Farm Harem Never 2, episode 9

Pouty Hakuren trying to make friends with a child should lead to sexy Hakuren making a child with friends, but it seems we’re never, ever going there. Related, having the Demon Lord defeated almost entirely off-screen is something I wish they would have done with Boxxo And Friends.

On the bright side, we got lots of Insane Tan-Elf Engineer Gals this week.

Verdict: mmmmm, tan-elf engineer gals.

(tan-elves earn the Esil seal of approval)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 10

“This week, we’re going to tell a small story about overcoming disability and self-doubt.”

“Let’s animate the fuck out of it!”

Verdict: really, really hoping for a season 2 announcement soon.

Trailer Park: Busty Catgirl Slob With A Habit

Wrong kind of habit, though. She’s just what it says on the tin: Chainsmoker Cat (Japanese title yani-neko = tobacco-resin cat), and it looks like the sort of gagging gag comic that would drive me away even with the promise of big bouncy titties. And it seems she hangs out with other addict catgirls (as opposed to catgirl addicts, who might have thought “I can fix her”). Not one I plan to watch next season.

For fun, here’s the result of telling an AI model to generate an image based on an AI analysis of a manga panel:

Original:

NSFW

(and yes, that’s Jamie, the Little Blonde Titty-Witch from A-Rank Adventure Harem, drunkenly expressing her affection for Our Hero)

“Your ideas are intriguing to me…”

“…and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.”

Today I Learned…

…they opened a Buc-ee’s 30 minutes away from my house. Oh, dear.

(okay, they opened it two years ago, but it’s on I-70, and if I’m up that way, I’m either going west from I-75 or east from I-675, and guess where it’s located)

An overused trope has been distilled down to its bare essence, with the announcement of an anime version of 「え、社内システム全てワンオ ペしている私を解雇ですか？」= “What, you’re firing me, the person who single-handedly manages the company’s internal systems?”. Short-name is ワンオペ解雇 = “wan-ope kaiko” = one-person operation + dismissal.

I’ve been convinced for quite a while that this real-life experience is the origin of the “kicked out of the hero party” genre.

In other news,

For those of you interested/worried, the fines will be karyo (過料) not karyo (科料).
(Law in Japan explains the new ¥2000 littering fine in Shibuya)

So, same pronunciation, different kanji, and the first one is just a fine while the second is a criminal charge. Given the lack of trash cans in public in Japan (mostly removed after a terrorist attack in the Nineties), it’s an important distinction.

(picture is unrelated but has been gathering dust so long that it’s no longer available on Pixiv…)

Texting a GenAI Gal

Edit-capable image-generation models solve a lot of problems; the early ones tended to change unrelated parts of the image way too much, but things have improved a lot. The various Flux.2 models do a good job at adding text, removing backgrounds, etc, and the paid models can do a lot more. Like “take this painting of dogs playing poker, replace the dog on the left with the character extracted from this French poster, replace the dog on the right with the guy from this painting, replace the dog in the middle with this picture of my sister in a renaissance dress, replace the remaining dogs with penguins, and render the result at 4K”. We’re still tinkering with the details, but Nano Banana Pro (via the Runpod public endpoints API) did the right thing on the first try, flipping the characters around and changing their poses to seat them at the table.

Adding the text to this was trivial by comparison, and took Flux.2-Klein-9B a few seconds:

(I’ve pretty much given up on doing nudity with Flux-based models; it can, on rare occasions, produce plausible bare breasts, but it mostly doesn’t, and none of the available LoRAs and customized models I’ve tried has done more good than harm)

I was in Buc-ee’s last night and found the 2024 Betty Crocker Found Recipes cookbook, promising “beloved vintage recipes worth sharing”, with a blurb saying they’d been selected from over a century of American favorites, “found in the Betty Crocker archives, dusted off and so delicious you’ll love them on today’s table”.

I opened it to a random page.

The recipe was from 1997.

