“Not that I would lech in your case, no, I got incest repellent. But the sight is nice.”
— Nicholas van Rijn, wishing his granddaughter would go toplessNot my holiday
My co-workers had the day off. Kind of means that I get the day off, except not.
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 5
Random scenes were random. Vampire medical research, nut trees, slime parachutes, and tan elves in both adorable chibi and lovestruck adult form.
Verdict: if this were the source material, Our Eager Tan-Elf Maiden would no longer be a maiden, but at least somebody openly wants the D.
FYI, this is pretty much the only tan-elf fan-art from the show:
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 6
This week, a wild man-witch appears! And quickly falls victim to the power of cuteness, against which no scruffy grumpy father figure can stand. Also, Our Main Father Figure demonstrates that he’s actually quite a good teacher. Also a good cook, the subject of the spinoff manga.
Verdict: the animators got to focus on charm instead of spectacle this week. Actually, they got the week off to recover from last week. That’s right, the B team is better than other shows’ A teams.
Omarchy Linux: oh, fuck no
Omarchy pitches itself as a “beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux”. After playing with it for a few days, I’d change that to “quirky, fragile, and retarded”.
Since I resurrected my old gaming PC on Ubuntu to run LLMs, I’ve been poking at the various recommended distros and installing them on an old Intel Macbook that I needed to wipe. It used to be my sterile international-travel laptop, but the last working version of MacOS made it run so slowly that I gave up and migrated that role to my other, not-quite-so-ancient Intel Macbook Air.
The old one predates Apple’s T1/T2 security chips, so it’s easier to install an alternative OS and get full hardware functionality. And indeed, everything worked just fine the second time I installed it.
Because the first install was unable to retrieve updated packages. Apparently, when it tells you that the installation is done and you should click the button to restart, it is not in fact done, and expects you to leave the installer USB stick inserted until the reboot finishes. Surprise!
The second install was fine, but not only did all of the supplied themes have low-contrast small text (and were mostly “dark”, blech), there was almost no ability to customize anything about the graphical UI. Pointer sensitivity and acceleration? No. UI font size? No. Custom font install? No. Pretty much everything you’d expect to find on a “control panel” of some sort simply wasn’t there. If the creators were aware of the concept of “accessibility”, I found no supporting evidence.
There is some customizability, but it involves just dumping you into a text editor with a config file that doesn’t have any useful documentation.
Two tiny little things led me to scrub the disk and try another distro:
-
There is a convenient and easy-to-press menu option to switch the wi-fi into AP mode. There is no button to switch back. I couldn’t undo what I accidentally did when the unchangeable over-sensitive trackpad settings clicked there while I was moving the pointer.
-
I opened the GUI file manager (which bafflingly doesn’t seem to support viewing any files outside of your home directory) and while moving the pointer with the trackpad, accidentally (see above) dragged one folder into another. Unfortunately, I had just made all folders visible (one of the only configuration options available), and since everything about the configuration is stored in
~/.localand~/.config, moving either one of them instantly breaks the entire user interface. I couldn’t open the application menu to get into the terminal, I couldn’t get at the settings, I couldn’t even cleanly shut down the system.
I was already feeling pretty negative about the whole experience, but those two easy fails finished it off. Neither would have happened if the trackpad driver had any configurability, even just a checkbox to turn off tap-to-click, and that sort of “opinionated” design is at the core of the distro. Fail.
God's Shouty Appraiser, episode 6
This week, it’s a trap! Our Plot-Advancing Bad Girl lures Our Hero Party to their doom, but first, it’s bath time! Our Bountiful Landlady and Our Best Guild Catgirl don’t get nearly as much exposure as Our Defensive Button Elf, but it’s enough to compensate for most of the shouting. To no surprise, Our Shooty Shota Hero receives even more ridiculous assistance from the gods.
Verdict: shouty fluff.
(still no fan-art, so catgirl is sadly unrelated)
Urakata 3.3
“Okay, accepting for the moment that I am the child in this relationship, which is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, our immediate problem is this Wicked Stepmother. As the responsible adult in the room, what have you got for protection?”
