This week, Our Shopping Hero buys a house online and pats himself on the back over its affordability, having missed the “assembly required” line in the description. Fortunately, the gods of sheer coincidence send Our Blue Furry-Boobed First Catgirl his way with her minions, and they spend a month inserting tab A into slot B. In a surprising oversight, she isn’t shown giving him an overnight cuddle during the montage. Then he spends another month adding finishing touches before moving out of The Full-Service Inn without giving His Convenient Pillow Gal more than a quick wave goodbye.

Which is fine, because accidentally rescuing a forest cat from hostile dog-people improves his standing even higher with Blue, who rewards his cat-care with overnight cat-service. (now, as for how he somehow permanently scared off a band of experienced dog-people hunters with unaimed slingshot fire and a backhoe, we’re just going to pretend that worked because protagonist)

When he closes his item stall for a few more days to dig a well, Our Bouncy Blonde Merchant’s Daughter comes looking for him. Alone, with no guards, escort, or maid. Completely by accident, she shows up at his place after the city gates have closed for the night, and expresses a willingness to “platonically” share a bed with him, as wealthy merchant’s daughters often do (ahem). But first, she spots his bath, leading to our first real fan-service shot of the series as she climbs in naked.

Never mind that his house is protected by nothing more than a white picket fence and a slingshot, and he’s already had half a dozen dog-people try to murder him just for trying to live in the forest, and now he’s got a hot chick bathing outdoors at night. Afterwards, he chickens out on Her Very Obvious Offer after sketching her like one of his French girls, buys a second bed, and pretends to be asleep when she checks to see if he’s really not gonna go for it. Based on previous events, I disbelieve this entire scene.

She makes arrangements to frequently visit and spend the night, finally hitting him over the head with a naked clue-by-four to get her points across. He turns her down again, right before she leaves town for a month-long trading trip. I disbelieve this entire scene.

Oh, and what has Our Forlorn Future Daughter been up to for the past three months or so? Being kicked around by bandit slavers while being extremely grateful none of them are lolicons.

Verdict: it’s a good thing this show has plenty of cute gals, because the story is a ridiculous series of handwaves and coincidences that makes my head hurt. Even the growing realization that he’s not the only one who’s crossed over from Japan and started “inventing” things doesn’t count as a plot yet. Well, at least they’re not shouting all the time, so that’s one headache I’m spared.

(not the correct bouncy blonde, but equivalent in quality)

🎶 Raindrops keep fallin’ from my hood 🎶

Last night, something happened that I had never seen even once in my life.

I was making a quick stir-fry for dinner when suddenly a stream of water poured out of my range hood, narrowly missing the skillet. While my brain was still waking up to the concept, it happened again. Dinner was done, so I moved the skillet far away and watched as it happened several more times. WTF?

Oh, right: the night before, we’d had a small amount of very fine snow combined with strong winds that must have gotten into the exhaust on the roof, and I hadn’t used the range since. Once I started cooking, the warm air went up and melted it. My hood has a permanent filter made of stainless steel baffles, and the water pooled up until it found the lowest spot and poured out.

(picture is unrelated, but squeaky clean!)

(classical reference)

Now deploying Kool & The Gang

How does it feel to have a President again after four years of nameless unaccountable staffers taking turns shoving their hands up Joe Biden’s puppet-hole?

Like this.

And this.

Perhaps some of this.

Definitely some of this.

And of course there’s plenty of this.

True, true.

“…cross country data and six additional studies find that people with lower AI literacy are typically more receptive to AI.” (cite)

…and they vote, too!

More accurate cosplay would get her arrested…

Meanwhile, in the AI Nanotech Blockchain Virtual Tulip Hype Labs

Much excitement is being generated by the MIT-licensed release of the Chinese-made Deepseek models. Let’s see how they do…

TL/DR: the results are terrible, but the detailed “reasoning process” is fucking hilarious. Reminder, this is supposed to be the good stuff, the first time pro-grade AI models have been released for offline use.

more...