“Vintage”.

Claude Envy

Windsurf just changed its name to Devin.

She has awakened! And she seems to be the only person in the cast who doesn’t shout, which explains why God was trying to keep her napping. Anyway, Evil Ivell attempts another cunning plan that should have worked if Our Shouty Shota hadn’t gotten divine help at just the right moment (a very prolonged moment, when the Big Bad Wolf should have torn him to pieces in the first five seconds of the fight), but even in failing, she managed to get Our Hero’s cheat powers revoked and teleport him right into a cliffhanger.

Verdict: will there be time for Our Dusky Best Catgirl to arrive and save the day? And will she drag along Button Elf and Our Isekai’d School Pals, or will all of that be saved for another season that may not happen? Next week, it ends.

(random unrelated catgirl from the archives)

(12 episodes for Not-Harem, 13 for Witch Hat)

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 10

Well, if we’re never going to get a proper harem, at least we got a swimsuit episode. Part two is an over-narrated explanation of how they finally got some new human villagers, which Our Hoe-Holding Mayor somehow thinks will resolve the gender imbalance despite all of them being young married couples. And New Female Villager #7 somehow triggers a cliffhanger, sigh.

(unrelated, of course, except for the animal ears and the swimsuit)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 11

Looks like it’s problem children all the way down, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Also, the return of Sexy Witch Gal, with a disguise that sends Our Heroine to the moon.

Verdict: two episodes left, and they’re clearly trying to create a satisfying season-ender. But true satisfaction comes from announcing a second season…

On Stargate

Some thoughts, now that Amazon has chickened out and shitcanned the previously announced new series…

I remember the magazine hype before the original Stargate was released in theaters. It… wasn’t as cool as they’d made it out to be, but was still a lot of fun. I rewatch it every few years.

SG-1‘s debut on Showtime blew me away. I was sad that we only got bare titties in the pilot episode (because Showtime demanded them), but it’s not like they needed cheesecake to sell the story. What I still love after all these years is that they hit the ground running, with all the characters well-developed and working well together, not just the core cast. About the only real clunker was the poor guy who got stuck with the job of summarizing the movie relationship between Jack and Ska’ra.

Anyway, I loaded it up on Prime over the weekend, and it started at the season 1 episode Bloodlines, in which Teal’c has to deal with the family he left behind when he defected. This was followed by Fire & Water, in which Daniel is declared dead. And neither of these stories could be told by today’s Hollywood. A father balancing duty against family and making difficult choices? A mother who vigorously disagrees with those choices and their impact on her and their son, but behaves like a grown-up about it? A cranky-but-wise father-figure mentor, training the son as he trained the father? And in the second one, a full military funeral executed with precision and respect for the service, without a hint of irony or eye-rolling?

And of course, Good Ol’ Doc Frasier, as usual carrying every scene she was in, standing up for the health of the team while still respecting the chain of command, instead of being used as a writers’ mouthpiece. (and she even got to kick a bit of ass in the next episode, Hathor)

(it did often feel like she was running the medical center alone…)

[given the fog of war, all I’ll say about Belfast is that my team there went home early yesterday and are all working from home today]

…again

…two years after utterly destroying the concept. They’re also insisting that McPhonePadOS 27 will be focused on stability and bug-fixes, but also on vigorously thrusting GenAI into every hole, so it’s going to be a real crap-shoot. Anyway, I’m slightly more likely to upgrade my Macs to the third 27.x release than to any 26.x release.

Oh, and apparently any software built with the new version of Xcode will be forced to use the Liquid Ass graphical theme. Because the people who don’t understand accessible UI design want to make sure nobody shows them how it’s done.

(Answer: currently in New Orleans)

The best part of the World Cup (well, only part, really) is watching Europeans gaze in awe at the America we take for granted.

From shouty Appraiser to shouty Maid

The trailer for Isekai Saint Maid, from the same original author as Shouty Appraiser, is quite shouty.

