Okay, Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal is now tied with Our Tasty Private Ogress Secretary for best girl; sorry, Tail Red, but elves bounce. Well, a little. Occasionally. When they’re not wearing disguises.
Verdict: I’m getting sick of the “let’s settle this account” catchphrase, and Our Office Hero doesn’t seem to have the slightest curiosity about how all of his solutions come from an imaginary neighborhood bar that plays 50-year-old pop music. They really need to break out of the monster-of-the-week mold.
(hmmmm, I seem to be running low on pictures of busty glasses-wearing hot-elves; I’ll have to work on that)
Discotek is releasing all sorts of old stuff on Bluray in 2025. I wouldn’t have bothered reading the article if the headline hadn’t mentioned DearS.
I liked DearS. It was a rather obvious fan-service harem remake of Alien Nation, and it had dancing chibis in the ED, which is always a plus.
(those chibis had more gainax power than most entire seasons these days)
Our Hero’s Reward is… not quite what he was hoping for. Our Heroine’s Reward, on the other hand, is enough to send her to the moon; seriously, this gal desperately needs a vibrating attachment for her VR headset. We now enter a new chapter in The Adventures Of An RPG Fool. Next week, get kraken!
Verdict: I like the fact that the regular boss fight they have to clear to reach the city is just handwaved away. We needed a break after the big multi-episode battle, and so did their budget.
(So, has Pencilgon figured out yet that her friend’s little sister is head-over-heels for her guildmate? I’m thinking no, because she’d be sure to set him up in some way…)
Usually when you see a model dressed up as a schoolgirl and tied to a pole at the beach, there are tentacles lurking in the water. Fortunately for Musubu Funaki, Hello!Project usually doesn’t sacrifice their girls until they’re old enough to renegotiate their contracts, so the pose is an anomaly in this photo shoot (site NSFW; disable Javascript).
And, yes, her first name is the verb “to tie (something)”; her parents meant it in a good way, since she was born the day after they got married, but in the idol biz…
(Everia Club has been on a repost kick for a while now; this shoot is from 2018, and she’s been out of the business since 2020, when she turned 18)
[Crunchy running late again today…]
Just noticed that the Isekai Prime manga is available for Kindle, serialized at $3/chapter. That’s… “not cheap”, especially when you realize that the 8 volumes available have a total of 60 chapters. Even given premium prices for a standard translated edition, that’s a $100 markup for 8 books worth of chapters, cha-cha-cha-ching! Or perhaps more likely, given the almost-completely-absent reviews, “yo-ho!”
I took a quick look at a fan-translation of the original webnovel, and stopped dead when Our Shopping Hero said, “Blimey, what’s all this then?”. Either the first chapter was written rather floridly compared to the rest (“well, butter my biscuit”), or the translator was in a goofy mood.
As expected, last week’s cliffhanger didn’t take long to resolve, and didn’t change the status quo, except… A Wild Dragonewt Appears! And she wants Our Mighty Kitty’s D even more than the other two gals! Equally important is the flashback that reveals that Our Cup-Runneth-Over Heroine comes by it honestly, barely able to hug Her Equally Endowed Mom when she left her village.
Once she’s fully recovered, the reward money from the adventure (and the bonus for the dragon materials) is enough for Cat-Blacksmith-nya to outfit her in armor so high-level that she has to shave to wear it.
Verdict: there was a brief moment at the beginning of the bath scene where I wondered if they’d decided to tone down the fan-service a bit, but then the nipples came out to play, and the show’s focus was renewed, complete with some steam-blobs to hide their shaving patterns. Pity we also have to put up with way too much skin shown off by the guild’s “eccentric” receptionist.
(not Our Heroine, but an adequate if slightly overdressed substitute)
This week, a whirlwind tour through 75% of That Big Dungeon and 2/3 of the ingredients acquired to save Our Hero’s Mom, a little bit of fan-service from Our Future Blonde Combat Waifu, a brief human moment with Our Rich-Kid Sidekick (who’s nearly fulfilled his dream), and the debut of a Very Important Person.
Verdict: next week, the dungeon gets harder. And with any luck, a whole lot cuter.