Okay, Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal is now tied with Our Tasty Private Ogress Secretary for best girl; sorry, Tail Red, but elves bounce. Well, a little. Occasionally. When they’re not wearing disguises.

Verdict: I’m getting sick of the “let’s settle this account” catchphrase, and Our Office Hero doesn’t seem to have the slightest curiosity about how all of his solutions come from an imaginary neighborhood bar that plays 50-year-old pop music. They really need to break out of the monster-of-the-week mold.

(hmmmm, I seem to be running low on pictures of busty glasses-wearing hot-elves; I’ll have to work on that)

Blah, blah, blah, DearS?!?

Discotek is releasing all sorts of old stuff on Bluray in 2025. I wouldn’t have bothered reading the article if the headline hadn’t mentioned DearS.

I liked DearS. It was a rather obvious fan-service harem remake of Alien Nation, and it had dancing chibis in the ED, which is always a plus.

(those chibis had more gainax power than most entire seasons these days)

Our Hero’s Reward is… not quite what he was hoping for. Our Heroine’s Reward, on the other hand, is enough to send her to the moon; seriously, this gal desperately needs a vibrating attachment for her VR headset. We now enter a new chapter in The Adventures Of An RPG Fool. Next week, get kraken!

Verdict: I like the fact that the regular boss fight they have to clear to reach the city is just handwaved away. We needed a break after the big multi-episode battle, and so did their budget.

(So, has Pencilgon figured out yet that her friend’s little sister is head-over-heels for her guildmate? I’m thinking no, because she’d be sure to set him up in some way…)

Born for invisible handcuffs…

Usually when you see a model dressed up as a schoolgirl and tied to a pole at the beach, there are tentacles lurking in the water. Fortunately for Musubu Funaki, Hello!Project usually doesn’t sacrifice their girls until they’re old enough to renegotiate their contracts, so the pose is an anomaly in this photo shoot (site NSFW; disable Javascript).

And, yes, her first name is the verb “to tie (something)”; her parents meant it in a good way, since she was born the day after they got married, but in the idol biz…

(Everia Club has been on a repost kick for a while now; this shoot is from 2018, and she’s been out of the business since 2020, when she turned 18)

[Crunchy running late again today…]

$erial Killer

Just noticed that the Isekai Prime manga is available for Kindle, serialized at $3/chapter. That’s… “not cheap”, especially when you realize that the 8 volumes available have a total of 60 chapters. Even given premium prices for a standard translated edition, that’s a $100 markup for 8 books worth of chapters, cha-cha-cha-ching! Or perhaps more likely, given the almost-completely-absent reviews, “yo-ho!”

I took a quick look at a fan-translation of the original webnovel, and stopped dead when Our Shopping Hero said, “Blimey, what’s all this then?”. Either the first chapter was written rather floridly compared to the rest (“well, butter my biscuit”), or the translator was in a goofy mood.

The Three Behemoths, episode 4

As expected, last week’s cliffhanger didn’t take long to resolve, and didn’t change the status quo, except… A Wild Dragonewt Appears! And she wants Our Mighty Kitty’s D even more than the other two gals! Equally important is the flashback that reveals that Our Cup-Runneth-Over Heroine comes by it honestly, barely able to hug Her Equally Endowed Mom when she left her village.

Once she’s fully recovered, the reward money from the adventure (and the bonus for the dragon materials) is enough for Cat-Blacksmith-nya to outfit her in armor so high-level that she has to shave to wear it.

Verdict: there was a brief moment at the beginning of the bath scene where I wondered if they’d decided to tone down the fan-service a bit, but then the nipples came out to play, and the show’s focus was renewed, complete with some steam-blobs to hide their shaving patterns. Pity we also have to put up with way too much skin shown off by the guild’s “eccentric” receptionist.

