Boxxo Or Bust 2, last two episodes

I never felt motivated to watch last week’s grimdark horseshit episode, but I might as well embrace the sunk-cost fallacy and get to the end. Here goes…

Shoe Fetishist acquired his peculiar hobby because he was looking for the boots that turned up as the prize in the recent competition. He’d bought them for his childhood friend and adventuring partner, only to wake up after losing a fight to find her mutilated corpse, with legs and boots missing. Yeah, that’s a great story that fits right in with slapstick comedy and lighthearted cheesecake.

Naturally they find the villain responsible without any difficulty, and he and his pals come right out and confess while twirling their metaphorical Snidely Whiplash mustaches. It’s “not well written”.

Basically both episodes are full of near-constant whiplash and expository lumps, right up to the final post-credits scene in which they announce that they’ll continue telling the wrong story in a future season.

Verdict: yeah, no; the people responsible for this mess don’t deserve any eyeballs for another season.

Speaking of ‘bust’,

Miri Hanai in a cowkini:

Tag-a-licious

One thing that’s annoyed me with my blog is that I gave up manually tagging posts with keywords several thousand posts ago, and now I sometimes have trouble finding the quote or reference I’m looking for. So I’m letting an LLM chew on the problem. Specifically, seed-oss-36b, which has been doing a bang-up job inventing color-coordinated cheesecake pin-up costumes and poses, without the annoying wokescold moralization that Google and OpenAI’s offline models ram past your tonsils and gag you with just for using the word “sexy”.

The code is trivial; all the fun is in the system prompt and the user prompt:

Examining the “reasoning”, it clearly separates the TOML metadata header from the body content and parses both as requested, and creates output in the correct format. I don’t necessarily want to use all the tags, but by writing them out to a separate file for each blog post, I can go through with another script and pull out the most common and the most distinctive tags.

When it finishes. Which at ~2 minutes/post on the Mac Mini is going to take about a week. The 4090 would be faster… if the model fit. 20GB on a 24GB card is a bit tight.

Tagged ‘delicious’

Let’s see what sort of poses and costumes seed-oss-36B has been giving me to use in my wildcards. I started out at the usual 1024x1600 resolution, but since I’m making pin-ups, I quickly switched to a Playboy-centerfold aspect ratio at 896x1920.

But not before it fabricated a waifu pic I found so tasty that I not only ran it through the refiner and upscaler, I then ran it through the commercial Topaz Photo AI tool for even more cleanup and a 4x upscale (that did not run me out of memory!), bringing the final result to a silly-resolution 9216x14400.

I might even print her out as a real poster; she could hang on the not-Zoom-visible wall in my office:

(10 megapixels, 132 megapixels)

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 11

Well, something just happened. With one episode to go, they really can’t deeply explore this new development, but at least everyone will live to see another Night.

Verdict: plot, with occasional animation. You know the conflict is over when they drop last season’s OP song into the mix.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 9

Our Mighty Tsuntail is back! Only in a supportive supporting-character kind of way for now, but this is a combination “must get stronger” and “everything’s better with friends” episode, in which Our Monstering Hero reconnects with his comrades and his childhood crush, while the world goes mad with the results of Naughty Number Nine’s latest efforts.

Dungeon Chibis rewatch

Crush-chan is less annoying the second time through. Naginata Gal is Best Girl by a huge margin. If new seasons keep sucking, I’ll be doing a lot of rewatches like this for a while.

Speaking of which, the three seasons of Dog Days never got a US Bluray release, but subbed Bluray rips are still torrentable. This is another show where everyone involved clearly loved what they were making.

(“pet me, you stupid hero”)

There would need to be explanations…

…if these showed up in the background of a Zoom meeting:

My office just got bigger

The one at home, that is, which was overcrowded with the old Ikea 31-inch-deep tables I brought from my old place and finally replaced. I didn’t use them as desks in my California house, but the desk set I had there went to Goodwill instead of onto the truck, so the tables were pressed into service.

