It was a dark and stormy night. Literally.

(base image generated with Krea 2 Turbo, titling added with the shiny new Qwen Image 2.1)

Magilumiere 2, episode 11

Our Emotionless Magical Hottie needs a more… stimulating transformation deck. Just sayin’.

Since this isn’t the final episode, it should come as no surprise that Our Magical Gals don’t manage to finish off the giant naughty hands this week. They make some progress, but just as much time is spent in a heart-to-heart magigal dialogue, which is only resolved when Our Semi-Sinister Rival Boss acts out of character to keep his employee from blowing herself up along with the monsters. (it’s not actually out of character, as recently revealed in the manga, but we don’t know his backstory yet)

Verdict: a bit melodramatic, but decently accomplished.

(definitely magical, definitely a girl, so close enough)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, fin

Okay, they just completely gutted the whole beach-resort adventure and turned it into five minutes of squeeing over the not-penguins, without even a token battle. On the bright side, most of Our Underage Haremettes are a lot healthier in bikinis than in their usual outfits, and the episode spends most of its time just hanging out with them. As a special bonus, Our Best Lizard Gal has a secret to cherish.

Verdict: I don’t think they’ve earned another season. They used the manga as their source instead of the light novels, which already stripped the series of some of its individuality, and then they adapted it poorly. They ripped through seven full volumes in twelve episodes, with uneven pacing and often-indifferent animation. The characters and the voice performances were fine, they were just didn’t use them well, and after speedrunning through the published manga, they jumped way ahead in the novels to create a half-assed final episode. Darnit.

(not Our Best Lizard Gal, but at least she’s got a nice tail)

Skeleton Knight 2, fin

Cardinal Fatboy was a terrible boss villain, and the need to make his performance comical was just annoying, given the way that he eats dozens of spear-carriers while Our Heroes pause to wait for their next turn. Once Our Bone Knight gets serious, the fight is obviously over, leading to a peaceful wrap-up, in which Our Casually-Dressed Titty Elf is about to confess her feelings when she’s literally cock-blocked by a flying chicken. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Verdict: yeah, this is pretty much how it went in the light novels, except for the whole “hot spring doesn’t cure the curse” thing they came up with. In the source, he starts carrying around a jug of spring water so he can temporarily reflesh himself during their adventures and take off his armor around the muggles, which really gets His Faithful Companion’s hormones working.

(wrong elf, right figure)

Fall Debuts

• 9/26: Wild Last Boss 2
• 9/30: Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2
• 10/2: Maomao 3.1
• 10/3: Vertex Force (?)
• 10/3: Isekai Kinky Porn Game Cheat Harem
• 10/4: Isekai Space Merc Harem
• 10/5: Isekai Goblin Mayor
• 10/7: Rerun’s Special Magic 2 (?)
• 10/11: Isekai Solo Worshipper

(I could use another season of this show…)

Drone warfare

Listening to people present about how they’re building GenAI “skills” to perform work tasks is like listening to a 9-year-old explain the science-fair project that his dad helped him with at the last minute.

Shadowplay

The recently-added support for weighted prompts in modern models in SwarmUI really lets you steer the output away from standard GenAI images, and not just by adding ridiculously huge boobs. Today’s exercise was taking a batch of my upcycled 1girl prompts and prepending <weight[2]:dimly lit, chiaroscuro>. I wanted to see how well it counteracted the very strong tendency toward putting a spotlight on the main subject no matter what kind of lighting you requested for the scene.

I’d say it was a success.

more...

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, fin

To no surprise, the magic leaves resolved the cliffhanger and cured Elephant Boy’s foreshadowing. The rest was pretty much a solid wrap to the season, although I find it hilarious that Our Manly Hero still thinks he can hold out three years before his wife demands to be properly wifed.

Related, a close-up casually reveals that Our Loyal Sidekick’s Cute Doggy Wife has some serious claws. I hope she likes it doggy-style, otherwise the poor guy’s back must look like hamburger every morning.

