But first, an Amazon shipping change!

Two items ordered on Wednesday, promised for Friday. On Friday, one of them was moved to Saturday. So far, pretty typical. On Saturday, its status changed to “approval needed”, and I was asked if it was okay for it to be delivered Monday. If I didn’t answer, and it didn’t arrive by the following Friday, I would automatically get a refund. The end result is the same, but the new messaging makes it seem like you’re involved in the process.

On with the cheesecake!

I liked the styling I was getting from Klein, so I tried some new LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, shooting for the feel of a good-looking gal on the cover of a paperback where the author’s name isn’t well-known enough to make the sale. The initial batch had them in lingerie, because that’s where I got the horned horny covergal from the previous post, but I decided to see if Klein did as well at the “retro-SF uniform” look as ZIT did the last time I tried it.

Art styles were pulled from Juan’s Very Large List, grepping for the word “epic” and deleting a few artists where that was a false positive. I used the prompt-enhancing system prompt recommended by Z-Image Turbo to flesh out the random locations, plus two of my own targeted system prompts to generate clothing and physical details, plus a final LLM pass to do general cleanup. This would have been agonizingly slow on the Mac, so I ran it on the gaming PC in between image-generation runs (because SwarmUI and LM Studio both think they have the GPU to themselves, trying to run them at the same time blows out the VRAM, even though they should fit).

My system prompts were:

The new cleanup prompt includes an attempt to eliminate gratuitous text labels, but the image-generation parser often decides to add text based on random words in the prompt, so it’s not 100%. I didn’t want to use my usual collection of retro-SF costume prompts, so I fed the following to the fashion sysprompt:

“Sexy science-fiction uniform for women, incorporating bright colors, advanced technology, and a variety of futuristic textures and materials. Uniform may include abstract symbols and attached technology, but no text. Avoid shoulderpads. Do not use black or silver as the primary colors. You may include accessories such as sci-fi weapons, scanners, datapads, crystals, or glowing energy.”

Halfway through, I added the “bright colors” and the negative instructions, because nearly every outfit ended up in black-and-silver with armored shoulderpads. Sigh. This was all with the gemma-3-12b-it-heretic-x-i1 model, and now that Gemma 4 has been released, I’m going to see if it does a better job; it’s getting good reviews, and I think there’s already a few uncensored versions.

Out of ~600 images, just under 13% had obvious anatomy fails, with most of them being extra arms or legs. There were some I rejected reluctantly, because the rest of the image was really good. They might be fixable with variation seeds, but I’ve kinda gotten out of the habit of doing that; it’s easy to spend more time tinkering than it’s worth, and you can always just make another batch.

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Slime 4, episode 1

Last season talked the audience to death. How do they start this season?

By spending the entire episode talking, of course. The CGI-heavy OP promises a great deal of action, and the ED is filled with drama related to The Little Big Bad who seems to be behind all the promised conflict, but they have a history of getting bogged down in endless meetings, so I won’t hold my breath.

(this unrelated oni-girlie is a much better cook than Shion, and if she gets the treatment she deserves this season, she’ll be one of many pregnant haremettes)

Boxxo Or Bust 3, episode 1

Season 2 worked hard to alienate anyone who enjoyed season 1, by trying to convert the lighthearted and frankly absurd adventures of a sentient vending machine and his cute girlfriend into a tired beat-the-demon-lord story that the author came up with and abandoned after he ran out of new vending machines to write about. No idea if the idea of making a large group of allies into poorly-written turncoats was in his notes somewhere, or was completely original.

How do they start this season? The OP is 50% sparkles, 50% shounen action; I honestly expected transformation sequences by the time it was over. The ED is pure chibi cuteness, so it looks like they’re going to whiplash the mood again.

Rock bath!

Get clean with Ruri and Nagi:

(naturally, you can get takeout)

Quad9 versus Amazon

Precisely at midnight, Quad9’s DNS servers stopped resolving subdomains of the form $bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com. I had their DNS first in my Pihole’s config, so it looked to me like every image on my blog suddenly vanished. I was quite relieved to discover that it was just a DNS server failure.

I opened a ticket with them, and it was fixed in 3 hours.

Accidental retro-sf paperback covergal

I was just cleaning my dynamic-prompt script, when it suddenly went off:

I can’t decide if I want to read this novel or write it…

If you use Ollama!

And you have an M5!

And at least 32 GB of RAM!

And you use the one specific model that they worked with Apple to support!

