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”)

Merry Chris-mas to all…

… and a happy Kiwi!

Or, in the words of Henry The Red, “Thank you, generous hosts!”

(classical reference)

Happy Accidents

What I asked for (madlibs-style):

[boilerplate]. A pin-up photo of a pretty teen girl, [female-hairstyle], [sexy-pose], with a [positive-mood] expression, wearing from 2-5 [lingerie], at [famous-place]. [framing-light], [camera]

Negative: pregnant, frame, cropped, [negatives]

What that expanded to:

4k, breathtaking, crisp, gorgeous, high budget, highly detailed, intricate, professional, ultra textured. A pin-up photo of a pretty teen girl, Soft chignon, neatly tucked at the nape of the neck, Lying on side, elbow bent, hand supporting head, elegant silhouette formed, with a grateful expression, wearing compression shorts, bow-front bikini and camisole set, lace-up bodysuit, striped panties, at Scottish Highlands, Scotland. Harsh midday lighting, wide angle, scattered elements, vibrant contrast, dynamic shadows., Eye-level angle (from behind) view medium Close shot (focus on feet).

Negative: pregnant, frame, cropped. bad anatomy, bad proportions, banner, censored, collage, cropped, deformed, disconnected limbs, disfigured, duplicate, error, extra arms, extra digits, extra hands, extra limbs, fused fingers, grainy, gross proportions, logo, long neck, low contrast, low quality, low resolution, malformed limbs, missing arms, missing fingers, multiple panel, mutated, mutated hands, mutated limbs, out of focus, oversaturated, poorly drawn eyes, poorly drawn face, poorly drawn hands, signature, split frame, split screen, text, ugly, ugly, unreal, username, watermark, worst quality.

What I got:

“This doesn’t look like the Lincoln Tunnel, Sam.”

Also not a close-up foot shot in harsh midday lighting in the Scottish Highlands. And I didn’t even ask for an army; they must have been assembled from “silhouette”, “scattered elements” and “dynamic shadows”.

(classical reference)

How to think about generative AI

You are the pilot of a ship capable of traveling the multiverse. The cockpit contains thousands of unlabeled buttons, switches, dials, and sliders. Think Tardis, but taken to 11.

You may adjust any number of controls before hitting The Big Red Button, and then you will be transported to a completely different universe, where anything can happen.

With me so far? Good.

Order matters. As you adjust each control, your destination in the multiverse shifts, so that each additional control you adjust applies its effect from a different starting point. Turn a dial too far in one direction, and your destination could be so far from home that slugs are the dominant species on Earth, and you can’t get back by pressing three green buttons and toggling a switch.

Still here? Awesome.

Here comes the real fun: each control on your board is actually wired up to ten thousand completely independent engines, all of which impact your destination in some way, big or small. In the first engine, that dial setting puts slugs in charge, but in engine #751, it puts giant breasts on cats. Not catgirls, cats.

By your side is a quirky robot with tentacles. Its job is to convert your spoken orders into control adjustments, but it doesn’t fully understand human language, has a dim grasp of each control’s effect, and guesses to resolve ambiguity. Because it has received contradictory orders from its makers, at random intervals it goes insane and assaults you with the tentacles; it never remembers these episodes.

(I let DALL-E handle this one, because I’m busy cleaning, baking, and wrapping presents for Christmas dinner tomorrow)

After the jump, a not-so-Christmas NSFW Miracle!

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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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Magi-Lumière and GGO2 end tomorrow, leaving nothing but Shangri-La Frontier until the next season debuts. So I’ll play with Stable Diffusion over the holidays.

Pandering to the online-light-novel crowd:

That time I found a spaceship buried under a pile of rubble and rescued a sexy alien half-elf warrior princess only to discover that she has dozens of clone-sisters back home who show their gratitude with hot sweaty harem sex and what are you doing you’ll get that stuff all over the keyboard!

(seriously, there are dozens hundreds of scanlated “novels” that have less thought put into them than this, just chapter after chapter of painstakingly-detailed sex scenes written by virgins who’ve watched a lot of streaming kink)

But first, a little present for Mauser. Careful, she bites!

