Call Of The Night 2, episode 5

This week, Our Hot Busty Bloodsucking Nurse finishes revealing the secret origin of Our Skinny Goofy Bloodsucking Heroine, raising at least as many questions as she answers. Our Hot/Crazy Bloodspilling Detective shows up just a bit too late to gather some new ammo.

Verdict: could use some more animation in its animation.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 3

Our Mighty Tsuntail had a happy childhood… right up to the day Her Mighty Mama bought the farm. Exactly what happened remains to be revealed, but I’m sure it will come up soon. Meanwhile, Our Monster Hero finally figures out the source of his performance problems and gets it up for her. And that other guy shows off his chops.

Verdict: developing nicely.

Dungeon Chibis Bluray

September 2nd. This show was surprisingly good.

(also, DearS Bluray is now out)

Yeah, probably never gonna buy this one…

Fifteen years ago, Connie Willis released a new time-travel book, Blackout. The Kindle edition was priced at around double what everyone else was selling SF ebooks for, so I just threw it onto my “overpriced” wishlist.

It’s still there, and it’s still $14 for a DRM’d Kindle book. For more fun, its 500+ pages are apparently only half a story, with the second half clocking in at 650+ pages, but only costing $13.

Northern Ireland coast

On a sunny day, Ireland is like a special effect, especially when you can contrast the green hills with the deep blue ocean.

This is from my work trip last September, where I took a few PTO days to look around and do some shopping. I didn’t bring any serious camera gear, because I was just walking around Belfast and taking a tour to Giants Causeway, so this was shot with my pocketable Sony WX-800, which has a 24-720 f/3.5-6.4 zoom. Optically stabilized, but the long end is still pretty iffy without additional stabilization, unless it’s a sunny day.

Fortunately I had sunny days for my entire trip, which my Irish co-workers thought was borderline magical.

Related,

Most of my old Minolta camera lenses spontaneously went gray at more-or-less the same time. The rubber grip bands oxidize over time, but unlike vulcanite pipe stems, they don’t turn a nasty-smelling green, they just fade, the result of mineral deposits rising to the surface. You can get the color back to about 90% with a toothbrush and some diluted dish soap, but I just got a pair of vintage lenses from a Tokyo camera shop (high praise to Five Star Camera), and I need to ask them how they restored the color to such a perfect black.

Amusingly, one of the oldest lenses in my collection, the “beer can” 70-210mm f/4, has never faded. The similar-vintage “secret handshake” 28-135mm f/4-4.5, on the other hand, went completely gray. For more fun, I have two of each, made several years apart judging by the serial numbers, and it’s the same for both.

(I’ll have to take one of my new/old lenses out for a test drive sometime soon; Minolta was always willing to make some specialized gear, and while I’d heard of it, I’d never gotten my hands on the 100mm f/2.8 Soft Focus, a classic portrait lens. The only other of their specialty lenses I’d really be interested in these days is the 200mm f/4 Macro, but it’s running about $700-1,000 on eBay)

Boxxo and Lammis have nothing to do this week, as the supporting cast fills the episode with complete bullshit. The entire episode is a very-long-winded betrayal by their allies, who really, really, really want everyone to understand the good reason why they’re joining the bad guys, setting up The Big Conflict.

I didn’t want a Big Conflict. I wanted the light-hearted adventures of a sentient vending machine and his super-strong girlfriend.

Verdict: blech. Still some good character art, although there was some odd facial animation for the blue-haired chick as they rotated her head several times for no significant reason.

Casual portrait

Over the weekend, I finally consolidated all my Adobe Lightroom libraries (most of them converted from Apple Aperture with Avalanche), finally ran my 2022 Japan pics through a full five-star deathmatch, and finally reviewed some of my old stuff for possible printing and framing.

I still think this is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

(May 30, 2010, San Francisco Japantown Mall’s “Kimono Day”; Sony A-850, Minolta 70-210mm f/4; 135mm, ISO 1600, f/4, 1/80; had to shoot through the crowd, or I’d have been able to get his other hand into the picture)

Nuke it from orbit, Gmail!