There’s a lot of experienced voice talent in the cast, which is promising. Our Mighty Magical Maid was recently indoors-y rock-jock Imari, for instance. First-time director, though, and the series composition is by the person responsible for both Log Horizon and Metallic Rouge, which means it could go either way.

“What is it now?”

Homebrew just switched the behavior of “brew upgrade” to include:

Do you want to proceed with the upgrade? [y/n]

Yes, you fucking dolt, that’s why I typed “brew upgrade” after typing “brew update”. Given that they added a bunch of emoji to the output a while back, I suspect they’re into vibe-coding, which is not what I want to see in my package manager, especially given all the recent high-profile supply-chain attacks.

(turning this off requires setting a new HOMEBREW_NO_ASK environment variable)

Of course the final battle against the Big Bad Evil Ivell had to be extra-shouty, with a side order of Button Elf. No reunion with his isekai’d friends, though, who at least got as far as meeting Our Best Guild Catgirl right before the credits rolled. No announcement of a second season, but they made no particular effort to tie off dangling plot threads, and in fact padded out the ending, so they may be hopeful.

Verdict: forgettable shouty fluff with not nearly enough catgirl. The divine revelations open up all sorts of questions about what’s really going on, but answers are unlikely to be animated any time soon. If ever.

(Little Witch catgirl is unrelated)

Today I was consumed with the desire to bitch-slap an emergency-room doctor into the next county. Fortunately, he wasn’t in the room at the time.

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 11

Seems like an odd time to be introducing an entirely new race of subjects, but they did include a crew of scantily-clad busty succubi, so I can’t complain. And then we got a standalone piece with all the subtlety and complexity of a four-panel gag comic.

Verdict: would have been significantly improved by having the succubi use their powers to get the haremettes a-hareming. One more week to go.

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 12

This week, Our Problem Children help Our New Problem Child deal with his crippling insecurity and history of abuse, and Sexy Witch Gal demonstrates that she is both A) an excellent teacher, and B) a damsel in distress.

Verdict: as part of next week’s season-ender, I demand the announcement of season 2. With a firm date attached.

(this week we got to see a new Bad Witch in action)

New promo videos for Magilumiere 2 and Isekai Ass-Guardian. The first shows off the new underrim-glasses-wearing magical engineer gal, and the second shows off the platonic-as-far-as-he-knows harem.

Apple Watch accessibility is infuriating

The crown button on my watch stopped working, and the FAQs suggest that the most likely cause was poor tolerances dirt in the gap, which could be fixed by holding it under running water and slowly rotating and pressing the crown button.

This worked. However, it also somehow turned on audio announcements of each on-screen action, which prevented any actual, y’know, actions. I could type in my passcode, and it would cheerfully recite the digits, but would not pass them through to the watch to unlock it. And this behavior survived a reboot.

The only way to regain control of the device was from the “accessibility” menu on the phone app. There was literally nothing I could do from the watch itself to disable what I had accidentally enabled; it was completely useless.

First Summer show for me will be Isekai Mighty Maid on Wednesday. Next up is Tan Teen Oni Waifu on July 3rd, Skeleton Knight 2 and Magilumiere 2 on the 4th, Isekai Ass-Guardian on the 5th, then Tanya 2 and Bumpkin 2 on the 8th.

Farm Harem Never 2, fin

Yeah, they pretty much ran out of material and padded the hell out of the ending. That’s what they get for deleting all the hareming. At least we got a small dose of tan-elf engineer gals to help finish it off.

Verdict: gutting the source made this a lot less fun than it could have been.

Witch Hat Atelier, fin

“Okay, do we rush the awesome story and risk ruining it, or do we cliffhanger the hell out of this final episode?”

Verdict: they cliffhangered the hell out of it. And they don’t seem to have announced a second season. Perhaps they’re waiting for the pitchfork-wielding crowds to assemble.

