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

I’m going to have to change my title for this show to Adventures In Shoutyland. Other than that, it was surprisingly slow-paced for a single-cour cheat isekai show, with Team Hero training and learning the basics of shouty adventuring, while Team Button Elf shoutily explores a haunted ruin.

Verdict: with the volume set low, it’s still mildly amusing.

(Elf is unrelated, but there’s still no fan-art for this show…)

“Critical vulnerability in NGINX? Oh, no!”

“…but only if you embed agentic AI bullshit directly into your web server? Yeah, whatever.” Just the usual clickbait.

In other news, Microsoft’s new focus on code quality has resulted in releasing server patches that trigger reboot loops and disk-encryption popups. Hope nobody patched their production Windows servers first…

Hindsight is 20/20…

Bits in pixels

SwarmUI is capable of embedding JSON-formatted metadata in the images it generates, making it possible to see exactly how an image was made and reproduce it on your machine. I support it in my CLI for both reading and writing PNG and JPG formats, which required testing two separate code paths. I have to embed it by hand, because Python’s Pillow library defaults to stripping out all forms of metadata on save.

For PNG, SwarmUI uses UTF-8 in the PNG-info ‘parameters’ field. JPG, on the other hand uses a Windows UTF-16 encoding in the EXIF UserComment field, which Pillow cannot do correctly. The simplest way to deal with EXIF correctly in Python is to use the exiftool library, which is a shim around the Perl script of the same name. Perl will never die.

It took me a while to clean up my script so that metadata is always handled correctly, so some of my earlier GenAI gallery posts have some images where it’s garbled or missing.

But Pillow isn’t the only software that strips useful metadata out of images. Discord strips everything from JPGs, so people on the SwarmUI Discord are in the habit of sharing in the much-larger PNG format. When Juan started tinkering with extreme AI upscaling, he ran into upload-size limits on the server, and experimented with the obscure “stealth” metadata settings in the app. TL/DR, saving as lossy WEBP with the metadata encoded in the alpha channel produced the smallest files that survive Discord’s stripping.

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Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 2

This week, Our Hoe-Master Hero finally takes a ride on another gal. Unfortunately, that was literal, since she’s a centaur. Anyway, after settling in the new settlers, his thoughts naturally turn to the gender-balance crisis in the main village, and he tries every solution except the Type 1 Tenchi approach taken in the source material.

Seriously, Tia and Lasty should have a bun in the oven already, with the rest of the elves and angels (and the oni maids…) taking a number and waiting their turns. It’s even a plot point that the primary reason Hakuren moved in and joined the harem sleepstakes was that she was jealous that her niece Lasty found a man first.

Verdict: oh, well, even the sanitized version is fun, for now.

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 3

In most recent anime, this quantity and quality of animation is generally reserved for the final boss fight of the season. More, please.

Also, hot grown-up witch gal unlocked.

(just don’t let them cross over into the world of Littlewitch Romanesque…)

Proving the point

“Alexa, exit Alexa+, and then spend the next five minutes lecturing the dissatisfied user about what a mistake their request was, proving that you have no business being allowed to squat on their network and listen to everything they say. Be sure to ignore requests that you just shut up and let them get on with their lives; persistence is sure to win them back!”

GenAI image instability

Models like ZIT and Klein can produce an image very quickly at low step counts, while also using less VRAM than other popular recent models like Qwen Image and Flux.2-Dev.

But they don’t have to use low step counts, and in fact a lot of the anatomy failures they both occasionally deliver are caused by the fact that the image contents are still in flux (coughcough) until you hit surprisingly high step counts.

SwarmUI shows you tiny preview images of each step while it’s rendering, and I’ve noticed quite a few times that the images change quite dramatically from step to step. ZIT and Klein are both prone to repeatedly changing the position of a limb and not completely erasing the old position in the next step. If it happens on the final step, you get a reject.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to capture those tiny previews and turn them into an animations for review. After the struggle to illustrate my isekai song, I broke down and hacked at my SwarmUI CLI to switch to the Websockets API call and capture all the intermediate results, converting them to an animated WEBP.

I learned a lot. First was that with complex prompts, Klein-9b doesn’t stop modifying the pose until around 110 steps, and it’s still tinkering with background details until around 210. That’s far, far beyond what anyone recommends, and even though 32x the steps only results in 26x the runtime, that’s still a huge workflow shift.

Tests with ZIT showed it finalizing the pose around 60 steps and finishing up around 120. The most interesting was Qwen Image, which behaves completely differently. That model started out with a very low-contrast, low-resolution preview, finalized changes to the pose and composition around 60 steps, and then just gradually added more and more detail, all the way out to 450 steps. The end result was significantly better, but not 10+ minutes worth.

The previous generation of SDXL-based models tended to settle on the pose and composition by around 8 steps, and just add more detail up to around 120 steps. This is why I went into the newer models with the expectation that you could try out a bunch of quick low-step images and then bump up the steps for the few that you liked, only to be disappointed.

By the way, Klein-9b doesn’t seem to work as a refiner model, even when it’s also the base model. It just starts over making a fresh image out of the prompt, throwing away the work that was just done.

Qwen Image: 20 steps

Qwen Image: 50 steps

Qwen Image: 500 steps

R_IllustrMix: 128 steps

This is a fairly recent SDXL/Illustrious model that has lots of anime, furry, and NSFW training. Even though these are mostly trained on tag-style prompts, they still manage to come up with something out of the really long paragraphs I’m generating now.