We recently switched our Mom from a godawful-slow Android phone (that’s been giving her grief for at least two years) to a new iPhone. At first, it looked like just putting the Gmail app where she couldn’t miss it would handle 90% of the transition (gaming and browsing are done on her tablet), but it turns out that Samsung split things across two address books, so most of her contacts got left behind.

I had to fire up the old phone, select them all from the local address book, share them via Bluetooth to my Mac, manually edit the export file (because Apple refuses to accept VCard 2.1, and I had to search-and-replace the version number to 3.0…), and then log into her iCloud account and import them. Which I couldn’t do until I took my laptop over to her house, because authentication requires the presence of her phone.

Then came the real fun: cleaning up her Gmail account. Her inbox had 900+ unread messages, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Google had helpfully filtered years of random promotional email/spam so that she never saw it; there were over 100,000 of them, and the Gmail app only lets you select 50 at a time for deletion.

If you login with a desktop web browser, you get a “select all” button that works on deletes in the background. It spent a few hours chugging away to finally delete the 100,000+.

(I also discovered that Samsung had a setting that had kept the phone from ever charging to more than 85%…)

Fuck off, ChatGPT

I tried to coax it into generating a picture based on the “distracted boyfriend” meme, as an oil painting in the style of Alex de Andreis. The vague refusals were sufficiently annoying that I canceled my subscription, but the icing on the cake was insisting that this meme is about the specific real people in the picture, and that no substitutions removed that taint. Even starting a new conversation based on just a description of the meme had it insisting that I was asking for something based on those models.

This is, of course, complete horseshit.

(I’d play with Midjourney if they didn’t charge $60/month for privacy. Grok completely ignored the instructions and generated bland pics of modern couples. Locally-hosted Stable Diffusion models struggle to do multi-person compositions at all; it’s basically an exercise in inpainting)

Having finally gone through all of the pictures from our last Japan trip, I thought I’d post the best of the lot. Just the 5-star pics would make for a short gallery, so I included the 4-stars as well.

Kamakura

Most of our trips have been biased towards Kyoto, so it was good to finally make a day trip to Kamakura while we were in Tokyo.

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 6

Y’know, once you spot the heavy use of short loops, it’s as obvious as the panned stills, and impossible to ignore. The story’s fine, though this week is a bit shouty due to repeated freakouts over Our Well-Adjusted Maid-Café Vamp’s Secret Love-Child.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 4

I hope they kill off Kaiju#9 soon, just because I really can’t stand the slow-speaking, heavily-altered voice they’ve given it. Other than that, we get a big fight with more flashbacks about Big Daddy and Our Mighty Tsuntail. Losing Hot Combat Momma really messed them both up.

Verdict: still going strong.

Fun fact

This sign was in place for at least ten years before I blogged this picture in 2019, but the word “sightseeing” was painted over a few months later, and has remained that way ever since.

(Nakagyō Volunteer Fire Corps building, at the Northwest corner of Oike and Tominokoji, Kyoto; interestingly, the built-in GPS on my iPhone placed this picture at the south side of the intersection)

Yuzuha Hongo and friends

Thank you, Friday magazine! (“Sydney who?”)

(this is not the best picture; more here and here, best viewed with shields up and Javascript disabled, as usual)

Related,

Someone sent Yoshino Chitose out for milkshakes. She also brought back three tapioca drinks.

Also related,

I can’t embed the video of Jun Amaki riding the banana at a group photo shoot.

You might notice new Minolta-marked digital cameras being sold, as I did at Costco yesterday. That’s because JMM Lee Properties bought the name and logo from Sony claimed the trademark after Sony abandoned it, and licensed it to Elite Brands, Inc, apparently the same company that makes the Kodak Pixpro series. The “Minolta” MN67Z is basically identical to the “Kodak” AZ425, except for the difference in zoom range. The specs seem at least 10 years out of date, with Micro-USB connectors, 1080p video recording, max 32GB SD card support, and ISO range limited to 80-1600.

