Last of the new shows for me
The Tale Of Tanya The Tragically Misunderstood 2, episode 1
Minimal recap and right back into the meat grinder. Our Heroine knows exactly how much a Russian winter sucks for an invading army, and is not happy about being that army.
Verdict: exactly as promised. I hope that Mary Sue doesn’t consume the entire season, though; it’s been so long since I read the early books that I don’t remember how long an arc it is.
Bumpkin and Harem 2, episode 1
This one’s on Prime, which naturally tried to feed me the English dub. Fortunately I reached the remote before I was scarred too badly by the voice actor’s poor fit for the role.
I don’t know who picked the OP song, but they’re clearly not a fan of current trends. Not that I particularly like it, but at least the singer wasn’t autuned into another species.
The recap was blessedly short, and it got right back into the story, with Our Magical Legal Loli recruiting Our Bumpkin for another teaching job.
Verdict: off to a good start.
(still not clear how she maintains knight discipline in that outfit, unless she has also offers night discipline)
“Oh, to be in Shibuya in the Summertime”
(but not really, because Japanese summer weather sucks)
How to convince me to watch a new show…
Everyone on ANN hates Ass-Guardian with a passion usually reserved for Trump. Given that the reviews these people write tend to include lengthy digressions about how a show reflects their overexplained life experience or validates their overexplained mental illness or just general me-me-me oversharing, I take their opinions with the seriousness they deserve.
(the same ass-clowns downvoted Tan Teen Oni Waifu for “colonialism” and “performative masculinity” and other horseshit)
Amazon: got clutter?
Amazon’s home page now looks like a grocery-store weekly ad.
Instagram AI-by-default
Got a public Instagram feed? Congratulations, anyone can use your photos for AI. Unless you navigate their menus to figure out how to opt-out. Unless it’s too late.
90% of photography is editing
I’ve now released the first few sets from my Certified 1-Girl Archives GenAI image prompt project. I started with ~120,000 images downloaded over several decades, ran them through a vision model to create categorized Markdown-format lists, ran those through a Python script to sanitize the categories and massage them into cleanly-structured JSON, then weeded out things that were obviously genai output or simply didn’t feature women-above-the-age-of-felony. The final tally was 117,361 JSON prompts.
I shuffled that list, broke it into 500-line chunks, and used my SwarmUI CLI to generate 256x256 images for each prompt, using the current best-in-class Krea 2 Turbo model. Twice, because the first time I had trouble matching the failures back to their source, so I reran the JSON generator and had it add a UUID field to each prompt, which I used as the name of the output file. (generating the JSON took about 2 minutes; generating the images took over a day)
Then I started deathmatching the results, doing a very quick girl/not-girl pass. This eliminated almost exactly 5% of the images, even when I expanded the rule slightly to exclude images with any visible text or blocks of whitespace (like a colored sidebar on a magazine page).
One thing that struck me was that very few of the images were bad. When I thought about it, though, it wasn’t surprising: every magazine or photobook was edited before printing, and every web download was edited by me deciding which ones I liked enough to possibly see again.
Bulk downloads of entire photoshoots were not included in the dataset. I found a bunch of those on my NAS, but didn’t process them because they’re full of garbage. In the early, early days of the web, people edited their photo galleries because uploading was tedious and hosting was expensive. Once subscription sites became a thing, though, the model shifted to “new content every day, and customers bitch if you’re stingy”, so they uploaded every photo that passed even a minimal QA check. Basically, if you’re thumb wasn’t in the picture, it was good enough.
So I’m looking at a large collection of ZIP files featuring pretty women wearing very little, about 85,000 photos, and it would take a full five-star deathmatch to extract the decent ones, leaving approximately 1,500. Honestly, I don’t think the small amount of variety it could add to the dataset is worth the tedium.
When you have 6 takes of “girl standing by wall” that were shot over the course of 10 seconds, you might have 1 half-decent picture, but it might not be worth posting because you also have 6 versions of “girl leaning against wall”, one of which is more flattering. Etc, etc.
This is why I wrote my deathmatch script. You edit before you take the picture. You edit as you take the picture. You edit when you check the camera afterwards. You edit when you review the pictures on your computer. You edit when you rank and tag the pictures. You edit when you choose what to send to an editor/publisher/blog.
And then they edit by picking the ones that suit their needs, which if you’re getting paid might require suppressing your own preferences and giving them everything.
Then other people edit by downloading the ones they like.
J. Barry O’Rourke has two anecdotes in his book Photographing Women Beautifully: in the first, he comes back from his first location shoot and hands over six negatives, then spends the next six months getting teased by the editor for not delivering the full take. In the second, he was flown to a tropical resort at the peak of the season for a lifestyle piece, recruited models onsite, got a fantastic cover photo and shoot, and as soon as he turned it in the editor paid through the nose to send him back for a reshoot. Because the positioning of the pineapple on the front of the towel wrapped around the man’s hips was “too suggestive”.
(Krea 2 Turbo got the meme format right on the first try, and I just had to re-gen a few times to get the words 100% and keep the pole from changing position between panels)
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