NSA reveals how bad their security is

Anthropic’s Mythos LLM went through it like a Swiss Army Knife through margarine.

Revised image-recognition prompt

So, after running ~80,000 photos through an image-recognition model, I’ve been working on consolidating them into a proper dataset. Unfortunately, the LLM output had so many inconsistencies that my processing script was turning into a mess of exceptions.

So I handed the system prompt over to Claude for cleanup and now I’m re-running the analysis. This will take a while, but the good news is that updating LM Studio on the M4 Pro Mini and re-downloading an MLX version of the model has sped up the processing and reduced the frequency of lockups.

New system prompt (still using qwen3-vl-4b):

It’s not perfect…

I asked it to describe this picture, and it never came back:

For a while I thought it had gone nuts looking for the 1girl, but eventually I got Claude to invent an explanation that there was an underlying problem with the specific model getting fixated on colors and going into a “degenerative repetition loop”. It even supplied helpful links that referred to a completely different LLM.

The suggested fix, setting a hard max-tokens limit and a repetition penalty of 1.1, seems to be working, but it might be the right answer for the wrong reason.

One quirk is that the format is so strict that all it does to identify multiple subjects is separate the lists with a blank line. No headers for “subject (left)”, “top panel”, etc.

The Anti-Altman

Wondermark explains it all:

“seriously, find another one”

Google Maps search:

J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg”
G: (zooms in on location that is closed for remodeling)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg”
G: (again)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg that’s not closed”
G: (again)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg seriously, find another one”
G: (returns all locations in ~10-mile radius)

Isekai Mighty Maid, episode 1

Reminder: this is from the same author as God’s Shouty Appraiser, so my expectations have been set accordingly. The most important limitation is that there is not a single catgirl in this former game-world.

The primary twist to the “reincarnated in my favorite game” theme is that Our Maid-Obsessed Heroine never heard of the game, and has no idea she’s the main character. Meanwhile, a good chunk of the cast was also isekai’d, and has obsessively-detailed knowledge of every possible path through the story, and she’s not playing it right! (it’ll be a while before we meet all the reborn characters)

How is it? Well, I could do without ever hearing the idol-pop rap in the OP song again; funny how they skipped that in the preview. They establish the two main girls and then jump into a flashback to explain how Mighty Maid got her dream job, saving her original Mary Sue life for the end.

Verdict: imagine Mahoro’s arrival in Mahoromatic, but less cute and far more powerful. And make it shouty.

(Nagi’s maid magic is best)

Fair warning…

The new new new new hotness in offline GenAI image-making is Krea 2, which produces pretty damn impressive images, and unlike Klein-9B, the one I was using most recently, you don’t lose 10%+ of your images to anatomy fails. One particularly interesting feature is that image generation is almost completely uncensored, but the text processing layer attempts to replace naughty words, and this turns out to be spectacularly easy to get around, making this perhaps the first zero-day-hardcore-hack model. Just be sure to specify that all participants are clearly of legal age, because it apparently will go there, too.

So, yeah, there will be more GenAI girls soon. Currently it’s working on a batch that converts Japanese cheesecake photos into oil paintings. Some work better than others.

Thanks, Apple

I needed to download something from Apple’s app store on my work Mac. Which meant I had to create a new Apple ID. Which meant I had to give it a unique phone number for verification; you can’t skip this, and the number can’t be tied to another Apple ID. It must also have a billing address, but the credit card is optional. Once you’ve set everything up, it also wants to enable cloud sync of all your data, so it had to be a new account; I will not mix work and personal data.

I needed to have a phone number that either accepted text messages or incoming calls, and it silently refused to call my Ooma VoIP number. So I had to charge and turn on the old iPhone that I’ve already wiped twice, that still has my old California phone number on it.

Which used to be associated with my personal Apple ID, but fortunately I changed that when I moved back to America. One text message later, and I could power the phone down again.

Why, yes, this is bullshit.

