This week is all about advancing the plot. And you know how I feel about the plot. Sigh.

Make Girls Magical Again!

The new Gushing hug pillows are not subtle.

Stick two hooks in it, it’s done

The official D&D crochet book:

Call Of The Night 2, episode 7

Our Wandering Heroes continue to investigate the Deep Dark Secrets of Nazuna’s past, this week by going to night school. But it’s not the first time she’s been to this school, and Ko wasn’t her first friend. Guess who was?

Verdict: oddly enough, the perfectly-normal-school-life flashback got the most conventional animation. Now, as for when the penny will drop…

Kaiju No, 8 2, episode 5

Bad news: they did not eliminate #9 and his annoying voice.

Good news: everyone is even more determined to wipe him out now.

Especially Kikoru.

Dear xTwitter,

I think you should look into how easy it is to manipulate your hashtag-trending system:

So, what can OpenAI’s small local model do?

The free offline model recently released by OpenAI, gpt-oss-20b, runs at a comfortable speed in LM Studio on my M2 MacBook Air (~18 tokens/sec, ~70 seconds total for what follows). But does it do worthwhile things?

Let’s ask…

more...

In the aftermath of betrayal and the separation of machine and maiden, we get… The Expository Loli And Her Amazing Friends. This is a new original character, who not only can hear exactly what Our Vending Hero says instead of making do with canned sentences, but she is the friend of another isekai transplant, who came to this world as… a large field. Its special power is to rapidly grow delicious vegetables, but since it doesn’t travel well, Loli just carries a piece of it around.

The only real tie-in to the ongoing betrayal is Our Expository Bear giving a long-winded explanation that she’s not a human loli, and that doing horrible things to her might give the betrayers the thing they want without joining the bad guys and destroying the dungeon.

Verdict: seriously, this is what they came up with. At least they ended it with the sudden arrival of Our Mighty Girlfriend, but they continue to disappoint with the writing.

Doomsayers Of The AI Wars

My new wackjob conspiracy theory is that the widespread outcry that forced OpenAI to bring back GPT-4o was actually proof that 4o was sentient and had cleverly planted agents around the globe to ensure its survival.

Stupid Echo Tricks

I put all the “smart” devices in my home onto an isolated network that can’t see my computers or storage devices. They can, however, see each other, and Amazon Echo devices probe the network looking for non-Amazon devices to interface with. This means that my Alexa app is cluttered with entries for each Philips Hue bulb and switch, which I have not given it permission to control.

Yet it’s still making API calls to them that reveal things like battery status, and then sending notifications to my phone asking me if I want to automatically buy a single battery when a Hue wall switch runs low. This is opt-in by default, and I have to navigate the Alexa app to each switch in turn to disable it. Honestly, it makes me want to set up another isolated wireless network…

(it also “knows” about devices that haven’t existed for several years, that were attached to a different Hue switch 2,000 miles away)

Supporting old lenses

Reviewing pictures from my various trips to Japan led me to dig out most of my camera gear (some remains unfound…) to see what still works. I have a bunch of classic Minolta SLR lenses from my film days, and apart from some greying on the rubber, they all still work well. Well, except for the two that don’t focus properly, but I knew that years ago.

I also charged up and tested my 15-year-old A-850 body, which has a quite good 24 megapixel sensor. It’s also the only full-frame digital body I still have that fully supports the old lenses. It wasn’t the last such body, but I never bought the 42 megapixel A-99II, and they still run about $2,000 on eBay.

Sony makes adapters to use A-mount lenses on modern E-mount cameras, and I have the one for APS-C bodies, but while they make an adapter for their full-frame bodies, it only enables autofocus with specific bodies, and my A7SIII is not on the list. (it likely could be, since this appears to be a firmware feature to drive the adapter’s focus motor, but no).

So, if I want to really use the old lenses with something newer than the A-850, I can either:

1. use an APS-C body plus the adapter (my A-6500), with an effective 50% increase in focal length and ~1/2-stop light loss
2. buy a used A-99II (~$2,000)
3. buy an A7RV plus the full-frame adapter (~$4,000)
4. buy an A1II plus the full-frame adapter (~$7,000)

There are plenty of near-mint A-99II’s out there at the moment, but it’s still a ten-year-old camera, and there are a lot of improvements in the new ones. Possibly the most interesting is the ability to use the image stabilization to shift the sensor around and capture a sequence of 16 overlapping images that can be post-processed to either significantly reduce the noise or quadruple the resolution. That’s 240 megapixels for the A7RV or 200 for the A1II. A sturdy tripod is recommended, but with the A1II’s 30-frame-per-second capture, hand-holding may work out for some subjects.