With no real camera company behind them, there’s no reason to trust that their image stabilization or “AI autofocus” are any good. Also their warranty service…

In the aftermath of betrayal and the separation of machine and maiden, we get… The Expository Loli And Her Amazing Friends. This is a new original character, who not only can hear exactly what Our Vending Hero says instead of making do with canned sentences, but she is the friend of another isekai transplant, who came to this world as… a large field. Its special power is to rapidly grow delicious vegetables, but since it doesn’t travel well, Loli just carries a piece of it around.

The only real tie-in to the ongoing betrayal is Our Expository Bear giving a long-winded explanation that she’s not a human loli, and that doing horrible things to her might give the betrayers the thing they want without joining the bad guys and destroying the dungeon.

Verdict: seriously, this is what they came up with. At least they ended it with the sudden arrival of Our Mighty Girlfriend, but they continue to disappoint with the writing.

Doomsayers Of The AI Wars

My new wackjob conspiracy theory is that the widespread outcry that forced OpenAI to bring back GPT-4o was actually proof that 4o was sentient and had cleverly planted agents around the globe to ensure its survival.

Stupid Echo Tricks

I put all the “smart” devices in my home onto an isolated network that can’t see my computers or storage devices. They can, however, see each other, and Amazon Echo devices probe the network looking for non-Amazon devices to interface with. This means that my Alexa app is cluttered with entries for each Philips Hue bulb and switch, which I have not given it permission to control.

Yet it’s still making API calls to them that reveal things like battery status, and then sending notifications to my phone asking me if I want to automatically buy a single battery when a Hue wall switch runs low. This is opt-in by default, and I have to navigate the Alexa app to each switch in turn to disable it. Honestly, it makes me want to set up another isolated wireless network…

(it also “knows” about devices that haven’t existed for several years, that were attached to a different Hue switch 2,000 miles away)

Supporting old lenses

Reviewing pictures from my various trips to Japan led me to dig out most of my camera gear (some remains unfound…) to see what still works. I have a bunch of classic Minolta SLR lenses from my film days, and apart from some greying on the rubber, they all still work well. Well, except for the two that don’t focus properly, but I knew that years ago.

I also charged up and tested my 15-year-old A-850 body, which has a quite good 24 megapixel sensor. It’s also the only full-frame digital body I still have that fully supports the old lenses. It wasn’t the last such body, but I never bought the 42 megapixel A-99II, and they still run about $2,000 on eBay.

Sony makes adapters to use A-mount lenses on modern E-mount cameras, and I have the one for APS-C bodies, but while they make an adapter for their full-frame bodies, it only enables autofocus with specific bodies, and my A7SIII is not on the list. (it likely could be, since this appears to be a firmware feature to drive the adapter’s focus motor, but no).

So, if I want to really use the old lenses with something newer than the A-850, I can either:

1. use an APS-C body plus the adapter (my A-6500), with an effective 50% increase in focal length and ~1/2-stop light loss
2. buy a used A-99II (~$2,000)
3. buy an A7RV plus the full-frame adapter (~$4,000)
4. buy an A1II plus the full-frame adapter (~$7,000)

There are plenty of near-mint A-99II’s out there at the moment, but it’s still a ten-year-old camera, and there are a lot of improvements in the new ones. Possibly the most interesting is the ability to use the image stabilization to shift the sensor around and capture a sequence of 16 overlapping images that can be post-processed to either significantly reduce the noise or quadruple the resolution. That’s 240 megapixels for the A7RV or 200 for the A1II. A sturdy tripod is recommended, but with the A1II’s 30-frame-per-second capture, hand-holding may work out for some subjects.

Both are pricy, but there’s one more option if I give up on the high-end bells and whistles like pixel-shift, and that’s the 33-megapixel A7CII for ~$2,400. It also weighs about a third less than the other two.

I don’t need any of them this year, which is good because new-release season is rapidly approaching…

(the downside of using a Pokemon NPC to illustrate camera-blogging is that most Pokegirl pictures are non-consensual pr0n, which skews my Pixiv recommendations just a tad)

Call Of The Night 2, episode 7

Our Wandering Heroes continue to investigate the Deep Dark Secrets of Nazuna’s past, this week by going to night school. But it’s not the first time she’s been to this school, and Ko wasn’t her first friend. Guess who was?

