Fastest. Tsunaround. Ever. Also, that wasn’t a turtle.

(unrelated horn-y gal will have to do until the fan-artists get to work on Alna)

Maomao: The Movie trailer

Here. TL/DR: it’s a new story by the original author that doesn’t conflict with the continuity in the upcoming Fall and Spring seasons.

The only thing worse than woke dubs…

…is Youtube’s AI trailer dubs. At least, I hope they’re AI, because the alternative is that non-Disney dub actors are even less talented than I remember from the last time I was exposed to their product.

(and yes, fuck-you-youtube for turning them on by default; that and auto-continue-to-unrelated-video are almost as annoying as your ads that I block)

Season’s Greetings ’Splodies

There seems to be some noise outside…

Project Hail Mary

Now on Prime Video. I didn’t think the book was as good as The Martian, but I guess I’ll find out how the movie is.

Based on the ‘Recommended For You’ page…

…Amazon thinks I have a six-year-old autistic daughter who only eats sustainable organic vegan snacks and drinks alkaline water, and who demands a constant supply of new fidget toys. Yeah, no. Well, not that I know of, which is the same thing when it comes to shopping.

Quality Control

“I’ve got 106,000 problems, and a 1girl is almost every one of them.”

I’m currently generating small (256x256) images for every one of the JSON prompts I’ve extracted from photos on my laptop and NAS, to see which ones should be removed from the final dataset. It takes about 1.5 seconds to generate each one with Krea2, so it will run for a while:

split -l 500 current.jsonl
start=1;
for i in x??; do
    echo $i
    mkdir -p out/$i;
    jq -r -s '.[]|.json' $i |
        sui -j -a 1:1 --pre out/$i/krea2 --set wctest \
            --seq $start --pad 6 gen -r krea2small -c 500
    start=$(($start + 500));
done

Thanks to the miracle of sorting, the output starts out with pics from the old late-Eighties/early-Nineties mail-order fashion/lingerie catalog Mello Mail. The vision model really captured the style, to the point that you not only can identify the era by the clothes and hairstyles, but I can even tell which pictures were based on my friend Carmen.

I’ve already found a few places where I can strip out more text from the generated prompts. I’m just opening up each batch of 500 in the MacOS Preview app and setting it to “contact sheet” mode, so I can quickly scan through the batch for things that either have text or don’t have women. It will also be obvious when I trip over anime cheesecake and GenAI fails, both of which will be removed.

I’ve only found one actual non-1girl prompt so far, and it’s because the LLM analysis was spectacularly wrong. Original: pair of large breasts viewed from above, with bra pulled out to show the nipples. LLM analysis: “a baby’s torso, viewed from above; adult hand with visible fingernails, gently holding the fabric at the sides of the baby’s torso; camera slightly elevated, looking down at the subject”.

NSFW

Dear Apple,

Please add back the whitespace that used to be at the edges of your windows. It’s really annoying to try to find the “drag” and “resize” areas when the content starts three pixels from the edge of the window. Either I end up resizing a window when I’m trying to select text, or selecting text when I’m trying to resize the window.

Seriously, I understand that you hate the entire concept of having multiple windows on screen, between the aggressive push for full-screen mode, the aggressive push for tabs, and the complete removal of window management options other than crude iPad “tiling” like Windows 1.1 is once again the height of fashion, but give the content room to fucking breathe. Make Whitespace Great Again!

(this public service announcement brought to you by everyone old enough to remember when Apple had evidence-based standards)

Isekai Mighty Maid, episode 1

Reminder: this is from the same author as God’s Shouty Appraiser, so my expectations have been set accordingly. The most important limitation is that there is not a single catgirl in this former game-world.

The primary twist to the “reincarnated in my favorite game” theme is that Our Maid-Obsessed Heroine never heard of the game, and has no idea she’s the main character. Meanwhile, a good chunk of the cast was also isekai’d, and has obsessively-detailed knowledge of every possible path through the story, and she’s not playing it right! (it’ll be a while before we meet all the reborn characters)

How is it? Well, I could do without ever hearing the idol-pop rap in the OP song again; funny how they skipped that in the preview. They establish the two main girls and then jump into a flashback to explain how Mighty Maid got her dream job, saving her original Mary Sue life for the end.

Verdict: imagine Mahoro’s arrival in Mahoromatic, but less cute and far more powerful. And make it shouty.

