“Dogs and cats, living together...”

Sun 8/16/26 10:49am

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Anime

Magilumiere 2, episode 7

This week, Our Big Fish learns that he was swimming in A Small Pond, and there are in fact other people as smart as he is. Naturally this leads to a series of flashbacks about growing up smart and lonely, with the only bright spot in his life being His Truly Magical Girl.

The villain accidentally managed to split the party, though, with two of Our Gals inside the barrier and the other two outside. So we now have two teams, with Our Boss trying to get there as fast as he can… next week.

Verdict: I’m not fond of the way they keep dropping everything for lengthy flashbacks. Otherwise, this was fine.

(I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen doujin porn of Our Naughty Villain crossing over into the innocent world of Magilumiere; there would definitely be Gushing)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, episode 7

“Adventurers Assemble!” This week, Our Harem Party adds a big guard dog (female, of course), an emotionless semi-demi-catgirl, and a big hint that they need one more to cover all bases. We’ve already seen her, but she won’t be available until the monsters that showed up in town at the end destroy her livelihood. So, next week, and that should be it for haremettes for a while.

Meeting the leader of The Party Formerly Known As First Place means we’re getting close to moving up to district 7, and you may recall that I mentioned that the latest manga volume is still there with a ways to go before advancing further, so I’m not sure how they’re going to spend the next five episodes. Things have been moving pretty fast so far.

Verdict: a lot of walk-and-talk-and-talk-some-more, but Our Best Lizard Gal gets some nice moments, and the rest of the gals have signed off on her getting in the tub with Our Rear Observer, so on the whole, I’d say it went well. And we learned something very interesting about the process of becoming a demi-human.

Her husband doesn’t reveal that his wife’s a catgirl this week, she won’t be appearing this season, and I don’t remember them giving a detailed description of her looks, so I’ll just say that it would be nice if she were somewhere between these two:

(probably the latter, maybe with a mask like Theresia)

Cosplay Harem season 2

In production.

Despite being much tamer than the manga, this show was still full of fun and eye candy, so the new season is going on my list, whenever it ends up being released.

In a “complete takeover of your machine if you’re on a public wifi network, even with the firewall turned on, because Apple automatically opens holes for their own trash software” kind of way (link goes to Ars, where I’m sure they blame Trump for the exploit).

My defense against this sort of attack is never leaving the house.

On the bright side…

If you can stomach the Liquid Ass GUI of MacOS 26, you can unlock your encrypted boot drive over ssh, allowing you to finish booting after an OS update without a physical screen, keyboard, and mouse.

Hopefully this won’t be removed in MacOS 27.2.3, which is likely when I’ll consider upgrading from 15.7.9.

More fun with Engadget’s Headlines For Dummies

Why are RAM prices so high right now?
Here’s how to reset your ASUS router
How to request an Xbox refund
What is analog TV and how is it different from digital TV?

Honestly, at this point I’m surprised they’re still using complete sentences.

Traffic safety?

Flock cameras near my house:

just north of an intersection on a “minor arterial” street, aimed at road.
between a motel and a coffee shop, aimed at minor side street.
other end of that minor side street, aimed across street at empty commercial property.
a pair aimed both directions on side street adjacent to highway onramp, covering two gas stations.
residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.
residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.
residential street, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.
just north of (closed) public pool, aimed at apartment complex parking lot.
dead-end street, aimed at community park parking lot.

Flock cameras located in downtown Miamisburg:

N Main St, industrial zoning, aimed south at road.

There are more “traffic” cameras covering my suburban neighborhood than there are surrounding the nearby Dayton Mall, which is surrounded by high-traffic streets and two highways. Interestingly, about a mile east of the mall is a non-Flock traffic camera pointed in all four directions at a major intersection with tons of businesses and a highway on-ramp. That brand of four-way camera is only installed at major intersections, while none of the Flocks are.

How To Train Your (Chibi) Dragon Waifu

Same prompt structure, just adding “chibi version of” at the start of the character description. First try, I got 2 out of 100, because it kept leaving off either the horns or the tail. So I explicitly requested horns and tail. And a steampunk aesthetic, which didn’t always work either.

“Genie woman” and “demon woman” didn’t work at all, and “devil woman” had the same problem with leaving off horns and tails most of the time; I suppose I’ll have to do a general monster-girl test to see which ones are well-represented in the training data.

Related, I’m back to testing LLMs for creating sets of unique prompts, and the “thinking” process remains painful to watch; I can’t imagine being an LLM developer at these companies and feeling proud of your creations.

I asked shiny new release qwen3.8-27b for 100 unique scenic fantasy locations between 25 and 75 words in length. It “decided” to make them all exactly 30 words in length using Madlibs-style template substitutions, and then spent 42 minutes burning GPU power on the task. The results were as generic and uninspired as you might expect, so I fed them to another LLM for creative expansion, which took 4 minutes to pad them out to an average of 175 words. Then I used a third LLM to compress them back down to a sensible length, which took another 6 minutes. Silly as it sounds, breaking the task up this way was easier and much faster than trying to write a prompt to write a prompt to write a prompt that did it all at once in the first LLM.