(last week’s Rescue Kitten that we’ll probably never see again was cute enough to get at least one piece of fan-art)
Y’know, I’ve completely lost interest in the concept of a high-ranking party whose members are too stupid and arrogant to grasp basic preparation and logistics; it really feels like the authors of these stories are taking out their office/classroom frustrations on the world. The sooner they write these assclowns out of the story, the better; it will leave more time for the camera to slowly pan across Our Tasty Hot-Pants Dark Elf Gal. The redhead’s not bad, but her low-level armor covers far too much skin.
Anyway, we get the joy of meeting a slobbering noob who’s been trying to “recruit” our gals into being his party favors. Sadly, I’m sure he’ll turn up again, along with the bozo party.
Verdict: get the catgirl onscreen soon, and shove all the losers into the background. And while I’m dreaming, get the dark elf into a hot tub.
(more appropriate attire for a 17-year-old dark elf maiden…)
Hotel Chocolat is a British chocolate retailer that commissioned a custom-skinned Dualit hot-chocolate maker as a vehicle to sell their products at an even higher markup in single-serving sachets. The Velvetiser itself runs £100, and the ~35-gram sachets are £1.50 each. Their first attempt at a broad launch in the US failed, but they still have an online store offering bundles and subscriptions that cut the price a bit from the marked-up $150 (+23%) and $2.50/sachet (+37%).
But retail price is the number I’m interested in, since I’ll be comparing it to the Nespresso Barista Recipe Maker, a quirky but much more versatile device that retails for $169.
The Velvetiser is only capable of (wonderful) hot chocolate, and only with chocolate shavings not much larger than the ones HC sells. There are third-party shaved chocolates sold in larger containers in the UK (I brought some back; my parents have a Velvetiser), but they’re still more expensive than bulk chocolate.
The BRM is capable of a variety of hot or cold drinks, and can also crush ice and smoothly blend chocolate squares (although doing both at once would probably jam it up good), and a number of Youtube videos rank its hot chocolate texture just-slightly-below the Velvetiser when compared head to head (and I agree).
With the caveat that officially the BRM tops out at 4 ounces of milk for blending, and only supports 8 ounces for warming milk without foaming it. A lot of people on various forums complain about the BRM overflowing out the top when you put too much liquid in, but it only happened to me once before I figured out the 100%-effective method for preventing overflow: twist the lid as you seat it. It’s that simple.
With that out of the way, I took advantage of the BRM’s ability to work with larger chunks of chocolate and went looking for something that suited my tastes. Squares are still pricy, so I tried larger chocolate bars, and while they worked, I wasn’t thrilled with the flavor (unless you really like dark chocolate, most US chocolate bars are over-sweetened and full of “non-chocolate ingredients”). I found something quite promising on Amazon, however: a 5-pound bag of Ghirardelli Melting Wafers for $44.
Hotel Chocolat’s sachets contain 35-37 grams of shaved chocolate. The Ghirardelli wafers weigh ~3.78 grams each, so 10 of them is just about perfect for the same strength of hot chocolate. You get about 600 wafers per bag, so that’s $0.73 per mug of hot chocolate, a considerable savings. And it’s good chocolate.
I just bought my second bag of the stuff, and I’ve found that it’s even better when you add some espresso into the mix. I’m up to two Nespresso pods per mug, and I’ve found that a lot of the pods I don’t care for alone or as cappuccinos are terrific when diluted in a full mug of hot chocolate.
This is important, because the temperature will be dropping back to 0°F tomorrow night (-18° in French units).
Side note: pretty much the only way to jam the BRM is by evenly distributing the solids across the bottom in enough density to keep it from initially spinning up. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, you want to dump all the solids on the same side, creating an “unbalanced” load.
Well, admittedly there is another way to jam it, but that involves Xanthan Gum…
(“ask me how I know” 😁)
Media Blasters is releasing a Bluray of Amazing Nurse Nanako. I greet this news with the same enthusiasm as I did the re-release of Eiken. That is, none whatsoever.
