The Three Behemoths, episode 11

Wish I could say they left out “Anna” again this week, but at least it was brief, and they compensated with a mother-daughter melon bath and some symmetrical docking kitten-smothering.

Anyway, after an obviously-telegraphed betrayal by a character added for precisely that purpose, The Big Bad arrives with his army and immediately makes a mockery of the elves’ defenses (Maginot Line much?). Big fight next week.

Verdict: one more episode, which has to include The Biggest Battle Ever and a catsexual harem wrapup? Somebody’s ambition is bigger than Aria’s chest.

(printable Vulcan model might make a good side project, if you’re up to gluing all the parts together; I think I’ll stick to Stable Diffusion)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 10

The Japan/Korea duel sets up some important things, but fortunately it doesn’t take very long, leaving time to show most of Our Hero’s Friends And Family And Rescue Babes (and Schoolgirl Hunter seems to have settled on Earnest Sidekick as Backup Best Boy…). Then it’s off to Ant Island, where the raid goes as planned, until it doesn’t. Whoopsie.

Verdict: better paced than I expected, given how close we’re getting to the end.

(a Hero’s Reward moment that should have happened)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 9

Our Eager Eavesdropping Catgirl’s a tad overdressed when she’s not kitted up for adventure, but Our Legendary Elf Receptionist makes up for it with a cleavage cuddle.

Then it’s Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch’s turn to overdress; pity, I’d been hoping her taste in street clothes matched her “professional” (coughcough) costume. Our Core Trio is in their usual civvies as well, hosting a party for the least surprising event of the season: permanently adding two new haremettes, exactly as promised in the episode title.

On the relationship front, Our Legal-Loli Healer is so far in the lead with Our Multi-Beloved Hero that she’s nearly unbeatable now; fortune favors the bold, indeed. Our Hot Dark Elf plays the ha-ha-only-serious card in an attempt to recover some ground. Hopefully these issues will be resolved in a shared bath scene soon.

Character art wasn’t consistent, but the show didn’t fall off the cliff, at least. Next week, it’s Party party time! Cleverly disguised as a clip episode.

Verdict: did we really need to show Dickhead’s End one last time (I hope) and then waste screen time talking about The Late Losers? Yeah, yeah, Yuke & Jamie needed closure, but we didn’t. I’m really looking forward to them never being mentioned again during the next cour.

(good luck catching up, Silk!)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 22

I Do Not Care What Happens In This Other Game. And their version of Western comic-book art doesn’t do it for me. As for the real-world game, Gal Gamer’s crush on Pro Gamer K is now obvious enough to be seen from space, but not from the chair next to her.

Verdict: not thrilled with the pacing coming into this finale, especially since the undersea quest was built-up as much more interesting.

Unrelated,

I drove to Chicago to spend some time with my sister and help her out post-surgery, and thanks to some jackass cutting off a semi, the trip took 90 minutes longer than it should have. So much for carefully timing the trip to avoid bumper-to-bumper traffic on Lake Shore Drive. Anyway, I got to see her new place, and spent some time sitting on her enclosed balcony that you could fish in Lake Michigan from, if you had a 25-story reel. And you didn’t mind the snow being blown into your face.

Speaking of Stable Diffusion…

I was just cleaning my catgirls, when they suddenly went off:

more...

Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, episode 9

Our Mighty Morphing Dragon MILF manipulates her way onto Our Cuddly Couple’s team, strengthens both members, and guarantees that they’ll be accepted on the New Dungeon Investigation Squad. If it weren’t for her obvious weaknesses and her willingness to let Our Heroes learn and grow, she’d be a real show-breaker. As it is, she just ensures that things don’t get dark and bloody, and we can continue to enjoy our Boy-Meets-Elf Sloooooooow-Burn Romance/Adventure/Comedy.

Verdict: “we’ve secretly replaced their fairy godmother with a foodie dragon mama; let’s see if anyone notices.”

The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 9

Mystery Managed! Maomao did her best to ignore information that would drag her deeper into Jinshi’s affairs, but in the end she just did her best. Most interesting was the surprise PoV change to the Emperor’s mother, who turned out to have more secrets than the one she set Maomao to solve. Sic Semper Pedo, as it were.

Hammer Of The Guild Gal, episode 9

If the show was always as light and fluffy as this episode, it would be 10 times better. Also, this is one of the rare filler shows this season where the character art hasn’t fallen off a cliff. Yet.

Verdict: finally getting all three of Our Cuddly Cuties into one room without any bloody deaths was a win. More revealing pajamas, like the ones in Our Mighty Heroine’s imaginary vacation, would have put the cherry on top. So to speak.