I could tell I’d be seeing a lot of her surprised face from now on. “You can’t feel the wards on the house? After the way you just walked through that binding spell?”
I shook my head with a dismissive snort, annoyed that it probably looked really cute. “Never had the patience for magic; I’m just good at breaking things. Honestly, I used to get worse from my ‘sisters’ just for cutting in line at breakfast. Unfortunately, my best spell-breaking technique only works on men, and would be illegal at twice my current age.”
Her eyes widened, and I decided that maybe now wasn’t the best time to talk about my experience. “Anyway, wards. We have some, and you seem pretty confident. Good. What about school? Do we need to stay home and hide Kit here for a while?”
She must have caught the eagerness in my voice. “Oh, no, young lady, you are not getting out of school that easily. I have a masking charm that will make you ‘less interesting’ to anyone hostile, and I can get another one for Kit from…”
“…the lovely Miss Bobo, right? I could tell you two were close, but I figured you were just closeted lesbians, not a pair of witches from a less-racist universe.”
Her furious blushing and stammered denial threatened to derail the conversation again, so I did something else I’m not good at: I apologized. “Sorry, that wasn’t appropriate or relevant; this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with another woman, and I’m really not good at it.”
“Accepted, and we’re going to have to work on your social skills, if only to protect Kit from things she’s definitely not ready to hear. And I understand the soap at your school tastes terrible.”
I paled at the memory. “Right, so for now we’re safe here and at school, but we can’t keep Kit and we can’t hand her over to the witch, so we need to fix something. We can ask her about other family on the walk to school tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive; it’s safer. And I’ll contact Jem to bring her up to speed and get that charm.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small, intricately-carved amulet. Damn, I’d missed a secret pocket. “Meanwhile, if you can sleep after all that espresso, I’d suggest you get to bed. Your second day of school isn’t going to be any easier than the first.”
“Right.” As an old trooper, I could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, and with any number of bed-partners, and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, free of dreams and regrets.
Young troopers, on the other hand, apparently had dreams. And in mine, I wasn’t alone.
Urakata 3.2
I helped mop the floor, not out of guilt for making Sally drop the coffee or an urge to help my new “mom” clean, but simple self-interest. I needed another espresso before I was up to telling the truth. Any truth.
Sally delivered a cup and a question. “So, you work for God?”
I sipped my hot black confidence-builder before replying. “Gods, plural, and most of them less pleasant than the one who brought us together. No names you’d be familiar with, although it’s a safe bet they’ve played the role in your world as well. The thing is, I shouldn’t even be able to say that much, whether I’m retired or still on active duty, which means that something really scr- odd is going on.”
Sally smiled, just a little too sweetly. “So, what exactly did you do for these gods? Run a lemonade stand?”
I shut her down with a look as black as my coffee. “I’m sure you have tales of divine messengers, muses, tricksters, assassins, and temptresses; I specialized in that last role, and I was the best, until I fu- made a mistake. One we are not going to discuss tonight.”
Sally opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, so I skipped ahead. “No, I was not a cute little six-year-old girl with glasses. I was the woman who walked into a party alone and walked out with your husband. And if you ever got him back, he’d been thoroughly inspired.”
“Huh; that sounds like our space program. Sixteen divorces on the team and somehow we still landed on the moon ten years early. Nobody ever knew what happened to the secretary all the engineers were fighting over; she just disappeared one day.”
Oops, I had been to her world; I knew my work. Fortunately, she didn’t. “Right, things like that. The Powers don’t necessarily agree on means and ends, and we usually have no idea whether we’re making things better or worse, but I didn’t really care. I was designed to turn boys into men and men into lapdogs, and I loved my work.”
A glance down at my current body was accompanied by another bitter swallow. “I’m a good ten years away from my usual methods, and I’ve never needed a fallback plan before. Which means that I have no idea how to deal with an evil mind-controlling bitch-witch that has her hooks in my best friend.”
A smile twitched into existence over the rim of Sally’s coffee cup. “You mean first friend, don’t you? I think you’ve been lonely for a very long time.”
