Frieren 2 starts on ThursdayFriday. Next Japan trip booked, with a very healthy yen-to-the-dollar rate. Honestly, it’s reaching the point where it’s cheaper to fly there and fill your suitcases than it is to pay the duty on overseas purchases. Speaking of finance…

“I’m so old…”

“…I remember when a 10% interest rate was high for a credit card, and it meant you had a poor credit rating.”

Activist mindset, unpacked

There’s yet another video of the aftermath of the Good shooting in Minnesota, in which it is alleged you can hear her wife shouting “why did you have real bullets?!?”. I won’t link it, because you cannot clearly see who’s speaking, but it’s certainly plausible, because only an idiot activist completely divorced from reality would ask this question, and she established those credentials in the earlier videos where it was clear she enjoyed confronting the officer documenting the scene.

Right up until she realized they were about to experience a felony arrest for deliberately interfering with law enforcement, tried and failed to get into the car, and yelled, “drive, baby, drive!”.

(and for those who haven’t been keeping up, the released video evidence clearly shows Good blocking traffic on a narrow one-way street for several minutes, having a good time as she dances around in the driver’s seat banging on her horn like a drum, then both she and her wife cheerfully taunting the officer; it also clearly shows her smiling as she shifts into gear and accelerates)

Split-random prompting

I want to inject more background variety into my pinup wallpaper, and the most common method is to pass your prompt through an LLM and give it instructions to enhance.

This has not produced satisfactory results, because every LLM I’ve tried has ended up removing significant details from the prompt. Things like having the women be young and pretty with lively expressions, which kinda defeats the purpose.

My latest test is to generate two separate dynamic prompts, one for the background and one for the subject, pass just the background output through the LLM, then merge them back together. The LLM model is an uncensored variant of Gemma3-12B, recommended by someone on the SwamUI Discord. I’d been using an older variant of the same model, and this one seems to produce cleaner results. I need to tweak the system prompt, though, because it’s adding men to the picture a bit too often. Sometimes that works, but only if she’s still the focus.

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The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, revisited

This is not a good movie. It is, however, a fun movie, from a genre lost in time. The “Diceman” comedy-club physical tics don’t translate well to screen close-ups, but otherwise it doesn’t take the character too seriously, and ends with him outgrowing it, much like Clay’s earlier film Casual Sex? (which Lea Thompson reportedly hated because they changed the ending to have “The Vin-man” redeem himself in her character’s eyes, and being a Good Feminist™, she wanted no part of that).

Clay has said that he thinks the film failed because of the orchestrated anti-Dice campaign that derailed his career. Yeah, I disbelieve; it wasn’t raunchy or edgy or quotable enough to satisfy his fans, and ended up just cheesy, with no rewatch value. And it debuted three weeks after Robocop 2, one week after Die Hard 2, and the same week as Ghost.

Actually, forget every other 1990 summer movie. Ghost was a monster hit that was still in more theaters in December than FF opened its three-week July run in. There was never a universe where FF was going to be a big hit, but it might have limped along for a while in a year without major competition for screens.

Anyway, have a dark-haired cigarette-smoking Italian-American in a studded leather jacket, sitting on a red convertible giving attitude:

(closest I managed to getting fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror; ZIT clearly doesn’t know what they are, and it was 50/50 what side of the car the steering wheel ended up on)

Grokking the negative

Pretty sure the AI-image bots flooding X in an effort to steal clicks from the bikini-photo bots have no idea what the letters “SFW” stand for, and are just applying the label randomly.

The last time I was in a work environment where the first image could have been displayed without complaint was in the Eighties, and it was a summer job that involved moving heavy objects. And even then, only because no women went back into the break room to hang out with the janitors.

NSFW

Seriously, the only images I see tagged “SFW” on X are the ones that aren’t.

Amazon ‘product support’

Wow, that was a tedious waste of my time. Ordered an item that required assembly and installation, found no instructions in the box or linked to the product page. Amazon insists that they handle product support, and sends me to a page that asks about the quality of the delivery. Twenty minutes of automated menus and chatbots, and the only thing I can do is return it for a refund as “defective”.

Settling the debate

Japanese plushie manufacturer recalls 4-eared pony girls. Fans complained that one of the gals had human ears in addition to her horse ears.

How bad is Fallout season 2?

I tried to watch some more of it; every scene without post-apocalypse Walton Goggins sucked, hard, including his pre-war scenes. I gave up and ordered a DVD copy of The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, because it’s not streaming anywhere. While I wait for it to arrive, I’m seriously considering buying the first season of The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father on Amazon Video. Just so you know where my head’s at.