(Nagi’s maid magic is best)

Fair warning…

The new new new new hotness in offline GenAI image-making is Krea 2, which produces pretty damn impressive images, and unlike Klein-9B, the one I was using most recently, you don’t lose 10%+ of your images to anatomy fails. One particularly interesting feature is that image generation is almost completely uncensored, but the text processing layer attempts to replace naughty words, and this turns out to be spectacularly easy to get around, making this perhaps the first zero-day-hardcore-hack model. Just be sure to specify that all participants are clearly of legal age, because it apparently will go there, too.

So, yeah, there will be more GenAI girls soon. Currently it’s working on a batch that converts Japanese cheesecake photos into oil paintings. Some work better than others.

Thanks, Apple

I needed to download something from Apple’s app store on my work Mac. Which meant I had to create a new Apple ID. Which meant I had to give it a unique phone number for verification; you can’t skip this, and the number can’t be tied to another Apple ID. It must also have a billing address, but the credit card is optional. Once you’ve set everything up, it also wants to enable cloud sync of all your data, so it had to be a new account; I will not mix work and personal data.

I needed to have a phone number that either accepted text messages or incoming calls, and it silently refused to call my Ooma VoIP number. So I had to charge and turn on the old iPhone that I’ve already wiped twice, that still has my old California phone number on it.

Which used to be associated with my personal Apple ID, but fortunately I changed that when I moved back to America. One text message later, and I could power the phone down again.

Why, yes, this is bullshit.

A good start

I’m delighted to see that the antifa terrorists who tried to murder police officers and federal agents as a “protest” against the concept of borders have been convicted and sentenced to decades in prison.

May there be many more (convictions, not attempted murders).

First Summer show for me will be Isekai Mighty Maid on Wednesday. Next up is Tan Teen Oni Waifu on July 3rd, Skeleton Knight 2 and Magilumiere 2 on the 4th, Isekai Ass-Guardian on the 5th, then Tanya 2 and Bumpkin 2 on the 8th.

Farm Harem Never 2, fin

Yeah, they pretty much ran out of material and padded the hell out of the ending. That’s what they get for deleting all the hareming. At least we got a small dose of tan-elf engineer gals to help finish it off.

Verdict: gutting the source made this a lot less fun than it could have been.

Witch Hat Atelier, fin

“Okay, do we rush the awesome story and risk ruining it, or do we cliffhanger the hell out of this final episode?”

Verdict: they cliffhangered the hell out of it. And they don’t seem to have announced a second season. Perhaps they’re waiting for the pitchfork-wielding crowds to assemble.

NSA reveals how bad their security is

Anthropic’s Mythos LLM went through it like a Swiss Army Knife through margarine.

Revised image-recognition prompt

So, after running ~80,000 photos through an image-recognition model, I’ve been working on consolidating them into a proper dataset. Unfortunately, the LLM output had so many inconsistencies that my processing script was turning into a mess of exceptions.

So I handed the system prompt over to Claude for cleanup and now I’m re-running the analysis. This will take a while, but the good news is that updating LM Studio on the M4 Pro Mini and re-downloading an MLX version of the model has sped up the processing and reduced the frequency of lockups.

New system prompt (still using qwen3-vl-4b):

It’s not perfect…

I asked it to describe this picture, and it never came back:

For a while I thought it had gone nuts looking for the 1girl, but eventually I got Claude to invent an explanation that there was an underlying problem with the specific model getting fixated on colors and going into a “degenerative repetition loop”. It even supplied helpful links that referred to a completely different LLM.

The suggested fix, setting a hard max-tokens limit and a repetition penalty of 1.1, seems to be working, but it might be the right answer for the wrong reason.

One quirk is that the format is so strict that all it does to identify multiple subjects is separate the lists with a blank line. No headers for “subject (left)”, “top panel”, etc.

The Anti-Altman

Wondermark explains it all:

“seriously, find another one”

Google Maps search:

J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg”
G: (zooms in on location that is closed for remodeling)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg”
G: (again)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg that’s not closed”
G: (again)
J: “Chase Bank near Miamisburg seriously, find another one”
G: (returns all locations in ~10-mile radius)

New promo videos for Magilumiere 2 and Isekai Ass-Guardian. The first shows off the new underrim-glasses-wearing magical engineer gal, and the second shows off the platonic-as-far-as-he-knows harem.

Apple Watch accessibility is infuriating

The crown button on my watch stopped working, and the FAQs suggest that the most likely cause was poor tolerances dirt in the gap, which could be fixed by holding it under running water and slowly rotating and pressing the crown button.

This worked. However, it also somehow turned on audio announcements of each on-screen action, which prevented any actual, y’know, actions. I could type in my passcode, and it would cheerfully recite the digits, but would not pass them through to the watch to unlock it. And this behavior survived a reboot.