For the record, I do not blubber. The sudden urge to throw myself into Sally’s arms and dissolve into a puddle of sniffles and tears was just this body’s reaction to stress, and I successfully fought it down. “Stop that; this is grown-up talk.”
“Yes, it is, and I think it’s more relevant than you realize. I didn’t know I’d be raising an older woman, but you definitely need a mother in your life. As does Kit, which helps explain how quickly you’ve bonded with her.”
The urge to blubber was rising again, like three-day-old sushi. I really needed to get this body under control so I could solve this problem and… then what, exactly? Get my old job back and leave? Get my old body back and retire to a beach villa with hot and cold running boy-toys? Without Kit, or Sally?
Shit.
The boss really got me good. I’d been here less than 24 hours, and I wanted to stay.
Dragon Fight Week
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 4
The best part of the tournament was that it only lasted a single episode. The worst part is that we didn’t get a longer, more active elf-angel wrestling match. Kudos to the winner for wrapping things up in style.
Verdict: fluff.
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 5
They’re really spoiling us with their animation budget. It’s like food porn with ink. This week, Our Apprentices learn to work together to find a way to deal with The Getting-Bigger Bad, with Our Prickly One grudgingly accepting Our Heroine’s presence on the team.
Hungry Hungry Hero 2 announced
Berserk Of Gluttony is getting a new season.
If the Right were like the Left…
…this Minnesota Wisconsin
brewery
would already have been burned to the ground, and right-wing
politicians and celebrities would be openly praising the act of
“direct democracy”.
Deflecting blame with both-sides-ism pretends that there’s no difference between Left and Right, but there is. And the difference is that only one side riots, loots, burns, and kills every time when they don’t get their way.
(picture is definitely unrelated)
God's Shouty Appraiser, episode 5
Did I miss something, or did The Thief’s Tail Tale end with her only giving back their second, much-smaller purse, despite how much he helped her out? In other news, while we didn’t see nearly enough of Our Best Guild Catgirl, at least Our Busty Landlady’s possessive affection made an appearance. She rubbed him raw to get another woman’s mark off.
Verdict: of course it ended with a Button-Elf shout.
(catgirl is unrelated, because there’s no fan-art for this show)
Definition of insanity:
Thinking that successfully assassinating Trump would make things better for Leftist causes.
As Was Foretold In The Ancient Scrolls
Okay, it’s actually something I said only three years ago:
Old Apple: “how can we make this feature usable by people who don’t know anything about computers?”
New Apple: “how can we monetize this pixel?”
It gains new relevance when the soon-to-retire Apple CEO recently said “Apple Maps was my first really big mistake”, and then the company just announced: “Apple Maps will now shove ads in your face, with no opt-out”.
Isekai Harem Merc promo video
This is a Fall show, so it will be competing for my attention with Isekai Porn Gamer, Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Maomao. Ahhh, Maomao.
Reminder: Summer has Bumpkin 2, Isekai Super Maid, Magilumiere 2, Tanya 2, Skeleton Knight 2, Frontier Lord & Oni Waifu, Isekai Ass-Guardian, and Isekai Otome Mecha Game Cheat Hero 2. The days are just packed.
(unrelated busty cutie, approximating how Our Mercenary Hero Hiro wakes up in the morning)
What did I name the revived PC that gave me so much trouble?
Agott.
“Spectrum? Damn near killed ’em!”
The pleasant new surprise in SwarmUI-ville is the Spectrum extension, which produces dramatic speedups with common image-generation models at very little cost to quality. The more steps you use in making your images, the more it helps, producing images as much as 3x faster. Woo-hoo.
Sadly, my LLM prompt-enhancement broke; running the headless version of LM Studio on the rebuilt machine is producing not-very-diverse results with prompts that work just fine on the Mac Mini with the same model. I asked it to generate flattering early-20th-century outfits for women, and it literally made 10 copies of the exact same outfit.
