I got a small-but-pleasant surprise when I did my taxes. The new exterior doors I bought last year qualified for an energy-saving tax reduction. Not huge, but worth the hassle of filling out the form.

Dear Amazon,

Can you please stop pretending that “top picks for you” is not just an excuse to shove paid promotions in our faces? It’s bad enough that you constantly fill it with seasonal promotions of things you know I won’t buy, but putting Lena Dunham’s new book at the top of the list was just mean.

After God’s Favored Appraiser comes Oblivious Saint Maid

The author of Appraiser must be feeling pretty good, with two adaptations back-to-back. The summer show will be Heroine? Saint? No, I’m an All-Works Maid (And Proud of It)!, in which a Japanese girl who was super-duper smart and accomplished in her first life finds herself reborn into a game world as the heroine, with the possibly-novel twist that she doesn’t know anything about the game or her role in it, so she indulges her long-held desire to become Super-Maid, totally screwing up the plot. Which was already going off the rails thanks to two other isekai’d teens who did play the game. More arrivals keep remembering their Earth pasts and trying to either take over as the main character or just change their fates, while Our Insanely OP Clueless Heroine just focuses on maidly perfection.

This season’s Foodie Maid has been doing a promotion with the Victorian-maid café I mentioned recently, who’s been getting a lot of visibility thanks to auto-translation on xTwitter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hooked up with this show as well.

(fan-artists appreciate how Nagi rocks a maid costume)

Fuel for the fire

Or more precisely, lack of fuel. My co-workers in Belfast worked from home on Tuesday, to avoid the traffic-blocking protests. I liked the farmer who rode his bicycle to protest, because he couldn’t afford the fuel to bring his tractor.

(this LoRA is basically limited to drawing Sexy Grownup Misty, not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

More fun with image-gen previews

One of the lesser-used features of Flux.2 and its derivatives is that it was allegedly trained on structured JSON prompts. The examples make it seem like there’s a schema you should follow, but it turns out that’s not so. I took one of my recent ~500-word paragraph prompts and told the offline LLM Gemma 4 to analyze it and convert it to JSON, without specifying any particular structure.

I fed the resulting prompt to Flux.2-Klein-9b and got a quite surprising result: the animated WEBP preview showed the post and composition settling down much faster than with a text prompt. The pose was stable right away, and by 20 steps it was done adding background elements, and just steadily added details.

The minor downside is that running the 31B version of Gemma 4 on my Mac Mini took 3+ minutes per prompt, which does not scale. I’ll have to look for smaller, faster models that are still smart enough to do the analysis and generate valid JSON. In my experience, the various methods of uncensoring reduce the formatting accuracy, so I might have to tinker with the prompting to avoid frightening the horses.

The major downside is that SwarmUI insists on parsing your prompts to apply its own features, with no way to bypass it. I’d say about 20% of my batch of LLM-generated JSON prompts tripped over this, using strings that triggered an attempt to convert words to a floating-point number.

animation

3D girl seeks new position

Jun Amaki is leaving the modeling business soon. So, what are her plans?

Auto-translation from xTwitter:

Benefits of dating me ↓💕

・Natural I-cup
・Petite with a baby face
・Sweet voice
・Can cook
・Always full of charm
・Surprisingly domestic

Drawbacks ↓

・Suddenly becoming lazy
・Breasts too big and getting stared at by people
・Too much of a spoiled baby
・Bad sleeping habits
・Getting full super quick

NSFW

Not seeing much of a downside here…

Space Fantasies

If I run Flux.2-Klein-9b at the recommended settings (CFG 1, 8 steps, 1024x1024-ish resolutions), it takes about 6 seconds to generate an image on my RTX 4090. This is fast enough to tinker with a dynamic prompt, run off a few hundred results, quickly reject the (9% at 8 steps) anatomy fails, and then pick out some that look pretty good. It’s a better use of my gaming PC right now than killing time grinding in Diablo IV or hunting for something new to play.

But since I already have hundreds of GenAI SF cover gals lying around waiting to be deathmatched, today we’re going to look at what happens when I really lean into letting LLMs enhance prompts.

I made the changes to my LLM-prompt-enhancing script to run multiple system prompts across the same string in order rather than invoking it multiple times in a pipeline, and it improved the stability, but it looks like the occasional crash is actually caused by a recent update to the engine under the hood (llama.cpp), so I still have to occasionally restart the script, whether it’s talking to the PC or the Mac Mini. Even on the gaming PC, it takes about as long to do a complex prompt enhancement as it does to generate the resulting image, so I just let them both run while I did other things, and occasionally kicked off a new batch.

