The Malfoid Memes just keep on coming. It’s apparently driving the Bluesky denizens completely berserk, to the point that they bullied a well-known professional artist until she gave in and deleted her take on it.

The Apothecary Diaries 3.1, episode 1

Hits the ground running. Maomao and Shinji are currently living separate lives, but fate is bringing them back together. Also the Emperor.

Wild Last Boss 2, episode 2

The battle against Psycho Bikini Lesbian continues, interrupted by flashbacks and backfill.

Verdict: I’m really getting tired of Flashbackus Interruptus, but otherwise this was fun.

Vortex Farce, episode 1

First impression: Sexy Bad Girl does Bad Thing in orbit, and that’s a fine way to start.

Second impression: I’d complain about how they integrate the CGI into the 2D animation, but the truth is they don’t even try.

Third impression: Our Hero’s Big Sister gets a crotch closeup in the middle of her introduction. Okay, now I believe this is from the director of Strike Witches and Vividred Operation.

Fourth impression: Mom is hot. Big Sister has a bit of bounce in gym clothes. Her fight scene starts with an ass shot, then graduates to braless downblouse; saving the nipples for a Bluray release, perhaps? And the OP promises plenty more eye candy in the form of post-highschool hotties, and both OP and ED possess amusing animation and non-horrific music. And I think they made it through pretty much all of the necessary lumpy exposition to explain what’s going on.

Verdict: I think I can work with this.

(picture is unrelated, but it’s got aliens, so close enough)

Isekai Kinky Porn Game Cheat Harem, episodes 1&2

Of all this season’s shows, this is not the one where I expected them to bring their A game. Naughty, naughty A game.

Verdict: exposition-heavy, but also fanservice-heavy.

Random isekai idea

Beaten To Death For My Taste In Music, I Woke Up In A Fantasy World And Became A Legendary Bard By Serenading A Tsundere Elf Princess With Barry Manilow Songs.

(took about 30 tries to get every word to render correctly; for some reason, it really hated “serenading”, and usually gave me “serenaring”. Still faster than laying it out in Illustrator and coming up with the framing and swashes by hand, but I’ve been tinkering with the settings, and it looks like small text errors in Qwen 2.1 are reduced by bumping up CFG from 1 to 2-3, at the cost of doubling the rendering time)

Today I Learned…

…that the reason Draco Malfoy fits so easily into a female bully stereotype is that J.K. Rowling based the character on memories of the girl who bullied her at school. Which also explains why she was unhappy with the attempt to redeem him at the end of the movies.

(this is the pic that launched a thousand Malfoid memes)

As usual, hold off on Apple’s latest

Shiny new iPhone 18 Pro Max Super Ultimate Frisbee Edition doesn’t work reliably on AT&T. Just a minor issue with a minor carrier, and multiple fixes being rolled out that might eventually solve the problem. Except for the ones that just have to be replaced.

“Thank you for paying to beta-test our product!”

(I might be interested in the new iPad Mini that’s supposed to be out this month, but not until at least January)

This week’s social-media darling is genderswapped Draco Malfoy (“Malfoid”). Without any other change to the storyline, she’s already a classic tsundere, but many fans have taken it further, adding redemption and romance. Because, let’s face it, nobody thought Harry&Ginny worked as a couple.

"Snitch, Harry, you're supposed to Seek for the Golden SNITCH!"

"I couldn't help it! Malfoid wasn't wearing panties!" pic.twitter.com/oZWYkImoET

— Gorgiryl (@gorgiryl) October 1, 2026

(first thing I’ve used my HiDive subscription for in quite a while…)

Oh, thank goodness, this is not going to suck. They skip the recap and jump right into curry and adventure, with Fran being just as adorable and deadly as ever. The OP song is not to my taste, but the animation is promising, showing off a whole bunch of new characters we’ll be seeing soon, one of whom we meet mere minutes into the show, when Our Unusual Heroes make a rash attempt to reach a floating island and end up falling into a necromancer’s lair. Wacky Hijinks Ensue, as promised.

The game is afoot, and it’s even animated nicely, and unlike the OP, the “Franmetal” ED is a keeper.

Verdict: yes, please.

Doofus Quest

Hadn’t even heard of this one, but it premieres this week. The voices in the trailer just sound wrong, for some reason, and the art is doing nothing for me, so No.

(Our Hero is in fact searching for something called “The Ivory Dofus”…)

Krea 2 knows many things…

…but it did not know The Dirty Pair. I asked Claude for help, but it was a total wuss and refused to even describe the costumes. When prodded, it came up with costumes that weren’t even in the same galaxy. So I asked Grok. For some reason it thought Kei had long hair, but that was an easy fix.