The good news is that only about half of the character art was done by the C-team this week. The bad news is that The Big Bad Dungeon Spiders were handled by the D-team. Honestly, the best part of the episode was Our Blue Furry-Boobed Catgirl narrating her jealousy.

Verdict: meh. I would be delighted if Our Shopping Hero gave up on the lame-ass chuuni incantations. They take up time that would be better spent on harem hijinks.

(Zabuton was so far above this week’s disposable puppets that I can’t even regard them as proper spiders)

This week, we get to see Our OG Party meet up for the first time in the real world, where they’re revealed to be… exactly like their avatars. In other words, Actual Sunraku is just as hyper and shouty as in-game. This does not win over the other pro gamer in the party, who’s reluctantly putting up with their antics because she trusts her regular partner (with a faint hint of “silent crush”).

We only get to see brief moments of the new game, though, because 90% of the episode is a huge exposition dump.

Verdict: four episodes to go, and not only do we have private matches between teammates, we have the actual competition, and occasional dips back into the underwater boss arc, which makes me think maybe they should have worked all this week’s exposition into the actual action.

(bringing in this serious fighting gamer would take this show to the next (naughty) level…)

The Three Behemoths, episode 10

Let’s see what positive things I can say about this episode:

1. The character art did not disintegrate, even though most of the battles were barely animated and Our Catsexual Heroine’s first fight didn’t even show her moves hitting any monsters.

2. The trivially-defeated Cocky Demon Lady was stacked, naked, and bathing, until she transformed, anyway. Since it was the only bath scene this week, at least they put some effort into it.

3. Our Catsexual Party all got to do something in the big battle, mostly because the enemy stood around and politely waited for them to finish their conversations. Neither the Big Bad nor His Mighty Minions seemed to be particularly motivated.

4. They were joined by Those Two Bikini Adventurers again, and probably the guys from that party as well. Shame they didn’t make it into a bath scene.

5. No homo. It’s sad that I have to call that out.

Other than that, it was just the usual coincidence and catsexuality. Our Hidden Behemoth transformed in front of everyone, but of course he was mistaken for something else, and got to turn back into a kitten at the end.

Verdict: this is past where the light novels ran out, so I have no idea what they’ll do in the remaining two episodes. But I have lowered my expectations again.

(Demon Queen Leafa-chan is unrelated, overdressed, and understacked, but the only character I’d want to generate for this week is Nekkid Demon Lady, who’s not in a LoRa yet; sorry, Stella, but your Big Moment was long-winded, obvious, and completely devoid of drama)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 9

Okay, in Esil’s final scene, right before she attempts to confess her obvious crush, she’s in the same light as Jinwoo, and their skin tones match the shot I used in last week’s comments, so canon is that she’s got an olive cast to her skin. Not inhuman or orc-like, just a tint.

With Our Best Girl abandoned, it’s time to save Mom, which they give a proper emotional payoff, showing Our Leveling Hero’s core humanity contrasting with what he’s made himself to get there. Also showing off Hot Little Sister nicely (and what was Our Sidekick doing hanging out with Schoolgirl Hunter?). Then it’s time to bathe the camera in testosterone and plot coupons, as The Sinister Japanese Hunters show up to taunt and train against Our Korean All-Stars. Big fight next week.

Verdict: four more episodes, which should wrap up the ant arc and drop some teasers for what comes next. And I kinda want to know how they’re handling this in the domestic release, where all the Korean characters are Japanese; are they simply reversing it?

(hey, actual fan-art of anime Esil, and she isn’t pulling a train!)

And one from an updated-last-week LoRa (with the tag line “the best girl is here!”), with decent ears:

Sample image from the LoRa:

A-Rank Dungeon Harem, episode 8

Four important things happened this week:

1. Our Little Blonde Titty-Witch survived with nothing more than some almost-fatal sword wounds, which is a lot better than her fate the last time we saw her. Turning State’s Evidence also led to her getting off fairly lightly, although I wonder what sort of work she’ll be performing for the next year to afford her little brother’s expensive medicine…

2. The rest of The Dick Party is dead (Rapey Muscle Guy and Queen Bitch offscreen with no details), and Fat Bastard Merchant is never coming near Our Harem Gals again.

3. Our Legal-Loli Healer is so far in the lead for Head Waifu that all the others are left stunned.

4. Wait, this show is going to run another cour? Without any asshole antagonists? Honestly, this week felt like a season ender, but apparently this was just the first major arc.