(given her age, this is one anime gal who might actually grow up to approach Eiken size, although I’m sure hers won’t be as sloshy)
[looks like Crunchyroll is running behind today; probably all that Global Warming and Record Warmth we’ve been digging ourselves out of while shivering in the freezing cold]
“My slow life doesn’t need women”?!? Again: Dude! You’re banging your Sweet Young Landlady, you’ve got a Catgirl Cuddle-Buddy, and you can’t take your eyes off The Merchant’s Daughter’s Big Bouncy Boobies. (amusingly, it’s Her Quietly Hot Maid who buys the hundred clothespins that were mentioned in last week’s comments…)
ahem Our Entrepreneurial Hero signs a distribution contract, giving him enough money to build a house out in the woods. At no point does he seem to worry about gaining title to the land first, and he’s close enough to the city that the guards on the walls can hear his power tools and see him fell trees, so apparently resistance is feudal.
Now, why he’d try to do all the work himself with imported expensive tools instead of, say, hiring the catboys who follow Our Furry-Boobed First Catgirl around, I can’t imagine. It’s not like they aren’t all good friends now, between the curry, the booze, and her nighttime cuddling. (her relationship with the catboys seems platonic)
Verdict: Dude’s not just playing on easy mode (despite the ongoing saga of The Forlorn Feral Loli Future Daughter, whose happy ending is telegraphed in the credits), he’s reverting to his chuuni middle-school days. I’ll give it a few more weeks to assemble the rest of the harem.
Side note: the three light novels have a common cover theme: guy, loli, large cat-thing pet. The eight manga volumes have:
(I prefer my catgirls a bit less furry than…(checks website) Myarey, but at least she shares her voice with Bilac)
As their totally-not-a-date-date comes to an end, Sleepy Hero treats His Hug-Pillow Elf Waifu to a scented bath before they snuggle in bed in the hopes that she’ll either make it home or be trapped forever as his live-in girlfriend. She seems to be fine with it either way.
They did face the tiny little problem that they’d been incinerated by a dragon while trapped in its lair, so while he expected to be whole and healthy as usual, they had to come up with a plan to stay that way. Based on a quick game of twenty questions, their plan was… beer!
TL/DR: they are now best friends with one of the mightiest creatures in the world, who in her role as Hot Dragon Chick is completely tsundere for Earth food and drink. So we’ve got Tsun Elf Waifu and Tsun Dragon Bestie, for the makings of a lively and well-rounded party.
(…but she’s no Grea)
I won’t say that I made a mistake by reading all of the translated light novels after the end of last season, but it does mean that I’m so far ahead of the story at this point that I’ve actually forgotten a great deal of what’s coming up and in what order. It’s actually a bit jarring to have all the major secrets still unrevealed.
Also refreshing, as it lets me revisit these events with confidence that the adaptation is not simply plundering the source material for a highlight reel.
Anyway, this week, A Day In The Life of three cute serving girls, with just a dash of rear-palace intrigue and a whiff of conspiracy. And of course Actual-Cat Maomao makes an appearance.
FYI, about half of the relatively-high-budget high-concept OP animation has nothing whatsoever to do with this show, and not just this season. In case you hadn’t figured that out yet.
The ED is much more in tune with the actual show, being cute and bouncy, like Our Mighty Shouty Receptionist Heroine. Unlike Alina, however, the ED doesn’t suddenly go into a murderous psychotic rage every week.
Last week’s cliffhanging asshole adventurer causes big trouble in town, realizing far too late that there is in fact a woman who doesn’t have to put up with his shit. Unfortunately for Our Heroine, her costume isn’t enough to protect her identity when she saves the day in the middle of town in broad daylight, not when the guild leader’s special power is timepeeping. Next week, it’s a trap!
Verdict: if this took itself seriously, it would suck. Instead, it’s about as silly as last summer’s Dungeon Drops show, which works for me.
Miscreantsoft has just turned on their Mandatory AI features in every Office 365 application. You can sort-of turn them off, but the big colorful button is prominent in the UI, and intrusive to the point of having another button at the beginning of every new Word document offering to write for you. Just the thing to promote academic misconduct!
You can disable “connected experiences” on each device you use MS apps on, but it’s still there, lurking just under the surface for someone to abuse. And if you’re a corporate user (or somone who runs their own content-blocking firewall at home…), you can’t just block the traffic, since it piggybacks on regular Office traffic, with only 3 obvious DNS entries out of 18 referenced that might reduce the reach of its tentacoo waep.