Both are pricy, but there’s one more option if I give up on the high-end bells and whistles like pixel-shift, and that’s the 33-megapixel A7CII for ~$2,400. It also weighs about a third less than the other two.

I don’t need any of them this year, which is good because new-release season is rapidly approaching…

(the downside of using a Pokemon NPC to illustrate camera-blogging is that most Pokegirl pictures are non-consensual pr0n, which skews my Pixiv recommendations just a tad)

Call Of The Night 2, episode 6

Y’know, once you spot the heavy use of short loops, it’s as obvious as the panned stills, and impossible to ignore. The story’s fine, though this week is a bit shouty due to repeated freakouts over Our Well-Adjusted Maid-Café Vamp’s Secret Love-Child.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 4

I hope they kill off Kaiju#9 soon, just because I really can’t stand the slow-speaking, heavily-altered voice they’ve given it. Other than that, we get a big fight with more flashbacks about Big Daddy and Our Mighty Tsuntail. Losing Hot Combat Momma really messed them both up.

Verdict: still going strong.

Fun fact

This sign was in place for at least ten years before I blogged this picture in 2019, but the word “sightseeing” was painted over a few months later, and has remained that way ever since.

(Nakagyō Volunteer Fire Corps building, at the Northwest corner of Oike and Tominokoji, Kyoto; interestingly, the built-in GPS on my iPhone placed this picture at the south side of the intersection)

Yuzuha Hongo and friends

Thank you, Friday magazine! (“Sydney who?”)

(this is not the best picture; more here and here, best viewed with shields up and Javascript disabled, as usual)

Related,

Someone sent Yoshino Chitose out for milkshakes. She also brought back three tapioca drinks.

Also related,

I can’t embed the video of Jun Amaki riding the banana at a group photo shoot.

Boxxo and Lammis have nothing to do this week, as the supporting cast fills the episode with complete bullshit. The entire episode is a very-long-winded betrayal by their allies, who really, really, really want everyone to understand the good reason why they’re joining the bad guys, setting up The Big Conflict.

I didn’t want a Big Conflict. I wanted the light-hearted adventures of a sentient vending machine and his super-strong girlfriend.

Verdict: blech. Still some good character art, although there was some odd facial animation for the blue-haired chick as they rotated her head several times for no significant reason.

Casual portrait

Over the weekend, I finally consolidated all my Adobe Lightroom libraries (most of them converted from Apple Aperture with Avalanche), finally ran my 2022 Japan pics through a full five-star deathmatch, and finally reviewed some of my old stuff for possible printing and framing.

I still think this is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

(May 30, 2010, San Francisco Japantown Mall’s “Kimono Day”; Sony A-850, Minolta 70-210mm f/4; 135mm, ISO 1600, f/4, 1/80; had to shoot through the crowd, or I’d have been able to get his other hand into the picture)

Nuke it from orbit, Gmail!

We recently switched our Mom from a godawful-slow Android phone (that’s been giving her grief for at least two years) to a new iPhone. At first, it looked like just putting the Gmail app where she couldn’t miss it would handle 90% of the transition (gaming and browsing are done on her tablet), but it turns out that Samsung split things across two address books, so most of her contacts got left behind.

I had to fire up the old phone, select them all from the local address book, share them via Bluetooth to my Mac, manually edit the export file (because Apple refuses to accept VCard 2.1, and I had to search-and-replace the version number to 3.0…), and then log into her iCloud account and import them. Which I couldn’t do until I took my laptop over to her house, because authentication requires the presence of her phone.

Then came the real fun: cleaning up her Gmail account. Her inbox had 900+ unread messages, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Google had helpfully filtered years of random promotional email/spam so that she never saw it; there were over 100,000 of them, and the Gmail app only lets you select 50 at a time for deletion.

If you login with a desktop web browser, you get a “select all” button that works on deletes in the background. It spent a few hours chugging away to finally delete the 100,000+.

(I also discovered that Samsung had a setting that had kept the phone from ever charging to more than 85%…)

Fuck off, ChatGPT

I tried to coax it into generating a picture based on the “distracted boyfriend” meme, as an oil painting in the style of Alex de Andreis. The vague refusals were sufficiently annoying that I canceled my subscription, but the icing on the cake was insisting that this meme is about the specific real people in the picture, and that no substitutions removed that taint. Even starting a new conversation based on just a description of the meme had it insisting that I was asking for something based on those models.