Additional fixes should be straightforward, and then I can drop them into more elaborate settings and situations. Maybe build them a nice planet to blow up.

Big Balls is back, baby!

Head of Engineering on the team responsible for the new America.gov site.

Dear Amazon,

It’s nice that you’re trying to educate your customers on how to avoid email scams. However, when telling people how to verify the message before clicking on a link, do not give them verification links to click on. Duh.

Verify messages with Alexa for Shopping

If you receive an email, text, or phone call claiming to be from Amazon, you can now check whether it’s legitimate.
There are three easy ways to verify:
Log in on the Amazon shopping app or on Amazon.com [link!] and type your question into the Alexa for Shopping chat, for example, “Did Amazon email me?” or “Did Amazon call me?”
You can also visit the Identify a Scam page [link!] to submit any message for verification.
Submit your question or forward a specific email to verify@amazon.com [link!].

If Amazon sent the message, you’ll know in moments.
Do not engage with a suspicious message in any way before verifying. We will automatically submit a report to Amazon internal teams, and we’ll continue to monitor your account for suspicious activity.

Visit amazon.com/scams [link!] to learn more ways to verify messages, access resources for scam prevention, and understand Amazon’s efforts to protect customers from fraudulent activities.

Dear Indian Contract Recruiter,

Yeah, this email offer really looks legit:

Title: Datacenter Engineer
Location: Reno, NV (Onsite)
Duration: 6+ months contract
Interview: MS Teams
Posiitons: 10
Pay rate: $25/hour

It goes on to describe multiple years of broad experience that are required, enough to at least double that hourly rate, even in an area with cheap cost-of-living.

Random useful GenAI

My large collection of meme pics tend to have terrible filenames that make them impossible to find later. I knocked together a simple prompt for a vision model to create better ones:

Analyze this image and use its significant elements and themes to compose a meaningful file name for the image using only letters, digits, and “-” to separate words; no other characters are permitted. Words MUST be separated by “-”. The filename MUST be no longer than 48 characters, and MUST NOT include a date or timestamp. Output only the new filename, with no formatting.

It’s not perfect. qwen3-vl-4b occasionally went batshit crazy (including one meme where it just repeated “kiwi” about 300 times), so I switched to a larger but sadly slower model.

(see if you can spot the reason that this GenAI photograph is impossible; you’ll need to click through to the full-size version)

Magilumiere 2, fin

Opened with a recap of the premise of the series? Check.

Replayed the last minute or two of the previous episode? Check.

Threw in a quick flashback to explain the real plan? Check.

Sudden crisis of confidence taking Our Emotionless Magical Hottie out of the game at a critical moment? Check.

With a lengthy flashback to her childhood trauma? Check.

Saved by the power of friendship and shared childhood anime? Check.

Honestly, the one thing I wasn’t expecting was Our Entire Magical Gal Gang suddenly adopting a Vividred Operation-style combat climax moment (without the crotch shots).

Verdict: pacing and storytelling were not their strengths this season, with way too many lengthy flashbacks deliberately interrupting dramatic moments. The final girl-bonding rescue-kitten triumph was fine, but would have had more emotional impact if the buildup to it hadn’t been broken up across so many episodes.

(wrong magical girl, I know)

Wild Last Boss 2, episode 1

The recap is limited to 2 minutes, and takes the place of the opening credits, which is a blessing. After that, the story picks up where it left off, with the primary flaw being that it’s mostly panned stills. Well-drawn stills, but they don’t spend a lot of budget this week until they get to the new bikini villain, who gets a reference-heavy CGI space battleship fight.

Verdict: promising to be as fun as last season.

(no new fan-art, and I already used most of the old stuff, so here’s a completely unrelated pic of Chiharu-chan’s Keyboard Cleaning Service)

The saga continues…

Book 5 of I’m The Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!

(space princess is unrelated; I’m tinkering with another series of book covers, this time with a retro-sf style; the tentative series title is Star Angels Detective Agency)

Dupe De Dupes

LLM creativity is often limited to MadLibs-style template substitution, so asking for N unique things often produces results that aren’t byte-for-byte identical, but so similar they might as well be. So I iterated on the problem with an LLM (possibly Google’s search, which can sometimes write working Python on the third try), and came up with a script that performs well at scales up to ~100,000 lines, which is more than I need for this task.