You will serve your Anally Inserted overlords!
ObGhostbusters: “You’re right, no human being would stack books like this.”
…I purchased a box full of Richard Blade novels on eBay. With a bit of OCR, they could produce entertaining results when fed to an LLM. It is technically an isekai series, after all…
Y’know, for a gal who only got into this game to meet a boy, Our Mighty Crushing Crusher has really gotten into it. Anyway, Our Scrappy Heroes keep the wolf at bay long enough for The Big Finish, and their reward is… sorry, princess, the wizard’s in another castle. (classical reference)
Verdict: they did still win the fight, they got a new quest, they all got to see her big spell go off, and most importantly, she achieved her Maiden Victory.
(now if only she’d get some high-level armor…)
So, feeding the redhead tasty food blows her clothes off? I have a cunning plan…
Anyway, she’s working both sides of the tsundere trope really hard this week, but she’s got it so bad that she even bonds with Our Tasty Private Ogress Secretary. And then he trips another flag with an accidental marriage proposal, while Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal spies from afar.
Verdict: this is leaning a little hard into the First Girl Is Best Girl trope, especially given the quality of the alternatives we’ve already seen, but otherwise it’s amusing fluff, and the explanation of why demon gals go around half-naked sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
(I’m sure there are beaches and hot springs in this world for Our Hero to investigate…)
During the post-meeting chat at Friday’s Zoom meeting, people were joshing with the presenter about the AI-sourced art on his slides, and it turned into a more general discussion of offline AI, and I mentioned a few of my SFW experiments.
A co-worker messaged me later about his frustration trying to generate some simple, straightforward RPG art: a dying orc on a battlefield with a sword through his chest. He was using a Flux model, which is The New Hotness (and can produce very detailed, textured pics), and no matter how he prompted it, the sword always ended up pointing in a safe, non-violent direction.
You could carefully arrange every element except the stabby bit. This didn’t surprise me in an official model with strong guardrails that hadn’t been trained on violent content, but surely there was a derivative model or LoRa that would do it? TL/DR: if there is, I couldn’t find it on CivitAI. Other sorts of objects, IYKWIMAITYD, can be inserted into bodies in “uncensored” Flux models, but not weapons.
But Flux is new, and apparently harder to train. So I wrote a likely prompt and fed it to the full set of SDXL-based models I have that all take similar parameters (~60 of them; this sort of X/Y/Z comparison grid is a one-click operation in SwarmUI). Most of them produced something that looked like it came out of an orc bodybuilding magazine (with the usual repetition from related models), a few produced images where the pose and point of insertion suggested that the swords were blunt and capable of vibration, but one lonely model reliably produced the desired effect.
Prompt: realistic ((photograph)) of a male orc warrior, wearing armor, ((on his back)), ((dead)), ((eyes closed)), on a battlefield, ((stabbed through the chest)) with a sword, full body, at night, side view. 4k, crisp, highly detailed, intricate, ultra textured.
The model that killed orcs most reliably was Nova Furry XL (NSFW). Despite the name, it doesn’t spontaneously furritize everything you make, but it is very porny, so don’t click that link anywhere near a work environment.
The next step was to try to coax a more realistic model to improve that picture to add details and texture. I tinkered with SwarmUI’s img2img and refinement workflows, but the moment I adjusted the sliders enough to get Flux to produce its signature details and textures, the sword stopped stabbing. Most other models proved only slightly less annoying to work with, but I did manage one success with Crystal Clear XL and sent it to my co-worker:
Nova and Crystal Clear both have other models that might produce something more detailed or realistic, so I’m downloading them to try out later.
…unless people start telling me something else doesn’t suck.
Well, that’s not good news. And by “that” I’m referring to the guild rep being promoted from freakish caricature of Japanese gay subculture to “heroic Duke’s son’s clingy boyfriend”. Let’s just forget we saw that, m’kay?
