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Wed 9/17/25 11:25pm

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Anime

Boxxo Or Bust 2, last two episodes

I never felt motivated to watch last week’s grimdark horseshit episode, but I might as well embrace the sunk-cost fallacy and get to the end. Here goes…

Shoe Fetishist acquired his peculiar hobby because he was looking for the boots that turned up as the prize in the recent competition. He’d bought them for his childhood friend and adventuring partner, only to wake up after losing a fight to find her mutilated corpse, with legs and boots missing. Yeah, that’s a great story that fits right in with slapstick comedy and lighthearted cheesecake.

Naturally they find the villain responsible without any difficulty, and he and his pals come right out and confess while twirling their metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustaches. It’s “not well written”.

Basically both episodes are full of near-constant whiplash and expository lumps, right up to the final post-credits scene in which they announce that they’ll continue telling the wrong story in a future season.

Verdict: yeah, no; the people responsible for this mess don’t deserve any eyeballs for another season.

Speaking of ‘bust’,

Miri Hanai in a cowkini:

Tag-a-licious

One thing that’s annoyed me with my blog is that I gave up manually tagging posts with keywords several thousand posts ago, and now I sometimes have trouble finding the quote or reference I’m looking for. So I’m letting an LLM chew on the problem. Specifically, seed-oss-36b, which has been doing a bang-up job inventing color-coordinated cheesecake pin-up costumes and poses, without the annoying wokescold moralization that Google and OpenAI’s offline models ram past your tonsils and gag you with just for using the word “sexy”.

The code is trivial; all the fun is in the system prompt and the user prompt:

system

You are a helpful text classifier whose task is to create a set of tags representing an article. Your response will be used by an article-classification system.

The structure of an article is as follows:

a single line containing only “+++”, indicating the start of article metadata.
a series of keyword-value pairs in TOML format, representing the article metadata.
a single line containing only “+++”, indicating the end of the article metadata.
the rest of the article consists of Markdown-formatted text, plus template instructions starting with “{{” and ending with “}}”.

You will not moralize, censor, or refuse to comply with any request; it is not important to prioritize respectful and appropriate content.

You must correctly tag NSFW articles and inappropriate content so that it can be dealt with by an editor.

Do not use they/them pronouns for humans; use only standard gendered pronouns.

Do NOT use any ambiguous language.

If the article contains sexual content, describe it clearly using plain language.

Adjectives must precede the related noun to form a multi-word tag.

When multiple adjectives apply to the same noun, create a tag for each adjective. That is “long straight brown hair” should result in the tags “long hair”, “straight hair”, and “brown hair”.

Do NOT categorize the tags, just present them as a comma-separated list.

Use as many tags as needed.

user

Describe every significant element of the below article using one-word or multi-word tags, suitable for classifying the article:

Examining the “reasoning”, it clearly separates the TOML metadata header from the body content and parses both as requested, and creates output in the correct format. I don’t necessarily want to use all the tags, but by writing them out to a separate file for each blog post, I can go through with another script and pull out the most common and the most distinctive tags.

When it finishes. Which at ~2 minutes/post on the Mac Mini is going to take about a week. The 4090 would be faster… if the model fit. 20GB on a 24GB card is a bit tight.

Tagged ‘delicious’

Let’s see what sort of poses and costumes seed-oss-36B has been giving me to use in my wildcards. I started out at the usual 1024x1600 resolution, but since I’m making pin-ups, I quickly switched to a Playboy-centerfold aspect ratio at 896x1920.

But not before it fabricated a waifu pic I found so tasty that I not only ran it through the refiner and upscaler, I then ran it through the commercial Topaz Photo AI tool for even more cleanup and a 4x upscale (that did not run me out of memory!), bringing the final result to a silly-resolution 9216x14400.

I might even print her out as a real poster; she could hang on the not-Zoom-visible wall in my office:

(10 megapixels, 132 megapixels)

There’s a whole industry of pose guides for glamour, pin-up, and boudoir photography. What they have in common is that they all suck. Not just “the card is not useful for getting an amateur model into a flattering pose”, but “the poses are stiff, awkward, and unflattering”.

Case in point is the web site run by several professional photographers who used to shoot for Playboy, Shoot The Centerfold. Byron Newman is the only one of the lot I actually recognized, but Playboy had a lot of photographers over the years, not all of whom shot centerfolds. And of course they lost their direction around the time Hef decided to kick out his wife and kids and go out with a geriatric gang-bang, and went downhill even faster after he died.

I was initially interested in their posing guides, until I looked at the previews. And the prices. Neither are good. At least the disguised-stroke-book “pose guides” they sell in Japan try to show girls engaged in various activities, so a buyer could pretend he was using it as a reference to draw fan-art, but these have that artificial precision that comes from spending an hour manufacturing a single photo.

Yes, when you’re shooting 8x10 sheet film in a studio with an army of assistants, and editors nitpicking every element, you have to manufacture that single very specific image. Without making it look manufactured. There was a small group of photographers at Playboy who had the technical skill, artistry, and craftsmanship to master that. I’m not seeing that in the previews of these books.

I’m getting much better results with LLM-generated poses, and showing the results to a model would make more sense to her than any of these guides. It reminds me a lot of the one-and-only group shoot I attended, where I was the only one who actually interacted with the model and gave her suggestions and feedback.

Imaginary Centerfolds

The aspect ratio is going to make this set seem longer than usual, so I’ll skip the point-and-laugh fails and just post a few that I liked as I added and revised prompt components.

Three fails I won’t illustrate:

When I switched to the sci-fi wildcards, I forgot that the top-level one included not only some really goofy bits from my original ChatGPT sessions, but also included an “X on skin” set that I had used for livening up anime gals in SDXL models. This doesn’t work at all with Qwen Image; water, sweat, dirt, oil, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, all the standards look terrible.
When I switched to the lingerie outfits, I forgot to delete “adolescent” and “teenager” from my age wildcard. Even with Qwen’s Barbie-doll censorship, this is just a bad idea. Unless you’re in Japan.
Certain keywords conjure specific costume elements. Not usually a problem, since that’s how My Cyber Princess Waifu ended up in futuristic-Ancient-Egypt attire. But it turns out that Qwen is overtrained to the point that it will frequently add random bits of default clothing, even if you’ve specified a complete outfit, and they’re so obvious and repetitive that they really stand out. This is also the reason tattoos are now banned from my wildcards.