(the translated light novels are way behind what’s been released in Japan, so I have no idea what comes next; book five came out in the US ~9 months ago, and it ended before Jamie’s rescue mission)

Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, episode 8

Our Foodie Dragon Mama has now been promoted to Mighty Morphin’ Dragon MILF, with the catchphrase “Buy the Bluray!”. Anyway, this is a hot springs episode, so the focus is on food, booze, blushing, steam, and inconvenient light rays.

Verdict: no complaints, although it’s surprising that Marie actually thought Kazuhiho was not interested in her as a woman. Seriously, does she think that’s a dagger in his pocket every time she rubs against him?

The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 8

Encyclopedia Maomao is on the case, and it’s the sort of Imperial Entanglement that she’s been working very hard to stay out of. Worse, it ties into Jinshi’s recent dream about his early childhood.

Verdict: Shisui is such a lovable goofball, getting up to things that would make Maomao blush.

Hammer Of The Guild Gal, episode 8

Who knew that all you needed to do was just try harder? And have Our Overpowered Heroine flip a switch and go into Double Secret God Mode, of course. Next week promises to be a relaxing interlude, so there will probably be a huge body count.

Verdict: they’re the ones setting these whiplashing contradictions, not me…

Diffusion Junction, How’s That Function?

(classical reference)

I’ve been using SwarmUI for all my AI-picture-making needs, but I wanted to experiment with some of the other frontends and backends without duplicating model directories, so I installed the Stability Matrix multitool/manager on the drive that’s not filled with a terabyte of models and LoRas, and pointed it to the existing SwarmUI directory. This mostly worked, except that it expected base models to be located in models/StableDiffusion, while SwarmUI used models/Stable-Diffusion. I renamed it for testing things, but then of course SwarmUI couldn’t find anything. Shortcuts created from the Windows GUI are not the same thing as symlinks, so I had to dredge up the appropriate PowerShell syntax:

New-Item -Path Stable-Diffusion -ItemType Junction -Value StableDiffusion

From the GUI, this looks like a shortcut, but it actually works from applications. And now I can keep using my existing GUI install while I play with all the ones supported by SM. So far, the most interesting feature it has is the model browser that detects updated versions, although SwarmUI still gets a thumbs-up for allowing you to paste in URLs for downloads rather than restricting you to searching CivitAI and HuggingFace via API calls. Oddly, it insists on installing in a completely different directory when it upgrades a model or LoRa.

Note that SM can install SwarmUI, but still has some references to the old, abandoned version called StableSwarmUI.

Dear ChatGPT, quit your day job

Someone asked it for an image with a transparent background, and it returned an image with Photoshop’s UI embedded:

(it apparently doesn’t support transparency at all, but it was eager to learn!)

This episode would have been a lot better if the C-team hadn’t done the character art.

Anyway, after frantically dealing with the surprisingly-minor results of Our Firestarting Loli’s first adventure in spellcasting, we quickly work our way through a few weeks of Slow Life With Two Wives, and finally add Our Orange Furry-Big-Boobed Catgirl to the cast, which does not please Our Blue Furry-Boobed Catgirl at all.

Our Shopping Hero pretends not to understand when Myaley is relieved that he hadn’t picked up yet another girlfriend, although Orange rapidly grows more affectionate, confirming her fears. Meanwhile, Blondie is over the moon at being referred to as “his wife” (especially the part where he doesn’t contradict the person who said it), and deeply annoyed when he gets called “her father”.

Speaking of finally, the Busty Blonde Mama and Her Blonde Loli Daughter from the credits finally show up and make ambiguous comments that are sure to matter next week.

Verdict: no whiplashing darkness here!

(C-grade character art will make it harder for the LoRa creators to get good shots of Orange)

Unrelated

There are now 15 Esil LoRas on Civitai. One of them’s gotta have decent ears. Also, anime canon is that she has pretty much the same skin color as Jinwoo, but I kind of liked the light purple.

(apparently the diffusion engine does much of its work in “latent space” at 1/4 the resolution before upscaling to fill in details, so small things that require unique details, like distant faces or elf ears (or fingers…), don’t have enough pixels to start with, so you get “weird shit” that has to be fixed with inpainting, etc)

Our Underwater Heroes reunite (mostly), with Our Half-Clad Birdman taking out a giant monster along the way. Then they deal with the most awful and terrible aspect of questing: figuring out when everyone can be online for the next week. One of those conflicts is Our Original Trio teaming up for the promised tournament in another game, which will probably take up the rest of the season.

Verdict: IIRC, we’ll get a little advancement in the kraken arc, but the rest is going to be a mix of real-life hijinks and exposition-heavy tournamenting.