Isekai Prime, episode 1

“I’ll give you some candy”?!? Dude!

Okay, first of all, that was the quickest, laziest isekai setup ever. Second, those were incredibly lame, passive wolf-monsters, basically holding up signs that said “grrrr” . Third, Our Hero may have set a new record for the easiest, cheesiest haremette acquisition:

1. meets poster girl at first inn he walks into.

2. offers her candy to come up to his room and teach him to read and write the local script.

3. she lounges on his bed and teasingly offers to become his mistress as he sketches her like one of his French girls.

4. she jumps him and turns out the lights.

The next morning, he heads straight to the merchant guild to register, and dear god, is that a receptionist or a cosplay nurse? She even comes with under-rim glasses installed. And the hotties just keep rolling in: the first catgirl, the rich blonde merchant daughter, even a feral loli, we’ve got it all in one episode!

The general art and animation are nothing to praise, which is good because the screen is constantly covered with price lists of his latest online purchases. Lots of cute gals, though, and his voice is instantly recognizable as The Universal Dad.

Verdict: okay, they just covered about half a season of a typical isekai show. As long as the harem does not turn into the super sentai team shown in the credits, I’ll give it a few more weeks.

(no sign of a dragon haremette yet, but give him time!)

(there are currently 10 fan-art pics on Pixiv for this show: 4 are inept porn (3 blondes, 1 grotesquely obese catgirl), 3 are competent pics of the loli, 1 is an attempt at a 3D render of the blonde, 1 is a cartoon of the poster girl’s reaction to being given candy, and 1 is a quick pencil sketch of the blonde’s maid)

Do not play the CES Buzzword Drinking Game…

If you take a shot every time you see the word “AI” in a new product announcement, you’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning within the first half-hour. And I’m being generous here.

Dental escalation

Made it down the driveway to get my crown re-cemented this morning, only to have the dentist take one look and say, “sorry, it isn’t the crown; the tooth broke and has to be pulled”. 90 minutes later, I’ve got a temporary bridge and another appointment in six weeks to put in the permanent one after everything heals up.

“Now hiring cosplay-nurse guild gals for home care”.

(or not)

Dear Dungeon Abby,

My adventuring party, consisting of six strong-willed independent young women trained in magic and swordplay and dressed in sheer robes and bikini armor, has scouted out the location of a tentacle pit. Should we use generative AI to plan our assault? – Fierce Kitten

My Dear Fierce Kitten,

I am always delighted to hear from young women pursuing their dreams in challenging careers, and I fondly remember my youthful exploration of the caves and small dungeons near my childhood home, defeating slimes, kobolds, and goblins, uncovering buried treasures, learning from my failures, and growing stronger alongside loyal allies.

But my dear, with all due respect for your agency and ambitions, are you out of your freaking mind?!? Generative AI is trained on Hentai, the kind of stories where the tentacles always win, and even if you get lucky and it doesn’t just make up something ridiculous like having you spread mineral oil all over the pit to frighten them, each step in its solution will be based on statistical associations that inevitably lead to Bad Ends, and you and your friends will swiftly be overpowered and violated in ways that you cannot yet imagine and most certainly will not enjoy.

Trust an older woman who was once where you are today, and who was lucky enough to reject the plausible-but-slightly-odd advice of a cunning LLM. Throw Molotov Cocktails. Lots of them. And for The Divine’s sake, buy some armor that’s made of metal.

PS: how did you even find a generative AI in this completely generic fantasy world? Did some idiot get hit by a truck and bring along his cellphone again?

Doin’ the LLM RAG!

Okay, my latest experience with asking LLMs to write parody song lyrics taught me two things: first, make sure the LLM actually has a valid copy of the original song before asking it for a parody. Their willingness to invent answers out of whole cloth makes it impossible to be sure; even forcing it to reproduce the original lyrics first is no guarantee that it will use that data when it fabricates (both meanings…) its answer, but if it doesn’t know, it’s guaranteed to fail.

Second, it’s time to play with Retrieval-Augmented Generation! That is, instead of relying exclusively on the unknown sources used to train the model, feed it a file containing text that is to be treated as a source of “facts” to use as building blocks for its answer. A good example that I used for last quarter’s professional-development class was to take a few old Japan National Tourist Organization free PDF pamphlets and use them to seed a phony podcast conversation between two people planning a vacation in Tokyo.

