GenAI’s come a long way since it recommended using glue on your pizza toppings. You still can’t trust it not to write instructions that will kill us all and destroy the world, but you can at least ask nicely.

I happened to have on hand a bunch of Ghirardelli chocolate melting wafers, which I use in colder months to produce delicious hot chocolate in my Nespresso Barista machine (still one of the only milk/coffee/etc frothers to be able to handle chunks of chocolate and ice).

Unfortunately, I buy it in 5-pound bags, and it’s been “a touch warm” recently, and I don’t think I’ll be drinking hot chocolate for a while. So I fired up Claude and asked it for instructions to make a chocolate sauce topping suitable for ice cream and tiramisu, using melting wafers and espresso. I made a half-batch that turned out quite nice, and it works well in a squeeze bottle right out of the fridge:

(I had to clean up the instructions, because they were over-literal and repetitive, and I reordered the ingredient list to match the order they’re used; highlighting the ingredients in the instructions is a personal preference that I could tell Claude to do, if I were to build a recipe layout “skill” at some point)

A flaw in the Pexar

Out of the box, it turns off the display at 11 PM and stays off until 7 AM the next day. So, what happens if you’re loading a big batch of images from a USB stick when the clock strikes?

You wait until morning to finish the import. Seriously. It’s completely unresponsive until then.

(I’d say those aren’t Best Lizard Girl Theresia’s snacks, except they look delicious…)

First impression: I never want to hear the OP song again. Autotune is a privilege, not a right, and the producers of this song need a five-year ban. Pity, really, because the OP animation is well-done and does a good job of showing off the cast and situations.

The ED song and animation, on the other hand, are excellent, focused on Our Best Lizard Girl Theresia.

Right off the bat, Our Hot Former Boss demonstrates that her idea of swordsmanship came straight from the Gainax Dojo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. What follows is a lot of pretty typical isekai worldbuilding, but I knew that was coming, and at least it’s necessary to the plot.

Verdict: I remain optimistic. Still a little odd to hear the voice of The Universal Boy Hero coming out of a grown man for once.

(no fan-art to speak of, but every gal’s an action gal)

Isekai Loner Harem season 2 announced

Here. Much less pervy than the original novels, in a good way. In the books, while he’s faithful to his three girlfriends, he subjects every other girl to well-lubricated magical-tentacle grope sessions in the pursuit of well-fitting fashion and armor. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Tomorrow we get to find out if I’ve been crossing my fingers for nothing, as Isekai Ass-Guardian debuts.

Skeleton Knight 2, episode 1

Our Hero is still a ridiculously OP RPG tourist, Our Titty Elf is still exasperated with his antics, Our Cuddly Beastgirl is still just a touch gay, Our Mascot is still expressing itself in “I am Groot” style, and the fan-art is still sparse and heavy on elf-service.

Verdict: should be fun, although I’ll never watch the OP or ED again.

(still had to open the season with slave raids, though…)

Magilumiere 2, episode 1

This one’s streaming on Amazon Prime, which was unable to search for the title. Fortunately I had the first season in my history.

Anyway, the story picks up right away, leading off with a bunch of dry plot coupons in a board meeting. Our Magical Gals don’t get to spring into action, but they do at least get to remind us of their personalities. Next week, we get our first look at Our Underrim-Glasses-Wearing Magical Engineer Gal.

Verdict: really pushing the story hard in this one, and since I’ve been keeping up with the manga, I can say that they have a pretty good one to tell.

(no new fan-art, sadly)

Level 2 Cheat Life With Wolf Waifu 2 announced

This show was very silly. Eventually the source material kind of ran out of interesting things to do, a common problem when the hero is so overpowered that gods start stopping by to ask for help. Maybe there’s still enough for a second season to be fun.

Bash-ing Agentic AI

…by using Bash shell syntax to hide malicious commands. Because these glorified cron jobs will believe anything they read, and then execute it.

Fastest. Tsunaround. Ever. Also, that wasn’t a turtle.

