I got a small-but-pleasant surprise when I did my taxes. The new exterior doors I bought last year qualified for an energy-saving tax reduction. Not huge, but worth the hassle of filling out the form.

Dear Amazon,

Can you please stop pretending that “top picks for you” is not just an excuse to shove paid promotions in our faces? It’s bad enough that you constantly fill it with seasonal promotions of things you know I won’t buy, but putting Lena Dunham’s new book at the top of the list was just mean.

After God’s Favored Appraiser comes Oblivious Saint Maid

The author of Appraiser must be feeling pretty good, with two adaptations back-to-back. The summer show will be Heroine? Saint? No, I’m an All-Works Maid (And Proud of It)!, in which a Japanese girl who was super-duper smart and accomplished in her first life finds herself reborn into a game world as the heroine, with the possibly-novel twist that she doesn’t know anything about the game or her role in it, so she indulges her long-held desire to become Super-Maid, totally screwing up the plot. Which was already going off the rails thanks to two other isekai’d teens who did play the game. More arrivals keep remembering their Earth pasts and trying to either take over as the main character or just change their fates, while Our Insanely OP Clueless Heroine just focuses on maidly perfection.

This season’s Foodie Maid has been doing a promotion with the Victorian-maid café I mentioned recently, who’s been getting a lot of visibility thanks to auto-translation on xTwitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hooked up with this show as well.

(fan-artists appreciate how Nagi rocks a maid costume)

Fuel for the fire

Or more precisely, lack of fuel. My co-workers in Belfast worked from home on Tuesday, to avoid the traffic-blocking protests. I liked the farmer who rode his bicycle to protest, because he couldn’t afford the fuel to bring his tractor.

(this LoRA is basically limited to drawing Sexy Grownup Misty, not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

More fun with image-gen previews

One of the lesser-used features of Flux.2 and its derivatives is that it was allegedly trained on structured JSON prompts. The examples make it seem like there’s a schema you should follow, but it turns out that’s not so. I took one of my recent ~500-word paragraph prompts and told the offline LLM Gemma 4 to analyze it and convert it to JSON, without specifying any particular structure.

I fed the resulting prompt to Flux.2-Klein-9b and got a quite surprising result: the animated WEBP preview showed the post and composition settling down much faster than with a text prompt. The pose was stable right away, and by 20 steps it was done adding background elements, and just steadily added details.

The minor downside is that running the 31B version of Gemma 4 on my Mac Mini took 3+ minutes per prompt, which does not scale. I’ll have to look for smaller, faster models that are still smart enough to do the analysis and generate valid JSON. In my experience, the various methods of uncensoring reduce the formatting accuracy, so I might have to tinker with the prompting to avoid frightening the horses.

The major downside is that SwarmUI insists on parsing your prompts to apply its own features, with no way to bypass it. I’d say about 20% of my batch of LLM-generated JSON prompts tripped over this, using strings that triggered an attempt to convert words to a floating-point number.

3D girl seeks new position

Jun Amaki is leaving the modeling business soon. So, what are her plans?

Auto-translation from xTwitter:

Benefits of dating me ↓💕

・Natural I-cup
・Petite with a baby face
・Sweet voice
・Can cook
・Always full of charm
・Surprisingly domestic

Drawbacks ↓

・Suddenly becoming lazy
・Breasts too big and getting stared at by people
・Too much of a spoiled baby
・Bad sleeping habits
・Getting full super quick

Not seeing much of a downside here…

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