Perhaps I gave it a bit too much freedom…

(more after the jump)

50s Backyard Pinups

For a change of pace, I abandoned my wildcard sets and just fed the LLM brief descriptions. The base prompt was simple enough:

A mid-century catalog illustration featuring a @<makeover:pretty young woman>@ wearing @<fashion: sexy lingerie from the 1950s>@, serving cocktails outdoors in the back yard of a 1950s suburban home. The image is composed to emphasize the setting as much as the woman.

There are a total of 4 LLM invocations: the two targeted ones listed above, the standard enhancement prompt recommended by Z-Image Turbo, and a cleanup pass I’ve named “legal review” that adjusts ages to cut down on random lolis.

(more after the jump)

Bumping the resolution 25% and adding 4 refining steps increased the generation time to a whopping 9.5 seconds, so after I’d made a bunch of those, I made a slight change to the theme.

Vintage Cherry Blossoms

A mid-century Japanese catalog illustration featuring a @<makeover:pretty young Japanese woman>@ wearing @<fashion: sexy lingerie from the 1950s>@, serving cocktails outdoors under a blossoming Japanese cherry tree in the Spring. The image is composed to emphasize the setting as much as the woman.

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I’m in a “pictures are unrelated” mood today…

Gate 2: Naval Gazing

I missed the teaser trailer for the Gate spinoff. Summary: no familiar characters appear.

TDS has long since become tedious

I did not have a very high opinion of most of the commenters on the Marginal Revolution blog, but it just went down anyway.

Klein-4b, not for me

The smaller, faster version of Flux.2-Klein looks impressive at first glance, but the failure rate on a large batch using the same prompts I fed to 9b was nearly 50%. Not just extra or missing limbs and fingers, but wildly disproportionate body parts. Giant heads, too-short legs, gorilla arms, giant man-hands, etc, etc. 9b is a lot more stable.

(unrelated, I think I need to update my prompt-enhancer to allow repeated passes over the same prompt; piping the output into a second (and sometimes third) copy of the script is overloading LM Studio on Windows, so while it’s more than 3x as fast as the Mac for running LLMS, the memory management is crashing the pipeline at random intervals. Reusing the same connection with different sysprompts should be more stable, so I just need to specify the behavior when multiple sysprompts are passed as arguments)

Pissing on the shoulders of giants

I was picking up some takeout at a restaurant, and this not-a-cover song was playing. It swiped the tune and some of the lyrics of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, but used them so poorly that I found myself wishing they’d just written a completely original bad song instead of dragging a classic down to their level.

If you use Ollama!

And you have an M5!

And at least 32 GB of RAM!

And you use the one specific model that they worked with Apple to support!

Somehow my excitement went down with each sentence…

Same prompt, different models

I took a sample from the less-than-fully-dressed dynamic prompts and handed it to three versions of Z-Image Turbo (standard, NSFW v5 & v6), Z-Image Base, Flux.2-Klein-9d, and Qwen Image 2512. Mostly the same parameters, except for increasing steps from 20 to 30 for ZI Base, Klein, and Qwen, and increasing CFG to 6 for ZI Base. I generated 10 images for each model, with random seeds, and kept the best 3.

Prompt:

Painting in the style of Delphin Enjolras, intimate portraits of women in interiors, soft pastel and oil technique, smooth sensual textures, dramatic chiaroscuro from warm lamplight, glowing warm palette, quiet, serene atmosphere. Of a elegant, tiny, Caucasian, college-age sexy woman with pear-shaped figure, luminous Dark brown eyes, delicately lobed Ears, subtly Aquiline Nose, perfectly tapered Chin, pointed Jaw, soft Rosy Cheeks, narrow Forehead, oval face shape, Prom makeup with healthy Reddish-Brown skin and White hair, softly curled into a low, romantic updo, with subtle highlights of champagne blonde, and her mood is cheerful. Standing forward bend, knees slightly bent, torso lowered, arms extended to floor, wrists aligned, neck elongated, collarbones gracefully defined. Her location is Historic Thera, Greece. Cool under-cabinet LED creates task lighting; functional focused illumination; clean kitchen-like quality. She is wearing pastel purple scalloped lace glossy ribbon with a delicate sheen, and a pastel purple tassel necklace.