Apparently the Fallout team decided that the cast of the first season just wasn’t large enough, and there weren’t enough side-plots. Season 1 had three main PoV characters, which was two too many, and now there are, what, 9? 12? 20? Fuck that.

(one PoV is enough for everybody…)

Unrelated,

Diablo IV’s new season exists to pre-sell the next DLC by giving early access to the insanely-overpowered new paladin class. Seriously, without even trying I ended up with a character who can sleepwalk through all Torment 4 content hitting one button every 60 seconds.

Yup, you sure showed those bosses who’s boss!

They are. Gaming studio learns that unionization does not in fact protect your job.

Rules of the road

Don’t park sideways to block a public street, with the deliberate intention of interfering with law enforcement.

This wasn’t covered in my Driver’s Ed course, but back in the stone age, the stupidity of blocking traffic and fucking with cops were both generally understood.

(and, no, do not hit the gas and attempt to flee when they come to arrest you for your crimes; success just adds more charges)

FYI…

If you check out the episode teasers for Fallout 2, you’ll see that episode 3 apparently gives a lot of screen time to an officer of the Legion. Who looks a bit odd, and doesn’t really seem to fit the role. And yet, he was vaguely familiar.

Looking him up, I guess I haven’t seen Macaulay Culkin in anything in over 30 years. I can kinda see the resemblance, but it takes a while.

Also, the clip reminds me that Lucy is an annoying character begging to be shot by everyone she meets.

Doggerel for nothin’…

(with no apologies to anyone…)

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
I’m makin’ 1girl for Christmas,
    Mommy & Daddy don’t know,
I just encrypted my hard drive,
    So now let’s get on with the show!

I found a LoRA for huge tits,
    Christmas 1girl for me.
Another that makes naughty bits,
    Christmas 1girl for me.

A wildcard set called Kinky Pose,
    Checkpoint trained on skanky hoes,
Piercings, tattoos, loligoth clothes,
    Christmas 1girl for me!

Oh… I made some 1girl for Christmas,
    Showing both front and behind,
I deepfaked all of my classmates,
    I’m sure that the teachers won’t mind!

The sitter found out what I’d done,
    3D 1girl for me!
It turned her on and we had fun,
    3D 1girl for me!

I tried out things I’d learned online,
    kept it up ’til half past nine,
Dad joined in and said it was fine,
    3D 1girl for me!

The pics were generated by feeding my lyrics in as a prompt.

Very first result…

NSFW

Random pointless product alert

Oura, maker of smart-rings that have 7-day battery life, has announced a new portable charging case capable of 5 full recharges. I’m not sure how large the off-grid-for-more-than-a-month market is for a fitness ring.

(picture is probably unrelated…)

Anyway,

There have been several attempts to add detail to Z Image Turbo’s barbie-doll nudity, both as LoRAs and as full model checkpoints. Most of them have not only failed to deliver on the promised parts, but their training data wrecks the faces, and often the general functionality.

My initial tests with Z Image Turbo By Stable Yogi suggested that if you weren’t asking for nudity, the output was usually nearly identical to the original model, and it played well with existing LoRAs trained against it.

There were some interesting differences. Regenerating my square-peg pic changed the scene significantly, and some other regens had easily-visible changes, but I wanted a controlled test with no LoRAs. I used my standard batch vertical wallpaper settings and fed 20 random prompts to the original model, then fed the same parameters back through the script, changing only the model name.

Even with identical seeds, the sampler I’m using introduces a tiny bit of randomness, so I expected minor changes that wouldn’t invalidate the test. (note: next time, use standard Euler instead of Ancestral to eliminate that)

TL/DR: I can’t pick a clear winner based on this sample. Sometimes one was clearly better, sometimes the other, sometimes I liked both. And of course, some of the pics just didn’t work out.

Click to embiggen…

1

A: better clothing texture and long hair. (why shamrock earrings and shoes? literal interpretation of color-word “clover-green” in prompt)

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Frieren season 2 is not the latest premiere of the season, quite, but it’s still gonna be a while. Hopefully the next story arc won’t be so focused on side characters I don’t really care about, although judging from the fan-art, there are plenty of people who really got hung up on Übel and Aura. I didn’t really see the attraction, personally.

“How many bunnygirls does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“As many as I can get my hands on!” – Hef

Today I Learned…

…that even the “following” tab on X doesn’t default to showing you what you want to see. Was there always a pulldown to switch from the useless default “popular” to “recent” and I never noticed it, or is this new?

