Chasing shadows

Mon 9/21/26 7:50pm

Comments: 0

Anime

It was a dark and stormy night. Literally.

(base image generated with Krea 2 Turbo, titling added with the shiny new Qwen Image 2.1)

Magilumiere 2, episode 11

Our Emotionless Magical Hottie needs a more… stimulating transformation deck. Just sayin’.

Since this isn’t the final episode, it should come as no surprise that Our Magical Gals don’t manage to finish off the giant naughty hands this week. They make some progress, but just as much time is spent in a heart-to-heart magigal dialogue, which is only resolved when Our Semi-Sinister Rival Boss acts out of character to keep his employee from blowing herself up along with the monsters. (it’s not actually out of character, as recently revealed in the manga, but we don’t know his backstory yet)

Verdict: a bit melodramatic, but decently accomplished.

(definitely magical, definitely a girl, so close enough)

Isekai Ass-Guardian, fin

Okay, they just completely gutted the whole beach-resort adventure and turned it into five minutes of squeeing over the not-penguins, without even a token battle. On the bright side, most of Our Underage Haremettes are a lot healthier in bikinis than in their usual outfits, and the episode spends most of its time just hanging out with them. As a special bonus, Our Best Lizard Gal has a secret to cherish.

Verdict: I don’t think they’ve earned another season. They used the manga as their source instead of the light novels, which already stripped the series of some of its individuality, and then they adapted it poorly. They ripped through seven full volumes in twelve episodes, with uneven pacing and often-indifferent animation. The characters and the voice performances were fine, they just didn’t use them well, and after speedrunning through the published manga, they jumped way ahead in the novels to create a half-assed final episode. Darnit.

(not Our Best Lizard Gal, but at least she’s got a nice tail)

Skeleton Knight 2, fin

Cardinal Fatboy was a terrible boss villain, and the need to make his performance comical was just annoying, given the way that he eats dozens of spear-carriers while Our Heroes pause to wait for their next turn. Once Our Bone Knight gets serious, the fight is obviously over, leading to a peaceful wrap-up, in which Our Casually-Dressed Titty Elf is about to confess her feelings when she’s literally cock-blocked by a flying chicken. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Verdict: yeah, this is pretty much how it went in the light novels, except for the whole “hot spring doesn’t cure the curse” thing they came up with. In the source, he starts carrying around a jug of spring water so he can temporarily reflesh himself during their adventures and take off his armor around the muggles, which really gets His Faithful Companion’s hormones working.

(wrong elf, right figure)

Fall Debuts

9/26: Wild Last Boss 2
9/30: Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2
10/2: Maomao 3.1
10/3: Vertex Force (?)
10/3: Isekai Kinky Porn Game Cheat Harem
10/4: Isekai Space Merc Harem
10/5: Isekai Goblin Mayor
10/7: Rerun’s Special Magic 2 (?)
10/11: Isekai Solo Worshipper

(I could use another season of this show…)

Drone warfare

Listening to people present about how they’re building GenAI “skills” to perform work tasks is like listening to a 9-year-old explain the science-fair project that his dad helped him with at the last minute.

Shadowplay

The recently-added support for weighted prompts in modern models in SwarmUI really lets you steer the output away from standard GenAI images, and not just by adding ridiculously huge boobs. Today’s exercise was taking a batch of my upcycled 1girl prompts and prepending <weight[2]:dimly lit, chiaroscuro>. I wanted to see how well it counteracted the very strong tendency toward putting a spotlight on the main subject no matter what kind of lighting you requested for the scene.

I’d say it was a success.