(not Our Heroine, but an adequate if slightly overdressed substitute)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 3

This week, a whirlwind tour through 75% of That Big Dungeon and 2/3 of the ingredients acquired to save Our Hero’s Mom, a little bit of fan-service from Our Future Blonde Combat Waifu, a brief human moment with Our Rich-Kid Sidekick (who’s nearly fulfilled his dream), and the debut of a Very Important Person.

Verdict: next week, the dungeon gets harder. And with any luck, a whole lot cuter.

(last week’s Rescue Kitten that we’ll probably never see again was cute enough to get at least one piece of fan-art)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 2

Y’know, I’ve completely lost interest in the concept of a high-ranking party whose members are too stupid and arrogant to grasp basic preparation and logistics; it really feels like the authors of these stories are taking out their office/classroom frustrations on the world. The sooner they write these assclowns out of the story, the better; it will leave more time for the camera to slowly pan across Our Tasty Hot-Pants Dark Elf Gal. The redhead’s not bad, but her low-level armor covers far too much skin.

Anyway, we get the joy of meeting a slobbering noob who’s been trying to “recruit” our gals into being his party favors. Sadly, I’m sure he’ll turn up again, along with the bozo party.

Verdict: get the catgirl onscreen soon, and shove all the losers into the background. And while I’m dreaming, get the dark elf into a hot tub.

(more appropriate attire for a 17-year-old dark elf maiden…)

Velvetised for your protection

Hotel Chocolat is a British chocolate retailer that commissioned a custom-skinned Dualit hot-chocolate maker as a vehicle to sell their products at an even higher markup in single-serving sachets. The Velvetiser itself runs £100, and the ~35-gram sachets are £1.50 each. Their first attempt at a broad launch in the US failed, but they still have an online store offering bundles and subscriptions that cut the price a bit from the marked-up $150 (+23%) and $2.50/sachet (+37%).

But retail price is the number I’m interested in, since I’ll be comparing it to the Nespresso Barista Recipe Maker, a quirky but much more versatile device that retails for $169.

The Velvetiser is only capable of (wonderful) hot chocolate, and only with chocolate shavings not much larger than the ones HC sells. There are third-party shaved chocolates sold in larger containers in the UK (I brought some back; my parents have a Velvetiser), but they’re still more expensive than bulk chocolate.

The BRM is capable of a variety of hot or cold drinks, and can also crush ice and smoothly blend chocolate squares (although doing both at once would probably jam it up good), and a number of Youtube videos rank its hot chocolate texture just-slightly-below the Velvetiser when compared head to head (and I agree).

With the caveat that officially the BRM tops out at 4 ounces of milk for blending, and only supports 8 ounces for warming milk without foaming it. A lot of people on various forums complain about the BRM overflowing out the top when you put too much liquid in, but it only happened to me once before I figured out the 100%-effective method for preventing overflow: twist the lid as you seat it. It’s that simple.

With that out of the way, I took advantage of the BRM’s ability to work with larger chunks of chocolate and went looking for something that suited my tastes. Squares are still pricy, so I tried larger chocolate bars, and while they worked, I wasn’t thrilled with the flavor (unless you really like dark chocolate, most US chocolate bars are over-sweetened and full of “non-chocolate ingredients”). I found something quite promising on Amazon, however: a 5-pound bag of Ghirardelli Melting Wafers for $44.

Hotel Chocolat’s sachets contain 35-37 grams of shaved chocolate. The Ghirardelli wafers weigh ~3.78 grams each, so 10 of them is just about perfect for the same strength of hot chocolate. You get about 600 wafers per bag, so that’s $0.73 per mug of hot chocolate, a considerable savings. And it’s good chocolate.

I just bought my second bag of the stuff, and I’ve found that it’s even better when you add some espresso into the mix. I’m up to two Nespresso pods per mug, and I’ve found that a lot of the pods I don’t care for alone or as cappuccinos are terrific when diluted in a full mug of hot chocolate.