Not a single image paid any attention to “Historic Thera, Greece”; most of them ignored “soft pastel and oil technique” (with standard ZIT going all-in on the pastels but doing nothing painterly; this is much more pronounced than the usual ZIT low-contrast that people work around with LUTs). The early mention of “women in interiors” seems to have combined with “clean kitchen-like quality” at the end to put them all into a generic Western-style kitchen, without even adding a window for the standard Santorini tourist view. The LLM “enhancement” to the prompt did add some interesting elements to her looks, but also made some of the sentences borderline incoherent.

As you can see, there’s no mention of nudity and naughty bits, with the only mention of clothing being a ribbon and a tassel, so it was up to the model to decide how much, and which, skin was showing.

Klein, like its resource-intensive parent Flux.2-Dev, had the best grasp of style. Speed-wise, standard ZIT was the fastest at 28 seconds, then the NSFW versions (+15%), then Klein (+50%), then Qwen (+140%), and finally ZI Base (+246%). The full Flux.2-Dev has a tendency to run out of memory on my machine at this resolution (1248x1824), but it’s safe to assume the results would be “very similar to Klein but better”.

(note there’s already a v6.1 for ZIT NSFW, but it’s locked away for another week…)

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Turning on region-blocking and automatic translation has had the effect of bringing American xTwitter into direct contact with its Japanese counterpart, and the results have been inspirational and hilarious.

Among the many unanticipated results is the Victorian maid café in Tokyo that has become so popular you can barely visit their web site; it’s suffering a classic slashdotting. Hopefully they’re getting real business out of it as well.

Small steps forward

Version 6 of that NSFW ZIT checkpoint had fewer grotesque anatomy fails and adult-rendered-as-way-underage fails. Still a ways to go, though; I have no idea why its training data included women with bushy black unibrows, for instance.

(some commenters are complaining about poor penis rendering, but since I prefer my nudes with no penis at all, even for recreational uses, I’m okay with that part)

Another step back

I searched my Amazon order history for “kitchenaid”. It returned: a butter slicer, a dusting wand, a dough-rolling bag, an apple peeler/corer, a pineapple peeler/corer, a kitchen-spoon rest, a cord organizer that advertised itself as “for kitchenaid…”, a mixer cozy (ditto), and a KitchenAid spice grinder.

By my count, that’s 70% unrelated cruft. Maybe do a string search before tokenizing it and handing it off to “AI”?

PyPI: litellm compromised

Thoroughly hacked. Detected on the same day, fortunately, but if it got pulled in as a dependency for something you run:

Assume any credentials present on the affected machine are compromised: SSH keys, cloud provider credentials (GCP ADC, AWS access keys, Azure tokens), Kubernetes configs, API keys in .env files, and database passwords.

Crunchyroll announces one show I might watch

plus some others.

Fridge waterfail

So, turning the fridge off for 12 hours solved the temperature problem, but it also somehow broke the seal on the water filter for the ice maker and water dispenser, so that when I went to fill the kettle, the filter leaked as much water as it passed, and since it’s located directly above the top shelf, the water went everywhere.

Once I finished cleaning up and reseated the filter, it stopped dispensing water at all, with the status screen (finally) showing LEAK and refusing to dispense water. Replaced the filter, no change; power-cycled the fridge, and the message changed to ERR. No water.

So I guess there’s going to be a service call after all.

Dark patterns

Network Solutions continues to spam me daily after buying my email provider. I click the Unsubscribe link. It takes me to a page with a checkmark for that specific type of spam (only), and a submit button.

The box is pre-checked. Clicking submit keeps me on that mailing list.

Before making the service call for my way-too-cold fridge, I emptied everything into coolers, powered it off, and waited 12 hours for it to come to room temperature.

Seems to have solved the problem, but I’ll definitely spot-check it for a while. It never hurts to have thermometers in both the fridge and freezer compartments, and my old ones didn’t record high/low range, so I threw a new set into my latest Amazon order.

I can’t even muster up a shocked face…

Crunchyroll major security breach:

“Crunchyroll may be facing a security breach through its ticketing system, which is outsourced through Telus in India”

Space Merc & Harem

Coming in the fall, and pretty much every episode unless they tone it down a lot. Our Hero gets isekai’d into his favorite space game with his OP custom ship, and quickly makes a name for himself as a first-rank mercenary and horndog. The teaser trailer gives a decent look at Mimi and Elma, the first two haremettes.