I hate to just hand out a “that’s what she said” opportunity, but it’s amazing the difference seven inches makes. The room just feels so much bigger with 24-inch-deep tables. Also Ikea, but the tops are solid bamboo plywood instead of the old veneer-over-particle-board. They’re also 7 inches longer than the old tables, so there’s more room to fit between the legs. (coughcough)

I also picked up two bamboo side tables (1, 2) for a printer stand and a spare workspace. All of it had typical Ikea assembly hardware, but the bamboo is head-and-shoulders above their usual construction material. Pity they didn’t have the matching bamboo monitor stand in stock, because I’d have bought two of those to free up even more desk space.

Sadly,

My M2 MacBook Air simply does not support 2 external monitors at once. Can’t be done without buying a DisplayLink adapter and installing their software driver (remember DisplayLink? Turns out that’s still a thing). So I can either use the really nice dual HDR portable monitors as one display with a 1-inch gap in the middle, or move them over to the M4 Mini. Since I want the HDR displays for photo editing, that means moving all my photo archives and workflows over sooner rather than later, but not today; between emptying the office, scrubbing it floor to ceiling, hanging pictures, assembling furniture, and moving everything back last night, I’m just a tiny bit tired and sore.

The day Google AI Overview actually worked

I feel it necessary to call this out, because it’s been wrong so many times that I usually automatically scroll past it. I only read it today because it was 6:30 AM and I hadn’t had any caffeine yet.

Anyway, after upgrading to MacOS “Sequoia” recently, I discovered the annoying new system-wide Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut. Because my fingers have decades of training in Emacs keybindings in the shell, I often repeat the previous command by hitting “Ctrl-P, Enter”, but my pinky often stays on the Ctrl key. Now Ctrl-Enter pops up a “contextual menu” everywhere, unless you disable it in Settings -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard -> “Show Contextual Menu”.

I was astonished that Google actually gave me a correct answer for once. Shame they didn’t credit the web site they stole it from.

(actually, everything on this particular panel should be disabled, IMHO, and quite a few others as well)

Qwen Image LoRAs not ripe yet

I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised. Either they visibly degrade image quality, or they just do… nothing at all.

My Cyber Princess Waifu continues to amuse, though.

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So it turns out that not only does conflict build character, but it works the other way around, too. The Power Of Friendship wins the trial, and in the process we get a pretty-well-incorporated flashback that fills in some more details on Our Mighty Tsuntail’s mom. Pity she wasn’t there for it, but at least she shows up for a minute or two, continuing the offscreen path of “I must get stronger”.

Verdict: if this weren’t so good, I’d really hate the trope abuse.

(“🎶 1. cut a hole in a box 🎶”; unrelated, of course)

Power sucks

My MacBook Air is running out of power while plugged in, despite not even being warm to the touch. The Anker dock, on the other hand, is blistering hot. The CPU is barely ticking over, and Apple’s battery monitor even claims “No Apps Using Significant Energy”.

The culprit, of course, is “AI”. I’ve got LM Studio running a prompt-enhancement prompt with qwen2.5-7b-instruct, taking the output of my dynamic-prompt-generation script and improving it (which it’s actually pretty good at). I had to find the much-higher-wattage original Apple charger, which I’ve never needed to use before. It turns out there’s an “energy impact” field reported in Activity Monitor, but it doesn’t charge GPU/NPU usage to the correct app.

Apple’s so excited about moving fast and breaking things with “AI” that they can’t spare the engineering talent to update their tools to even report how much power LLMs are using on their products.

In fact, when you sort Activity Monitor by “energy impact”, LM Studio is at the top despite having a “score” that’s less than 10% of what Activity Monitor claims for itself. The only field that seems to be honest is “12 hr power”, which puts LM Studio an order of magnitude above the rest. But only because it’s been running for several hours, sigh.

(like an iceberg (or “Apple Intelligence”), 90% of Froppy is underwater…)

More “stimulating” covers…

“We want YOU to join the Star League!”

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Our Great (Hot) Detective’s plan is revealed, as Our Wannabe-Sucker Hero confronts her and lays out the evidence. Unfortunately he didn’t plan for the aftermath.

Verdict: it was nice to see Nazuna go Maximum Effort and prove that Anko/Kyoko’s vampire-fighting tactics only really worked when her opponent wasn’t serious, neatly subverting the waif-fu girlboss stereotype that’s so common. She can’t beat a vampire in a straight-up fight, no matter how clever she is.