(unrelated horn-y gal will have to do until the fan-artists get to work on Alna)

Maomao: The Movie trailer

Here. TL/DR: it’s a new story by the original author that doesn’t conflict with the continuity in the upcoming Fall and Spring seasons.

The only thing worse than woke dubs…

…is Youtube’s AI trailer dubs. At least, I hope they’re AI, because the alternative is that non-Disney dub actors are even less talented than I remember from the last time I was exposed to their product.

(and yes, fuck-you-youtube for turning them on by default; that and auto-continue-to-unrelated-video are almost as annoying as your ads that I block)

Season’s Greetings ’Splodies

There seems to be some noise outside…

Project Hail Mary

Now on Prime Video. I didn’t think the book was as good as The Martian, but I guess I’ll find out how the movie is.

Based on the ‘Recommended For You’ page…

…Amazon thinks I have a six-year-old autistic daughter who only eats sustainable organic vegan snacks and drinks alkaline water, and who demands a constant supply of new fidget toys. Yeah, no. Well, not that I know of, which is the same thing when it comes to shopping.

Quality Control

“I’ve got 106,000 problems, and a 1girl is almost every one of them.”

I’m currently generating small (256x256) images for every one of the JSON prompts I’ve extracted from photos on my laptop and NAS, to see which ones should be removed from the final dataset. It takes about 1.5 seconds to generate each one with Krea2, so it will run for a while:

split -l 500 current.jsonl
start=1;
for i in x??; do
    echo $i
    mkdir -p out/$i;
    jq -r -s '.[]|.json' $i |
        sui -j -a 1:1 --pre out/$i/krea2 --set wctest \
            --seq $start --pad 6 gen -r krea2small -c 500
    start=$(($start + 500));
done

Thanks to the miracle of sorting, the output starts out with pics from the old late-Eighties/early-Nineties mail-order fashion/lingerie catalog Mello Mail. The vision model really captured the style, to the point that you not only can identify the era by the clothes and hairstyles, but I can even tell which pictures were based on my friend Carmen.

I’ve already found a few places where I can strip out more text from the generated prompts. I’m just opening up each batch of 500 in the MacOS Preview app and setting it to “contact sheet” mode, so I can quickly scan through the batch for things that either have text or don’t have women. It will also be obvious when I trip over anime cheesecake and GenAI fails, both of which will be removed.

I’ve only found one actual non-1girl prompt so far, and it’s because the LLM analysis was spectacularly wrong. Original: pair of large breasts viewed from above, with bra pulled out to show the nipples. LLM analysis: “a baby’s torso, viewed from above; adult hand with visible fingernails, gently holding the fabric at the sides of the baby’s torso; camera slightly elevated, looking down at the subject”.

NSFW

Dear Apple,

Please add back the whitespace that used to be at the edges of your windows. It’s really annoying to try to find the “drag” and “resize” areas when the content starts three pixels from the edge of the window. Either I end up resizing a window when I’m trying to select text, or selecting text when I’m trying to resize the window.

Seriously, I understand that you hate the entire concept of having multiple windows on screen, between the aggressive push for full-screen mode, the aggressive push for tabs, and the complete removal of window management options other than crude iPad “tiling” like Windows 1.1 is once again the height of fashion, but give the content room to fucking breathe. Make Whitespace Great Again!

(this public service announcement brought to you by everyone old enough to remember when Apple had evidence-based standards)

It’s up into the nineties outside this week, something I only experience during the brief walk from my air-conditioned car to air-conditioned stores, before returning to my air-conditioned home.

Speaking of hot things, the image-analysis processing is over 103,000 images now, just finishing up a big batch of Hello!Project photobooks (the primary virtue of which is that their usual stylists were locked out of the room). After that is ~7,000 magazine pics to extract from ZIP and RAR archives, and then at some point I’ll do the ~35,000 pornsite pics.

Unrelated, my Macbook Air lost track of its storage again, requiring a hard power-cycle. Seems to happen when it’s been up about three weeks and I do a lot of SMB traffic to the NAS (like extracting all those RAR and ZIP archives…).

Number 1 in logistics!

Amazon: we think UPS lost your package, so we’re going to claim “delayed in transit” and make you wait another week before you can apply for a refund.

