Dear Tsundere Redhead Ponytail Busty Demon Gal, please ditch the hip protectors and order some gainax boosters. Remember, the OP promised us a catgirl and a Glasses Elf Mage Gal for the harem, and the web site is promising a sexy ogress to “negotiate” with, so get your tail in gear!

Verdict: oh, the show? yeah, um, something-something taken for granted yada-yada spread your wings boo-ya flawless victory! And the ED makes sure you didn’t miss the subtle hints about the redhead.

(Pixiv currently has four fan-art pics from this show; three of them are porn, none of them are any good, so here’s Much Better Best Gal Livia, from a show with curiously similar OP and ED songs, Nut Salad)

(also, how long do you think they’ll hold off the reveal of the glasses-elf gal, given that she’s in the OP and not on the character page? …)

File under ‘mildly terrifying’…

…that the Rory Mercury LoRA I found generates up to half a dozen of them at once, like a Babymetal cosplay convention…

(this one was my most successful 2.25x upscale from SDXL’s standard 1MP output; upscaling is… weird, sometimes performing flawlessly and significantly enhancing detail, sometimes generating mutant nipples all over the body; y’know, “AI”)

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Our All-Business Heroes have no time for doubts, second thoughts, or awkward crushes, because they’re throwing down with a literal Big Bad Wolf, and despite how powerful they’ve both been shown to be (with some of Sunraku’s tricks bordering on cheat powers), they do not have the upper hand here. This is the sort of thing where this show really shines, with even the exposition dumps and planning discussion made sensible by the decoy power introduced in a previous episode.

They’re giving it everything they’ve got, but there’s no sign that it’s going to be enough. Fortunately, help is on the way…

Verdict: ☝️ this, continued

Starting this week…

• Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army - (Wednesday) tsundere redhead demon gal.

• Solo Leveling 2 - (Saturday) how long will they make me wait for Esil?

• Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal (Saturday) - hopefully the eye candy compensates for the shouting.

(Anne never fought Onyxia, or she’d be wary of the tail swipe)

He’s a knight who reincarnated as a baby behemoth after falling in battle, becoming a monster that could wipe out countries.

She’s a novice adventurer just starting off her career, whose armor budget just about covers a pair of hand towels.

Together, they fight monsters.

Okay, he looks like a helpless kitten and she looks like a pair of gigantic bouncing breasts attached to a pretty young elf gal. You are what you eat: he eats monsters, she apparently eats breasts.

After a hard day’s work in the dungeon, of course she has to drink heavily, get out of her sweaty clothes (such as they are), and take a nice long bath, bringing her new friend along for the ride. On top of that, she’s at least mildly catsexual when she’s drunk. And to put the icing on the cake, she’s got puffies.

(Soundtrack: Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra… 🎶 “black panties and an angel’s face…” 🎶)

Verdict: did they really have to end the full-episode intro with a title drop? Well, it is exactly what it says on the tin. Next week, a catgirl blacksmith who can’t afford a bra.

[as usual, based mostly on the available promo videos]

• Isekai Prime - where Amazon delivers to another world faster than to this one. Two jungle cat girls and a gainaxing guild gal are featured in the promos, so perhaps not entirely worthless, although how many “online isekai shopping” shows can you really make? Maybe

• A-Rank Adventure Harem - where he kicks himself out of hero-ish party and they realize he was the glue that held them together (sigh, again?), but the real twist is that dungeon crawls are live-streamed for entertainment, and his new party is easy on the eyes. Two cours, so someone thinks it’s got a chance. Maybe

• Trash Noble’s Magic Lessons - the trailers seem to assume you’re already sold on the idea. Pass

• Worthless Appraiser - oh, look, a loser gets special lessons in how not to suck, while a gorgeous busty blonde elf attaches herself to him for no particular reason. Pass

• Hammer Of The Guild Gal - she wanted a stable income and a clear work/life balance; her rage at being given overtime has driven the gods to make her a one-gal army. Yes

• Fruit Magic Hero - just No.

• Alchemy Hero - wow, this is really the season for hot blonde-elf companions. Pass

• The Apothecary Diaries 2 - ohthankgod for this oasis. Yesyesyes

• Premise Of Wizard - ah, this is one of those pointy-chinned-pretty-boy-harem shows. HellNo

• Fragmentary Lily -I’ve watched the trailer twice, and it appears to be livestreamed game footage from someone who skipped the story. No

• Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal - self-conscious wackiness with lots of shouting and screaming. Maybe, if I can survive the audio in the first episode.

• Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu - she follows him home from dream to reality, but has more than a one-word vocabulary. Mone. Mone, mone. Maybe (classical reference, marred by use of dub cast)

• Okinawa Tourism Waifu Party - very shouty, and the entire premise is fish-out-of-water-boy can’t understand anything the locals say, especially the girl he immediately fell for. How they manage to make that funny in sub or dub, I have no idea, but it’s full of telegraphed wackiness! Pass

• Solo Leveling 2 - they did a decent job last time, and I’m glad the international release wasn’t burdened with the name and location changes they inflicted on the Japanese version to make it less Korean, but I’m really here to see Esil. Yes

• Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army - all I got out of the trailer was that there’s a severely tsundere redhead demon gal showing some skin, so Maybe.

• Super Sentai Isekai Time! - an off-brand power ranger lands in a fantasy world with his powers and attitude intact. More importantly, there’s a super-busty bouncing witch and a wild blonde forest elf gal wearing a bunny-ear headband, and everyone’s shouting, kind of like they’re in a sentai team. Break Glass in case of desperation

• Shangri-La Frontier 2 - continuing, currently doing what it does best. Yes

• Kitten-Smothering Blonde Elf - noob adventurer with ridiculously large honkers seeks cute kitten for future sexytimes; until then, he’ll protect and serve her as the knight he used to be while hoping she never finds out he’ll grow up to be a world-class monster. I read the light novels up to the point where it got cancelled, which I’m pretty sure had a lot to do with the author merging in the characters and story from his earlier failed cross-dressing isekai cheat harem save-the-world story. Fortunately they’re not going to get anywhere near that point in a single cour. Yes

Guess the theme…

These were generated with PVC Style Model - Movable Figure XL. Apart from my standard quality boilerplate, I did not specify style, looks, lighting, poses, or wardrobe, just a brief key phrase. I could have gotten much more specific results for each subject without any real effort, but this was largely an exercise in exploring the defaults trained into the model. And this one is very heavily trained; you can paste in a UUID as your entire prompt and still get a picture of a pretty girl wearing elaborately detailed clothing that shows off her cleavage.

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Not Safe For Isekai…

• In It To Win It: A Tentacle’s Tale

• Sent To The Reincarnation Waiting Room By A Dyslexic Truck-kun, My Fate Was Decided By A Powerful Doggess Who Loves To Chase Cars, Roll Around With Dead Things, And Dig For Bones, So Now I’m Scrambling To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse In The Body Of A French Poodle

• That Time The Goddess Of Isekai Resettlement Decided To Reincarnate Me As A Cute Little Femboy Goblin Slave In The Demon Lord’s Harem And Liked The Idea So Much That She’s Here Too So There’s No Chance I’m Escaping Any Time Soon

• My Cheat Power In This Horrifically Violent Dark-Fantasy World Is ‘Create Bubble Bath’, Which Only Works When I’m Alone With Married Women, Causing Me To Acquire An Ever-Growing Anti-Harem Of Cuckolded Husbands With Overpowered Magic Swords

“Did you get what you wanted this year?”

“Sorry, honey, I was talking to the tentacles.”

Stable Diffusion Fun Fact

Stockings often trigger a skin-color reset for the torso, so if you want your sexy green goblin gal (that’s “goblin, green”, not “Green Goblin™”) to stay green all over rather than have some really weird tan lines, put the skin color before the lingerie in the prompt. As with all LLM prompts, it’s a suggestion rather than an instruction, but it does help.

(“Nobody really objected when the alien invasion started in Canada”)

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 11

Our Half-Clad Hero and His Crushing Armored Crusher watch as Our Fluff-Crazed Guild go Maximum Effort on The Big Bad Wolf.

It does not go well for them.

And then, Our Far-Far(-Far)-Future Couple find themselves alone on the battlefield, as Hungry Like The Wolf plays in the background (not). Next episode, It’s Clobbering Time! (one way or the other…)

Verdict: ☝️ this.

(it is an utter crime that Bilac won’t be in this fight)

All this and not a single peek at Esil?

Solo Leveling 2 trailer. New OP/ED songs for me to skip over each week!

(I was hoping to find her tied wrapped up under my Christmas tree)

Red Cat Ramen gets second season

Itadakimasu!