Verdict: this show could only have been improved by adding more Alna-service. And less comic-relief tranny.

Speaking of which, someone took a stab at that special fertility lingerie…

NSFW

10 Years A Harem Lord, fin

Well, some of the speedline-filled panned stills were well-drawn. Others, not so much. Clearly they did not save up a lot of money to animate the last big battle, or at least not the half that doesn’t have Our Hero in it.

Anyway, the reward for saving the world is getting another waifu added to your household, and this one has bigger boobs than the others put together.

Verdict: pretty typical OP protagonist, uninspired enemies, several cute gals who deserve fan-art.

(glasses gal is sadly unrelated; seriously, there’s just two crude pencil sketches of characters from this show)

Fall season possible fluff: Vertex Force

Our Shota Hero is jealous that his big sister inherited the family power of Summon Mecha Puppet, but in a crisis, it turns out that he got Summon Mecha Armor instead. Despite the promise implicit in “from the director of Strike Witches and Vividred Operation”, the trailers are surprisingly tame. However, they hired some well-known voice actors, so maybe?

The Visa Renewal Of Tanya The Problem-Solver 2, episode 11

Well, somebody just made a deal with the devil. Shit, meet fan.

Verdict: y’know the one thing I don’t like about this season? The OP and ED songs. The first season was far superior: OP, ED.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 11

To no great surprise, Our Bumpkin Hero is not happy to be working alongside the mercs who were recently on the other side, and it doesn’t help that their leader delights in pushing his buttons. I’m okay with this, but what really strains credulity is that Beryl’s the only one who can tell that Mystery Maiden is obviously Rose with a haircut and a mask.

The basic undead are quickly handled, and then it’s time to take down the four big monsters. The mercs take one, Our Hero and His White Haremette split up to take two more, hoping to have enough time to catch up with the fourth, when… A Wild Red Haremette Appears. Gosh, that was convenient.

All four fights are finished in this episode. I just wanted to say that, because of how rare it is as you approach the end of a season. Even better, the interlude with Our Darling Daughter training one-on-one against Short-Stack Haremette has a conclusive ending, too. Almost like they planned out the pacing!

Verdict: pretty good pacing, leaving just the wrap-up. So, next week will Our Hero’s thoughts once again turn to wifing up the Whitehair?

(white-haired waifu is unrelated)

Isekai Ass-Guardian preview…

They just posted a preview of this weekend’s episode. Unwilling to start a new arc, they’re skipping straight to a beach episode to end the season.

Double-checking against the manga, last week’s episode was the end of volume 7, and dealing with the new black box with the help of Shield Gal Seraphina would come next, followed by the acquisition of a new suit. Volume 9 introduces a new friendly party and an obstacle to further advancement, and a joint adventure with multiple fights.

So they’re skipping over all of the remaining source material in order to get the gals into swimsuits, not that there’s anything wrong with that. This particular event does happen in the novels, but if we were following that continuity, we’d have just finished book two, and the beach resort is in book five. And that’s definitely the story they’re not-adapting, because the preview showed the not-penguins.

That’s pretty much an admission that they know they’re not getting a second season. Which, to be fair, they haven’t earned.

Isekai Space Merc Harem promo

New video showing the two core haremettes and promising to get far enough to introduce Sexy Robot Maid Waifu. I don’t see Underage Noble Cutie Waifu, though, who should be present if the maid is. (the blonde officer and the underrim-glasses-wearing doctor just make his life more complicated without jumping into his bed… for a very long time)

RoboWaifu’s voice actress has plenty of experience playing emotionless hotties, with multiple seasons as DanMachi’s Aiz Wallenstein. Hot Mess Glasses Gal’s been in the business for at least 25 years, having voiced my favorite supporting character in Angelic Layer, Ringo. The blonde was recently a certain “tortured” Princess.

(robo-maids are fully functional in this universe…)

Shangri-La Frontier 3

Coming in January and running for two cours, so it should be able to get through a good chunk of story.