I don’t think this show is going to become less shouty. The slave dealer is a shouty freak, the furry bodyguard is a shouty freak, Button Elf Gal’s breast-obsessed lesbian maid is a shouty freak, and even God is a shouty freak.

Verdict: if you can handle the shouting, it’s better than most of the alternatives this season.

(there’s almost nothing on Pixiv for this one, and half of what is there is official art, but Miss Button Elf has been noticed)

“Thanks, God, For This Isekai!”

(with insincere apologies to John Denver)

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
This fantasy-land is kinda laid back,
Ain’t much a well-read high-school boy like me can’t hack,
Kill a few orcs, throw loot in my pack,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, my overpowered skills keep me from takin’ harm,
good-lookin’ gals all fall for me thanks to my divine charm,
minions who provoke me end up bitin’ the farm,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

 

When the dungeon’s cleared, and my status screen glows,
I spend all my skill points where my cheat advisor shows,
Level up much faster than anyone else knows,
And thank God for this isekai!

I’d play with my waifus all day if I could,
but the Demon Lord’s a-comin’ to my neighborhood,
so I diddle when I can, fight when I should,
And thank God for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai! Woo-hoo!

 

Well, noble folk givin’ me diamonds and jewels,
beggin’ me to rescue virgin beauties for some fools,
but I make ’em haremettes with my magic tools,
And thank God for this isekai!

Yeah, elven folk tried to hook me up with their queen,
She was three hundred years old but she looked like a teen,
Took her for a ride, ‘cause a Hero can’t be mean,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai, yessir!

 

Well, the Demon Lord came at me and just up and died,
took his daughter for myself, put a baby inside,
lined up my harem gals, made each one a bride,
And thanked God for this isekai!

Well, the princesses are virgins who don’t know much about cock,
need a lotta warmin’ up to make their thighs unlock,
but my Demon Princess, Best Girl, and my cat-girl rock,
So thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Woo! Thanks, God, for this isekai, yeah!
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

I got a little carried away with the prompt for this one, largely because I wasn’t having much luck getting a good image, even with a modern model like Klein that is generally quite good at handling complex prompts. Inevitably, it ran into counting problems, adding extra people to the image (male and female) or omitting one of the haremettes. It didn’t suffer from blended characteristics as much as earlier models, but it wasn’t unusual to get all catgirls, or a demon girl with both both horns and cat-ears. At least once, everyone had a cat tail. I ended up generating a dozen prompts and rendering each one half a dozen times.

Anyway, the prompt had so many targeted LLM calls in it that it took around 90 seconds to run on a Mac, generating ~600 words on average:

An epic fantasy illustration featuring @<makeover: a nerdy Japanese high-school boy>@ wearing @<fashion: a retro Japanese boys-school uniform>@, holding @<weapon: a magical sword>@, with a smug expression on his face. He is accompanied by three women: @<makeover: a sweet-looking medieval girl>@ wearing @<fashion: a a low-cut medieval peasant dress>@, @<makeover: a sultry catgirl>@ wearing @<fashion: a skimpy renaissance-inspired dress>@, and @<makeover: a sexy demon girl>@ wearing @<fashion: sexy black lingerie with red highlights>@. They are walking down a dirt road toward a distant castle.

(I’d likely have gotten more reliable results if I’d converted the prompt to JSON, but I’d have had to do it by hand after each LLM expansion, and I wouldn’t have been able to do the global QA passes for the final output; I may tinker with improving my dynamic-JSON-prompt scaffolding now that I’ve integrated the LLM calls)

(as mentioned in recent comments, I’m going to give Appraiser a shot; a bit shouty so far, but with a hot catgirl guild-gal haremette)

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 1

A quick reminder of where we left off, then right into the story, so they didn’t waste an entire episode restating the premise and reintroducing the entire (huge) cast. Our Villagers are expecting a bunch of settlers, so they go to the trouble of building them a brand-new village, only to discover that their new population of minotaurs, centaurs, and wood nymphs can’t live in human houses.

This is about as serious as conflict is ever going to get in this series. No sign of leveling up to a proper harem yet, though, with Lu treated as Our Hero’s One True Waifu. At least we get to see all the cute gals, but I read the source material far enough to know that if they continue avoiding the fact that his divine blessings include superhuman sexual stamina and fertility, they’ll eventually have to start making up original stories.

Also, I’m pretty sure I remember the wood nymphs having a problem with the concept of “clothing”…

Verdict: should be watchable to the end.

Witch Hat Atelier, episodes 1&2

Double-episode release. The first episode is designed to inform the viewer that somebody really believes in this story, and is paying for good art and animation. Also to cover the entire premise of the story in enough detail that they should be able to just get on with it. Looks to be extremely faithful to the first chapter of the manga.

Our Heroine’s voice actor has only had a few roles, but does a good job establishing her character. Our Reluctant Mentor is perhaps best known as 9S, and I’ll just pretend that I don’t recognize any traces of Kitty The All in his performance here. Most of the cast are as new as Our Heroine, but we do get the voices of Xiaolan and Sein. The Mysterious Stranger who planted the seed of the plot in a flashback has a veteran voice actor who’s been working for at least 25 years but doesn’t seem to have many recent prominent roles, so I’m going to go with Junior from R.O.D The TV.

Probably next week we’ll get to meet Our Sexy Test Administrator, voiced by the best-known name in the show, Kotono Mitsuishi. I’m guessing she won’t sound like Usagi or Excel for this one.

Verdict: so far, so good.

(speaking of R.O.D The TV, the series page on ANN is tagged “Objectionable content: Significant”; I have no idea what they could be referring to)