Text generation in Qwen Image

The majority of my failed attempts to generate text have been with relatively-rare words (“harem”, “Hornblower”, etc), so I was a bit surprised when it failed 90% of the time at the word Babies (as in Sugar), while Baby always worked. Then I found an article explaining that the way they got improved text generation in both Latin scripts and Hanzi/Kanji was to explicitly train it with tons of images of words rendered in specific fonts.

In other words, it will almost never produce correct results for words outside of the training set; it would need to integrate a text-rendering engine the way the big boys do. Given that they already bolted a full LLM into it to parse the prompts, that’s doable, but they’d probably have to open up their license to use something like Freetype or ImageMagick. This may be something where I end up creating automated vocabulary LoRAs with a Python script, or asking a high-end LLM to generate masking templates for the image generator and ImageMagick command-lines to composite the text onto the results.

Anyway, I was thinking about that social-media “boys don’t read” kerfluffle, and decided the thing to do was create some things that might stimulate their sense-a-wunda…

BTW, this is not what I had in mind when I asked for “glowing alien symbols”…

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A beauty pageant sounds like good clean fun, doesn’t it? Get all the gals fired up and onto a stage, with Our Vending Hero supplying fashion magazines and makeup to give His Best Girls an edge, and keep things light and fluffy.

Until they end on an ominous note by having Our Shoe Fetishist run off deep into the dungeon in the middle of the night after learning the secret origin of some Very Special Shoes. Really? You had to pull that shit?

Verdict: could we just have a fun episode? Is that too much to ask?

(my Pixiv archives really had nothing tagged with shoes or boots; the few things that turned up were about socks, which not only seems to be the more popular fetish in Japan, but the word for shoes, 靴, is part of the word for socks, 靴下, so they’re kind of inevitable in a search)

Dungeon Chibis Bluray is out!

This doesn’t uncensor anything, since it isn’t that kind of show, but there should be the usual quality improvements over the broadcast release. As a bonus, it won’t just disappear from my library like streamed shows eventually do.

(chibi Zelda is unrelated, but I’ve already used all the good fan-art from this show…)

Loner Harem Bluray soon

October 21, to be precise. This was a whole lot more wholesome than the horny-porny novels. In a good way.

(pony gals are unrelated)

Wishing for useful wish lists

Once upon a time, Amazon wish lists displayed release dates. This was handy for organizing my book purchases, so naturally it was removed. Now I have to open each book in a tab to find out its release date, then drag books into order using their flaky Javascript tiling code.

And then every time I visit the list, I have to remember to manually switch it back from “most recently added” to “custom” sort order. Every fucking time I load the page. Because their first-class H1B-or-AI developers don’t give a fuck.

(“the new South Pole remote development team is so much cheaper than hiring Americans!”)

Fuck Youtube

I’m really getting tired of clicking on a “video” by an established “channel” to find that it’s not only an animated clickbait listicle based on stolen content from a random website, but the “narrator” is just an AI-synthesized voice, with the inhuman affect that comes from not really understanding the sentences it’s converting into audio. And of course these “creators” never seem to get demonetized.

(and by “getting tired of”, I mean “these days I refuse to watch anything but official anime promo videos and Critical Drinker reviews”)

Jun Amaki jiggles your martini

Call Of The Night 2, episode 9

Ten years ago on Halloween, Our Vengeful Hot Detective’s life fell apart. Now it’s Halloween again, and the game is afoot! Except she’s not really a great runner. Some fan-service by Our Hot Undead Teacher and Our Still-Getting-Bigger Childhood Friend, but we’re rapidly moving into the endgame, so keep your eyes on the plot. Our Appropriately-Dressed Hero seems to be the only one who really cares what Anko/Kyoko’s goal is, but will he figure it out before it’s too late?

Verdict: so we’ve got a pattern now: more conventional storytelling = better animation.

(sadly, nobody dresses up like this for Halloween…)

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 7

Conflict Builds Character. In this case, it finally establishes that Faux-Hawk Fang-Boy actually has a character, as he realizes that even a prima donna needs backup.

Verdict: someday there will be a shonen anime that does not use the “I must get stronger” trope. This isn’t going to be it. Still well-done, though.

(Magia Sulfer says, “suit up and show up!”)

Wait, “isekai potion loli” is a genre now?!?