Look at this set, and you can see it was doing the same thing for sci-fi city backdrops and black armor/cyborgs. I cherry-picked the most diverse results, but well over 90% were basically the same pic with different heads. So I ended up throwing away almost all of the results and the prompts that generated them, and started over with a different model and sysprompts.
Back from the dead...
[perhaps coincidentally, my MacBook Air lost its tiny little mind and started killing off running processes, starting with Terminal and Finder, so I couldn’t examine the health of the system and couldn’t restart or force-quit any apps. I had to power-cycle it. It had been up for an entire week! Hope the new Apple CEO hires a QA department…]
So after rebuilding my 11-year-old gaming PC on Ubuntu 25, only to discover that LM Studio wasn’t supported on it, I tried to rebuild it on 22, which failed. Then on 22 Server, which failed. Then on Arch, then Mint, then Windows 10. Fail, fail, fail. Different USB sticks, burned different ways, and even a few DVD installs in there.
[Fun fact: Ubuntu ISO images are not designed for or tested on DVD; they are intended for building virtual machines or burning to USB sticks. This is also true for Windows 10, with the added complication that you have to diddle the bits when copying to USB because it has a file that’s larger than 4 GB on it.]
Annoyed at the litany of failure, I cracked open the case, blew out the dust, pulled out and reseated the memory, graphics card, and SSDs, burned a brand new Ubuntu 25 image onto a brand new USB stick (using Rufus on Windows, which seems to be the most reliable option if you don’t currently have a working Linux box…), and reinstalled with no network connection or optional packages.
This worked, and to my immense surprise, the secondary drive that I’d installed SwarmUI on was still intact, despite the fact that I’d made it the boot drive during several of those failed installs, and I’m quite certain I wiped the partition table at least twice, which means that the installers were just lying about formatting the disks and copying data, sigh.
After discovering the appropriate incantation to make Appimages work, I did some quick testing with LM Studio. No head-to-head performance comparisons, because I had to download Very Small Models in order for the RTX 2060 to be able to run them without offloading to system RAM. Also, it’s only academic curiosity, since I’m replacing the card.
For reference, you need a shim library to get Appimages to work; web searches (with or without AI) mostly suggest installing a version of Fuse that will break the rest of your system, but this works:
chmod +x *.appimage
sudo apt install libfuse2t64
After doing that, however, I discovered the LM Studio appimage crashes at the drop of a hat under Ubuntu 25, so I switched to their command-line-only “llmster” build, which has been running for several hours now.
For amusement, here are the original specs for the old Asus:
- Intel Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz (Skylake)
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- GTX 980 4GB graphics card
- 2TB “hybrid” hard disk (8GB SSD cache)
- 256GB SSD
- 550-watt power supply
Over the years, I doubled the RAM, upgraded to a GTX 1060 6GB card, and replaced both drives with 1 TB SATA SSDs. Later, I replaced the 1060 with an RTX 2060 6GB, and it was still quite capable at running most games.
Now that I’ve got the silly thing booting again, I swapped in the RTX 5060Ti 16 GB card that I got cheap (er, “cheap”, these days). I was going to install a Corsair power supply as well, but Amazon didn’t deliver it as promised. No weather delay, crashed semi, or other legitimate excuse, they simply didn’t ship it, and said, “meh, maybe tomorrow”.
I wanted a higher-quality, more powerful, eleven-years-younger power supply to make the machine quieter and more reliable. I won’t get the full performance out of the new GPU on this machine, but it’s still faster than the Mac Mini running the exact same LLM.
(the Mini can run much larger models than this card, of course, or at least slow-walk them)
Future backgrounds
Even with LLMs stirring the pot, my SF backgrounds are starting to look a bit familiar. So I’m working on generating a whole bunch of new ones. Two samples from a recent session:
Reviving an obsolete PC
That’s obsolete as in Microsoft refuses to allow me to install a supported OS on perfectly good hardware.
Fuck legibility!
Just installed Ubuntu 25 on an old PC (that might still have enough GPU power to run LLMs faster than a Mac Mini with an M4 Pro…), and the Terminal app does not grok the concept of black text on any color background. It’s fucking dark mode everywhere, and the “palettes” were designed by people who think low contrast is virtuous.