New Year, old song.

My New Goddess Is A Shoulder Chibi?

I might, might have to try to watch the 58-minute-long premiere of Hero Sentence, after this screenshot from Tenka Seiha’s otherwise tepid review.

Because shoulder chibi.

There are three downsides. First, the plot summary sounds like complete nonsense. Second, the price of the super-long premiere was delaying the next episode until the 15th. Third, the trailer promises that it’s utter crap.

’Nuff said

Related,

Unrelated,

I came out on the SwarmUI Discord as a despiser of “modern UI preferences”. I just couldn’t take the praise for low-contrast text and the holiness of dark mode:

(amusingly, the creator of the app was sure he’d really-truly forced dark mode for the Windows console to ensure the color text (retch) worked, and was quite surprised that I was seeing black-on-white as The Great Old Ones intended)

Side note: by default, to ZIT, “monk” means “Buddhist monk”, even with additional context that should have steered the style to European/Christian; kind of like how it thinks “dumplings” means “gyoza”.

Stripping down the artist list

Now that I’m done making holiday pinup wallpaper, I started the year with the SF dynamic prompts. Although perhaps in retrospect I should have done something special-force-y.

Anyway, I made a few hundred and ran a quick deathmatch where I rejected anything that I didn’t want to stare at as wallpaper, then removed any artist who showed up on the reject list more than 4 times. This knocked about 35 names off the list, then I did it again.

Along the way, I flagged a number of images that caught my attention for various reasons. Some work as pinup wallpaper, some… don’t.

(prompts and parameters in EXIF UserComment, although it might whine about “unknown encoding”; I need to switch the new JPG operation in the pipeline to call exiftool, because I forgot that I’d already tried Pillow’s native EXIF handling before and it sucks)

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Remember that three-week-old order that was never shipped? Yeah, USPS reports that it still hasn’t shipped, and while Amazon’s fully-automated and AI-degraded customer support “chat” system believes the data that’s in the system, it was finally willing to process a refund Friday… over the next 24 hours or so. So they’ve had my money for most of a month, which if you multiply it by the number of unhappy customers who were fucked over for the holidays, adds up to a tidy sum.

Perhaps it’s just more profitable than “shipping goods to customers”.

(and, yes, literal peanuts were involved; from the other recent negative reviews of the marketplace dealer, it looks like “Virginia Diner” took December off)

(as a special bonus, I had to manually search for it on the order page, because the pretense that it had “shipped” (which is an obvious misinterpretation of the USPS status code) kept it from appearing in the convenient “Not Yet Shipped” tab, and absent any action on my part, it would eventually just end up at the end of my order history…)

Chinese fabrication

Speaking of Amazon, I bought an espresso tamping station, and it arrived Friday. Take a good look at the pictures, and you’ll see that there are no photographs of the product. They’re all 3D renders with composited accessories. The wood frame was fine, but even with rubber feet on the bottom it didn’t sit quite level, and more importantly, the black acrylic insert was CNC’d ever-so-slightly oversized for the CNC’d wood.

So the worker simply slathered the bottom with glue and pounded it into place, which lasted long enough to get it into the box and ship it. Looking at the reviews, I’m not the only one who discovered this quality workmanship when the glue failed and the center of the insert bent up. I sanded down the edges until it fit, then used gap-filling superglue and a bunch of woodworking clamps to reattach it.

So, good design (swiped from another company), shoddy assembly, and zero QA. I’d have bought a better one for twice the price, but this was the only one that would arrive by this weekend…

(it was surprisingly difficult to get ZIT to grasp the concept of “pounding a square peg into a round hole”; if it made the peg at all, it was almost always undersized, and at least half the time the hammer was held upright, pounding with the base of the grip)

Random test image

As I’ve added functionality to my SwarmUI cli, it’s gotten kind of crufty. In particular, I had two different methods of creating images in JPG format: server-side during generation, and client-side batch conversion. The problem with the first one is that I also added client-side cropping and unsharp-masking, which added more compression artifacts.

So I gathered up the code for cropping, resizing, sharpening, and format conversion, abstracted them into a “process” class that applied them in a well-defined order, and set the server to always generate PNG. Took a while to get everything working, but it makes it possible to clean up the code and make all the processing options available to multiple sub-commands.

(I needed a quick regression-test image to confirm that everything worked, so I used the very simple prompt “a catgirl”. Most of the time this produces a dull photograph of a girl with cat-ears, but this one time the model hit it out of the park)