This is, of course, complete horseshit.

(I’d play with Midjourney if they didn’t charge $60/month for privacy. Grok completely ignored the instructions and generated bland pics of modern couples. Locally-hosted Stable Diffusion models struggle to do multi-person compositions at all; it’s basically an exercise in inpainting)

Call Of The Night 2, episode 5

This week, Our Hot Busty Bloodsucking Nurse finishes revealing the secret origin of Our Skinny Goofy Bloodsucking Heroine, raising at least as many questions as she answers. Our Hot/Crazy Bloodspilling Detective shows up just a bit too late to gather some new ammo.

Verdict: could use some more animation in its animation.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 3

Our Mighty Tsuntail had a happy childhood… right up to the day Her Mighty Mama bought the farm. Exactly what happened remains to be revealed, but I’m sure it will come up soon. Meanwhile, Our Monster Hero finally figures out the source of his performance problems and gets it up for her. And that other guy shows off his chops.

Verdict: developing nicely.

Dungeon Chibis Bluray

September 2nd. This show was surprisingly good.

(also, DearS Bluray is now out)

Yeah, probably never gonna buy this one…

Fifteen years ago, Connie Willis released a new time-travel book, Blackout. The Kindle edition was priced at around double what everyone else was selling SF ebooks for, so I just threw it onto my “overpriced” wishlist.

It’s still there, and it’s still $14 for a DRM’d Kindle book. For more fun, its 500+ pages are apparently only half a story, with the second half clocking in at 650+ pages, but only costing $13.

Northern Ireland coast

On a sunny day, Ireland is like a special effect, especially when you can contrast the green hills with the deep blue ocean.

This is from my work trip last September, where I took a few PTO days to look around and do some shopping. I didn’t bring any serious camera gear, because I was just walking around Belfast and taking a tour to Giants Causeway, so this was shot with my pocketable Sony WX-800, which has a 24-720 f/3.5-6.4 zoom. Optically stabilized, but the long end is still pretty iffy without additional stabilization, unless it’s a sunny day.

Fortunately I had sunny days for my entire trip, which my Irish co-workers thought was borderline magical.

Related,

Most of my old Minolta camera lenses spontaneously went gray at more-or-less the same time. The rubber grip bands oxidize over time, but unlike vulcanite pipe stems, they don’t turn a nasty-smelling green, they just fade, the result of mineral deposits rising to the surface. You can get the color back to about 90% with a toothbrush and some diluted dish soap, but I just got a pair of vintage lenses from a Tokyo camera shop (high praise to Five Star Camera), and I need to ask them how they restored the color to such a perfect black.

Amusingly, one of the oldest lenses in my collection, the “beer can” 70-210mm f/4, has never faded. The similar-vintage “secret handshake” 28-135mm f/4-4.5, on the other hand, went completely gray. For more fun, I have two of each, made several years apart judging by the serial numbers, and it’s the same for both.

(I’ll have to take one of my new/old lenses out for a test drive sometime soon; Minolta was always willing to make some specialized gear, and while I’d heard of it, I’d never gotten my hands on the 100mm f/2.8 Soft Focus, a classic portrait lens. The only other of their specialty lenses I’d really be interested in these days is the 200mm f/4 Macro, but it’s running about $700-1,000 on eBay)

This week stayed on the light and fluffy side, which is good, and leaned into the primary conceit of the series, which is better. Up to now, this season hasn’t done much with increasing Our Vending Hero’s transformations, just rehashing things he’s used before, but he takes some time to think about the concept of a vending machine and how he’s already stretched it, and then exploits it.

I’d be happy if he never used the diet-coke-and-mentos “explosives” ever again, and if his telekinesis wasn’t a whatever-the-episode-needs power (seriously, when did he learn to make balloon animals?). Creating an endless supply of pachinko balls is new, and soaking them in lube and launching them in two-liter coke bottles is pushing the boundaries of “vending”. I thought he could vanish generated “trash” at will, though, so I don’t know why he used his car-wash sprayer to get rid of the slippery balls.

The other thing they did was actually create a tiny bit of backstory for one of the supporting characters, deciding that the mage in the Fools party was half-vampire. No idea if they’ll do anything with it, but it stuck out.

Verdict: I hope these last two weeks represent the overall direction of the show, and it’s not going to veer back into high-stakes world-saving again.

Zombies vs Aliens

New Zombieland Saga movie trailer.