Somehow my excitement went down with each sentence…

Same prompt, different models

I took a sample from the less-than-fully-dressed dynamic prompts and handed it to three versions of Z-Image Turbo (standard, NSFW v5 & v6), Z-Image Base, Flux.2-Klein-9d, and Qwen Image 2512. Mostly the same parameters, except for increasing steps from 20 to 30 for ZI Base, Klein, and Qwen, and increasing CFG to 6 for ZI Base. I generated 10 images for each model, with random seeds, and kept the best 3.

Prompt:

Painting in the style of Delphin Enjolras, intimate portraits of women in interiors, soft pastel and oil technique, smooth sensual textures, dramatic chiaroscuro from warm lamplight, glowing warm palette, quiet, serene atmosphere. Of a elegant, tiny, Caucasian, college-age sexy woman with pear-shaped figure, luminous Dark brown eyes, delicately lobed Ears, subtly Aquiline Nose, perfectly tapered Chin, pointed Jaw, soft Rosy Cheeks, narrow Forehead, oval face shape, Prom makeup with healthy Reddish-Brown skin and White hair, softly curled into a low, romantic updo, with subtle highlights of champagne blonde, and her mood is cheerful. Standing forward bend, knees slightly bent, torso lowered, arms extended to floor, wrists aligned, neck elongated, collarbones gracefully defined. Her location is Historic Thera, Greece. Cool under-cabinet LED creates task lighting; functional focused illumination; clean kitchen-like quality. She is wearing pastel purple scalloped lace glossy ribbon with a delicate sheen, and a pastel purple tassel necklace.

Not a single image paid any attention to “Historic Thera, Greece”; most of them ignored “soft pastel and oil technique” (with standard ZIT going all-in on the pastels but doing nothing painterly; this is much more pronounced than the usual ZIT low-contrast that people work around with LUTs). The early mention of “women in interiors” seems to have combined with “clean kitchen-like quality” at the end to put them all into a generic Western-style kitchen, without even adding a window for the standard Santorini tourist view. The LLM “enhancement” to the prompt did add some interesting elements to her looks, but also made some of the sentences borderline incoherent.

As you can see, there’s no mention of nudity and naughty bits, with the only mention of clothing being a ribbon and a tassel, so it was up to the model to decide how much, and which, skin was showing.

Klein, like its resource-intensive parent Flux.2-Dev, had the best grasp of style. Speed-wise, standard ZIT was the fastest at 28 seconds, then the NSFW versions (+15%), then Klein (+50%), then Qwen (+140%), and finally ZI Base (+246%). The full Flux.2-Dev has a tendency to run out of memory on my machine at this resolution (1248x1824), but it’s safe to assume the results would be “very similar to Klein but better”.

(note there’s already a v6.1 for ZIT NSFW, but it’s locked away for another week…)

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Turning on region-blocking and automatic translation has had the effect of bringing American xTwitter into direct contact with its Japanese counterpart, and the results have been inspirational and hilarious.

Among the many unanticipated results is the Victorian maid café in Tokyo that has become so popular you can barely visit their web site; it’s suffering a classic slashdotting. Hopefully they’re getting real business out of it as well.

Small steps forward

Version 6 of that NSFW ZIT checkpoint had fewer grotesque anatomy fails and adult-rendered-as-way-underage fails. Still a ways to go, though; I have no idea why its training data included women with bushy black unibrows, for instance.

(some commenters are complaining about poor penis rendering, but since I prefer my nudes with no penis at all, even for recreational uses, I’m okay with that part)

Another step back

I searched my Amazon order history for “kitchenaid”. It returned: a butter slicer, a dusting wand, a dough-rolling bag, an apple peeler/corer, a pineapple peeler/corer, a kitchen-spoon rest, a cord organizer that advertised itself as “for kitchenaid…”, a mixer cozy (ditto), and a KitchenAid spice grinder.

By my count, that’s 70% unrelated cruft. Maybe do a string search before tokenizing it and handing it off to “AI”?

There’s a work-in-progress checkpoint model based on Z-Image Turbo that promises better photographic-quality NSFW results than the existing ones, and at least one of my terminally-online 1girl-maker acquaintances gave it a thumbs-up, so I took it for a spin.

First impression: equal parts Teen Vogue and Barely Legal, with a dash of Girls’ Life to bring the ages down. In some cases way down, leading to quick deletion of images where prompts requesting adult female humans produced lolis. It also often produced elf ears, but that’s not something that would help defend you in court.

I’ve also been running the generated prompts through an LLM ordered to diversify the output by only adding flattering details to descriptions of faces, bodies, hair, clothing, and makeup, but LLMs do whatever is statistically likely, and will randomly remove keywords or change things they’re told not to. Using explicit numbers for ages seems to limit that sort of damage, although there was a surprisingly youthful “127-year-old” in one batch. Must have been some elf blood in there, even though it didn’t give her the ears.