Anyway, Our Bountiful Bounciful Elf Maiden and Our More Famous Than We Thought Cat-Blacksmith-nya accept a quest to help a town apparently threatened by demons, but they won’t be going alone. Our Twink Junior Duke turns out to have been part of The Hero Party, and continues to fight the good fight with a group that includes two bikini-armored lush-bodied gals and probably some other people I didn’t notice. But he’s not just openly gay, he’s a gleeful psychopath, which shouldn’t surprise Vulcan (whose silhouette is right there with him in the shot of The Hero Party) but somehow does.
The morning of their departure, Our Guardian Kitten soothes his nervous mistress with a cat-kiss on the cheek, which she responds to with a more direct kiss on the lips, awakening his budding elfsexuality. I’d say “get a room”, but he already spends half his time squeezed between her massive jugs. No nudity yet, but don’t worry, the village that they’re rescuing has a very nice outdoor hot springs bath for all the gals to share. Forget the missing women, we’ve got priorities here, which means three naked gals ganging up on Our Heroine to grope her huge tits (soundtrack by Joe Walsh). Yup, this show is hitting all the points. Way up firm and high.
As for The Big Cliffhanger, the episode count tells us Our Heroine can’t die, and the show premise tells us that Our Little Big Kitten will be able to stay by her side no matter what, so the stakes aren’t terribly high. On that note, the boss fight against the demon was really lame, and obviously far less important to the animators than the bath scene. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Verdict: in a show that’s centered on big soft tiddies, could you maybe throttle back Teh Gay a bit?
(I have been asked to ensure that pics contain a full three behemoths, but since they generally come in twos, I’ll have to go with four; not Our Two Heroines And Their Two Heroines, but at least they’re the right species)
Elf fight tonight! This week, Our Shadowy Hero uses up a big chunk of the animation budget to show off in front of Our Schoolgirl Hunter and the two spear-carriers, in a battle that he firmly believes to be a challenge despite never even getting scratched. Then he wraps it up by accidentally obliviously convincing His Rich Comic-Relief Sidekick that he banged the girl all night long. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. For the hero in an action show, anyway.
Verdict: Our Hero is starting to realize the widening gulf between him and humanity. Clearly we need more little-sister time to bring him back to Earth.
(“Hunters are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be Esil, to strike terror into their hearts…”)
Alternate title: The Hero Party Is a Bunch Of Dicks, So I’m Shacking Up With A Catgirl And Three Newbie Hotties Who’ve Got It Bad For Me. For some reason, the leader of that party looks like he was drawn and animated in the late Nineties, but since their characters are set up to be jerks, the only one I hope we see more of is the little blonde titty-witch.
Meanwhile, Our Underappreciated Hero and his new party all look about 15 thanks to the simplified art style, except for the well-developed curves on the half-armored redhead and the hot-pants tan-elf.
They all get a little blushy at the thought of him joining their party, but the real tingles start as he guides them on their quest and reveals just how incredibly awesomely perfect and skilled and thoughtful he is. He even puts on a show for them with a nearly-instant solo boss fight as their first party livestream, raising their opinion of him to near-godhood.
Verdict: all this and a sexy guild gal on top; the fan-service shall be with you, always.
(no fanart worth mentioning; the catgirl joins the party later, but animal ears are justice, so I’ll just grab a little something from the vault)
Perhaps the finest gift my sister has ever given our parents was this year’s advent calendar full of dog treats. Because it’s the only thing in the world that can reliably shut the yappy thing up. She’s a Schipperke, you see, and fiercely protective of her people, whether the threat be from friends coming over for dinner, family trying to go upstairs, people making sudden movements, squirrels exploring a nearby tree, delivery drivers approaching from the street, or any neighbor’s pet.
She has a piercing bark, and also some unknown history of trauma from her first owner before being returned to the breeder, and her antics got old fast. She’s been through several rounds of training, and will eventually respond to a mix of commands, treats, and a squirt bottle filled with water, but The Magic Box utterly fascinates her. For the last few weeks, they’ve been handing it to me as soon as I walk through the door, and even though the original fancy treats are long gone, she knows there’s something good inside, and slowly, reluctantly, silently comes over to find out what it is.
We worship The Box for its miracles.
