Last week, at a summit featuring such noted nutrition experts as SpongeBob SquarePants and Jared the Subway sandwich guy, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that forbids public schools from selling sodas.
— The Center for Consumer Freedom, 9/21/2005The quest for good stuff...
New Year, old song.
My New Goddess Is A Shoulder Chibi?
I might, might have to try to watch the 58-minute-long premiere of Hero Sentence, after this screenshot from Tenka Seiha’s otherwise tepid review.
Because shoulder chibi.
There are three downsides. First, the plot summary sounds like complete nonsense. Second, the price of the super-long premiere was delaying the next episode until the 15th. Third, the trailer promises that it’s utter crap.
’Nuff said
Related,
Unrelated,
I came out on the SwarmUI Discord as a despiser of “modern UI preferences”. I just couldn’t take the praise for low-contrast text and the holiness of dark mode:
(amusingly, the creator of the app was sure he’d really-truly forced dark mode for the Windows console to ensure the color text (retch) worked, and was quite surprised that I was seeing black-on-white as The Great Old Ones intended)
Side note: by default, to ZIT, “monk” means “Buddhist monk”, even with additional context that should have steered the style to European/Christian; kind of like how it thinks “dumplings” means “gyoza”.
Stripping down the artist list
Now that I’m done making holiday pinup wallpaper, I started the year with the SF dynamic prompts. Although perhaps in retrospect I should have done something special-force-y.
Anyway, I made a few hundred and ran a quick deathmatch where I rejected anything that I didn’t want to stare at as wallpaper, then removed any artist who showed up on the reject list more than 4 times. This knocked about 35 names off the list, then I did it again.
Along the way, I flagged a number of images that caught my attention for various reasons. Some work as pinup wallpaper, some… don’t.
(prompts and parameters in EXIF UserComment, although it might whine
about “unknown encoding”; I need to switch the new JPG operation in
the pipeline to call exiftool, because I forgot that I’d already
tried Pillow’s native EXIF handling before and it sucks)
Amazon nickel-and-diming for peanuts
Remember that three-week-old order that was never shipped? Yeah, USPS reports that it still hasn’t shipped, and while Amazon’s fully-automated and AI-degraded customer support “chat” system believes the data that’s in the system, it was finally willing to process a refund Friday… over the next 24 hours or so. So they’ve had my money for most of a month, which if you multiply it by the number of unhappy customers who were fucked over for the holidays, adds up to a tidy sum.
Perhaps it’s just more profitable than “shipping goods to customers”.
(and, yes, literal peanuts were involved; from the other recent negative reviews of the marketplace dealer, it looks like “Virginia Diner” took December off)
(as a special bonus, I had to manually search for it on the order page, because the pretense that it had “shipped” (which is an obvious misinterpretation of the USPS status code) kept it from appearing in the convenient “Not Yet Shipped” tab, and absent any action on my part, it would eventually just end up at the end of my order history…)
Chinese fabrication
Speaking of Amazon, I bought an espresso tamping station, and it arrived Friday. Take a good look at the pictures, and you’ll see that there are no photographs of the product. They’re all 3D renders with composited accessories. The wood frame was fine, but even with rubber feet on the bottom it didn’t sit quite level, and more importantly, the black acrylic insert was CNC’d ever-so-slightly oversized for the CNC’d wood.
So the worker simply slathered the bottom with glue and pounded it into place, which lasted long enough to get it into the box and ship it. Looking at the reviews, I’m not the only one who discovered this quality workmanship when the glue failed and the center of the insert bent up. I sanded down the edges until it fit, then used gap-filling superglue and a bunch of woodworking clamps to reattach it.
So, good design (swiped from another company), shoddy assembly, and zero QA. I’d have bought a better one for twice the price, but this was the only one that would arrive by this weekend…
(it was surprisingly difficult to get ZIT to grasp the concept of “pounding a square peg into a round hole”; if it made the peg at all, it was almost always undersized, and at least half the time the hammer was held upright, pounding with the base of the grip)
Random test image
As I’ve added functionality to my SwarmUI cli, it’s gotten kind of crufty. In particular, I had two different methods of creating images in JPG format: server-side during generation, and client-side batch conversion. The problem with the first one is that I also added client-side cropping and unsharp-masking, which added more compression artifacts.
So I gathered up the code for cropping, resizing, sharpening, and format conversion, abstracted them into a “process” class that applied them in a well-defined order, and set the server to always generate PNG. Took a while to get everything working, but it makes it possible to clean up the code and make all the processing options available to multiple sub-commands.