I didn’t require full frontal nudity in every pic, so a few of these are outside the NSFW tag; most, however, are topless, bottomless, or both. The training in v5.0 of the model is unstable, leading to a higher rate of anatomy fails than the base ZIT model, especially for genitals, so I rejected a lot of images. v6.0 will be available in a few hours, so hopefully it’s less disaster-prone.

I threw in a bunch of random art styles, but the strong training bias towards photorealism meant that the subject was often a photo in front of an artsy background, sometimes literally casting a shadow on a painting.

(note: my Mac Mini with an M4 Pro takes about 3x as long to do text-generation as my Windows box with an RTX 4090, using the same model (gemma-3-12b-it-heretic-x-i1) and software (LM Studio); what I’ve seen of early benchmarks on the M5 MacBook Pros suggests that they’re still not great at running text or image models. All they really offer is the ability to slowly run models that don’t fit into consumer-graphics-card VRAM)

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Bit of a fumble there at the end, as if they ran themselves out of material and padded things out to avoid having to start the next story arc, which they’ve spent the past few episodes dropping hints about. Especially since season 3 isn’t coming out until next Fall. A few good character moments, anyway, and a nice self-contained story at the bridge.

This Fall will have Maomao, Fran & Sword-Daddy, and in the hopefully-won’t-suck column, Isekai Space Merc & Harem, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Isekai Fetish-Porn Gamer (aka “Magical Explorer”), but having to wait a year-and-a-half after such a short season is a bit of a downer.

(season 3 of The Apothecary Diaries will be Fall and Spring, with a movie in between)

PyPI: litellm compromised

Thoroughly hacked. Detected on the same day, fortunately, but if it got pulled in as a dependency for something you run:

Assume any credentials present on the affected machine are compromised: SSH keys, cloud provider credentials (GCP ADC, AWS access keys, Azure tokens), Kubernetes configs, API keys in .env files, and database passwords.

Crunchyroll announces one show I might watch

plus some others.

Fridge waterfail

So, turning the fridge off for 12 hours solved the temperature problem, but it also somehow broke the seal on the water filter for the ice maker and water dispenser, so that when I went to fill the kettle, the filter leaked as much water as it passed, and since it’s located directly above the top shelf, the water went everywhere.

Once I finished cleaning up and reseated the filter, it stopped dispensing water at all, with the status screen (finally) showing LEAK and refusing to dispense water. Replaced the filter, no change; power-cycled the fridge, and the message changed to ERR. No water.

So I guess there’s going to be a service call after all.

Dark patterns

Network Solutions continues to spam me daily after buying my email provider. I click the Unsubscribe link. It takes me to a page with a checkmark for that specific type of spam (only), and a submit button.

The box is pre-checked. Clicking submit keeps me on that mailing list.

Before making the service call for my way-too-cold fridge, I emptied everything into coolers, powered it off, and waited 12 hours for it to come to room temperature.

Seems to have solved the problem, but I’ll definitely spot-check it for a while. It never hurts to have thermometers in both the fridge and freezer compartments, and my old ones didn’t record high/low range, so I threw a new set into my latest Amazon order.

I can’t even muster up a shocked face…

Crunchyroll major security breach:

“Crunchyroll may be facing a security breach through its ticketing system, which is outsourced through Telus in India”

Space Merc & Harem

Coming in the fall, and pretty much every episode unless they tone it down a lot. Our Hero gets isekai’d into his favorite space game with his OP custom ship, and quickly makes a name for himself as a first-rank mercenary and horndog. The teaser trailer gives a decent look at Mimi and Elma, the first two haremettes.

I’ve been enjoying the light novels, so I hope this gets handled competently. Our Hero Hiro’s voice actor is perhaps best known for Benimaru in Slime, first gal was the lead in Emotionless Robo Waifu, second gal has had mostly small roles, and Our Hot Blonde Ally is best known to me as Class Rep in Loner Harem, although some might recognize her as a certain Princess who deals with “torture”. The director has done some porn OAVs as well as a lot of individual episodes of various shows. Animation production by the studio who did Hoe Harem and the awkwardly-named She Professed Herself Pupil Of The Wise Man; they do have a lot of CGI experience, at least, and they’re gonna need it for this one.

(picture is unrelated. pity)

Figure Facts

That Haruhi-bunny pic I posted recently? I’d unpacked it just before taking the picture, and it wasn’t until I went to put it on a shelf that I realized she’s wearing fishnet seamed stockings. Made of fabric. Somewhere out there, a factory worker had to go to the trouble of actually pulling on her stockings before boxing her up.