The only way to regain control of the device was from the “accessibility” menu on the phone app. There was literally nothing I could do from the watch itself to disable what I had accidentally enabled; it was completely useless.

Today I was consumed with the desire to bitch-slap an emergency-room doctor into the next county. Fortunately, he wasn’t in the room at the time.

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 11

Seems like an odd time to be introducing an entirely new race of subjects, but they did include a crew of scantily-clad busty succubi, so I can’t complain. And then we got a standalone piece with all the subtlety and complexity of a four-panel gag comic.

Verdict: would have been significantly improved by having the succubi use their powers to get the haremettes a-hareming. One more week to go.

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 12

This week, Our Problem Children help Our New Problem Child deal with his crippling insecurity and history of abuse, and Sexy Witch Gal demonstrates that she is both A) an excellent teacher, and B) a damsel in distress.

Verdict: as part of next week’s season-ender, I demand the announcement of season 2. With a firm date attached.

(this week we got to see a new Bad Witch in action)

Of course the final battle against the Big Bad Evil Ivell had to be extra-shouty, with a side order of Button Elf. No reunion with his isekai’d friends, though, who at least got as far as meeting Our Best Guild Catgirl right before the credits rolled. No announcement of a second season, but they made no particular effort to tie off dangling plot threads, and in fact padded out the ending, so they may be hopeful.

Verdict: forgettable shouty fluff with not nearly enough catgirl. The divine revelations open up all sorts of questions about what’s really going on, but answers are unlikely to be animated any time soon. If ever.

(Little Witch catgirl is unrelated)

(12 episodes for Not-Harem, 13 for Witch Hat)

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 10

Well, if we’re never going to get a proper harem, at least we got a swimsuit episode. Part two is an over-narrated explanation of how they finally got some new human villagers, which Our Hoe-Holding Mayor somehow thinks will resolve the gender imbalance despite all of them being young married couples. And New Female Villager #7 somehow triggers a cliffhanger, sigh.

(unrelated, of course, except for the animal ears and the swimsuit)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 11

Looks like it’s problem children all the way down, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Also, the return of Sexy Witch Gal, with a disguise that sends Our Heroine to the moon.

Verdict: two episodes left, and they’re clearly trying to create a satisfying season-ender. But true satisfaction comes from announcing a second season…

On Stargate

Some thoughts, now that Amazon has chickened out and shitcanned the previously announced new series…

I remember the magazine hype before the original Stargate was released in theaters. It… wasn’t as cool as they’d made it out to be, but was still a lot of fun. I rewatch it every few years.

SG-1‘s debut on Showtime blew me away. I was sad that we only got bare titties in the pilot episode (because Showtime demanded them), but it’s not like they needed cheesecake to sell the story. What I still love after all these years is that they hit the ground running, with all the characters well-developed and working well together, not just the core cast. About the only real clunker was the poor guy who got stuck with the job of summarizing the movie relationship between Jack and Ska’ra.

Anyway, I loaded it up on Prime over the weekend, and it started at the season 1 episode Bloodlines, in which Teal’c has to deal with the family he left behind when he defected. This was followed by Fire & Water, in which Daniel is declared dead. And neither of these stories could be told by today’s Hollywood. A father balancing duty against family and making difficult choices? A mother who vigorously disagrees with those choices and their impact on her and their son, but behaves like a grown-up about it? A cranky-but-wise father-figure mentor, training the son as he trained the father? And in the second one, a full military funeral executed with precision and respect for the service, without a hint of irony or eye-rolling?

And of course, Good Ol’ Doc Frasier, as usual carrying every scene she was in, standing up for the health of the team while still respecting the chain of command, instead of being used as a writers’ mouthpiece. (and she even got to kick a bit of ass in the next episode, Hathor)

(it did often feel like she was running the medical center alone…)

She has awakened! And she seems to be the only person in the cast who doesn’t shout, which explains why God was trying to keep her napping. Anyway, Evil Ivell attempts another cunning plan that should have worked if Our Shouty Shota hadn’t gotten divine help at just the right moment (a very prolonged moment, when the Big Bad Wolf should have torn him to pieces in the first five seconds of the fight), but even in failing, she managed to get Our Hero’s cheat powers revoked and teleport him right into a cliffhanger.

Verdict: will there be time for Our Dusky Best Catgirl to arrive and save the day? And will she drag along Button Elf and Our Isekai’d School Pals, or will all of that be saved for another season that may not happen? Next week, it ends.

(random unrelated catgirl from the archives)