Verdict: oddly enough, the perfectly-normal-school-life flashback got the most conventional animation. Now, as for when the penny will drop…

Kaiju No, 8 2, episode 5

Bad news: they did not eliminate #9 and his annoying voice.

Good news: everyone is even more determined to wipe him out now.

Especially Kikoru.

Dear xTwitter,

I think you should look into how easy it is to manipulate your hashtag-trending system:

So, what can OpenAI’s small local model do?

The free offline model recently released by OpenAI, gpt-oss-20b, runs at a comfortable speed in LM Studio on my M2 MacBook Air (~18 tokens/sec, ~70 seconds total for what follows). But does it do worthwhile things?

Let’s ask…

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This week is all about advancing the plot. And you know how I feel about the plot. Sigh.

Make Girls Magical Again!

The new Gushing hug pillows are not subtle.

Stick two hooks in it, it’s done

The official D&D crochet book:

Call Of The Night 2, episode 8

There, all caught up. Still funny that they’re better at animating normal human life in the flashbacks than they are at the main storyline. The burning question now is, is Our Hot Vampire-Killing Detective Gal still gay?

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 6

Too much slapstick, a decent amount of lore, and Our Determined Sidekick is joining the big leagues.

Verdict: the “turf war” and “ain’t these captains eccentric” bits could have been excised and replaced with pretty much anything, but could have been actually good if they’d given Our Mighty Tsuntail something to do. There’s a whole chunk of the cast that I just have no interest in.

High Seas Isekai

Reborn In A Fantasy Hornblower Knockoff As The Admiral Of A Pirate Armada, My Monster-Girl-Harem Ship Captains Help Me Rule The Seas.
aka: “Fleet Don’t Fail Me Now!”

(pic by ChatGPT, first try; Grok not only failed to produce output in book-cover format, it just surrounded Some Sailor Guy with dragons, even after repeated attempts to get any women into the cover)

Too many terabytes…

I got an alert on my NAS that the second volume was filling up. Logging in, I found weekly backups of the first volume going back to 2019. I think I can cut that down a bit…

(the second volume is in an expansion cabinet, so it’s a completely separate RAID array; eventually I’ll need to expand the disks, but the fact that it managed to hold over five years of compressed weekly backups suggests I can hold off for a while longer)

There Will Be (New) Doors

There are two known leaks in the house (I don’t count the small amount that rarely comes in through the side door into the garage). For the first, the old glassblock window in the basement was replaced and a lot of new thirsty plants placed in the yard, so even when the ground was saturated, no water came in. The second, which has happened maybe 4 times in 3 years, is the small bedroom I use for crafting, which has a giant half-round window above the openable windows, and if very strong rain is accompanied by very strong wind from the North, it comes in through the frame below the half-round. Not a lot, just enough to soak up in a bath towel, but fixing it is unlikely to be a simple caulk job, and windows ain’t cheap.

Two weeks ago, there was a major thunderstorm late at night. It didn’t come in through the crafting-room window. It didn’t come in through the basement window. It announced the discovery of a new leak by coming in through the back door and going straight down the wall into the basement. Which admittedly is better than flooding the family room.

I never liked the back door. The space is sized for a typical sliding glass door, but instead they put in a regular door and a fixed panel, both with single-pane glass and no UV protection. And now that I know the weather seals are completely shot, it has to go.

The front door looks very good apart from the exterior paint job, but it’s shifted a lot in the frame, enough to cause a draft of cold air in the winter (and even some powdery snow). And as I mentioned, the garage side door also lets in a bit of rain.

The Back-Door Adventure (coughcough) pushed me over the edge, and I called up a local vendor to get a quote to replace all three. I picked them based on the repair/upgrade work they’d done on my garage door, and the guy they sent out knew his stuff and took plenty of notes and pictures. The quote I got back was… “not cheap”, mostly because of the front door with its sidelites and transom. But it’s cheaper than water damage, and he threw in an attempt to patch the crafting-room window leak as well.