(I needed a quick regression-test image to confirm that everything worked, so I used the very simple prompt “a catgirl”. Most of the time this produces a dull photograph of a girl with cat-ears, but this one time the model hit it out of the park)
Breath Of The GenAI
Another functional style LoRA for Z Image Turbo is BOTW Zelda Style. At full strength it applies too much of the game’s various racial characteristics, but at 80% it mostly applies the visual style without the goofy Hyrulian NPC faces or painful Gerudo figures (impossibly small waists combined with washboard abs is not sexy).
I’m okay with it randomly applying Zelda’s remarkable ass, though…
Sometime soon I should generate fantasy location and costume prompts, and perhaps some bunnygirl-friendly locations for Easter. Some of the Christmas locations look vaguely Hyrule-ish, but mostly not.
Wintering again
First it rained heavily yesterday, then the temperature dropped 30°F last night, and then I looked out the front door this morning to find that high winds (40+ MPH) had blown my empty trash bins sixty feet down the street, and had also filled my yard with a mix of trash and recyclables from neighboring houses.
As I went out for what I thought would be a quick pickup, snow started blowing around. I got the bins back up to the house, but had to retreat and gear up before finishing the cleanup, because my fingers were starting to hurt from the bitter icy wind.
So, yeah, staying in for the rest of the day.
(style courtesy of one of the few useful ZIT LoRA, Cute Future, which really shifts the mood of my holiday cheesecake)
Teh Anime Warz
Lots of back and forth on the xitter in the never-ending battle between “people who like Japanese pop culture” and “people who insist on ‘fixing’ it in translation”. My take:
Localizers believe that they’re better writers in English than the original authors are in Japanese. If this were true, they wouldn’t be working as localizers.
Random study-buddy
(I’m really liking this particular cartoon style; it reliably comes out strong and consistent and cute; style section of prompt is “Drawing in the style of Jon Burgerman, chaotic compositions of cartoon characters, free-form doodling with bold, looping linework, flat graphic lighting, a vibrant, candy-colored palette, playful and energetic atmosphere.”)
Paradoxies
So, AI is consuming all memory production in the world while simultaneously being unable to remember which commands destroy data. I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.
“Alexa, exit Alexa+”
How much do we want AI everywhere? Instead of the original plan to make it an add-on paid service, Amazon is rolling out the new “AI” “enhanced” Echo “experience” to Prime customers by default. To opt out and restore the old dumb “by the way, did you know that I’ll keep talking until you swear at me to shut up?” behavior, use the above command. Which will probably work as reliably as switching away from the “for you” feed on X…
(took about 20 tries to get the speech bubble to come from the drone, sigh; fortunately it only took 4 seconds per try)
“Package delayed in transit”
Oh, Amazon, you and your bullshit.
- Dec 10: marketplace order placed, “may arrive after Christmas”.
- Dec 11: “Package left the shipper facility”
- …
- Dec 26: “Package delayed in transit”
- Actual USPS site, Dec 11-27: “Shipping label created, USPS awaiting item”
- Amazon status: “Estimated to arrive by January 1”
The best part is how Amazon now adds text insisting that the information on the order status page is the same as what’s available to their customer service agents, (implied) “so don’t bother contacting them”.
(fortunately it was just a present for myself…)
Skeleton Knight 2 announced in January
No, not announced for January, just that there will be an announcement for the second season in January.
(I’ve already used almost all of the decent non-porn fan-art from the first season…)
Santa’s School For Naughty Girls
Just helping them get their start…
(ZIT’s having some scaling issues today; must have had too much ice cream and pudding for Christmas (classical reference))
Post-Christmas Clearance Sale
Everything must go!
Glass Bottom Boat
She has my sword…
GenAI Gals after the jump
Unexpected presents...
Amazon Interstellar
Childhood’s End
No, not that one. This one. Of the many pop-culture references from the Seventies that have been converted to LoRAs, this is not one I intend to pursue.
Blackout
My patience is rewarded, as the 15-year-old overpriced Connie Willis novel finally drops below $10 on Kindle.
Merry Christmas from The Cheesecake Faptory
Tear off the wrapping paper and enjoy!
[Update: just realized I made the "-small" versions full-4K as well, which was silly. Page should load a lot faster now...]
Note that my new workflow is built around my SwarmUI
CLI, which
now correctly preserves metadata even when generating to JPG, so the
large images have the full parameters embedded in the EXIF User
Comment field, making it possible to drag them back into SwarmUI or
just view the prompt and other settings with exiftool:
exiftool -b -usercomment cheesecake.jpg | jq .