I’ll have to construct a legible display with stone knives and bearskins, like our primitive ancestors did.
As for performance, the graphics card is an old RTX 2060 with 6 GB of VRAM, and running Z-Image Turbo, it created a 1024x1024 catgirl in 27 seconds, compared to my current RTX 4090 at 3.8 seconds with the same settings.
I haven’t tested LM Studio yet, because they distribute it as an Appimage file that I can’t even open on Ubuntu 25, and it turns out they only support 20 and 22. Guess I’ll reinstall with 22, sigh…
(Ubuntu 22.04.5 does not install, sigh. The installer just sits and spins, and Ctrl-Alt-T does not pull up a terminal to see what’s going on, if anything; I’m getting flashbacks to the first time I tried Ubuntu and had it fail miserably)
Live by the chatbot, die by the chatbot
It’s not as efficient as X’s community notes, but when AI over-enthusiast Alex Tabarrok rewrote history with “research” provided by an AI, he was refuted in the comments by someone who consulted the exact same AI.
My new favorite 4K wallpaper…
Made with Klein-9b, upscaled 2x with the SwarmUI SeedVR2 extension.
A wide environmental portrait featuring a cheerful, elegant, tall, Western European woman in her early twenties with a slender figure, steel gray eyes, lobed ears, snub nose, tapered chin, chiseled jaw, round cheeks, low forehead, and a round face shape, wearing runway/editorial makeup that complements her healthy brown skin and caramel brown hair styled with a scarf wrap. She is situated within a darkening, richly detailed interior space enveloped in the soft, deep hues of twilight, mimicking the epic scale and dramatic flair characteristic of Don Lawrence’s sci-fi/fantasy work. The scene is bathed in highly detailed gouache painting style with hyper-detailed realism. Dramatic volumetric lighting casts deep shadows contrasting against pockets of warm, saturated light emanating from unknown sources. She wears a form-fitting jumpsuit in iridescent teal and magenta, featuring segmented panels of brushed bronze and deep violet, accented with wrist-mounted utility bands of pale yellow, holding a handheld scanner emitting soft cyan light, and incorporating several dangling technological attachments made of clear resin elements. The background subtly suggests the impossible geometries of a tidal power station structure, its metallic components intricately twisted within a space that hints at quantum foam instability, all rendered with meticulous care for textures—wood grain, aged metal, or complex fabrics—under an overall color palette that is vibrant and intensely saturated, evoking a grand and adventurous atmosphere.
Although I wouldn’t say no to this one…
A 23-year-old sexy Greek woman with a fit figure, dark green eyes, rounded helix ears, short nose, round chin, soft jaw, dimpled cheeks, and a widow’s peak forehead, sporting a triangle face shape, sophisticated polished makeup, healthy caramel skin, and red auburn hair styled in a rocker shag with messy layers, looks cheerful while standing near a colossal, spiraling ramp structure that dominates the scene, forming multiple intersecting pathways ascending vertically around a central axis point; these ramps appear to transition between parallel realities. The ground plane is a merged landscape of flatlands composed primarily of uniform grey regolith, sharply contrasted by veins and patches of dark, textured volcanic rock formations creating intricate geometric patterns across the floor, with visible areas beneath demonstrating phase transitions within an energetic quantum field in shifting, probabilistic colors. Unstable crystalline clouds with distinct sharp geometric facets float above the ground, catching ambient light dramatically. She wears a vibrant cerulean jumpsuit made of iridescent material, accented with panels of lime green stretch fabric featuring hot pink geometric piping, and is accessorized with a wrist-mounted communicator displaying soft yellow light and a hip-attached datapad with visible switches and dials. The scene is rendered as a highly detailed digital painting in the style of Gediminas Pranckevicius, capturing a medium shot within an indoor atmosphere bathed in fading daylight; though the ramps suggest epic surrealism, the overall composition utilizes muted colors and an earthy palette to evoke hushed introspection, with dramatic atmospheric light filtering through unseen openings casting long, soft shadows across surfaces.