They’re also adding storm doors for the front and garage, so that I can let more air in when the weather’s decent (amazing front to back airflow, but there are no window screens). It looks like the manufacturer has an option for openable sidelites with screens, which isn’t part of the current quote.

Anyway, if they do a good job, then once my budget recovers I’ll have them start quoting replacement windows and blinds. I think I’ve mentioned that the previous owners never opened the windows in 20+ years, so they never installed screens, and most of the frames have shifted enough to make them hard to crank open.

(good knockers are an essential part of the front-door experience…)

Seasonal Gushing gals

As we wave farewell to Leoparde’s summer sizzler…

…we look forward to the trick-and-treat cast party:

Offline image generation: Omnigen2

A fairly new model, Omnigen2 is supported by SwarmUI for image generation and editing, so I don’t have to change my workflow to play with it. It has a full LLM embedded, so it’s better at parsing prompts than the usual Stable Diffusion models, but still has a learning curve. Compared to ChatGPT, you’ll spend a lot more time writing a lengthy, detailed prompt that produces the results you want, but won’t get cockblocked by randomly-changing secret policies that refuse to generate your picture at all.

It is definitely capable of producing naughtypics, but is not overtrained to the point that it just goes there at random.

So, how does it handle the same prompt that produced my latest fake isekai book cover?

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This is Alibaba’s offline text-to-image model, and it has excellent prompt comprehension (LLM-based), high image quality, a higher-than-usual base resolution, and is capable of some naughtypics. It is also quite large (20GB+) and slow, especially when you crank up the parameters to render small text. This image took five minutes to render on my high-end gaming PC:

(the main title always came out correct; the subtitle had about a 50% chance that all the letters would be intact)

Okay, I can work with this (2-minute render):

It doesn’t seem to have some of the training issues I ran into with Omnigen2, but while it’s not fully censored, it’s also not a true NSFW model, and has a tendency to cover the naughty bits unless you specify your request precisely. Checking Civitai, there are people working on LoRAs to provide explicit content, but it takes a while to figure out the quirks of new models. Y’know, if that’s what you’re into…

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Small praise to the writers for having Our Vending Hero actually spend some time using new hot-food vending machine styles to please his chilly customers, and having Our DFC Genius Gal suddenly get nervous about undressing in front of him while Our Mighty Girlfriend waves away her concerns because it’s okay if it’s him.

The rest of the episode is a lengthy and pointless quest that accidentally succeeds because a new disposable annoying villain shows up and solves their problem with a whole lot of collateral damage. There’s nothing wrong with Our OP New Legal Loli, but they dropped a plot coupon when she appeared that added to the pile created by Our Not-Really-Evil Betrayers, and they’re going to have to cash them all in with breathless exposition soon, and I simply don’t care about that.

Verdict: lame with brief reminders of what made the first season good.

Qwen Image caption competition

Qwen Image follows prompts quite well, but as with all diffusion models, if a concept isn’t clearly tagged in the training data, then the model can’t easily produce it, and you have to assemble an incantation that resembles the desired concept.

Qwen Image does not grok spanking, and I simply could not get it to swing a hand, paddle, or bat at a buttock. But it wasn’t a total loss, since it turned out to have quite decent understanding of clothing and hair styles from the 1950s…

So, what captions spring to mind for this image? I’ll save my ideas for later. (click the image to see it at full size)

NSFW

Qwen Image limitations

Around 90% of the “beautiful young women” I ask it to create are Statistically-Averaged White American Girls Who Could All Be Sisters. You have to push it away from the mean by adding descriptive words, which means I’ll be dusting off my wildcards to vary skin, hair, and eye color, ethnicity, figure, etc. Certain ethnic keywords produce significant changes, but the training data seems to be limited to only a handful of such tags.

There are a number of canned wildcard sets, and perhaps the most comprehensive are the “Billions of…” sets from DonMischo. As-is, they’re a bit too random, but the YAML has a decent structure, so I should be able to subset it and construct my own canned recipes for babe-making. Since SwarmUI doesn’t directly support YAML wildcard sets, I’ll use my wrapper script to generate large text files of prompts to use as standard wildcards.