I’ve been enjoying the light novels, so I hope this gets handled competently. Our Hero Hiro’s voice actor is perhaps best known for Benimaru in Slime, first gal was the lead in Emotionless Robo Waifu, second gal has had mostly small roles, and Our Hot Blonde Ally is best known to me as Class Rep in Loner Harem, although some might recognize her as a certain Princess who deals with “torture”. The director has done some porn OAVs as well as a lot of individual episodes of various shows. Animation production by the studio who did Hoe Harem and the awkwardly-named She Professed Herself Pupil Of The Wise Man; they do have a lot of CGI experience, at least, and they’re gonna need it for this one.

(picture is unrelated. pity)

Figure Facts

That Haruhi-bunny pic I posted recently? I’d unpacked it just before taking the picture, and it wasn’t until I went to put it on a shelf that I realized she’s wearing fishnet seamed stockings. Made of fabric. Somewhere out there, a factory worker had to go to the trouble of actually pulling on her stockings before boxing her up.

Low temperature yesterday: 19°F.

High temperature Sunday: 78°F.

Solo Leveling manga tease

The recent volumes of the SL manga have been labeled “side stories”, and are the bridge between the original series and the sequel, Ragnarok. They include snapshots of Our Hero’s post-victory life, but also a brief glimpse of A Brighter Future.

I’m referring to Best Girl Esil, of course.

Wokalizing Gushing 2?

There are reports that the translation for the upcoming second season of Molesting Magical Girls will be done by one of the opinionated woke localizers who’s been butchering other series. Really hope that doesn’t happen; season 1 exceeded all rational expectations.

Summer: Retired Soldier With Horny Waifu

I read enough of the source material to recognize all the characters in the trailer, and while he definitely acquires a white-haired dark-skinned teenage oni waifu, there’s a touch of bait-and-switch in the setup, as the story gradually adds past events that make him more and more important. I mean, his feats in the present were enough to win the girl, and what more can a man ask for?

(unrelated Best Horny Waifu… and Other Best Horny Waifu)

Workday failed to pass the buck

They argued that the hiring discrimination they got caught doing for their corporate clients was just “the algorithm”. A federal judge just called bullshit and said they’re on the hook for illegal discrimination against protected classes (in this specific case, over-40 applicants).

Given that I’m one of the many applicants who would apply on a Friday evening and be rejected before sunrise on Saturday, I hope this decision holds up and eventually restores some slight sanity to the job market.

Also, cancel all H1B visas and eliminate the program. It’s a clear case of regulatory capture, overwhelmingly benefiting Indian nationals at the expense of American citizens.

(I suspect that eliminating H1B would also end the careers of a lot of Indian execs and senior managers, far too many of whom are reported to be taking kickbacks from their visa-hostage workers)

Learn from my fail!

Something that I hadn’t seen on previous trips to Japan is places advertising curry as カリー (“karii”). The more common romanization カ レー (“karei”) is used for Japanese-style curry, which outside of restaurants is generally made with solid blocks of commercial roux; I can usually find Vermont or S&B blocks at US groceries.

The other is for Indian-style curry, which is not what I want to eat when in Japan. Actually, not a big fan of it anywhere, although I will usually order curry in Thai restaurants.

My plan for this weekend is to make a relatively thick Japanese-style curry with finely-chopped ingredients and bake it into my dinner-roll recipe, using the technique from Alton Brown’s recent sloppy joe bun video. I’m in the habit of buying curry bread at Japanese bakeries, but those are usually deep-fried, and most of the ones I had this trip had too-flaky crusts that made terrible hand-held food.

Illegal Truckers Of The Amazon

While driving to Chicago for the flight to Japan with my sister, I passed a jackknifed semi carrying an Amazon trailer, which had failed to navigate a quite generous highway onramp in broad daylight in good weather. In the distance, I could see the Amazon warehouse it had just left.

Given what we’re (finally) hearing about grossly unqualified illegals getting commercial drivers licenses and “operating” big rigs with no qualifications and no ability to understand English, and Amazon’s notorious cheapness, I strongly suspect that the notable increase in broken delivery promises is directly tied to shipments being scattered across the landscape when their “drivers” crash.

In other news, the item that was promised for same-day delivery on Tuesday by 10 PM was last seen on the other side of the state on Tuesday at 4:15 PM, and no longer has an estimated delivery date.

Interestingly, this is one where I don’t have to wait a week to cancel, and in theory, I could do so and reorder the product with the promise of next-day delivery…