Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 6

At this point, I have to conclude that they’re just taunting the audience. First we have Our Plowing Hero officially winning the right to bang angels, including Second Wife Tia, but not noticing that that’s what just happened. Then he mediates a marriage between Hakuren’s Wimpy Little Brother and His Stalker Fiancée, leading Hakuren’s Other Brother to hint that everyone knows she’s looking to ride the divine tool, and the dragon lady herself to openly state her intentions, both of which fly right over his head.

Verdict: sanitized for your (over-) protection.

(dragon princess is unrelated)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 7

In which many lessons are learned, and the animation budget is once again well-spent.

Verdict: gosh, it’s like someone’s out there pulling the strings!

Mythos Mostly Mastered Marketing

According to the author of curl, the AI model “too dangerous to release” not only ain’t much to write home about, but the people invited to try it were only allowed to watch someone else use it on their behalf.

Last week ended with Our Shouty Hero being given a seriously over-powered bow. This week, he uses it (and the power of Our Shouty Loli Sage) to rush back to the rescue of Our Shouty Furry Knight. With incredibly convenient timing, he temporarily restores Furry’s Full Power, making quick work of the undeafeatable silver wolf that had just defeated them all. Meanwhile, Our Shouty Button Elf is squeezed into a strapless magical dress; it has to be magical, because it held up far better than her usual buttons. Upon discovering that she was called home to become the wife of someone with even less common sense than she has, she promptly fled back to a life of adventure, but not before giving her lesbian maid one last free show.

If this sounds over-packed, it was, to the point that they finished wrapping up the plot threads over the ED music, denying us the wholesome sight of a dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

Verdict: no dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

(silver wolf is unrelated)

Wow, desktop Linux is catching up to Windows!

I ran apt upgrade last night on agott, and came back eight hours later to find it sitting at a screen demanding I set a Secure Boot password. No explanation of why this didn’t come up when I was installing the OS or during the two previous sets of upgrades. No option to not use it. Makes me feel all worn and fiery inside.

Pirate flags at half-mast

The director of Bodacious Space Pirates (and another show some folks might recognize, Martian Successor Nadesico) has died.

Claude Design hallucinated its own functionality

My sister’s in town, and she had a small graphic-design task she needed to do for what I’d describe as “bullshit corporate reasons”. Not really part of her job, just one more damn thing tossed onto her already-full plate. Her pal ChatGPT (which we now pronounce “chat-jippity” after someone said it that way in one of my meetings a while back) failed hard, and I remembered Anthropic’s recent announcement that Claude Design was A New Thing.

She went off and had a happy little session with it, and then asked for the results. It said they’re in /home/claude/projects/..., which of course doesn’t exist. It gave several sets of instructions on how to open and view the slideshow it created, none of which worked. It pretended to run commands with Claude Code to fire up a local web server, which did not happen. It offered to bundle everything up into a single file for her to download and click on, which to no surprise at this point, did not happen.

We went off to dinner, and when we got back, I took over. She had all the image files it had incorporated into the design, so all we really needed was the HTML/JS slideshow. The first time, it gave us just a stub file, but when we pointed that out, it supplied the complete file. With that, I was able to open Terminal, construct the directory tree it expected, and open the file so she could review the animation.

It looked nice. So, apart from the danger of it relying on the dubiously-secured Claude Code, “win”?

My co-workers had the day off. Kind of means that I get the day off, except not.

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 5

Random scenes were random. Vampire medical research, nut trees, slime parachutes, and tan elves in both adorable chibi and lovestruck adult form.

Verdict: if this were the source material, Our Eager Tan-Elf Maiden would no longer be a maiden, but at least somebody openly wants the D.

FYI, this is pretty much the only tan-elf fan-art from the show:

NSFW

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 6

This week, a wild man-witch appears! And quickly falls victim to the power of cuteness, against which no scruffy grumpy father figure can stand. Also, Our Main Father Figure demonstrates that he’s actually quite a good teacher. Also a good cook, the subject of the spinoff manga.

Verdict: the animators got to focus on charm instead of spectacle this week. Actually, they got the week off to recover from last week. That’s right, the B team is better than other shows’ A teams.

Omarchy Linux: oh, fuck no

Omarchy pitches itself as a “beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux”. After playing with it for a few days, I’d change that to “quirky, fragile, and retarded”.