This is important, because the temperature will be dropping back to 0°F tomorrow night (-18° in French units).

Side note: pretty much the only way to jam the BRM is by evenly distributing the solids across the bottom in enough density to keep it from initially spinning up. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, you want to dump all the solids on the same side, creating an “unbalanced” load.

Well, admittedly there is another way to jam it, but that involves Xanthan Gum…

(“ask me how I know” 😁)

“But why?!?”

Media Blasters is releasing a Bluray of Amazing Nurse Nanako. I greet this news with the same enthusiasm as I did the re-release of Eiken. That is, none whatsoever.

(given her age, this is one anime gal who might actually grow up to approach Eiken size, although I’m sure hers won’t be as sloshy)

[looks like Crunchyroll is running behind today; probably all that Global Warming and Record Warmth we’ve been digging ourselves out of while shivering in the freezing cold]

Isekai Prime, episode 2

“My slow life doesn’t need women”?!? Again: Dude! You’re banging your Sweet Young Landlady, you’ve got a Catgirl Cuddle-Buddy, and you can’t take your eyes off The Merchant’s Daughter’s Big Bouncy Boobies. (amusingly, it’s Her Quietly Hot Maid who buys the hundred clothespins that were mentioned in last week’s comments…)

ahem Our Entrepreneurial Hero signs a distribution contract, giving him enough money to build a house out in the woods. At no point does he seem to worry about gaining title to the land first, and he’s close enough to the city that the guards on the walls can hear his power tools and see him fell trees, so apparently resistance is feudal.

Now, why he’d try to do all the work himself with imported expensive tools instead of, say, hiring the catboys who follow Our Furry-Boobed First Catgirl around, I can’t imagine. It’s not like they aren’t all good friends now, between the curry, the booze, and her nighttime cuddling. (her relationship with the catboys seems platonic)

Verdict: Dude’s not just playing on easy mode (despite the ongoing saga of The Forlorn Feral Loli Future Daughter, whose happy ending is telegraphed in the credits), he’s reverting to his chuuni middle-school days. I’ll give it a few more weeks to assemble the rest of the harem.

Side note: the three light novels have a common cover theme: guy, loli, large cat-thing pet. The eight manga volumes have:

1. guy, blonde, blue catgirl
2. guy, blonde, loli, cat-thing
3. guy, loli, loli2, blue catgirl
4. guy, blonde, loli, orange catgirl
5. guy, blonde, loli, noble blonde
6. guy, blonde, loli, loli2
7. guy, blue catgirl, orange catgirl (all wearing hazmat suits)
8. guy, blonde, loli, cat-thing, blue catgirl, orange catgirl

(I prefer my catgirls a bit less furry than…(checks website) Myarey, but at least she shares her voice with Bilac)

Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, episode 2

As their totally-not-a-date-date comes to an end, Sleepy Hero treats His Hug-Pillow Elf Waifu to a scented bath before they snuggle in bed in the hopes that she’ll either make it home or be trapped forever as his live-in girlfriend. She seems to be fine with it either way.

They did face the tiny little problem that they’d been incinerated by a dragon while trapped in its lair, so while he expected to be whole and healthy as usual, they had to come up with a plan to stay that way. Based on a quick game of twenty questions, their plan was… beer!

TL/DR: they are now best friends with one of the mightiest creatures in the world, who in her role as Hot Dragon Chick is completely tsundere for Earth food and drink. So we’ve got Tsun Elf Waifu and Tsun Dragon Bestie, for the makings of a lively and well-rounded party.

(…but she’s no Grea)

The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 2

I won’t say that I made a mistake by reading all of the translated light novels after the end of last season, but it does mean that I’m so far ahead of the story at this point that I’ve actually forgotten a great deal of what’s coming up and in what order. It’s actually a bit jarring to have all the major secrets still unrevealed.