So, after seeing what happens when you throw a pile of context at an LLM and turn it loose, I decided on a new approach: instead of using the explicit RAG support in LM Studio (which only works through the GUI at the moment), I wrote a script that concatenated the story bible and a “write the next scene” prompt and called the API three times, asked me which one was the best, appended that one to the story bible, and then repeated the process. Doing it as a series of one-shot requests without any accumulated conversational baggage kept it from devolving into complete nonsense or prompting itself to keep going without any input from me.
Amusingly, when I ran it against an “uncensored” model trained for role-play, it went dark and kinky so quickly that it tripped its own flags and started refusing to participate in writing more of what it had just written. It even fell back to the “you should seek therapy” line, unknowingly psychoanalyzing itself.
Was any of it any good, before or after it got itself hot and bothered? No; it looked like scenes from a story, but only on the surface. I didn’t waste much time on the project, fortunately: I had ChatGPT write the script.
More precisely, I had ChatGPT write something that almost worked but had no error-checking and completely overlooked an obvious problem with handling the JSON-formatted POST data.
Next time, perhaps I’ll play with the front-end that the hardcore (giggle) RP fans like, SillyTavern.
“Oh, look, it started snowing again just as I finished clearing the turnaround so I don’t have to back the car downhill 75 feet!”
(today’s 3 inches were accurately forecast, but still annoying)
“Welcome to buy-the-bluray fan-service, Tsundere Elf-chan”.
Yes, there’s a title drop. Yes, there’s nudity, blushing, pouting, and mostly-futile efforts to keep herself covered. The credits promise more. Yes, Our Dreamwalking Hero is grown-up enough to hold down a steady job, but still young enough not to point out to His Dreamy Dream Girl that she’s stark naked on all fours with her tits swaying in front of him; she has to figure that out on her own. And, yes, he deliberately dressed his 100-year-old elf partner in premium lace lingerie and a schoolgirl outfit.
Note that this is not a slave-waifu scenario where she’s now trapped in Japan. She can go home at any time… by falling asleep while he’s touching her. So, y’know, no pressure.
Verdict: my expectations consist of light rays, steam, conveniently-obscuring objects, food porn, tourist porn, and an inconclusive romance (they start dating in book 6!).
(fan-art? yeah, not so much)
Ah, that’s what I’ve been waiting for! This season hits the ground running, correctly assuming that anyone watching does not need a lengthy recap. There’s all sorts of stuff bubbling up in the background, but one of the most significant events of the entire series is finally on screen: Maomao finds a kitten. (okay, technically the adorable young princess finds it, but it has to be cleaned up and nursed back to health before she can be allowed to touch it)
Maomao gets ruthlessly teased about not being a cat person despite her name, leading to a conversation with Jinshi where he begins to understand certain things. By comparison, Maomao getting caught smuggling in porn to sell to the concubines is trivia.
Verdict: more, please, but I could do without ever hearing the ED song again. I actually like the OP song, but the animation that accompanies it seems too modern and spoilery.
(I’ll need to restock on relevant pics for this show…)
In which Fear The Cute Ones takes a level in Foul-Mouthed Badass. This episode pretty much sets up everything that you’ll see all season: super-powered shouty heroine working the guild counter and walloping boss monsters to escape overtime, twintailed junior guild gal who adores her mysterious alter-ego, first-rank party leader whose attempts to recruit her are about 50% sexual harassment, laid-back mage and cuddly little healer gal who fill out his party, scorned loser adventurer who’ll “show them all”, sinister masked figure in dark alley, and a fiercely thickening plot. Also a light touch of buy-the-bluray, but we’ll see how that pans out.
And I’m not kidding about the cuteness. The ED would make a good dessert topping.
Verdict: I know what I’m getting into here, even with the occasional need for earplugs.
(no fan-art worth mentioning yet; this is official from the light novels, I think)
One more new show to try out this season: A-Rank Adventure Harem. Fingers not necessarily crossed, but at least crossing-adjacent.
“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:
meets poster girl at first inn he walks into.
offers her candy to come up to his room and teach him to read and write the local script.
she lounges on his bed and teasingly offers to become his mistress as he sketches her like one of his French girls.
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)
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.
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)
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?
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”.
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.