(despite the series’ popularity, I’ve already used all the good fan-art…)

Just-in-time backups

After I cleaned up my laptop storage, I swapped in a new external SSD for Time Machine backups, moving to a faster 2 TB USB-C drive. I bought it back in 2023, and haven’t used it for much, so it’s basically still new. It’s a Crucial X10 Pro, and I paid $129 for it. Current price for a name-brand 2TB external SSD with comparable performance? $400+.

(pic is unrelated, of course)

Rewrite time!

I need to rewrite my LLM prompt-enhancement script. I keep running into problems where it goes into a tight loop and never returns after processing N prompts, and I simply can’t reproduce the failures using LM Studio’s GUI or CLI. I initially tried converting it from the lmstudio package to litellm so it would be backend-agnostic, but that turns out to make usage annoying. So I’ll do a straight-up converison to the openai package and see if that avoids the looping problem. Actually, I’ll tell Claude to do it, and see if it can make working code out of working code. It mostly did the right thing for converting to litellm a while back.

The specific task that’s been giving me grief is converting the paragraph prompts generated for my c1ga project to classification tags, to enable improved searches in Juan’s Quarry SwarmUI extension. For now I’m just running the lms CLI in a loop over the data files, since the performance is adequate; it hasn’t gotten stuck once, and I’m about 30,000 prompts in.

And no, I do not plan to buy or lease a new high-end Mac Studio to run LLMs. Honestly, right now you’re better off renting GPUs in the cloud if you don’t want to pass all your traffic through one of the major players. I use the M4 Pro Mac Mini with LM Studio, but it also runs my photo-processing workflow nicely. (which may soon not involve an Adobe subscription, because those assholes just keep getting more annoying and less useful)

(why doesn’t Ariane dress like this more often?)

You can really save money on animation by starting the episode with 9 solid minutes of talking. The good news is that they actually spend that money on the fight between Our Slightly Gay Catgirl and Her Former Older Brother. Which has a satisfying conclusion.

Anyway, Talking Head-Priest made it clear that Big Big Bad’s power is on another level compared to anyone else. Which just means that he hasn’t seen Our Unfleshed Hero cut loose. And won’t, because there’s only one more episode this season. But before he goes, he delivers more exposition, revealing the faces and roles of a whole bunch of other Bad Cardinals scattered around the world doing evil. Which, again, only one more episode, so we’ll see this footage again someday.

With everything else resolved, of course Arc ended up separated from the others and in just the right place to battle Our Gluttonous Cardinal. Next week.

Verdict: way too much setup before the fight, but a good fight, and a decent bit of closure. Good thing nobody knows that Arc can resurrect the dead, as seen in the first season…

Pixel!

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is now available as an ebook. Kindle at least, although I expect it’s on other platforms as well. Hopefully this means that they’ve finally sorted out the rights, and To Sail Beyond The Sunset will come out soon. I think that and Number Of The Beast are the last ones you can only get on dead trees (which may only apply in the US, of course).

Engage!

The most views and likes I’ve ever gotten on xTwitter came from a reply in which I relayed a story I heard from a martial-arts instructor about his first trip to Japan. 41,000+ views, 1,500+ likes, 4 retweets.

I have one follower. I was up to five twice, but I blocked them as obvious scam accounts.

Poly!

Someone new to the GenAI image-making game was trying to use an LLM to create prompts for retro low-poly gaming graphics, and asked a lot of questions on the SwarmUI Discord. Several people recommended Krea 2 Turbo, since it’s pretty much the current thing, and can do a wide variety of styles, but he was having trouble putting it all together, so I threw together a prompt to show how easy it is to do most things in K2T:

So, given this perfectly good style, I decided to upcycle some of my large 1girl-prompt archive to use it. For speed, I dropped the resolution to 1024x1024, and finally switched to the int8-convrot version of K2T, which runs ~35% faster, so these images took an average of 5.2 seconds to gen.