Also refreshing, as it lets me revisit these events with confidence that the adaptation is not simply plundering the source material for a highlight reel.

Anyway, this week, A Day In The Life of three cute serving girls, with just a dash of rear-palace intrigue and a whiff of conspiracy. And of course Actual-Cat Maomao makes an appearance.

Hammer Of The Guild Gal, episode 2

FYI, about half of the relatively-high-budget high-concept OP animation has nothing whatsoever to do with this show, and not just this season. In case you hadn’t figured that out yet.

The ED is much more in tune with the actual show, being cute and bouncy, like Our Mighty Shouty Receptionist Heroine. Unlike Alina, however, the ED doesn’t suddenly go into a murderous psychotic rage every week.

Last week’s cliffhanging asshole adventurer causes big trouble in town, realizing far too late that there is in fact a woman who doesn’t have to put up with his shit. Unfortunately for Our Heroine, her costume isn’t enough to protect her identity when she saves the day in the middle of town in broad daylight, not when the guild leader’s special power is timepeeping. Next week, it’s a trap!

Verdict: if this took itself seriously, it would suck. Instead, it’s about as silly as last summer’s Dungeon Drops show, which works for me.

Clippy Is Your Copilot

Miscreantsoft has just turned on their Mandatory AI features in every Office 365 application. You can sort-of turn them off, but the big colorful button is prominent in the UI, and intrusive to the point of having another button at the beginning of every new Word document offering to write for you. Just the thing to promote academic misconduct!

You can disable “connected experiences” on each device you use MS apps on, but it’s still there, lurking just under the surface for someone to abuse. And if you’re a corporate user (or somone who runs their own content-blocking firewall at home…), you can’t just block the traffic, since it piggybacks on regular Office traffic, with only 3 obvious DNS entries out of 18 referenced that might reduce the reach of its tentacoo waep.

You will serve your Anally Inserted overlords!

Meanwhile, Reddit is throwing up Scary AI Halloween ads…

ObGhostbusters: “You’re right, no human being would stack books like this.”

In a moment of weakness…

…I purchased a box full of Richard Blade novels on eBay. With a bit of OCR, they could produce entertaining results when fed to an LLM. It is technically an isekai series, after all…

Grid Girls

Up to this point, I’ve been more-or-less taking the advice of model creators and uploaded pictures on CivitAI when it comes to choosing the sampler and scheduler settings for Stable Diffusion models, but this produced problems when I tried to compare the same prompt and parameters across a large group of models, to see how they handled details like faces, finger counts, lighting, depth of field, and of course, “paying attention to the prompt”.

I was going to do a detailed comparison of the 13x31 grid of pictures I got from testing identical settings with all of the available schedulers and samplers, but as I worked my way through the results, I learned an important lesson: don’t choose a reference pic where the gal’s legs are crossed and her fingers are interlaced. This is pretty much the worst-case scenario for evaluating SD images of human beings…

TL/DR: over a third of the combinations produced garbage, and about half of the rest looked very similar in the foreground with some minor out-of-focus differences in the background, but there were quite a few small differences in her clothing’s shape, color, coverage, and material. Face and hair were pretty similar, with only a few looking like a completely different girl, and maybe a quarter having the hair parted on the other side. A fair number changed the pose in some way, although there were maybe six different poses total out of 403 images.

Next time, I’ll set the test up more carefully, so I can actually draw some conclusions beyond, “yeah, just don’t bother with most of the samplers and schedulers”. 😁

“Customers say”

Amazon’s “AI” comment-summarizer says this:

Customers find the story engaging and action-packed. They describe the book as a fun, intense read that is worth reading. The series is considered good to great by customers. Readers appreciate the complex characters and the author’s writing style. The pacing is described as fast and consistent. Overall, customers praise the author’s writing quality and consider it an excellent military adventure.