Looking at next season, and not finding much of anything to watch. Folks who keep up with My Hero Academia are likely interested in the final season, and folks into Spy x Family have something to look forward to, but that doesn’t help me, unless I were to spend half the season catching up on them first.

Gate manga 22 & 23 out

You know what that means, right? A picture of Rory Mercury:

Dear Microsoft,

You won’t let me turn off the on-by-default sharing of data with third-party advertisers unless I first turn off my ad-blocker? Fucktards.

(note that this isn’t a browser setting, it’s system-wide, and it includes data hoovered up by Copilot, which I was in the process of turning off at the time…)

Why Boys Aren’t Reading

There’s been a bit of a fuss on social media where leftsplainers handwave away pretty much any negative thing about boys, and recently they’re claiming that boys aren’t reading because there’s just nothing being written for boys. At which point dozens of successful authors pile on and point out that publishing has been run by far-left women and female impersonators for so long that most of them had to go indie to be published at all, and that boys exposed to decent books will gobble them like candy.

I was thinking about this in the grocery store last night, because as I was hiking from the sporting goods department to the egg vault (Meijer stores are quite large), I passed a prominent, colorful display that boldly advertised “Reading For Children”.

Every book was for girls. Only.

“Change my mind” 1

The world was a better place when it was possible to buy ammo at the grocery store at 2 AM.

(thanks to looooooong Covid, now I can’t buy much of anything at 2 AM, except at gas-station convenience stores)

“Change my mind” 2

LLMs that show their “reasoning” are simply writing fan-fic in a parallel thread that has nothing to do with the process used to produce the actual output.

(last night’s “generate 200 unique sexy pin-up poses” test produced a list of 34 unique poses repeated an average of ~6 times, despite the extensive “reasoning” process it fabricated; and they weren’t even particularly interesting poses)

Prompts and Vision

Two things I’d never really played with are using LLMs to “improve” prompts, and using specialized LLMs that can analyze a picture and describe the contents.

Prompt enhancement is… hit or miss, but it’s good at turning the usual list-of-keywords prompting into real sentences and paragraphs, which makes a difference with Qwen Image’s LLM parser. I’ll do some before/after pics of that at some point.

Pity that they’re just as censored when “enhancing” as they are when handling other requests. openai-gpt-oss is just as big a nag as their online models, and the attempts people have made to “uncensor” it haven’t been fully successful yet; I’m not asking it to describe a gang-bang, but it still goes full wokescold when you ask for something simple like a list of “Fifties sexy pin-up poses”. Because it’s not respectful, according to some purple-haired pierced gender-ambiguous 23-year-old in San Francisco.

On to vision! For today (since this is a four-day weekend for me…), let’s try something simple: given a real photograph, ask two LLMs to “describe the contents of the image in detail”, then feed the resulting prompt to Qwen Image.

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Small praise to the writers for having Our Vending Hero actually spend some time using new hot-food vending machine styles to please his chilly customers, and having Our DFC Genius Gal suddenly get nervous about undressing in front of him while Our Mighty Girlfriend waves away her concerns because it’s okay if it’s him.

The rest of the episode is a lengthy and pointless quest that accidentally succeeds because a new disposable annoying villain shows up and solves their problem with a whole lot of collateral damage. There’s nothing wrong with Our OP New Legal Loli, but they dropped a plot coupon when she appeared that added to the pile created by Our Not-Really-Evil Betrayers, and they’re going to have to cash them all in with breathless exposition soon, and I simply don’t care about that.

Verdict: lame with brief reminders of what made the first season good.

Qwen Image caption competition

Qwen Image follows prompts quite well, but as with all diffusion models, if a concept isn’t clearly tagged in the training data, then the model can’t easily produce it, and you have to assemble an incantation that resembles the desired concept.

Qwen Image does not grok spanking, and I simply could not get it to swing a hand, paddle, or bat at a buttock. But it wasn’t a total loss, since it turned out to have quite decent understanding of clothing and hair styles from the 1950s…

So, what captions spring to mind for this image? I’ll save my ideas for later. (click the image to see it at full size)

NSFW

Qwen Image limitations

Around 90% of the “beautiful young women” I ask it to create are Statistically-Averaged White American Girls Who Could All Be Sisters. You have to push it away from the mean by adding descriptive words, which means I’ll be dusting off my wildcards to vary skin, hair, and eye color, ethnicity, figure, etc. Certain ethnic keywords produce significant changes, but the training data seems to be limited to only a handful of such tags.

