(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?

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

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