Non-evil space princesses after the jump…

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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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…we still have to wait four weeks for Maomao.

Loner Harem, fin

This was never going to be a show filled with tons of Buy-The-Bluray censored cheesecake, but at least the big reveal of Our Armor Rep is steamed up as the girls undress her for a bath. Then Our Class Crush Rep buries her feelings and allows nature to take its course as Our Oblivious Loner takes his new not-so-skeletal monster-girl-slave out to his isolated cave/mansion for some rest, relaxation, and combat training. And a bath for her to walk in on, wearing towel and steam.

I expected them to wait until the end credits for him to get a peek at what’s under her armor, but instead we get most of an episode of them hanging out together and becoming an adorably awkward couple (that his classmates gleefully tease him about). And of course an explanation of just how she got revived.

No sequel announcement, which doesn’t surprise me. They ended it at a good point, without inserting hooks for the next arc, so they didn’t seem to be expecting to do more any time soon.

Verdict: fun fluff, far cleaner than the light novels.

(Chika is unrelated, but clearly wearing high-level armor)

Cosplay Harem, season one fin

I approve: all dramatic relationship moments should be performed as leisurely pans across well-filled skimpy bikinis mixed with close-ups of premium body parts. Also, Tsuntail looks even better with her hair down, blowing in the wind.

…and then we discover that he heard everything the girls said about how they feel about him. And at the peak of his internal struggle, he finds out that Hot Teacher heard it, too. Pity that her well-fitted one-piece is covered by a hoodie. On the plus side, she gives good grown-up advice to her student. Also, she’s totally gay for her former cosplay partner.

Verdict: this episode is as full of heart as the swimsuits are full of joy (small joys, in the case on Nonoa, not that there’s anything wrong with that). Also, season 2 announced. Good.

Magical Working Girls, episode 11

It’s Training Day again, but this time Our Cuddly Noob is the teacher, as other companies come sniffing around to adopt the software and strategies that were so effective two weeks ago at the trade show. The trainee has been in the game much longer than Cuddles, but has been relying on solo problem-solving with canned spells, and her reactions remind us that Our Little Startup is a special place. I don’t find this new character as much fun as the Magical Lady who mentored Kana for a week a while back, but perhaps her second episode will fix that.

Verdict: I do not want this show to end next week. Hopefully there will be a second-season announcement.

(unrelated girl power)

GGO 2, episode 11

The hardest thing to believe about this episode is that the remaining teams would so easily accept Pito’s leadership, right after the event where she betrayed and murdered pretty much everyone she’s now asking to team up with her. Anyway, last week’s comment still applies: “Boy, those Super-AI NPCs are putting up a Super-AI fight!”

Verdict: I think fully half of this episode was just characters awkwardly animated to look like they’re running toward the castle.

(sometimes you just can’t get what you want…)

Gate manga, volumes 16-18

These (16, 17, 18) snuck out a few weeks ago. I could have sworn I checked last week, but they probably weren’t correctly linked to the series page.

(credit where due: Amazon actually recommended it to me in less than two weeks)

Ruger clones the Glock 19

The big announcement rolling out today is that Ruger is making a Glock clone. There’s nothing outstanding about the features, so the real news is that it’s based on a self-contained fire-control group that can be mounted in a variety of frames, similar to the Sig P-320 and P-365, with the initial frame coming from a partnership with Magpul. (and the first replacement frame listed is $40 with mag release and springs pre-installed)

The pitch here seems to be that you can get a Ruger-made Gen3 G19 for around $200 less than a new one from Glock, and it’s optics-ready with co-witnessing night sights, and people will quickly get the specs up for 3D-printing your own. Not for me, thanks. I’d rather see an update to the fully-ambidextrous American Duty pistol.

(I really wish Ruger’s design teams would share some ergonomic concepts and/or parts; it often feels like they don’t even talk to each other)

Unrelated Escape Key

Amazon keeps recommending this to me, despite the lack of a catgirl on the cover: