Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 8

FYI for the translator: not only does yoroshiku tanomu not mean “I hope this works”, what idiot thought that Our Mighty Hero would ever say “I hope this works” to his troops right before a battle? Have they watched the show?

This is far milder than the sort of localization errors that really set fans off, where woke morons are rewriting the scripts to change the point of entire scenes and the nature of major characters, but come on, even the still-mostly-broken online translator apps don’t mistranslate a simple phrase like “yoroshiku tanomu” (“I’m counting on you”).

Anyway, The Big Battle doesn’t go as either side expected, but if you were expecting things to go badly for The Good Guys, clearly you haven’t been watching the show, either.

Verdict: Boy Gets Doggy Girl. And I suspect Our Loyal Sidekick will be less reticent than his master, so I expect puppies soon.

(unrelated GenAI doggy girl is one of the few I got who didn’t have a muzzle)

10 Years A Harem Lord, episode 8

Okay, so they did cast the queen, and brought her on-screen this week, which means that they could easily have followed the source and had her show up earlier, both in locking down the vampire’s Big Magic Rock and in providing a bit of late-night fan-service when they opened the tunnel. Which makes it look like they just didn’t want the fan-service?

Anyway, no one should be surprised that the crime boss was easily defeated and that they found plenty of evidence he was Up To No Good, and also that there are still vampires running around behind the scenes.

Also, we have a new damsel in distress, and this one’s got red underrim glasses, so you know she’s worth rescuing. Speaking of haremettes, the loli redhead is going to be a real heartbreaker in a few years.

Verdict: Good Clean Fun.

(yeah, just throwing out unrelated pics tonight…)

Amazon fixed estimated delivery times!

By removing them! This week, none of my orders that reached the “out for delivery” stage has an estimated delivery window, and while the map view still gets loaded, it no longer indicates how many stops away the driver is or their approximate location.

Dear Apple,

Could you please unfuck the behavior of the “repeat” functionality in the MacOS Music.app? Eventually? If I select “repeat one”, I expect it to do two things:

1. repeat the same song until I choose another one.
2. stay selected until I select a different option.

This hasn’t worked since you replaced iTunes with this PoS that demonstrates that you don’t need vibe-coding to write garbage.

Playing with Obsidian

I’ve been having issues with Joplin’s sync (for a long time, actually), and a co-worker suggested I try out Obsidian, which has various sync options including an end-to-end encrypted service they run for a small fee, as well as a robust plugin architecture.

Which you need, because out of the box it’s kinda limited for the sort of things I want from a note app. To achieve rough parity with Joplin, I had to add:

• Importer - required to get your existing data into Obsidian.
• Note Toolbar - basic formatting buttons.
• Frontmatter Date Manager - update the “updated” field on edit; otherwise you simply can’t sort notes by recent edits.
• Fold Properties By Default - otherwise you lose a lot of screen space to note metadata.
• Vault Backup - export to compressed archive.

One thing that took a while to figure out was a reverse-chronological display of every note in a vault, regardless of where it was stored in organizational sub-folders. Turns out you need to use “Bases” and set up a list view that sorts by the “updated” metadata field (which is never… updated by the basic app). The results aren’t terribly pretty, but it works.

Pity it’s Yet Another Node.js App.

There are some recipe-management plugins, which might make it a decent alternative to the current crop of paid apps, and it’s apparently got a big following in the role-playing community, for setting up and running games.

(fun fact: the randomized prompt didn’t specify an animal species for this one)

Oh, look, more GenAI horseshit!

I was wandering through Amazon recommendations, because there’s a new release of Asimov’s Lucky Starr novels, and came across an “enriched edition” of The Stainless Steel Rat, with the following blurb. I shit you not:

In Harry Harrison’s book ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’, readers are taken on a thrilling journey through a futuristic world filled with advanced technology and cunning criminals. The book combines elements of science fiction and heist genres, offering a unique and engaging reading experience. Harrison’s witty writing style and fast-paced storytelling keep readers on the edge of their seats while exploring themes of morality and rebellion in a society governed by strict laws and regulations. The Stainless Steel Rat is a classic example of Harrison’s ability to blend humor, action, and social commentary in a thought-provoking narrative. Harry Harrison, known for his extensive work in science fiction, brings his expertise to ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’. His background as a military engineer and involvement in political activism provides insight into the themes of rebellion and social justice present in the book. Harrison’s rich imagination and attention to detail make ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ a must-read for fans of science fiction and adventure. I highly recommend ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ to readers looking for a captivating blend of futuristic technology, clever heists, and moral dilemmas. Harry Harrison’s masterful storytelling and unique narrative style make this book a standout in the science fiction genre, offering a thrilling and thought-provoking read.

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience:

• A succinct Introduction situates the work’s timeless appeal and themes.
• The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists.
• A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era’s events and influences that shaped the writing.
• A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings.
• Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work’s messages, connecting them to modern life.
• Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance.
• Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

The so-called “editorial reviews” are about completely unrelated books. The release is from 2020, but I can’t help but think someone had their chat-bot “freshen” the blurb recently. Much as dog urine could be used to “freshen” a fine whiskey.

The worst part is that they reused the ASIN listing for the actual book, so Amazon thinks I own it, and likely would try to “upgrade” the copy I have if I re-downloaded it.

Magical Girl Lyrical Tanya 2, episode 7

What do you do when there’s no chance of winning? Change the game. But first you need to explain the lives of ordinary people to Our Heroine, who’s not known for her empathy. Then you recruit her into your conspiracy.

(the author was inspired by a piece of Nanoha fanfic that he read, but some earlier claims that Tanya’s story grew out of the author’s Nanoha fanfic apparently were the result of poor translations of Japanese fan sites)

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 7

While Our Bumpkin’s away, Our Dutiful Daughter has her routine upended by a temporary move into the dorms. Where she gets an unexpected lesson in discipline, but at least she’s with a friend.

Meanwhile, Our White-Haired Haremette is very unhappy to discover that a noble has assigned his pretty younger sister to “protect” him from other women.

Verdict: “why, no, I have no idea where your sister went; have you checked the disturbed layer of sod over by the midden?”

(I’m not even looking for fresh fan-art for this show any more; here’s my favorite recent GenAI mouse gal)

Seems like only yesterday I updated MS Office…

Oh, wait, it was yesterday. And the week before. And maybe a few days before that. Imagine how fast they could update it if Github worked!

(today I accidentally invented a timeline where Frank Frazetta did the cover art for gay romance novels)

Horse and Bridal…

Saddle ’er up!

Host: Mac Mini (2024, M4 Pro, 64 GB)

Model: google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-qat (MLX, 4-bit quantization)

Performance: ~60 tokens/second

Prompt:

Create a list of 100 unique, creative image-generation prompts describing scenic locations that present a high-fantasy adventure aesthetic. Do not use names of real places. Do not include people. Do not include art style, medium, or depth of field. Describe only the visual elements of each location in concrete terms, as a self-contained paragraph of 25 to 75 words. Do not number the list or include any text formatting.

Now, let’s see what sort of “thinking” process led to these results…

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Okay, whatever they’ve been feeding those beastkin to make them build that well that quickly, I’ll take a dozen bottles; I’ve got a lot of work that needs done around the house.

Also, I would very much like to see more of Our Busty Romantic Book-Loving Ninja Horse Gal.

Verdict: a very silly interlude. I approve.

(no new fan-art, so it’s back to the GenAI mines)

How it’s going…

The “top picks” on Amazon’s recommendations page for me currently include:

• Fahrenheit 451
• Animal Farm
• Lord of the Flies

Also, Logic for Programmers, but that’s because it was already in my cart.

Sold or stolen?

I should check to see if Dropbox has been hacked recently, since I’m getting a lot of spam to the email address I only used with them. Fortunately, I don’t use their service any more, so I can blacklist that address.

Magilumiere 2, episode 7

This week, Our Big Fish learns that he was swimming in A Small Pond, and there are in fact other people as smart as he is. Naturally this leads to a series of flashbacks about growing up smart and lonely, with the only bright spot in his life being His Truly Magical Girl.

The villain accidentally managed to split the party, though, with two of Our Gals inside the barrier and the other two outside. So we now have two teams, with Our Boss trying to get there as fast as he can… next week.

Verdict: I’m not fond of the way they keep dropping everything for lengthy flashbacks. Otherwise, this was fine.

(I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen doujin porn of Our Naughty Villain crossing over into the innocent world of Magilumiere; there would definitely be Gushing)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 7

“Adventurers Assemble!” This week, Our Harem Party adds a big guard dog (female, of course), an emotionless semi-demi-catgirl, and a big hint that they need one more to cover all bases. We’ve already seen her, but she won’t be available until the monsters that showed up in town at the end destroy her livelihood. So, next week, and that should be it for haremettes for a while.

Meeting the leader of The Party Formerly Known As First Place means we’re getting close to moving up to district 7, and you may recall that I mentioned that the latest manga volume is still there with a ways to go before advancing further, so I’m not sure how they’re going to spend the next five episodes. Things have been moving pretty fast so far.

Verdict: a lot of walk-and-talk-and-talk-some-more, but Our Best Lizard Gal gets some nice moments, and the rest of the gals have signed off on her getting in the tub with Our Rear Observer, so on the whole, I’d say it went well. And we learned something very interesting about the process of becoming a demi-human.

Her husband doesn’t reveal that his wife’s a catgirl this week, she won’t be appearing this season, and I don’t remember them giving a detailed description of her looks, so I’ll just say that it would be nice if she were somewhere between these two:

(probably the latter, maybe with a mask like Theresia)

Cosplay Harem season 2

In production.

Despite being much tamer than the manga, this show was still full of fun and eye candy, so the new season is going on my list, whenever it ends up being released.

Mac screen sharing considered harmful

In a “complete takeover of your machine if you’re on a public wifi network, even with the firewall turned on, because Apple automatically opens holes for their own trash software” kind of way (link goes to Ars, where I’m sure they blame Trump for the exploit).

My defense against this sort of attack is never leaving the house.

On the bright side…

If you can stomach the Liquid Ass GUI of MacOS 26, you can unlock your encrypted boot drive over ssh, allowing you to finish booting after an OS update without a physical screen, keyboard, and mouse.

Hopefully this won’t be removed in MacOS 27.2.3, which is likely when I’ll consider upgrading from 15.7.9.

More fun with Engadget’s Headlines For Dummies

• Why are RAM prices so high right now?
• Here’s how to reset your ASUS router
• How to request an Xbox refund
• What is analog TV and how is it different from digital TV?

Honestly, at this point I’m surprised they’re still using complete sentences.

Traffic safety?

Flock cameras near my house:

• just north of an intersection on a “minor arterial” street, aimed at road.

• between a motel and a coffee shop, aimed at minor side street.

• other end of that minor side street, aimed across street at empty commercial property.

• a pair aimed both directions on side street adjacent to highway onramp, covering two gas stations.

• residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.

• residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.

• residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.

• just north of (closed) public pool, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.

• dead-end street, aimed at community park parking lot.

Flock cameras located in downtown Miamisburg:

• N Main St, industrial zoning, aimed south at road.

There are more “traffic” cameras covering my suburban neighborhood than there are surrounding the nearby Dayton Mall, which is surrounded by high-traffic streets and two highways. Interestingly, about a mile east of the mall is a non-Flock traffic camera pointed in all four directions at a major intersection with tons of businesses and a highway on-ramp. That brand of four-way camera is only installed at major intersections, while none of the Flocks are.

How To Train Your (Chibi) Dragon Waifu

Same prompt structure, just adding “chibi version of” at the start of the character description. First try, I got 2 out of 100, because it kept leaving off either the horns or the tail. So I explicitly requested horns and tail. And a steampunk aesthetic, which didn’t always work either.

“Genie woman” and “demon woman” didn’t work at all, and “devil woman” had the same problem with leaving off horns and tails most of the time; I suppose I’ll have to do a general monster-girl test to see which ones are well-represented in the training data.

Related, I’m back to testing LLMs for creating sets of unique prompts, and the “thinking” process remains painful to watch; I can’t imagine being an LLM developer at these companies and feeling proud of your creations.

I asked shiny new release qwen3.8-27b for 100 unique scenic fantasy locations between 25 and 75 words in length. It “decided” to make them all exactly 30 words in length using Madlibs-style template substitutions, and then spent 42 minutes burning GPU power on the task. The results were as generic and uninspired as you might expect, so I fed them to another LLM for creative expansion, which took 4 minutes to pad them out to an average of 175 words. Then I used a third LLM to compress them back down to a sensible length, which took another 6 minutes. Silly as it sounds, breaking the task up this way was easier and much faster than trying to write a prompt to write a prompt to write a prompt that did it all at once in the first LLM.

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Tan Teen Oni Waifu, episode 7

This village is really going to the dogs. In a good way, at least for Our Loyal Sidekick, who doesn’t make it through “hello” before falling for Our Cute Canine Guide Gal. Fortunately, seeing him treat her charges as equals is enough to melt her heart, so there shouldn’t be any problems with this second interspecies relationship.

All is not simply slow-life in the middle of nowhere, however, as the plot once again raises its ugly head, in the person of the less-inept-than-you’d-expect fallen noble who’s been behind pretty much everything so far. This time, he’s persuaded Evil Princess to swipe power and authority to make another invasion attempt.

Fortunately, there’s a Good Prince, as well, and he tries to stop the mess before it gets out of hand. Next week, war!

Verdict: the sooner we’re past this conflict, the sooner we never see Princess Diane again. With luck, that’ll also be the end of The Gelded Noble, who kind of ruins any scene he’s in.

(no fan-art, as usual, so I had to gen up a cute white-haired doggy gal; not easy, since Krea2 tends to really go for breeds with long muzzles)

10 Years A Harem Lord, episode 7

I’ll give the show credit for one thing: the thugs terrorizing Our New Loli Housekeeper might want to sell her into slavery, but just as a general worker, not an underage sex slave; other shows tend to be less “wholesome”.

Anyway, apart from finding a loli and patching up a hole, things move pretty slowly this week, but end with the promise of a fight and a new maiden to rescue from shadowy villains.

Verdict: “hey, let’s leave the runaway loli out on a street corner, with a guard dog who’s kinda vague on the concept, so we can get her kidnapped again.” Also, still waiting on a definitive answer on Our Chicken Holder’s gender; s/he gets some very pretty closeup shots this week, but the subtitles using “he” are an interpretation, not a reflection of the Japanese dialogue, unless I missed a line.

(I may have to knock together a prompt for Our Devoted Wolf Girl, but meanwhile, here’s another cute doggie)

Gate novels finally available in translation

It took Amazon five months to inform me about a release from an author I follow, and only after the second book was released. Sigh.

Also Amazon

I am actually more surprised that Amazon delivered my latest order on the day promised than I would be if it were late. That’s how bad their logistics have been for me recently.

D is for Dragon-gal

I got some nice lizard gals in recent batches, so I decided to level them up.

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The Epic Poem of Tanya The Remarkably Effective 2, episode 6

This week, The Dance Of The Certifiable Badasses. Plural, because we get to see Russian mages tough enough to survive being purged and sent to “rehabilitation” camps, as well as a general who leads from the front. Also, Our Nimble Adjutant survives playing decoy.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 6

They did not cheap out on animating The Big Duel. They used a few speedlines, but only to represent… speed, and put a lot of effort into the action and camerawork.

However, Our White-Knight Haremette’s crush has reached the point where not seeing Our Bumpkin Hero leads her to spend her evenings in drunken exposition with Her Red Rival. Short-Stack, on the other hand, is completely oblivious to her eligibility, with no reaction to hearing Big Daddy say “seriously, son, get a wife; maybe a nice swordswoman or wizard”. Personally, I’m still rooting for Our Hot Magic Teacher.

(unrelated swordswoman is a fully-qualified waifu candidate)

With fourteen you get catgirl

I understand why Our Tan Teen Oni Waifu is on the cover of every book in the Frontier Lord light-novel series, but why does it take until book 14 to reveal that there’s a catgirl in town?

Oura farming

I have an Oura ring, which started out with a roughly 7-day battery life. A while back, it started reporting “N hours” left after maybe 3 days, and updates and restarts didn’t help. Then it started saying “21 hours left” and just shutting off about 3 hours later. Device is just over 1.5 years old.

When placed on the charger, it immediately claimed to be about 40% charged. Thinking this sounded an awful lot like the old laptop battery behavior where one cell went bad and the device didn’t notice or adjust, I started looking at a new device. Coincidentally, there’s a new model of Oura ring that just came out.

I didn’t really want to buy another one, but then came the day when the device shut down and didn’t come back. The basic support advice was to reset it from the app, but you can’t do that when it doesn’t boot. Reading further, I found the last-ditch failsafe reset: place ring in charger, pick up charger, rapidly smack charger down onto table a bunch of times, wait one minute, repeat if needed.

That worked. Pity it still shuts itself off at ~40% battery life. I guess I’ll just put it on the charger after two days. If its life drops any further, I’ll think about a replacement. I’d prefer a ring to a watch for sleep tracking, but not if it has to be replaced in less than two years again.

Dear Adobe,

I have all notifications disabled for Creative Cloud, and yet just now you decided to cover the lower right corner of my screen with a custom oversized pop-up window informing me there was a new version of Illustrator, and asking if I wanted to update right now or later. The pop-up was missing a “fuck off and stop bothering me” button.

The worst part? I already installed that update yesterday.

X hates casuals

My new daily ritual is unlocking my xTwitter account by checking the yes-i-am-a-human box and acknowledging my understanding of the rules I somehow violated in my sleep. I’m guessing it’s pissed off at Brave, since I’ve almost never posted anything, and really only use it to keep up with a handful of people. Either that, or someone disapproves of the accounts I’m giving likes to…

Speaking of X

When a tweet appears in the “for you” timeline, the top choice in the “…” menu is “not interested in this”. When a tweet with a reply under it by someone you follow appears, the top choice is “follow this person”, and there is no “not interested” option, although you can still mute or block them. In both cases, misclicking the round “…” button by even a single pixel takes you to the tweet you were trying to avoid.

Infected Mexican jalapenos are Trump’s fault!

Taylor Farms, makers of fine products containing e.coli and cyclospora, have now recalled jalapenos full of salmonella. The Ars writer and the commenters make it all about Trump.

Elven Tradwives Of The American Midwest

Too elegant to just walk around barefoot and pregnant!

Fantasy Fox

I don’t usually go for the full furry type, but…

After all the buildup, they kind of cheaped out on the big reveal. And no, I don’t mean the gals taking a dip in the hot spring, although that could have been a longer scene. This diverges from the light-novel version of the story in a rather significant way, unless they spend more time next week dealing with what happens when Our Boney Hero gets not-really-his-body back. Careful viewing will reveal one secret that he of course forgot a long time ago, but the expert’s opinion on what happened to him doesn’t provide enough emphasis on a major plot point.

Verdict: I’ll forgive all flaws for Our Titty Elf giving in to her long-suppressed attraction, while Our Slightly Gay Ninja Catgirl eggs her on and then can’t believe she’s actually going to do it.

Stale alert…

I’m on call this week, and one of the services I support threw an alert for a file-pull cron job that hasn’t succeeded in 20,675 days. So, January 1, 1970 strikes again!

Engadget, For Dummies

Either there is no longer any volume of tech news or product releases, or the writers and editors at Engadget have all been replaced with AI slop. I can find no other explanation for recent stories like:

• Here’s how to pair your Roku remote
• How waterproof are AirTags? Here’s what to know
• How to use Claude’s voice mode
• Here’s how to format a USB drive on Windows
• How to hide and unhide an app on your iPhone or iPad (and why you may want to)
• The Apple Watch heart rate feature you probably didn’t realize existed
• Are USB flash drives becoming obsolete?
• PSA: Apple has released security updates for Mac

Honestly, all that’s missing are exclamation points and emoji.

Tell me you’re crazy without telling me you’re crazy

I got a giggle out of the Person Of Transitude who fled the evils of Imperial Trumpyland for a refugee camp in Enlightened Europistan, discovered that she was surrounded by violent bigoted third-world savages, and fled back to San Francisco, only to complain that it’s too expensive there.

Yes, dear, because it’s San Francisco, which hasn’t been affordable since before you were a little boy. Maybe do a little research before your next move, preferably not relying on GenAI?

The perfect waifu does not exi…

(all of these are sized for my Lexar Pexar photo frame, and I’ve been getting some really nice results mashing up the JSON prompts generated from my archives and then passing individual fields through targeted LLM prompts; I can’t use really fast models, though, since they tend to skip over large chunks of the instructions and just go wild on their own (z-image-engineer-v6 is basically hardwired to generate complete prompts, and sucks for anything else). gemma-4-e4b-it-heretic is working out nicely, and taking only a few seconds to separately flesh out the background and the subject’s appearance without generating tons of irrelevant details that end up contradicting other fields)