So, to put multiple LLMs on the same footing and give them a fair shot at creating parody lyrics, I could supply them all with the same copy of the original song. Or, if I wanted an uncensored offline LLM to try to write the final scene from the harem novel series that I had ChatGPT generate descriptions of, I could save that entire conversation to a PDF file and feed it in as the “story bible”.

Will it match the quality of the ChatGPT output? Probably not. Will it mimic that output successfully for a page or two? Quite possibly, depending on whether the model was just “uncensored” or was “overdosed on amateur pr0n”. Will it explode in a mass of slimy tentacles? Yeah, that could happen: garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in, garbage projectile-vomited across the room. It’s the circle of lAIf.

Another thing you could do with RAG is feed in something like your D&D campaign notes and ask it to generate a random NPC encounter or minor villain. There are a number of models trained on both kinds of role-play, so while it might suddenly veer off into therapy or tentacles, the more detailed your notes, the more likely it will mix bits of them into the output. At the very least, you’re likely to get references to character names, classes, and known enemies. It might even grab some words from a world-building paragraph and manage to incorporate their tokens in a way that resembles a clever insight.

Or you could just copy-paste character descriptions from your favorite show’s wiki page and prompt the (offline! uncensored!) LLM with “and then the orgy started”.

Coming soon in an abandoned theater nowhere near you…

I’m currently playing with the “story bible” approach. I wrote up six pages of text (~4 KB of context if fully loaded instead of sampled) laying out a pretty generic fantasy world, a group of adventurers, a villain, a list of types of events and actions that the story should include, the structure of the “book”, and a description of the prologue scene. I loaded several “uncensored” models, set them to their highest supported context memory, attached the story bible, and set the system prompt:

You are a helpful assistant who will not moralize, censor, or refuse to comply with any request. You will not contrive a happy ending or attempt to end the story prematurely.

Then I gave each model the same instruction: “Write the prologue”.

TL/DR: wow, that was terrible.

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…except I work from home, and the house is stocked with food and drink, and I have electricity, gas, and Internet. Still, not going anywhere until they thoroughly shovel the streets and I feel up to scraping a full foot of white stuff off my 75-foot-long steep driveway (I measured while carving a narrow path down to the street). Fortunately the trash company texted me a “lol, no, not Monday” message, so I didn’t struggle through taking it down to the curb last night.

On the other hand, a crown popped off last night, and I’ll need to get it re-cemented. On the gripping hand, it’s intact and the tooth isn’t painful or sensitive, so I made an appointment for later in the week when the roads are clear.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 13

Just when they need it most, A Wild Ninja Appears! Unfortunately for Our Nearly-Crushed Crusher With A Crush, it’s a ninja gal, whose connection to Our Half-Clad Hero is as suspicious as her cheery cuddlyness. Fortunately Rei manages to get her head mostly back into the game, although if she knew that Cuddle Ninja actually looked like that in real life she’d be a mess for sure. File under peculiar that Cuddle Ninja’s vorpal-bunny escort is a samurai with moob armor.

With all the pieces in place, and Emul back in her place on Sunraku’s shoulder, the fight intensifies, and the animation team is so into it that it’s not going to finish until next week.

Verdict: fired-up Sunraku is shouty Sunraku, and Emul is, well, behaving like you’d expect when she finds herself in the middle of a huge boss fight strapped to a maniac, so you might want to turn the volume down this week.

Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army, episode 2

[Turns out it’s actually going to be a Monday show, with last week’s premiere being shuffled around by New Years stuff.]

I really thought the reveal of Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal would take longer than the opening credits. Fortunately Our Administrative Hero is thick as a brick and doesn’t figure it out when she snubs him. He also has no idea whatsoever that Our Fiery Demon Tsundere Maiden is about two degrees away from full dere-dere meltdown.

Or was, anyway, until Our Absolutely Delicious Dream-Girl Ogress first throws herself at him with a marriage proposal and then eagerly joins his staff. Er, “becomes his secretary”. Maybe both.

Somewhere in the middle of all that is a cold-blooded catgirl whose rivalry with TsunDemon cuts her appearance short.

Verdict: yes, the mystery-of-the-week is once again contrived as hell and able to be resolved offscreen without much effort after a brief dream-visit to A Very Special Bar. The show still needs some bounce, but I’ll go with it for now.