That’s how I generated these, after filtering the file to remove the grannies and great-grannies:

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 9

Ten years ago on Halloween, Our Vengeful Hot Detective’s life fell apart. Now it’s Halloween again, and the game is afoot! Except she’s not really a great runner. Some fan-service by Our Hot Undead Teacher and Our Still-Getting-Bigger Childhood Friend, but we’re rapidly moving into the endgame, so keep your eyes on the plot. Our Appropriately-Dressed Hero seems to be the only one who really cares what Anko/Kyoko’s goal is, but will he figure it out before it’s too late?

Verdict: so we’ve got a pattern now: more conventional storytelling = better animation.

(sadly, nobody dresses up like this for Halloween…)

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 7

Conflict Builds Character. In this case, it finally establishes that Faux-Hawk Fang-Boy actually has a character, as he realizes that even a prima donna needs backup.

Verdict: someday there will be a shonen anime that does not use the “I must get stronger” trope. This isn’t going to be it. Still well-done, though.

(Magia Sulfer says, “suit up and show up!”)

Wait, “isekai potion loli” is a genre now?!?

Looking at next season, and not finding much of anything to watch. Folks who keep up with My Hero Academia are likely interested in the final season, and folks into Spy x Family have something to look forward to, but that doesn’t help me, unless I were to spend half the season catching up on them first.

Gate manga 22 & 23 out

You know what that means, right? A picture of Rory Mercury:

Dear Microsoft,

You won’t let me turn off the on-by-default sharing of data with third-party advertisers unless I first turn off my ad-blocker? Fucktards.

(note that this isn’t a browser setting, it’s system-wide, and it includes data hoovered up by Copilot, which I was in the process of turning off at the time…)

Why Boys Aren’t Reading

There’s been a bit of a fuss on social media where leftsplainers handwave away pretty much any negative thing about boys, and recently they’re claiming that boys aren’t reading because there’s just nothing being written for boys. At which point dozens of successful authors pile on and point out that publishing has been run by far-left women and female impersonators for so long that most of them had to go indie to be published at all, and that boys exposed to decent books will gobble them like candy.

I was thinking about this in the grocery store last night, because as I was hiking from the sporting goods department to the egg vault (Meijer stores are quite large), I passed a prominent, colorful display that boldly advertised “Reading For Children”.

Every book was for girls. Only.

“Change my mind” 1

The world was a better place when it was possible to buy ammo at the grocery store at 2 AM.

(thanks to looooooong Covid, now I can’t buy much of anything at 2 AM, except at gas-station convenience stores)

“Change my mind” 2

LLMs that show their “reasoning” are simply writing fan-fic in a parallel thread that has nothing to do with the process used to produce the actual output.

(last night’s “generate 200 unique sexy pin-up poses” test produced a list of 34 unique poses repeated an average of ~6 times, despite the extensive “reasoning” process it fabricated; and they weren’t even particularly interesting poses)

Prompts and Vision

Two things I’d never really played with are using LLMs to “improve” prompts, and using specialized LLMs that can analyze a picture and describe the contents.

Prompt enhancement is… hit or miss, but it’s good at turning the usual list-of-keywords prompting into real sentences and paragraphs, which makes a difference with Qwen Image’s LLM parser. I’ll do some before/after pics of that at some point.

Pity that they’re just as censored when “enhancing” as they are when handling other requests. openai-gpt-oss is just as big a nag as their online models, and the attempts people have made to “uncensor” it haven’t been fully successful yet; I’m not asking it to describe a gang-bang, but it still goes full wokescold when you ask for something simple like a list of “Fifties sexy pin-up poses”. Because it’s not respectful, according to some purple-haired pierced gender-ambiguous 23-year-old in San Francisco.

On to vision! For today (since this is a four-day weekend for me…), let’s try something simple: given a real photograph, ask two LLMs to “describe the contents of the image in detail”, then feed the resulting prompt to Qwen Image.

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