Essentially, I used a small LLM trained on sentence structure to vectorize each line in the file and then locate clusters of similar items in vector space. Saving each stage of the process as JSON allowed me to debug it and tune the cutoff so that it didn’t decide that every MadLibs string was the same. Because even good prompts are a lot more similar than normal prose paragraphs.

All the work was done by the people who wrote the Python libraries and the example code that was scraped by the AI to glue them together. I just cleaned up the results and added real CLI support. If I had a lot of really large prompt files to dedupe (like Juan’s huge prompt datasets), I’d have to throw it at Claude to add support for storing the vectors in a real DB (and run it on a machine with a proper GPU).

Dear Powerline,

Your ad network is completely blocking the ability to read your site if any form of ad-blocking is detected, even false positives, repeatedly throwing up a browser modal dialog box that can even prevent someone from navigating to another site in some browsers.

The solution is to block Javascript on your site. This is probably not what you wanted.

Dear Amazon,

What is this for?

Seriously, what’s in it for me? Even setting aside the awkward phrasing of “my usuals” and “on deal”, how do I actually benefit from having an “agent” (cron job) periodically add things to my cart and hit me up with random notifications? Your recommendation system keeps pitching me toys for autistic toddlers and Oprah-recommended books, and I’m supposed to believe you know what I want to buy?

This is on top of the way you’ve broken your search engine with LLMs. Seriously I just searched my order history for “Karres”, as in the James Schmitz novel and the inferior pastiches assembled under the heavy hand of Eric Flint. What was the first item in the search results?

“Potable Aqua Water Purification Tablets”

Picture Is Unrelated

I just feel like there’s a story here…

Because it’s a day ending in “Y”, Github is flaky again.

(I originally posted this on xTwitter to see how many people see my mostly-reply-only account: two weeks, 5 views; this was a pretty trivial K2T render, since it knew the character and costume)

A Canticle For Degurechaff 2, fin

Tanya did indeed get to fuck some people up, but not the specific one she set out to, and she got pretty fucked up in return. Then of course she just had to go and trip another flag. The biggest surprise was that she had let Visha in on the secret plan.

Verdict: really, really hoping it doesn’t take as long to get another season going.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, fin

“Dear Amazon, why does it take five minutes to get a Fire TV box to cough up the latest episode of a show that’s on Prime, on my watchlist, and that I’ve been watching for 12 weeks in a row?”

This episode felt like it was at least double-length, it was so packed with material; seriously, I had to check the runtime. Just the final battle with the Bad Pope felt like an entire episode, and then they had an episode’s worth of wrap-up, with just the faintest hint that Our Bumpkin is starting to think of His White Haremette as the front-runner in The Game Of Waifu.

Also, season 3 announced.

Verdict: pretty darn good. The pope fight was much too talky, but I guess zombie-summoning clergy was just the theme of the season, so what can ya do?

(perhaps if Our Age-Appropriate Magical Schoolteacher dressed like this, Our Hero would notice her obvious interest…)

Well, that was pointless…

I wanted to customize my iPad lock screen with the GenAI book covers below, picturing a kind of “this is what I’m reading right now” look, with the image changing each time. TL/DR, you can’t do that.

First, if you select an album as the source, then you also turn on automatic zoom-to-detected-subject, so it won’t display the entire image. This is not optional.

Second, the lock screen must display the date and time, and it must be displayed at a large size, centered, in the upper third of the display. You can try to make it mostly transparent, but you cannot make it go away or move it to a less-intrusive location.

Third, it keeps a very aggressive cache of the images you’ve tried to use in previous attempts, including zoom and blur effects that it applied without asking. You have to completely delete the images from the device to revert these hidden changes.

Apple knows what’s best for you. Always.

Series silliness with Qwen 2.1

I really liked how the not-Nancy-Drew book cover came out, so I took the prompt template and applied it to a batch of my GenAI fantasy battlemaidens, with titles generated from the images by gemma-4-31b, using a simple prompt template:

Analyze this image and use its significant elements and themes to compose 8 distinct titles for a genre fiction novel. Output only the titles, one per line, without any number, formatting, or Markdown.

I thought 90% of the titles I got out of it were uninspired and repetitive, but some of them at least drew on elements present in the images, so I was able to combine them into a “series formula”. The author name came from one of my really old scripts that does weighted random selection based on US Census data. Also, I got frustrated with my current prompt script’s habit of locking up and knocked together a title-specific one using the openai Python SDK instead of LM Studio’s native one.

(generating each image took ~13 seconds with Krea 2 Turbo; adding the titling with Qwen 2.1 (which also often adjusted the position of the subject and generated new background around the edges) took ~40 seconds)

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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 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.

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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?