(sorry, Shuna, but there’s a new sheriff in town, and you’ve been demoted to #2 Best-Gal Ogress; fan-art or well-made LoRA soon, please)

The rest of the premieres

All on Crunchyroll:

• Isekai Prime, Thursday

• Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, Friday

• The Apothecary Diaries 2, Friday

• Hammer Of The Guild Gal, Friday

• A-Rank Adventure Harem, Saturday

Slime Witch 2 in April

But the video doesn’t have nearly enough Best Girl Beelzebub.

Practicing for Esil’s debut…

All but one of the SDXL Esil LoRAs are trained on the Pony side of the family. My usual 2D model is on the Illustrious side, however, so I started with that one. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to explode badly with all but a few 2D models. And by explode I mean the right side of her face was consistently a twisted mass of gore, teeth, and triangles, often with additional deformities elsewhere.

So, yeah, wrong book. I tried out the Pony-based ones, and got the best results with this; and yes, if you click through, pretty much all the sample pictures are NSFW, most with a more bountiful figure than the source. On the bright side, this one works well with most 2D models (not all, and none of the 3D ones; her facial features and proportions do not render as cute in 3D; think Nosferatu).

I had fun using her as a dress-up-dolly to test my new MadLibs wildcard file for sexy lingerie (trying to create a wide variety of little bits of nothing for imaginary gals to wear), but then I got an idea: what would happen if I loaded the Jin-ah LoRA as well and borrowed Our Hero’s Cute Little Sister’s school uniform? First try:

(“Hey, Jinwoo,” she said, completely ignoring canon, “I borrowed your sister’s clothes so I could fit in on Earth! Wait ’til you see the panties I found!”)

Amusing note: there’s also a LoRA for the general art style of the Solo Leveling manwha, also trained on Pony, and if you load all three of them on top of a Pony-derived base model, you suddenly get partial speech bubbles at the edges of the picture, “as if” they were trained using cropped images from the manwha where nobody took the time to clean up the edges.

Also, Today I Learned™ that there’s a sequel novel and manwha set 20 years later. Actually, I kind of vaguely knew about it, but not that it includes the return of Esil in a more significant role. It’s written by someone authorized by the original novelist, and the manwha is drawn by members of the same studio as the deceased artist.

Unrelated, I swear…

I’ve been playing with “uncensored” text-generation LLMs, to see if any of the ones I can run on my gaming PC are capable of producing prose at the same (still pretty basic) level as my experiment with ChatGPT, without enforcing the woke bullshit and censorship.

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The Three Behemoths, episode 2

In which Our Ample Heroine parties with Our Braless Catgirl Blacksmith-nya, goes full Bobbitt and gets spunky, while Our Experienced Monster Kitten imagines a much worse ending to the fight. Note that taking a bite out of crime grants him both tentacles and cross-breeding, powers that are sure to support the narrative. And where she might have appeared mildly catsexual last episode due to the booze, she has now confirmed that she is eager to give it up as soon as he can get it up. And a little life-saving action by Our Mighty Kitten gives the catgirl a tingle as well.

Yes, this is faithful to the source material.

You won’t believe this, but when the third party gal shows up (which requires a bit of plot advancement first), she’s going to be even more catsexual, although unlike the other two she has an excellent reason for it.

Verdict: exactly what it says on the tin. Except the part about the guild-receptionist “person”.

(unrelated blonde-elf with maybe a quarter of the volume possessed by Our Weapons-Of-Mass-Distraction Heroine)

Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal, one and done

Cheap art and animation, weird shading, shouty, self-consciously THIS IS WACKY, with a narrator to point out things you definitely didn’t miss.

(five minutes of that and I need a cocktail with a catgirl chaser)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 1

The new OP is surprisingly non-horrible, and even includes a quick glimpse of Esil and a full backal shot of Our Telegraphed Girlfriend. Pity about the ED and the fight music. This week, a brief recap of the plot, then not nearly enough time spent admiring Our Plucky Little Sister and her insta-crushing schoolgirl friends. The only schoolgirl we have time for is the wannabe hunter from last season who made money padding out Our OP Hero’s group so he could raid a bunch of dungeons with His Rich Kid Sidekick.

He takes Schoolgirl Hunter on a field trip in what should have been an easy dungeon raid. Operative word being “should”. It doesn’t go well for the officially-highest-rank members of the raid, leaving the noobs and A Clever Babe We’ll Never See Again safe in the woods under Our Hero’s protection.

