…unless people start telling me something else doesn’t suck.

The Three Behemoths, episode 3

Well, that’s not good news. And by “that” I’m referring to the guild rep being promoted from freakish caricature of Japanese gay subculture to “heroic Duke’s son’s clingy boyfriend”. Let’s just forget we saw that, m’kay?

Anyway, Our Bountiful Bounciful Elf Maiden and Our More Famous Than We Thought Cat-Blacksmith-nya accept a quest to help a town apparently threatened by demons, but they won’t be going alone. Our Twink Junior Duke turns out to have been part of The Hero Party, and continues to fight the good fight with a group that includes two bikini-armored lush-bodied gals and probably some other people I didn’t notice. But he’s not just openly gay, he’s a gleeful psychopath, which shouldn’t surprise Vulcan (whose silhouette is right there with him in the shot of The Hero Party) but somehow does.

The morning of their departure, Our Guardian Kitten soothes his nervous mistress with a cat-kiss on the cheek, which she responds to with a more direct kiss on the lips, awakening his budding elfsexuality. I’d say “get a room”, but he already spends half his time squeezed between her massive jugs. No nudity yet, but don’t worry, the village that they’re rescuing has a very nice outdoor hot springs bath for all the gals to share. Forget the missing women, we’ve got priorities here, which means three naked gals ganging up on Our Heroine to grope her huge tits (soundtrack by Joe Walsh). Yup, this show is hitting all the points. Way up firm and high.

As for The Big Cliffhanger, the episode count tells us Our Heroine can’t die, and the show premise tells us that Our Little Big Kitten will be able to stay by her side no matter what, so the stakes aren’t terribly high. On that note, the boss fight against the demon was really lame, and obviously far less important to the animators than the bath scene. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Verdict: in a show that’s centered on big soft tiddies, could you maybe throttle back Teh Gay a bit?

(I have been asked to ensure that pics contain a full three behemoths, but since they generally come in twos, I’ll have to go with four; not Our Two Heroines And Their Two Heroines, but at least they’re the right species)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 2

Elf fight tonight! This week, Our Shadowy Hero uses up a big chunk of the animation budget to show off in front of Our Schoolgirl Hunter and the two spear-carriers, in a battle that he firmly believes to be a challenge despite never even getting scratched. Then he wraps it up by accidentally obliviously convincing His Rich Comic-Relief Sidekick that he banged the girl all night long. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For the hero in an action show, anyway.

Verdict: Our Hero is starting to realize the widening gulf between him and humanity. Clearly we need more little-sister time to bring him back to Earth.

(“Hunters are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be Esil, to strike terror into their hearts…”)

A-Rank Adventure Harem, episode 1

Alternate title: The Hero Party Is a Bunch Of Dicks, So I’m Shacking Up With A Catgirl And Three Newbie Hotties Who’ve Got It Bad For Me. For some reason, the leader of that party looks like he was drawn and animated in the late Nineties, but since their characters are set up to be jerks, the only one I hope we see more of is the little blonde titty-witch.

Meanwhile, Our Underappreciated Hero and his new party all look about 15 thanks to the simplified art style, except for the well-developed curves on the half-armored redhead and the hot-pants tan-elf.

They all get a little blushy at the thought of him joining their party, but the real tingles start as he guides them on their quest and reveals just how incredibly awesomely perfect and skilled and thoughtful he is. He even puts on a show for them with a nearly-instant solo boss fight as their first party livestream, raising their opinion of him to near-godhood.

Verdict: all this and a sexy guild gal on top; the fan-service shall be with you, always.

(no fanart worth mentioning; the catgirl joins the party later, but animal ears are justice, so I’ll just grab a little something from the vault)

The Magic Box

Perhaps the finest gift my sister has ever given our parents was this year’s advent calendar full of dog treats. Because it’s the only thing in the world that can reliably shut the yappy thing up. She’s a Schipperke, you see, and fiercely protective of her people, whether the threat be from friends coming over for dinner, family trying to go upstairs, people making sudden movements, squirrels exploring a nearby tree, delivery drivers approaching from the street, or any neighbor’s pet.

She has a piercing bark, and also some unknown history of trauma from her first owner before being returned to the breeder, and her antics got old fast. She’s been through several rounds of training, and will eventually respond to a mix of commands, treats, and a squirt bottle filled with water, but The Magic Box utterly fascinates her. For the last few weeks, they’ve been handing it to me as soon as I walk through the door, and even though the original fancy treats are long gone, she knows there’s something good inside, and slowly, reluctantly, silently comes over to find out what it is.

We worship The Box for its miracles.

RAG-ing bull(shit)

So, after seeing what happens when you throw a pile of context at an LLM and turn it loose, I decided on a new approach: instead of using the explicit RAG support in LM Studio (which only works through the GUI at the moment), I wrote a script that concatenated the story bible and a “write the next scene” prompt and called the API three times, asked me which one was the best, appended that one to the story bible, and then repeated the process. Doing it as a series of one-shot requests without any accumulated conversational baggage kept it from devolving into complete nonsense or prompting itself to keep going without any input from me.

Amusingly, when I ran it against an “uncensored” model trained for role-play, it went dark and kinky so quickly that it tripped its own flags and started refusing to participate in writing more of what it had just written. It even fell back to the “you should seek therapy” line, unknowingly psychoanalyzing itself.

Was any of it any good, before or after it got itself hot and bothered? No; it looked like scenes from a story, but only on the surface. I didn’t waste much time on the project, fortunately: I had ChatGPT write the script.

More precisely, I had ChatGPT write something that almost worked but had no error-checking and completely overlooked an obvious problem with handling the JSON-formatted POST data.

Next time, perhaps I’ll play with the front-end that the hardcore (giggle) RP fans like, SillyTavern.

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