UPS: um, the truck arrived in Ohio 18 hours ago, at a depot about a two-hour drive from your house, and it’ll be delivered by noon.

Every Tuesday is Patch Tuesday

Have you noticed how frequently Microsoft is pushing Office updates recently? Like last month where they had to quickly fix basic functionality in Outlook, and then another today?

Jiraporn

Better than Bugzillaporn!

(the photo shoots are terrible, and the site is NSFW and ad-infested, but I’d still file her tickets)

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Witch Hat Atelier season 2 has been announced.

Bruce Campbell’s new book

Reconcile, a Western novella.

(I told Krea2 Turbo that I wanted to play Cowgirls & Indians…)

Oh, dear, more 1girls

While finishing up my batch image-analysis, I stumbled across several more archives. One is a small number of fairly low-resolution images from a late-Eighties/early-Nineties mail-order fashion/lingerie catalog called Mello Mail. They released a screensaver with a bunch of their pictures, and my friend Carmen was their star model.

Then I found a series of scanned photobooks featuring my favorite fashion disasters, the girls of Hello!Project.

And then I found myself wondering what ever happened to all the stuff I downloaded from a certain paid adult website nearly 20 years ago, and eventually I located ~35,000 images in ZIP archives on the NAS. It’s a bunch of under-edited semi-pro shoots with mostly-amateur models, but it offers a wider selection of ethnicities, as well as details not available in pictures legal to distribute in Japan. I think I’ll keep it as a separate dataset, though, since pretty much everything in it has to be tagged NSFW.

NSFW

(to my surprise, that site still exists, and claims to be actively updating; wonder if they’ve gotten better at it over the years…)

Bought a Lexar Pexar (dexar, flexar, rexar, sexar…)

I’ve owned or gifted half a dozen digital photo frames, and I decided to see if there was one out there that I could fill up with GenAI gals without involving an app or a cloud, but that still had a good-quality screen. They’re basically Android tablets with a large bezel and no battery, and even the really low-end ones seem to be tarted up with Google/iCloud/subscription services that must always be active in order to display anything, which is the exact opposite of what I want.

Lexar’s Pexar can operate completely standalone with internal storage and images transferred on SD card or USB stick, or you can hook it up to wi-fi and use a sharing code to allow people to send you photos from an app. The people they licensed the software from, Frameo, make extensive promises on their site that pictures are encrypted end-to-end, and their content cannot be examined in transit.

Out of the box, that’s it: copy files to it directly, or use a phone app to send pics to a frame that you have been given a unique, time-limited sharing code for.

The app has an optional $2/month subscription fee that offers remote management of a frame (keeping it up to date for Grandma, basically) and encrypted-at-rest cloud backup. Again, they promise that they cannot examine your pics in any way. Like for AI training, for instance.

I like the screen, and while the “frame and mat” are plastic, it looks nice from viewing distance. The first major flaw is that Frameo is terrible at managing large picture collections. If you copy 1,000 images from an SD card or USB stick, you can’t directly import them into an album; you have to tap-and-drag to select them out of the “all photos” list after the import. The second major flaw is that it crashed twice on me while I was doing this. Apart from the stability issue, the UI is actually pretty clean and responsive, just a bit limited.

The third major flaw, for most people, is that the display on the 11-inch model has a 3:5 aspect ratio (1200x2000), which matches basically no camera ever made, so most pictures have to be scaled, cropped, or displayed letterboxed. Either that or you switch to the “collage” mode.

This doesn’t matter to me, since I’m using my SwarmUI CLI to generate the images at 1216x2048 with auto-crop, so everything is precisely the correct size. The frame handles WEBP cleanly, so the 32 GB of storage can hold plenty of these ~124 KB pics. (it also does video, but I haven’t even looked at those models)

(for reference, Krea2 Turbo at 10 steps with 2 refiner steps takes ~32 seconds per gen on my 4090, and I let it run overnight so I’d have plenty of initial test pics to put on the frame; “upcycled redheads of college age”)

Minor flaw? I’m not convinced that the “shuffle” mode isn’t just “random”. I’ll need to set up a test album with numbered pics. It should be able to do it properly, since it can sort the slideshow order in various ways, and a shuffle is effectively just a bad sort that gets re-shuffled when you hit the end.