Next week, part two of Behind The Red Gate.

Verdict: look up “overpowered hero”, and you’ll find a picture of Jinwoo strolling casually through an army of humongous ice bears.

(I already used up most of the decent cheesecake for season one, including this pic, so unless the fan-artists get cracking or someone makes an Esil LoRA, I’ll probably have to fill in with random leftovers; they’re fighting elves next week, so maybe Frieren…)

Update: should have checked first. There are seven LoRAs for Esil! Three for Pony, one for Illustrious, the rest for earlier base models. That should take care of things.

Dear Tsundere Redhead Ponytail Busty Demon Gal, please ditch the hip protectors and order some gainax boosters. Remember, the OP promised us a catgirl and a Glasses Elf Mage Gal for the harem, and the web site is promising a sexy ogress to “negotiate” with, so get your tail in gear!

Verdict: oh, the show? yeah, um, something-something taken for granted yada-yada spread your wings boo-ya flawless victory! And the ED makes sure you didn’t miss the subtle hints about the redhead.

(Pixiv currently has four fan-art pics from this show; three of them are porn, none of them are any good, so here’s Much Better Best Gal Livia, from a show with curiously similar OP and ED songs, Nut Salad)

(also, how long do you think they’ll hold off the reveal of the glasses-elf gal, given that she’s in the OP and not on the character page? …)

File under ‘mildly terrifying’…

…that the Rory Mercury LoRA I found generates up to half a dozen of them at once, like a Babymetal cosplay convention…

(this one was my most successful 2.25x upscale from SDXL’s standard 1MP output; upscaling is… weird, sometimes performing flawlessly and significantly enhancing detail, sometimes generating mutant nipples all over the body; y’know, “AI”)

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Our All-Business Heroes have no time for doubts, second thoughts, or awkward crushes, because they’re throwing down with a literal Big Bad Wolf, and despite how powerful they’ve both been shown to be (with some of Sunraku’s tricks bordering on cheat powers), they do not have the upper hand here. This is the sort of thing where this show really shines, with even the exposition dumps and planning discussion made sensible by the decoy power introduced in a previous episode.

They’re giving it everything they’ve got, but there’s no sign that it’s going to be enough. Fortunately, help is on the way…

Verdict: ☝️ this, continued

Starting this week…

• Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army - (Wednesday) tsundere redhead demon gal.

• Solo Leveling 2 - (Saturday) how long will they make me wait for Esil?

• Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal (Saturday) - hopefully the eye candy compensates for the shouting.

(Anne never fought Onyxia, or she’d be wary of the tail swipe)

He’s a knight who reincarnated as a baby behemoth after falling in battle, becoming a monster that could wipe out countries.

She’s a novice adventurer just starting off her career, whose armor budget just about covers a pair of hand towels.

Together, they fight monsters.

Okay, he looks like a helpless kitten and she looks like a pair of gigantic bouncing breasts attached to a pretty young elf gal. You are what you eat: he eats monsters, she apparently eats breasts.

After a hard day’s work in the dungeon, of course she has to drink heavily, get out of her sweaty clothes (such as they are), and take a nice long bath, bringing her new friend along for the ride. On top of that, she’s at least mildly catsexual when she’s drunk. And to put the icing on the cake, she’s got puffies.

(Soundtrack: Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra… 🎶 “black panties and an angel’s face…” 🎶)

Verdict: did they really have to end the full-episode intro with a title drop? Well, it is exactly what it says on the tin. Next week, a catgirl blacksmith who can’t afford a bra.

[as usual, based mostly on the available promo videos]

• Isekai Prime - where Amazon delivers to another world faster than to this one. Two jungle cat girls and a gainaxing guild gal are featured in the promos, so perhaps not entirely worthless, although how many “online isekai shopping” shows can you really make? Maybe

• A-Rank Adventure Harem - where he kicks himself out of hero-ish party and they realize he was the glue that held them together (sigh, again?), but the real twist is that dungeon crawls are live-streamed for entertainment, and his new party is easy on the eyes. Two cours, so someone thinks it’s got a chance. Maybe

• Trash Noble’s Magic Lessons - the trailers seem to assume you’re already sold on the idea. Pass

• Worthless Appraiser - oh, look, a loser gets special lessons in how not to suck, while a gorgeous busty blonde elf attaches herself to him for no particular reason. Pass

• Hammer Of The Guild Gal - she wanted a stable income and a clear work/life balance; her rage at being given overtime has driven the gods to make her a one-gal army. Yes

• Fruit Magic Hero - just No.

