The Visa Renewal Of Tanya The Problem-Solver 2, episode 11

Well, somebody just made a deal with the devil. Shit, meet fan.

Verdict: y’know the one thing I don’t like about this season? The OP and ED songs. The first season was far superior: OP, ED.

Bumpkin & Harem 2, episode 11

To no great surprise, Our Bumpkin Hero is not happy to be working alongside the mercs who were recently on the other side, and it doesn’t help that their leader delights in pushing his buttons. I’m okay with this, but what really strains credulity is that Beryl’s the only one who can tell that Mystery Maiden is obviously Rose with a haircut and a mask.

The basic undead are quickly handled, and then it’s time to take down the four big monsters. The mercs take one, Our Hero and His White Haremette split up to take two more, hoping to have enough time to catch up with the fourth, when… A Wild Red Haremette Appears. Gosh, that was convenient.

All four fights are finished in this episode. I just wanted to say that, because of how rare it is as you approach the end of a season. Even better, the interlude with Our Darling Daughter training one-on-one against Short-Stack Haremette has a conclusive ending, too. Almost like they planned out the pacing!

Verdict: pretty good pacing, leaving just the wrap-up. So, next week will Our Hero’s thoughts once again turn to wifing up the Whitehair?

(white-haired waifu is unrelated)

Isekai Ass-Guardian preview…

They just posted a preview of this weekend’s episode. Unwilling to start a new arc, they’re skipping straight to a beach episode to end the season.

Double-checking against the manga, last week’s episode was the end of volume 7, and dealing with the new black box with the help of Shield Gal Seraphina would come next, followed by the acquisition of a new suit. Volume 9 introduces a new friendly party and an obstacle to further advancement, and a joint adventure with multiple fights.

So they’re skipping over all of the remaining source material in order to get the gals into swimsuits, not that there’s anything wrong with that. This particular event does happen in the novels, but if we were following that continuity, we’d have just finished book two, and the beach resort is in book five. And that’s definitely the story they’re not-adapting, because the preview showed the not-penguins.

That’s pretty much an admission that they know they’re not getting a second season. Which, to be fair, they haven’t earned.

Isekai Space Merc Harem promo

New video showing the two core haremettes and promising to get far enough to introduce Sexy Robot Maid Waifu. I don’t see Underage Noble Cutie Waifu, though, who should be present if the maid is. (the blonde officer and the underrim-glasses-wearing doctor just make his life more complicated without jumping into his bed… for a very long time)

RoboWaifu’s voice actress has plenty of experience playing emotionless hotties, with multiple seasons as DanMachi’s Aiz Wallenstein. Hot Mess Glasses Gal’s been in the business for at least 25 years, having voiced my favorite supporting character in Angelic Layer, Ringo. The blonde was recently a certain “tortured” Princess.

(robo-maids are fully functional in this universe…)

Shangri-La Frontier 3

Coming in January and running for two cours, so it should be able to get through a good chunk of story.

(despite the series’ popularity, I’ve already used all the good fan-art…)

Just-in-time backups

After I cleaned up my laptop storage, I swapped in a new external SSD for Time Machine backups, moving to a faster 2 TB USB-C drive. I bought it back in 2023, and haven’t used it for much, so it’s basically still new. It’s a Crucial X10 Pro, and I paid $129 for it. Current price for a name-brand 2TB external SSD with comparable performance? $400+.

(pic is unrelated, of course)

Rewrite time!

I need to rewrite my LLM prompt-enhancement script. I keep running into problems where it goes into a tight loop and never returns after processing N prompts, and I simply can’t reproduce the failures using LM Studio’s GUI or CLI. I initially tried converting it from the lmstudio package to litellm so it would be backend-agnostic, but that turns out to make usage annoying. So I’ll do a straight-up converison to the openai package and see if that avoids the looping problem. Actually, I’ll tell Claude to do it, and see if it can make working code out of working code. It mostly did the right thing for converting to litellm a while back.

The specific task that’s been giving me grief is converting the paragraph prompts generated for my c1ga project to classification tags, to enable improved searches in Juan’s Quarry SwarmUI extension. For now I’m just running the lms CLI in a loop over the data files, since the performance is adequate; it hasn’t gotten stuck once, and I’m about 30,000 prompts in.

And no, I do not plan to buy or lease a new high-end Mac Studio to run LLMs. Honestly, right now you’re better off renting GPUs in the cloud if you don’t want to pass all your traffic through one of the major players. I use the M4 Pro Mac Mini with LM Studio, but it also runs my photo-processing workflow nicely. (which may soon not involve an Adobe subscription, because those assholes just keep getting more annoying and less useful)

(why doesn’t Ariane dress like this more often?)

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