The moment a nude turned up, I had to laugh: hexnipples. Just grab a wench-wrench and turn the knobs!

NSFW

more...

(classical reference)

I was not in the mood to watch anime on Friday. I also tried to stay far away from social media. My efforts were not 100% successful, since I was still exposed to mind-boggling stupidity and vile hatred, but hopefully only a fraction of what was out there.

Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 11

Shiftless Older Brother is quickly reformed, a mysterious visitor rewards Our Hero with exactly what he doesn’t know he needs yet, and Our Waifu casually provides some delightful service. Oh, and then there’s a cliffhanger that comes out of nowhere.

Verdict: as delicious as Alna looks with just her white bikini, I really wish she’d bought some of that frog’s lingerie…

(belatedly, I realize that they kept Our Cute Doggie Waifu from going for a soak with the others, because they’d have had to draw her wet fur…)

10 Years A Harem Lord, episode 11

I’m pretty sure we could have gotten the point with a lot less tedious backstory. “Glasses Gal Alchemist accidentally made Bad Stuff that makes vampires tougher”. See, there’s ten minutes back that could have been used to animate the fight scenes.

…

For fuck’s sake, would you STOP TALKING! Seriously, I thought that once the parents filled in the backstory, we’d be able to get on with it, but noooooooo, as Teh Tru Ebill manifests itself, it takes a long nap to allow the girl to explain Even More Backstory, without a trace of expression thanks to the animators just moving her lips.

The battle’s going to carry over to next week’s finale, though, thanks to a completely underwhelming cliffhanger. Will anyone still watching this show actually believe that Our Hero is down for the count, and that Glasses Gal is now just a tasty snack before the end of the world?

Verdict: 20 pounds of exposition in a 5 pound bag leaves me gagging.

(glasses gal is unrelated)

Magilumiere 2, episode 10

Team Good Guys plan to intercept Team Bad Guys’ offensive. Meanwhile, Our Spunky Magical Gal manages to draw some humanity out of Our Robot-Like Magical Hottie. This will be important later.

Then it’s counter-offensive time, as Our Surprisingly-Well-Connected Office Manager manages to acquire the exact time and place that the new monster will be released. Our Magical Gals are first on the scene and spring into action, despite facing a girl’s worst nightmare: all hands.

Verdict: next week, Even More Hands.

(recognizable fan-art!)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 11

“That’s not the way mommy tells it!”

    “Shut up, kid, that’s the way I tell it.”

(there might be a handful of people in the world who recognize this quote…)

Last week, we interrupted the rescue mission, so Our Heroic Harem finishes up the battle against Miss Evil Plant Puppet using the kinda-sexy harpies and a well-timed backstab. Then we get to meet Shield Gal Seraphina, someone who’d be important in a future season, but will at least be of some use next week.

Then the story diverges significantly from both the novels and the manga, as Our Cheek Protector is forced into a battle of wits against the remnants of Evil Puppet Plant inside the Miss. The results are basically the same, with Our Best Lizard Gal showing up naked in his dream in time to save the day, but in both sources he knew what would happen and faced it deliberately, it wasn’t some sort of trick what-if scenario. And there was some key exposition left out, in which Evil Plant calls out Theresia’s demi status as a failed conversion into a full monster. This would have been useful information to guide Our Hindmost Hero toward her cure.

All’s well that ends well, and they say goodbye to The Recovering Other Guys and step toward the entrance to the next district.

Verdict: not bad, just a bit baffling why they changed things up. Both fights were a bit rushed; not the early-season speedrun, but still less than satisfying.

(no new fan-art for Best Lizard Gal, so how about a new figurine of Best Cowkini-Clad Naughty Magical Gal?)

Free the bits!

I was playing with some old encrypted volumes that I converted from the long-dead TrueCrypt to the VeraCrypt fork. Since I’d done the conversion on Windows (using the last version that handled both formats), they were stored on my NAS.