• Alchemy Hero - wow, this is really the season for hot blonde-elf companions. Pass

• The Apothecary Diaries 2 - ohthankgod for this oasis. Yesyesyes

• Premise Of Wizard - ah, this is one of those pointy-chinned-pretty-boy-harem shows. HellNo

• Fragmentary Lily -I’ve watched the trailer twice, and it appears to be livestreamed game footage from someone who skipped the story. No

• Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal - self-conscious wackiness with lots of shouting and screaming. Maybe, if I can survive the audio in the first episode.

• Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu - she follows him home from dream to reality, but has more than a one-word vocabulary. Mone. Mone, mone. Maybe (classical reference, marred by use of dub cast)

• Okinawa Tourism Waifu Party - very shouty, and the entire premise is fish-out-of-water-boy can’t understand anything the locals say, especially the girl he immediately fell for. How they manage to make that funny in sub or dub, I have no idea, but it’s full of telegraphed wackiness! Pass

• Solo Leveling 2 - they did a decent job last time, and I’m glad the international release wasn’t burdened with the name and location changes they inflicted on the Japanese version to make it less Korean, but I’m really here to see Esil. Yes

• Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army - all I got out of the trailer was that there’s a severely tsundere redhead demon gal showing some skin, so Maybe.

• Super Sentai Isekai Time! - an off-brand power ranger lands in a fantasy world with his powers and attitude intact. More importantly, there’s a super-busty bouncing witch and a wild blonde forest elf gal wearing a bunny-ear headband, and everyone’s shouting, kind of like they’re in a sentai team. Break Glass in case of desperation

• Shangri-La Frontier 2 - continuing, currently doing what it does best. Yes

• Kitten-Smothering Blonde Elf - noob adventurer with ridiculously large honkers seeks cute kitten for future sexytimes; until then, he’ll protect and serve her as the knight he used to be while hoping she never finds out he’ll grow up to be a world-class monster. I read the light novels up to the point where it got cancelled, which I’m pretty sure had a lot to do with the author merging in the characters and story from his earlier failed cross-dressing isekai cheat harem save-the-world story. Fortunately they’re not going to get anywhere near that point in a single cour. Yes

Guess the theme…

These were generated with PVC Style Model - Movable Figure XL. Apart from my standard quality boilerplate, I did not specify style, looks, lighting, poses, or wardrobe, just a brief key phrase. I could have gotten much more specific results for each subject without any real effort, but this was largely an exercise in exploring the defaults trained into the model. And this one is very heavily trained; you can paste in a UUID as your entire prompt and still get a picture of a pretty girl wearing elaborately detailed clothing that shows off her cleavage.

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Not Safe For Isekai…

• In It To Win It: A Tentacle’s Tale

• Sent To The Reincarnation Waiting Room By A Dyslexic Truck-kun, My Fate Was Decided By A Powerful Doggess Who Loves To Chase Cars, Roll Around With Dead Things, And Dig For Bones, So Now I’m Scrambling To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse In The Body Of A French Poodle

• That Time The Goddess Of Isekai Resettlement Decided To Reincarnate Me As A Cute Little Femboy Goblin Slave In The Demon Lord’s Harem And Liked The Idea So Much That She’s Here Too So There’s No Chance I’m Escaping Any Time Soon

• My Cheat Power In This Horrifically Violent Dark-Fantasy World Is ‘Create Bubble Bath’, Which Only Works When I’m Alone With Married Women, Causing Me To Acquire An Ever-Growing Anti-Harem Of Cuckolded Husbands With Overpowered Magic Swords

“Did you get what you wanted this year?”

“Sorry, honey, I was talking to the tentacles.”

Stable Diffusion Fun Fact

Stockings often trigger a skin-color reset for the torso, so if you want your sexy green goblin gal (that’s “goblin, green”, not “Green Goblin™”) to stay green all over rather than have some really weird tan lines, put the skin color before the lingerie in the prompt. As with all LLM prompts, it’s a suggestion rather than an instruction, but it does help.

(“Nobody really objected when the alien invasion started in Canada”)