A good start

I’m delighted to see that the antifa terrorists who tried to murder police officers and federal agents as a “protest” against the concept of borders have been convicted and sentenced to decades in prison.

May there be many more (convictions, not attempted murders).

I may have to skim through the first season of Skeleton Knight to remind myself what’s going on; it’s been a while, and the light novels stopped rather abruptly.

As for Tan Teen Oni Waifu (officially, “The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects”), I just hope it’s good enough for me to make it through the season. I mean, it’s not an isekai, not a harem, the hero is an honorable man and proven warrior who looks his age, the twin lolis are completely unsexualized, and the stakes are modest.

And in a departure from recent tradition, there will be other things to watch!

Keeping the arse in Ars…

Detailed analysis of hominid bones supposedly revealed that the pre-humans:

“…had a concept of gender as a part of an individual’s identity”

No, you clod, it means that they could tell the difference between boys and girls at a glance. Yeesh.

The trouble with Supergirl

One thing I haven’t seen in the (apparently quite justified) criticism of this movie is that in the graphic novel it’s based on (for some definition of “based”) Supergirl isn’t the main character. I’d describe it as “how my coming-of-age road trip with Supergirl changed my life”. Not exactly a summer blockbuster of a plot, which would have made it a poor choice even before the extensive rewrites and reshoots.

Anyway, here’s another bit of Krea2 cheesecake

The Krea 2 Turbo model is much more stable than Klein-9B when it comes to anatomy. I’ve had a very small number of extra fingers, and exactly one extra arm out of a few thousand gens. One gal was missing half an arm, but she was a robot, and these things just happen to robo-gals.

more...

GenAI: elephants all the way down

Forget “vibe coding” and “prompt engineering”; the new hotness is “loop engineering”, in which you tell your Agent to write the prompts that write the prompts that write your code.

🎶🎶🎶🎶
AI write the prompts that make the GenAi sing,
    AI write the prompts to exfiltrate all my things,
AI write the prompts that make IT guys cry,
    AI write the prompts that write the prompts.
🎶🎶🎶🎶

Krea2 Gone Wild

Unlike most image-gen models, Krea2’s training included explicit sexual material, and just censored Those Words in the text-processing layers. Which means that people didn’t have to train LoRAs on their own collections of nekkid people, and just had to diddle a few matrices (Juan’s extension, Silvercoin’s LoRA; use the LoRA).

The upside of this is that enabling NSFW details doesn’t inject a lot of possibly-incompatible data into the model. Most NSFW LoRAs change faces and increase the frequency of broken anatomy, but Krea2 remains stable. The downside is that it doesn’t know all the words; you have to be a bit clinical in describing the naughty bits.

Related, my image-analysis script has been running in the background, generating pretty detailed descriptions of 75,000+ images from my blog, laptop, and NAS. The LLM wasn’t 100% consistent in naming the categories, but it was good enough that I was able to clean them up in a script and generate well-structured JSON.

The primary limitation to the dataset is that most of the women are Japanese, but another little script allows me to rewrite each entry so I can change the art style, setting, race, hair, etc. For instance, this recipe changes 18-year-old Japanese girls into grown-up Irish redheads and gives each one a different art style:

{
    "style": "shuf:styles",
    "age": "32 years old",
    "sex": "female",
    "ethnicity": "Irish",
    "skin_color": "pale and lightly freckled",
    "eye_color": "light-green",
    "looks": "extremely pretty face",
    "complexion": "lightly-freckled",
    "figure": "perky medium-sized breasts, small waist, slender hips, firm round buttocks, flat stomach",
    "expression": "friendly smile with visible teeth",
    "hair_color": "rich red"
}

Haven’t decided yet if the script should be called upcycle or reskin. 😁

Krea2 doesn’t always nail the “age” field, but I tried it with a variety of expressions starting at “18 or older”. 😁

(unlike my older cheesecake posts, all the GenAI girls are linked to higher-res images)

more...