Since I resurrected my old gaming PC on Ubuntu to run LLMs, I’ve been poking at the various recommended distros and installing them on an old Intel Macbook that I needed to wipe. It used to be my sterile international-travel laptop, but the last working version of MacOS made it run so slowly that I gave up and migrated that role to my other, not-quite-so-ancient Intel Macbook Air.

The old one predates Apple’s T1/T2 security chips, so it’s easier to install an alternative OS and get full hardware functionality. And indeed, everything worked just fine the second time I installed it.

Because the first install was unable to retrieve updated packages. Apparently, when it tells you that the installation is done and you should click the button to restart, it is not in fact done, and expects you to leave the installer USB stick inserted until the reboot finishes. Surprise!

The second install was fine, but not only did all of the supplied themes have low-contrast small text (and were mostly “dark”, blech), there was almost no ability to customize anything about the graphical UI. Pointer sensitivity and acceleration? No. UI font size? No. Custom font install? No. Pretty much everything you’d expect to find on a “control panel” of some sort simply wasn’t there. If the creators were aware of the concept of “accessibility”, I found no supporting evidence.

There is some customizability, but it involves just dumping you into a text editor with a config file that doesn’t have any useful documentation.

Two tiny little things led me to scrub the disk and try another distro:

1. There is a convenient and easy-to-press menu option to switch the wi-fi into AP mode. There is no button to switch back. I couldn’t undo what I accidentally did when the unchangeable over-sensitive trackpad settings clicked there while I was moving the pointer.

2. I opened the GUI file manager (which bafflingly doesn’t seem to support viewing any files outside of your home directory) and while moving the pointer with the trackpad, accidentally (see above) dragged one folder into another. Unfortunately, I had just made all folders visible (one of the only configuration options available), and since everything about the configuration is stored in ~/.local and ~/.config, moving either one of them instantly breaks the entire user interface. I couldn’t open the application menu to get into the terminal, I couldn’t get at the settings, I couldn’t even cleanly shut down the system.

I was already feeling pretty negative about the whole experience, but those two easy fails finished it off. Neither would have happened if the trackpad driver had any configurability, even just a checkbox to turn off tap-to-click, and that sort of “opinionated” design is at the core of the distro. Fail.

This week, it’s a trap! Our Plot-Advancing Bad Girl lures Our Hero Party to their doom, but first, it’s bath time! Our Bountiful Landlady and Our Best Guild Catgirl don’t get nearly as much exposure as Our Defensive Button Elf, but it’s enough to compensate for most of the shouting. To no surprise, Our Shooty Shota Hero receives even more ridiculous assistance from the gods.

Verdict: shouty fluff.

(still no fan-art, so catgirl is sadly unrelated)

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 4

The best part of the tournament was that it only lasted a single episode. The worst part is that we didn’t get a longer, more active elf-angel wrestling match. Kudos to the winner for wrapping things up in style.

Verdict: fluff.

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 5

They’re really spoiling us with their animation budget. It’s like food porn with ink. This week, Our Apprentices learn to work together to find a way to deal with The Getting-Bigger Bad, with Our Prickly One grudgingly accepting Our Heroine’s presence on the team.

Hungry Hungry Hero 2 announced

Berserk Of Gluttony is getting a new season.

If the Right were like the Left…

…this Minnesota Wisconsin brewery would already have been burned to the ground, and right-wing politicians and celebrities would be openly praising the act of “direct democracy”.

Deflecting blame with both-sides-ism pretends that there’s no difference between Left and Right, but there is. And the difference is that only one side riots, loots, burns, and kills every time when they don’t get their way.

(picture is definitely unrelated)

Did I miss something, or did The Thief’s Tail Tale end with her only giving back their second, much-smaller purse, despite how much he helped her out? In other news, while we didn’t see nearly enough of Our Best Guild Catgirl, at least Our Busty Landlady’s possessive affection made an appearance. She rubbed him raw to get another woman’s mark off.

Verdict: of course it ended with a Button-Elf shout.

(catgirl is unrelated, because there’s no fan-art for this show)

Definition of insanity:

Thinking that successfully assassinating Trump would make things better for Leftist causes.

As Was Foretold In The Ancient Scrolls

Okay, it’s actually something I said only three years ago:

Old Apple: “how can we make this feature usable by people who don’t know anything about computers?”

New Apple: “how can we monetize this pixel?”

It gains new relevance when the soon-to-retire Apple CEO recently said “Apple Maps was my first really big mistake”, and then the company just announced: “Apple Maps will now shove ads in your face, with no opt-out”.

Isekai Harem Merc promo video

This is a Fall show, so it will be competing for my attention with Isekai Porn Gamer, Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Maomao. Ahhh, Maomao.