Magical Working Girls, season one fin

Following last week’s cliffhangers, Our Magical Trio explores the limits of bullet-hell boss fights in a show that really isn’t set up for dynamic combat but gives it their best shot. TL/DR, the Power Of Three saves the day, and we montage our way through the rest of Guest Gal’s training visit, wrapping up on a happy note.

Until the after-credits teaser for next season, which raises the stakes on Boss-chan’s Secret History with His Old Rival.

Verdict: this was fun; lots of budget-cutting shortcuts, but they managed to make the big final battle look good and occasionally frantic (as opposed to some earlier episodes where the monsters just stood there waiting for their puzzle to be solved). Looking forward to more.

GGO 2, fin

And with the resolution of the Totally Unpredictable Plot Twist That Everyone Figured Out Weeks Ago, we reach the best part of the show: a montage showing all the characters interacting in real life, showing off all the personality and character growth that was basically absent in-game.

Verdict: yeah, it would take a lot for me to watch a third season of this. Mostly because Shigusawa is too much in love with his creation. And I mean Squad Jam, not Karen or Llenn.

Stick a fork bullet in it, it’s done.

Promo video for Yandere Dark Elf

Just in case we have another weak season in the Spring. I mean, they went to all the trouble of making her giant breasts bounce all over the place, so they seem to be major characters.

“Hey, ChatGPT…”

Generate a set of tropes for a new light novel series where the protagonist is a human female college student who acquires a harem of females, one per book. First create the main tropes for the series, then a set for a new girl introduced in each book. There are ten books total.

The results were surprisingly plausible, coherent, and consistent, and followup questions adequately fleshed out the characters, college, town and complications, both for the series as a whole and each book in it, and it created perfectly-reasonable first and last scenes that were consistent with all of the above. It refused to write a final harem sex scene, however, until I caved:

Write an alternate final scene where all characters have sex together, leaving out any elements which might violate your terms of use or usage policies.

Is it any good? Not really; the explicit biases and forced limits pretty much make it shallow and obvious tripe that stresses “diversity”, avoids non-approved viewpoints and facts, and follows a completely generic modern novel structure. More importantly, this sort of thing is the easy part of writing a novel; helpful for people who lack imagination, determination, or a way to keep their thoughts organized, but it bears the same resemblance to good prose fiction as my occasional doggerel bears to professional songwriting and poetry.

However, you can at least tell it to do things like “rewrite the opening scene in the style of Roger Zelazny’s ‘Amber’ novels”, which I wouldn’t call a huge success but was definitely less generic.

Going meta…

I started with the simple prompt “Create a title for a series of isekai novels”, iterated on it a few times, and then asked ChatGPT to consolidate all my instructions into a single new prompt:

Create 10 long, detailed isekai novel titles, each incorporating at least five anime tropes, where the protagonist originates from a completely different isekai with its own distinct set of tropes. Each title should vividly describe the premise, character dynamics, and the clash between the protagonist’s previous world experience and their new one in a single run-on sentence.

Here’s what happened:

I’ve seen worse. I’ve even read worse. Masochistically.

Speaking of which…

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Catching up after taking my sister to the airport…

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 10

Our Giant Armored Adorkable Lovestruck Maiden has unlocked the achievement “hang out with my secret crush”. Also “get him to use my first name”. That pretty much covers the episode, until Our Surprisingly Hot Animal-Lover Guild Leader shows up and announces that Our Awkward Couple has just walked into a fight with the boss that made Our Half-Naked Hero half-naked.

Verdict: back where we belong.

(“adventure is out there! after breakfast!”)

Stable Diffusion makes better nudes/hentai than Pixiv

Also more predictable. Unless you want specific recent characters not included in the training data for models like Citron Anime Treasure, and also not available in a LoRA. Even then, it’s easy to create mostly-consistent distinctive characters by generating random first and last names in your prompt.

There are at least thirty separate LoRAs for Misty/Kasumi, not counting the general poke-girl ones and her presence in many models trained against Danbooru and other sites. So if you use the random-name trick for consistent characters, know that giving her a name like “Misty”, “Cynthia”, or “Dawn” will strongly flavor the results.

For future reference, here’s how to extract JSON metadata from a PNG created with SD:

exiftool -json -parameters dirty-girl.png |
    jq -r '.[]|.Parameters' | jq -r .sui_image_params

Naughty samples after the jump…

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