(note that Lexar just released an updated version of the 11-inch frame that uses their own software stack, which suggests that they plan to stop licensing Frameo)

GenAI: elephants all the way down

Forget “vibe coding” and “prompt engineering”; the new hotness is “loop engineering”, in which you tell your Agent to write the prompts that write the prompts that write your code.

🎶🎶🎶🎶
AI write the prompts that make the GenAi sing,
    AI write the prompts to exfiltrate all my things,
AI write the prompts that make IT guys cry,
    AI write the prompts that write the prompts.
🎶🎶🎶🎶

Krea2 Gone Wild

Unlike most image-gen models, Krea2’s training included explicit sexual material, and just censored Those Words in the text-processing layers. Which means that people didn’t have to train LoRAs on their own collections of nekkid people, and just had to diddle a few matrices (Juan’s extension, Silvercoin’s LoRA; use the LoRA).

The upside of this is that enabling NSFW details doesn’t inject a lot of possibly-incompatible data into the model. Most NSFW LoRAs change faces and increase the frequency of broken anatomy, but Krea2 remains stable. The downside is that it doesn’t know all the words; you have to be a bit clinical in describing the naughty bits.

Related, my image-analysis script has been running in the background, generating pretty detailed descriptions of 75,000+ images from my blog, laptop, and NAS. The LLM wasn’t 100% consistent in naming the categories, but it was good enough that I was able to clean them up in a script and generate well-structured JSON.

The primary limitation to the dataset is that most of the women are Japanese, but another little script allows me to rewrite each entry so I can change the art style, setting, race, hair, etc. For instance, this recipe changes 18-year-old Japanese girls into grown-up Irish redheads and gives each one a different art style:

{
    "style": "shuf:styles",
    "age": "32 years old",
    "sex": "female",
    "ethnicity": "Irish",
    "skin_color": "pale and lightly freckled",
    "eye_color": "light-green",
    "looks": "extremely pretty face",
    "complexion": "lightly-freckled",
    "figure": "perky medium-sized breasts, small waist, slender hips, firm round buttocks, flat stomach",
    "expression": "friendly smile with visible teeth",
    "hair_color": "rich red"
}

Haven’t decided yet if the script should be called upcycle or reskin. 😁

Krea2 doesn’t always nail the “age” field, but I tried it with a variety of expressions starting at “18 or older”. 😁

(unlike my older cheesecake posts, all the GenAI girls are linked to higher-res images)

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I may have to skim through the first season of Skeleton Knight to remind myself what’s going on; it’s been a while, and the light novels stopped rather abruptly.

As for Tan Teen Oni Waifu (officially, “The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects”), I just hope it’s good enough for me to make it through the season. I mean, it’s not an isekai, not a harem, the hero is an honorable man and proven warrior who looks his age, the twin lolis are completely unsexualized, and the stakes are modest.

And in a departure from recent tradition, there will be other things to watch!

Keeping the arse in Ars…

Detailed analysis of hominid bones supposedly revealed that the pre-humans:

“…had a concept of gender as a part of an individual’s identity”

No, you clod, it means that they could tell the difference between boys and girls at a glance. Yeesh.

The trouble with Supergirl

One thing I haven’t seen in the (apparently quite justified) criticism of this movie is that in the graphic novel it’s based on (for some definition of “based”) Supergirl isn’t the main character. I’d describe it as “how my coming-of-age road trip with Supergirl changed my life”. Not exactly a summer blockbuster of a plot, which would have made it a poor choice even before the extensive rewrites and reshoots.

Anyway, here’s another bit of Krea2 cheesecake

The Krea 2 Turbo model is much more stable than Klein-9B when it comes to anatomy. I’ve had a very small number of extra fingers, and exactly one extra arm out of a few thousand gens. One gal was missing half an arm, but she was a robot, and these things just happen to robo-gals.

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