When I opened them on my Mac, everything was fine until I tried to copy all the files, and then I started getting timeouts and errors, so I copied the images down, opened them from there, and started moving the files around. Then I ran out of free disk space. Then my external SSD backup drive started thrashing and complaining about no free disk space. Then the Finder went out to lunch, which pretty much leaves you with only the apps that are already running, although sometimes you can still launch apps that are on your Dock.

Apple provides no tools that would help diagnose or solve the problem. The Apple solution is simply to reboot and hope for the best, except I know from experience that it won’t reboot cleanly when any process is hung, so you’d actually end up holding down the power button and rudely powering down the system.

Fortunately I always have terminal windows open, and I knew what I was looking for: unlinked open files. I was looking for processes holding onto those VeraCrypt images, and I found them with: sudo lsof -n -s | sort -k7rn | head.

Sure enough, Google turned up a bug in the latest version of VeraCrypt for Mac that leaves fuse-t processes running after unmount, even for clean unmounts. This doesn’t just hold onto disk space after files are deleted, it leaves the encrypted volumes accessible. Oopsie.

(the original timeouts and errors? Apple’s SMB stack is fragile under load, and while I’ve done all the recommended tuning, VeraCrypt’s encryption method leads to constant random-access reads, which is pretty much the worst-case scenario)

(oh, and after cleaning up the mess, the internal SSD went from 7 GB free to 200+ GB)

Tanya The Remarkably Sane Compared To That Jury 2, episode 10

This week, a fight in which bullets would have been a lot cleaner, and would also have removed a bunch of useless paper-shufflers from the board. The Empire is facing the unpleasant fact that they’re so powerful that everyone is afraid of them, but not powerful enough to take on the entire world at once. The only choices left are bad ones.

Verdict: I’m delighted to say that I have no idea what will happen next. But I’m pretty sure that Tanya’s going to fuck some people up.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 10

Despite a brief training diversion for Our Determined Daughter, we’re all-in on the plotting this week, with the bad guys attacking in an unexpected way, the other bad guys maybe not being on the wrong side, and Our Missing Haremette still not revealing which side she’s on. Our Thigh-Flashing Legal Loli is apparently sitting this one out, and appears only to remind us that she’s still in the cast. Perhaps the most significant development, however, is that before the shit hits the fan, Our Hero starts seriously thinking about marriage, while staring at Our White-Haired Haremette’s always-exposed cleavage.

Oh, and we have confirmation that Our Death-Flag-Tripping Knight will never fully recover from his injuries. Hopefully there’s still enough left of him to satisfy his future wife, since she’s clearly standing by her man.

Verdict: the sudden switch to Daughter Training kinda broke the pacing, much as I like the character. Otherwise, this seems to be working out well, with enough time for the final battle and a clean wrap-up.

(still some Misty in the archives…)

Hey, Disney, next time you need an Evil Witch:

“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”

(Krea 2 Turbo knows a lot of characters out of the box, but sometimes requires more than just the name; in this case, “Pokemon trainer Misty” brings in almost everything, including forcing an anime art style. It resisted most attempts to draw her in other styles, and was even reluctant to change her clothes or remove them. Adding a General Naughtiness LoRA got rid of the clothes, but the version I have is hard to steer towards photographs; looking up the link just now revealed a new version that promises to do better)

The time for isekai tourism is over. We get a lengthy reminder of last week’s heavily-telegraphed “shocking twist”, just a teensy bit more on The Big Big Bad, some mustache-twirling from The Gluttonous Little Bad, and some excellent truth-pheromone work from Our Naughty Ninja Pony Gal. Next week, more fighting.

Verdict: I’d like to remind the animators that when a rescue is urgent, and Our Skeletal Paladin can see the attack happening, it is completely pointless for him to spend the next five minutes riding toward the scene. Seriously, I don’t care how fond he’s gotten of his new steed, we’ve seen how he teleports right into the middle of things whenever there’s a crisis. And we’ve also seen that Our Threesome can each take out one of these giants with almost zero effort.

