There will be witches!
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.
(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)
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