There are a number of canned wildcard sets, and perhaps the most comprehensive are the “Billions of…” sets from DonMischo. As-is, they’re a bit too random, but the YAML has a decent structure, so I should be able to subset it and construct my own canned recipes for babe-making. Since SwarmUI doesn’t directly support YAML wildcard sets, I’ll use my wrapper script to generate large text files of prompts to use as standard wildcards.

That’s how I generated these, after filtering the file to remove the grannies and great-grannies:

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Call Of The Night 2, episode 8

There, all caught up. Still funny that they’re better at animating normal human life in the flashbacks than they are at the main storyline. The burning question now is, is Our Hot Vampire-Killing Detective Gal still gay?

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 6

Too much slapstick, a decent amount of lore, and Our Determined Sidekick is joining the big leagues.

Verdict: the “turf war” and “ain’t these captains eccentric” bits could have been excised and replaced with pretty much anything, but could have been actually good if they’d given Our Mighty Tsuntail something to do. There’s a whole chunk of the cast that I just have no interest in.

High Seas Isekai

Reborn In A Fantasy Hornblower Knockoff As The Admiral Of A Pirate Armada, My Monster-Girl-Harem Ship Captains Help Me Rule The Seas.
aka: “Fleet Don’t Fail Me Now!”

(pic by ChatGPT, first try; Grok not only failed to produce output in book-cover format, it just surrounded Some Sailor Guy with dragons, even after repeated attempts to get any women into the cover)

Too many terabytes…

I got an alert on my NAS that the second volume was filling up. Logging in, I found weekly backups of the first volume going back to 2019. I think I can cut that down a bit…

(the second volume is in an expansion cabinet, so it’s a completely separate RAID array; eventually I’ll need to expand the disks, but the fact that it managed to hold over five years of compressed weekly backups suggests I can hold off for a while longer)

There Will Be (New) Doors

There are two known leaks in the house (I don’t count the small amount that rarely comes in through the side door into the garage). For the first, the old glassblock window in the basement was replaced and a lot of new thirsty plants placed in the yard, so even when the ground was saturated, no water came in. The second, which has happened maybe 4 times in 3 years, is the small bedroom I use for crafting, which has a giant half-round window above the openable windows, and if very strong rain is accompanied by very strong wind from the North, it comes in through the frame below the half-round. Not a lot, just enough to soak up in a bath towel, but fixing it is unlikely to be a simple caulk job, and windows ain’t cheap.

Two weeks ago, there was a major thunderstorm late at night. It didn’t come in through the crafting-room window. It didn’t come in through the basement window. It announced the discovery of a new leak by coming in through the back door and going straight down the wall into the basement. Which admittedly is better than flooding the family room.

I never liked the back door. The space is sized for a typical sliding glass door, but instead they put in a regular door and a fixed panel, both with single-pane glass and no UV protection. And now that I know the weather seals are completely shot, it has to go.

The front door looks very good apart from the exterior paint job, but it’s shifted a lot in the frame, enough to cause a draft of cold air in the winter (and even some powdery snow). And as I mentioned, the garage side door also lets in a bit of rain.

The Back-Door Adventure (coughcough) pushed me over the edge, and I called up a local vendor to get a quote to replace all three. I picked them based on the repair/upgrade work they’d done on my garage door, and the guy they sent out knew his stuff and took plenty of notes and pictures. The quote I got back was… “not cheap”, mostly because of the front door with its sidelites and transom. But it’s cheaper than water damage, and he threw in an attempt to patch the crafting-room window leak as well.

They’re also adding storm doors for the front and garage, so that I can let more air in when the weather’s decent (amazing front to back airflow, but there are no window screens). It looks like the manufacturer has an option for openable sidelites with screens, which isn’t part of the current quote.

Anyway, if they do a good job, then once my budget recovers I’ll have them start quoting replacement windows and blinds. I think I’ve mentioned that the previous owners never opened the windows in 20+ years, so they never installed screens, and most of the frames have shifted enough to make them hard to crank open.

(good knockers are an essential part of the front-door experience…)