You’ll never believe this, but…

That Amazon package that went from California to Illinois, had no tracking updates for five days, then appeared back in California? Supposedly left California early Monday morning and hasn’t been spotted since. It’s “still on the way”, allegedly by Friday, but has reached the point where Amazon is now offering me a refund.

Since I don’t actually need it for anything soon, I’m just going to see what happens. Will it suddenly acquire a new tracking number or shipping company, as they’ve done before, or will it just show up a few months from now, as they’ve also done before.

The Flying Sister

Not to be confused with The Flying Nun. I was expecting my sister to fly into town on Wednesday. Monday afternoon she called to say she’d missed a connection on one of her regular business flights, and if she was going to have to Zoom into a meeting, she could do that from my house. So she was going to come to my place early.

Then she (and 20 other planeloads of people) got stuck on the tarmac at O’Hare and missed that connection, with no later flights to Dayton. Fortunately she lives in Chicago, so she wasn’t just stuck in an airport overnight. Although it took them three hours to find her bags…

So close…

They almost did the meme:

Waifu-a-go-go

[trivia: the Hollywood nightclub “Whisky a Go Go” was named after the first French disco club, which was named after the British movie “Whisky Galore!” (a-gogo being Frogspeak for “galore”)]

The dynamic wildcarding is shaping up nicely (although I need to split it up into categorized sets, and generate a wider variety now that I’ve got the prompting down), and I was in the mood to generate a big batch of pinup gals, but it just takes too damn long, and I can’t fire up a game on the big PC while all its VRAM is being consumed fabricating imaginary T&A. Belatedly it occurred to me that if I’m going to do a separate refine/upscale pass on the good ones anyway, why not do the bulk generation at a lower resolution?

Instead of the nearly-16x9 resolution of 1728x960 upscaled 2.25x to 3888x2160, I dropped it to 1024x576, which can be upscaled 3.75x to exactly the monitor’s 3840x2160 resolution. That cuts the basic generation time from 90 seconds to 35, and if I also give up on using Heun++ 2/Beta for the upscaling (honestly, the improvements are small, and it changes significant details often enough to force me to retry at least once), the refine/upscale time drops from 33 minutes to 10. That makes it less annoying to ask for several hundred per batch.

I did get some odd skin texturing on the first upscaled image, so I tried switching to a different upscaler. That changed a bunch of details, so now I’ve downloaded new upscalers to try. TL/DR, the more you upscale, the more of your details are created by the upscaler.

On a related note, file under peculiar that in MacOS 15.x, Apple decided to strictly enforce limits on how often you can rotate wallpaper. It used to be that the GUI gave you a limited selection but you could just overwrite that with an AppleScript one-liner. Nope, all gone; now you’re only permitted to have the image change every 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day. No other intervals are considered reasonable. Apple knows you don’t need this.

No doubt the QA team that used to test this stuff was axed to fund the newly-released Liquid Ass GUI that unifies all Apple platforms in a pit of translucent suck.

(just as I’ve settled on “genai” as shorthand to refer to the output of LLMs and diffusion models, I’ve decided I need a short, punchy term for the process of building prompts, selecting models and LoRA, and iterating on the results; I could, for instance, shorten the phrase “Fabricating Pictures” to, say, “fapping”…)

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