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Witch Hat Atelier season 2 has been announced.

Bruce Campbell’s new book

Reconcile, a Western novella.

(I told Krea2 Turbo that I wanted to play Cowgirls & Indians…)

Oh, dear, more 1girls

While finishing up my batch image-analysis, I stumbled across several more archives. One is a small number of fairly low-resolution images from a late-Eighties/early-Nineties mail-order fashion/lingerie catalog called Mello Mail. They released a screensaver with a bunch of their pictures, and my friend Carmen was their star model.

Then I found a series of scanned photobooks featuring my favorite fashion disasters, the girls of Hello!Project.

And then I found myself wondering what ever happened to all the stuff I downloaded from a certain paid adult website nearly 20 years ago, and eventually I located ~35,000 images in ZIP archives on the NAS. It’s a bunch of under-edited semi-pro shoots with mostly-amateur models, but it offers a wider selection of ethnicities, as well as details not available in pictures legal to distribute in Japan. I think I’ll keep it as a separate dataset, though, since pretty much everything in it has to be tagged NSFW.

NSFW

(to my surprise, that site still exists, and claims to be actively updating; wonder if they’ve gotten better at it over the years…)

Bought a Lexar Pexar (dexar, flexar, rexar, sexar…)

I’ve owned or gifted half a dozen digital photo frames, and I decided to see if there was one out there that I could fill up with GenAI gals without involving an app or a cloud, but that still had a good-quality screen. They’re basically Android tablets with a large bezel and no battery, and even the really low-end ones seem to be tarted up with Google/iCloud/subscription services that must always be active in order to display anything, which is the exact opposite of what I want.

Lexar’s Pexar can operate completely standalone with internal storage and images transferred on SD card or USB stick, or you can hook it up to wi-fi and use a sharing code to allow people to send you photos from an app. The people they licensed the software from, Frameo, make extensive promises on their site that pictures are encrypted end-to-end, and their content cannot be examined in transit.

Out of the box, that’s it: copy files to it directly, or use a phone app to send pics to a frame that you have been given a unique, time-limited sharing code for.

The app has an optional $2/month subscription fee that offers remote management of a frame (keeping it up to date for Grandma, basically) and encrypted-at-rest cloud backup. Again, they promise that they cannot examine your pics in any way. Like for AI training, for instance.

I like the screen, and while the “frame and mat” are plastic, it looks nice from viewing distance. The first major flaw is that Frameo is terrible at managing large picture collections. If you copy 1,000 images from an SD card or USB stick, you can’t directly import them into an album; you have to tap-and-drag to select them out of the “all photos” list after the import. The second major flaw is that it crashed twice on me while I was doing this. Apart from the stability issue, the UI is actually pretty clean and responsive, just a bit limited.

The third major flaw, for most people, is that the display on the 11-inch model has a 3:5 aspect ratio (1200x2000), which matches basically no camera ever made, so most pictures have to be scaled, cropped, or displayed letterboxed. Either that or you switch to the “collage” mode.

This doesn’t matter to me, since I’m using my SwarmUI CLI to generate the images at 1216x2048 with auto-crop, so everything is precisely the correct size. The frame handles WEBP cleanly, so the 32 GB of storage can hold plenty of these ~124 KB pics. (it also does video, but I haven’t even looked at those models)

(for reference, Krea2 Turbo at 10 steps with 2 refiner steps takes ~32 seconds per gen on my 4090, and I let it run overnight so I’d have plenty of initial test pics to put on the frame; “upcycled redheads of college age”)

Minor flaw? I’m not convinced that the “shuffle” mode isn’t just “random”. I’ll need to set up a test album with numbered pics. It should be able to do it properly, since it can sort the slideshow order in various ways, and a shuffle is effectively just a bad sort that gets re-shuffled when you hit the end.

(note that Lexar just released an updated version of the 11-inch frame that uses their own software stack, which suggests that they plan to stop licensing Frameo)