Reminder: Summer has Bumpkin 2, Isekai Super Maid, Magilumiere 2, Tanya 2, Skeleton Knight 2, Frontier Lord & Oni Waifu, Isekai Ass-Guardian, and Isekai Otome Mecha Game Cheat Hero 2. The days are just packed.

(unrelated busty cutie, approximating how Our Mercenary Hero Hiro wakes up in the morning)

What did I name the revived PC that gave me so much trouble?

Agott.

“Spectrum? Damn near killed ’em!”

The pleasant new surprise in SwarmUI-ville is the Spectrum extension, which produces dramatic speedups with common image-generation models at very little cost to quality. The more steps you use in making your images, the more it helps, producing images as much as 3x faster. Woo-hoo.

Sadly, my LLM prompt-enhancement broke; running the headless version of LM Studio on the rebuilt machine is producing not-very-diverse results with prompts that work just fine on the Mac Mini with the same model. I asked it to generate flattering early-20th-century outfits for women, and it literally made 10 copies of the exact same outfit.

Look at this set, and you can see it was doing the same thing for sci-fi city backdrops and black armor/cyborgs. I cherry-picked the most diverse results, but well over 90% were basically the same pic with different heads. So I ended up throwing away almost all of the results and the prompts that generated them, and started over with a different model and sysprompts.

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Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 3

I appreciate the way the busty oni maid is completely resistant to the weather, and feels no need to bundle up for the cold. Same for the busty minotaur maiden who’s attracted a non-mayor suitor. Also, they gave a quick nod to the source having the dryads run around topless, so there’s clearly something in the air.

Indoors, the less gifted young ladies wear their usual outfits to participate in Japanese cuisine lessons, so we get some mild cheesecake to go with the sudden transformation into a cooking show.

Verdict: an entire season goes by with Our Harem Hotties spending most of their time locked inside with Our Hero, and there’s not a single new pregnancy. Clearly they’re Just Not Gonna Go There, sigh.

(unrelated demonic cheesecake is unrelated, potentially fails limb-count; this one came out of a random subset of Juan’s ridiculously-large collection of random prompts, augmented by a few passes through LLMs, and Klein-9B wasn’t able to reconcile all the body parts with only 16 steps, so I cranked it to 64, then upscaled with the SeedVR2 extension). There were millions of lines in the file I used, so I knocked together a quick “shuf|head” script that caches the location of the start of each line, making it easy to efficiently retrieve random lines from very large files)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 4

It’s increasingly common for fans to complain about “creative” translation that replaces the author’s intentions with the localizer’s biases. It’s a real problem, thanks to wokies capturing that part of the industry and steamrolling over anyone who dares to complain.

So I think it’s important to praise thoughtful, intelligent translation, like we’re getting in this show. This week, Our Plucky Apprentices go out on a shopping expedition, and get dragged into the main plot by trying to keep Coco out of trouble. Lured by Our Bad Hat into a rather dangerous place, Our Proud And Prickly Apprentice Agott blames their predicament on Coco.

Trapped in a maze, on the run from a very Big Bad, she snaps at Our Heroine. Our Quiet One manages to blow a hole in the wall to let them escape. That’s the setup.

As she enters the escape hole, Prickly says, “let’s leave this dead-end behind”, coldly stating that the others can take that either way: the maze, or Coco.

The original Japanese is “let’s leave ‘koko’ (this place)”, which of course sounds exactly like her name, making the followup line a direct slap in the face, with no ambiguity. The translation does a good job of preserving that.

Verdict: from magic lessons and world-building, to extreme peril, the story is rock-solid.

Boldly going!

Although the USS Mauser had plenty of men on board, they never went on away missions, and always seemed to be drained.

Gaming when new toys cost too much …

I don’t usually read the Japan video game rankings, but I happened to click on it this week, and 5 of the top 20 are at least 6 years old. Two others are ports to current hardware.

Crossing the streams

I found a 3-year-old draft of the next scene in Virginia’s story, and liked it a lot better than the previous versions. So I touched it up and then wrote another. Hey, it’s only been five years since the last scene…

Anyway, it got me thinking about how my more recent hobby of creating pretty gals with GenAI might be useful for illustrating this tale. So I’m looking through the collection for a likely candidate to be the face (and figure) of OG Virginia, as well as her less-shopworn little sisters. Then I’ll need a Sally, a Jem, a Kit, and a new-life Virginia.

First random stab at Classic V:

NSFW