Human summarizer says, “OH JOHN RINGO NO!”. 😁

Artificial Incantations

How to get Flux.1-Dev to stab an orc: “…bleeding from a large chest wound. A sword grows vertically from the wound.” The official release seems a bit vague on what an “orc” looks like, but with some extra prompting will do the right thing:

side view, at night. photograph of a male ((orc)) warrior with green skin, pointed ears, and tusks, wearing armor, ((lying on back)) on a battlefield with his eyes closed, bleeding from a large chest wound. A sword grows vertically from the wound.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 14

Y’know, for a gal who only got into this game to meet a boy, Our Mighty Crushing Crusher has really gotten into it. Anyway, Our Scrappy Heroes keep the wolf at bay long enough for The Big Finish, and their reward is… sorry, princess, the wizard’s in another castle. (classical reference)

Verdict: they did still win the fight, they got a new quest, they all got to see her big spell go off, and most importantly, she achieved her Maiden Victory.

(now if only she’d get some high-level armor…)

Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army, episode 3

So, feeding the redhead tasty food blows her clothes off? I have a cunning plan…

Anyway, she’s working both sides of the tsundere trope really hard this week, but she’s got it so bad that she even bonds with Our Tasty Private Ogress Secretary. And then he trips another flag with an accidental marriage proposal, while Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal spies from afar.

Verdict: this is leaning a little hard into the First Girl Is Best Girl trope, especially given the quality of the alternatives we’ve already seen, but otherwise it’s amusing fluff, and the explanation of why demon gals go around half-naked sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

(I’m sure there are beaches and hot springs in this world for Our Hero to investigate…)

“Uncensored”, huh?

During the post-meeting chat at Friday’s Zoom meeting, people were joshing with the presenter about the AI-sourced art on his slides, and it turned into a more general discussion of offline AI, and I mentioned a few of my SFW experiments.

A co-worker messaged me later about his frustration trying to generate some simple, straightforward RPG art: a dying orc on a battlefield with a sword through his chest. He was using a Flux model, which is The New Hotness (and can produce very detailed, textured pics), and no matter how he prompted it, the sword always ended up pointing in a safe, non-violent direction.

You could carefully arrange every element except the stabby bit. This didn’t surprise me in an official model with strong guardrails that hadn’t been trained on violent content, but surely there was a derivative model or LoRa that would do it? TL/DR: if there is, I couldn’t find it on CivitAI. Other sorts of objects, IYKWIMAITYD, can be inserted into bodies in “uncensored” Flux models, but not weapons.

But Flux is new, and apparently harder to train. So I wrote a likely prompt and fed it to the full set of SDXL-based models I have that all take similar parameters (~60 of them; this sort of X/Y/Z comparison grid is a one-click operation in SwarmUI). Most of them produced something that looked like it came out of an orc bodybuilding magazine (with the usual repetition from related models), a few produced images where the pose and point of insertion suggested that the swords were blunt and capable of vibration, but one lonely model reliably produced the desired effect.

Prompt: realistic ((photograph)) of a male orc warrior, wearing armor, ((on his back)), ((dead)), ((eyes closed)), on a battlefield, ((stabbed through the chest)) with a sword, full body, at night, side view. 4k, crisp, highly detailed, intricate, ultra textured.

The model that killed orcs most reliably was Nova Furry XL (NSFW). Despite the name, it doesn’t spontaneously furritize everything you make, but it is very porny, so don’t click that link anywhere near a work environment.

The next step was to try to coax a more realistic model to improve that picture to add details and texture. I tinkered with SwarmUI’s img2img and refinement workflows, but the moment I adjusted the sliders enough to get Flux to produce its signature details and textures, the sword stopped stabbing. Most other models proved only slightly less annoying to work with, but I did manage one success with Crystal Clear XL and sent it to my co-worker:

Nova and Crystal Clear both have other models that might produce something more detailed or realistic, so I’m downloading them to try out later.