for Esil! Three for Pony, one for Illustrious, the rest for earlier base models. That should take care of things.

(new anime? not until Saturday!)

The relative ease of customizing Stable Diffusion models means that thousands of people are stirring the pot and training their own. This is good, since the official models are biased and censored, but it’s also bad, because the derivative models are biased in different directions, and often over-trained to the point that they simply snap when you find their edges.

Most people don’t do their custom training against the base SD models; they layer their collection of picture/keyword pairs on top of one that’s already been “uncensored” or augmented in some way, with the two major anime branches being Illustrious and Pony. What this means in practice is that feeding the same settings to related models will often produce very similar results.

So, just how similar do they get?

I’ve been using SwarmUI’s grid feature to evaluate different models by passing them all the same prompt, seed, and settings.

For each set, I used a character LoRa (small patch model that can be used to add character/style/location data onto other models with varying success depending on heredity), and generated multiple pictures in my go-to model for cute-and-occasionally-naughty material, CAT - Citron Anime Treasures (Illustrious-based), until I found something that looked like a decent starting point:

Setting aside the boilerplate and the character trigger words, the prompt was:

laughing, standing with arms spread, head back, grounded stance, freedom in motion, outdoors, at Santorini, Greece

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Dear Tsundere Redhead Ponytail Busty Demon Gal, please ditch the hip protectors and order some gainax boosters. Remember, the OP promised us a catgirl and a Glasses Elf Mage Gal for the harem, and the web site is promising a sexy ogress to “negotiate” with, so get your tail in gear!

Verdict: oh, the show? yeah, um, something-something taken for granted yada-yada spread your wings boo-ya flawless victory! And the ED makes sure you didn’t miss the subtle hints about the redhead.

(Pixiv currently has four fan-art pics from this show; three of them are porn, none of them are any good, so here’s Much Better Best Gal Livia, from a show with curiously similar OP and ED songs, Nut Salad)

(also, how long do you think they’ll hold off the reveal of the glasses-elf gal, given that she’s in the OP and not on the character page? …)

File under ‘mildly terrifying’…

…that the Rory Mercury LoRa I found generates up to half a dozen of them at once, like a Babymetal cosplay convention…

(this one was my most successful 2.25x upscale from SDXL’s standard 1MP output; upscaling is… weird, sometimes performing flawlessly and significantly enhancing detail, sometimes generating mutant nipples all over the body; y’know, “AI”)

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Once you’ve asked chatbots for information a few times, you start to spot patterns. Here’s a perfect example: I asked Google about putting vanilla extract in tiramisu (something traditional recipes don’t do). High on the list of results was Spoonable Recipes, and every line screams generative AI:

Mascarpone cheese is the most popular ingredient in tiramisu dishes. In fact, over 80% of tiramisu recipes contain mascarpone cheese.

Softened is a frequent preparation for mascarpone cheese in tiramisu dishes.

Mascarpone cheese is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 8 ounces, 1 pound or 1 cup.

Another popular ingredient in tiramisu is white sugar. From the recipes we’ve sampled for tiramisu, over 70% have white sugar.

Tiramisu dishes often call for white sugar to be granulated.

White sugar is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 1 tablespoon, three quarters of a cup or a quarter cup.

…

Another popular ingredient in tiramisu is vanilla extract. From the recipes we’ve sampled for tiramisu, over 40% have vanilla extract.

Vanilla extract is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 1 teaspoon or half a teaspoon.

In tiramisu recipes that contain vanilla extract, it is on average, 0.7% by weight.

In recipes for tiramisu, vanilla extract is often used with mascarpone cheese, ladyfinger cookies, confectioners sugar, chocolate and white sugar.

Potential substitutions for vanilla extract in tiramisu:
    pumpkin pie spice

Also, vanilla extract is not often used with flour, white chocolate, pumpkin and lemon curd.

And remember, that cream won’t whip itself!

(as investor-hungry “AI” companies frantically scramble for fresh content to build their next-generation engines with, they’re hoovering up previous-generation output like this “recipe analysis” and spreading the contamination. A lot of people doing text-to-image generation rave about Flux over Stable Diffusion XL, but the first time I tried it, I got even more fingers per hand; one poor gal must have had a dozen, and that’s enough ladyfingers for three full servings of tiramisu!)

Our All-Business Heroes have no time for doubts, second thoughts, or awkward crushes, because they’re throwing down with a literal Big Bad Wolf, and despite how powerful they’ve both been shown to be (with some of Sunraku’s tricks bordering on cheat powers), they do not have the upper hand here. This is the sort of thing where this show really shines, with even the exposition dumps and planning discussion made sensible by the decoy power introduced in a previous episode.

They’re giving it everything they’ve got, but there’s no sign that it’s going to be enough. Fortunately, help is on the way…

Verdict: ☝️ this, continued

Starting this week…

• Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army - (Wednesday) tsundere redhead demon gal.

• Solo Leveling 2 - (Saturday) how long will they make me wait for Esil?

• Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal (Saturday) - hopefully the eye candy compensates for the shouting.

(Anne never fought Onyxia, or she’d be wary of the tail swipe)

Fun fact: the prompt elements “Christmas” and “Santa Hat” have a powerful impact on the setting (strong bias toward indoors, decorated Christmas tree, boxed presents, fireplace with stockings hung), clothing colors (bright red and bright green), and skin tones (white Euro/American). I had to completely rebalance my skin-color wildcard file and add emphasis and throw in an extra “dark” and move it to the front of the prompt before even mentioning the girl.

And, no, I wasn’t going to add prompts that pulled in the bullshit derivative marxist mid-winter “harvest” festival invented by a convicted torturer as a “black christmas”. Because I really don’t want to find out what directions that would push the engine.

Anyway, the only other big change compared to the last gallery is that the naughty bits are covered. This required some emphasized additions to the negative prompt, and a fair amount of pruning.

(I used my usual “5-star deathmatch” method of repeatedly downranking 2/3 of the images until only 1/81 end up with 5 stars. I was able to do this quite quickly because it wasn’t like my vacations to Japan where I only have so many source images; at five seconds a pop to make more, I can be quite aggressive at discarding them in DarkTable)

Y’know the best part of generating cheesecake with “AI”? You can order it not to use a fucking wide-angle lens!

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He’s a knight who reincarnated as a baby behemoth after falling in battle, becoming a monster that could wipe out countries.

She’s a novice adventurer just starting off her career, whose armor budget just about covers a pair of hand towels.

Together, they fight monsters.

Okay, he looks like a helpless kitten and she looks like a pair of gigantic bouncing breasts attached to a pretty young elf gal. You are what you eat: he eats monsters, she apparently eats breasts.

After a hard day’s work in the dungeon, of course she has to drink heavily, get out of her sweaty clothes (such as they are), and take a nice long bath, bringing her new friend along for the ride. On top of that, she’s at least mildly catsexual when she’s drunk. And to put the icing on the cake, she’s got puffies.

(Soundtrack: Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra… 🎶 “black panties and an angel’s face…” 🎶)

Verdict: did they really have to end the full-episode intro with a title drop? Well, it is exactly what it says on the tin. Next week, a catgirl blacksmith who can’t afford a bra.