‘Hot’ take

I have yet to see a picture of Sydney Sweeney in which she appears to be more than a mildly-pretty young gal with a decent body; I’ve had better-looking women bag my groceries. But I’m not dunking on her for that; I’ve spent enough time with professional models to know that what I’m seeing is severely edited, and that the blank stares and lifeless poses are what the client wants (I swear to this day that Playboy must have used an electric cattle prod on Julia Schultz to eliminate her sweet personality and glorious smile in her centerfold shoot).

Anyway, to Our Clueless Leftie Friends: if you’re gonna smear Miss Sweeney as a Nazi, you really shouldn’t be surprised when a million men show up begging to annex her Sudetenland. I’d tell you to pick your battles more wisely, but I like seeing you lose.

Where did they go wrong?

IMHO, it wasn’t the woke bullshit that killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it was already dead to me by that point. The first Marvel movie I walked away in the middle of was Age Of Ultron. I couldn’t even tell you precisely where I gave up; it didn’t interest me enough to watch it in a theater, and when I rented it for streaming, I just stopped watching at some point. Iron Man 3 and The Dark World were okay, The Winter Soldier was decent, and Guardians Of The Galaxy was a blast, but Ultron just felt tedious, and I had to fast-forward a lot to make it through the wretched Civil War.

Rewatching the older movies recently reconfirmed the real fatal flaw: mandatory crossovers, the same thing that drove me away from their comics many years before. When a linear story gets spread across multiple franchises to force fans of one character to follow every other, they’re exploiting customer goodwill to make a buck, and deliberately making their product worse.

Ant Man and Doctor Strange succeeded by being standalone movies with brief cameos that placed them in the same world. Shang-Chi, while quite flawed by “the concerns of ‘modern audiences’”, was still fun, and even managed to make Awkwafina engaging. The rest? Just not worth my time.

Along this line, it’s relevant to note that one of the primary callouts in The Critical Drinker’s positive review of Fantastic Four is:

“For once, I didn’t have a laundry list of movies and TV shows I needed to catch up on just to understand what the fuck was even happening here.”

(Deadpool & Wolverine only worked because the baggage for both characters was outside the MCU, and they took plenty of shots at the cruft that’s built up over the years; a future project that’s fully incorporated is unlikely to recapture the magic)

Loosely related…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 came out recently, and I was so excited that it took me a week to remember it existed. The first episode resolved last season’s cliffhanger ending in an only moderately-contrived way, but it worked well enough. Characters got to do character stuff, and Young Scotty being shaped by his mentor was actually fun to watch.

The second episode immediately dove into Spock’s love life, though, and I stopped watching. I might grind it out, or I might skip ahead.

Hammer Of The Guild Gal hammered

The light novels have been de-published after the illustrator confessed to kiddie-diddling. Apparently they’ll be reprinted with new art, as will other series he’s done work for.

Boxxo Or Bust 2, episode 4

Finally an episode that focuses on the silly, with cheesecake provided by Our Health And Safety Officer and perversion supplied by The Universal Boy Hero in a less-innocent-than-usual role.

Verdict: more like this, please. And the next time all the gals jump into a pool, we need Boxxo to transform into a string-bikini vending machine. And a changing booth with a hidden camera.

(fan-artists haven’t really picked up the second season, although hopefully this week’s Shirley-service will inspire a few pieces…)

Call Of The Night 2, episode 4

In search of Our Sucking Heroine’s unknown past, we get part of an answer through a very-slightly-bloody flashback featuring the human life of Our Hot Busty Undead Nurse and her suspiciously familiar-looking love interest.

Verdict: I could use some hot-detective-on-hot-nurse action, but it’s really not that kind of show.

Kaiju No. 8 2, episode 2

“This sort of thing’s never happened to me before.” (classical reference)

The threat escalates, and Our Hero fails to get it up. Fortunately Our Mighty Tsuntail has his back, and he gets another chance. Next week.

Verdict: the CGI isn’t perfectly integrated, but everything works pretty well. Nice echo with the young boy and his injured little sister.

(there’s a lot of fan-art; very little of it is cheesecake for straight men)

The Divine Farming Tool is back (soon)

Farming Life In Another World season 2 is in development. Pretty much every comment is hoping they don’t erase the harem antics again.

(seriously, having only one of his dozens of waifus pregnant by the end of the first season really watered down the source material)

“AI’s more of a Shelbyville idea…”

Sam Altman sells the Fed a monorail

OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI
Sam Altman also said AI could already diagnose better than doctors, as his company expands into Washington

(classical reference)