Dear Adobe,

Not expecting much, I attempted to contact support to ask how to disable the unwanted pop-up notifications from Creative Cloud when all categories of notifications are already disabled.

The first-level AI chatbot, “Sinish”, took twenty minutes to confuse itself into thinking I had a subscription problem, and transferred me to chatbot “Dinesh”, who took ten minutes to apologize for not being able to do anything that was not subscription-related. I was then transferred to “senior technician” Sugeeta (chatbot), who spent twenty minutes misunderstanding English before requiring me to reboot my computer as the first step of diagnosing the problem. I pointed out that this would end the chat.

Five minutes later, “Sugeeta” returned to inform me that I would receive a callback afterwards. Having wasted enough of my time, I ended the session and left a one-star review and non-profane feedback, which will no doubt be processed by another AI and never reach a human being.

TL/DR: while it’s possible that “senior technician” Sugeeta was a human being in an Indian call center, I doubt it.

Ready for the punchline? The next day, my “support ticket” was closed out and filed under the category “performance”.

(by the way, the cause of the pop-ups is an auto-restarted background job running a script called “UpdateNotifier”, one of more than a dozen constantly left running, at least two of which run node.js, and which don’t get killed off even if you completely uninstall Creative Cloud from your Mac)

(okay, it rained a bit, but the only thing misty is all the archived fan-art of A Certain Grown-up Pokegal)

Magilumiere 2, episode 9

This week, we have a psychopath and a dating coach (not the same person), as a short flashback stirs the plot and leads to some heavy exposition. Our Plucky Heroine has a bit of the sads as she can no longer take innocent joy in magical-girling, thanks to the behind-the-scenes nastiness that’s brewing. Fortunately, she’s up for the challenge.

Verdict: really liking the expanded cast.

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 10

Little too much repetition of stuff we learned last week right at the start, but at least Our Bountiful Guild Gal sees them off, and Our Former Boss has grown comfortable showing cheek. But before we follow them into the dungeon, Our Flat-Affect Semi-Demi-Catgirl and Our Insecure-But-Capable Merchant Lass engage in a little light bonding. Speaking of which, I think the Naked Camo Suit should be put into production right away; it might be too late to attract enough fans to secure a second season, but this would certainly help, especially if they all try it on before deciding that it should go to Theresia.

Anyway, the first fight in the dungeon mostly goes well, but Our Best Lizard Gal’s feeling a little down after being forced to attack her friends, and finds a way to cheer herself up that just happens to reinforce her relationship with Our Derrière-Garde Hero.

Then it’s time for the first half of what’s got to be the next-to-last fight of the season, as The Other Guys fall into the clutches of the latest named monster, forcing Team Harem into a tough fight that will get resolved next week.

Verdict: wow, the music was loud and intrusive this week. Other than that, it went pretty well.

WTF, Aliexpress?

For many years, I’ve been creating custom email addresses for vendors in the form $vendor@$mydomain. Aliexpress explicitly forbids you from using an address in the form aliexpress@anything. So I ended up creating my account as just4youclowns@$mydomain.

Unforgetful: requires Liquid Ass

I went to try out an improved Reminder app for Mac/iPhone/iPad, only to discover that the Mac version requires the UI design disaster that is 26.2, which I refuse to “upgrade” to.

Tried it on my phone, and I’m really not liking the non-deterministic display order. Seriously, if I have a dozen things on my list to do today, and 8 of them are things to pick up at the grocery, I expect them to be sorted together and displayed in a consistent order. I do not want to miss one of them because for some reason it’s way at the bottom after “buy gas” and “break down cardboard boxes”.

The grownup version

You cannot buy ebooks of the British editions of the Harry Potter books in the US. You can, however, buy the dead-tree adult edition, which I recently did. Interestingly, it ground to a halt for me in precisely the same place that an attempt to rewatch the movies did: teen dating angst in Goblet Of Fire.

I’m going to have to skip over the whole Christmas Dance bit to where the story picks back up.