“Oh, look, it started snowing again just as I finished clearing the turnaround so I don’t have to back the car downhill 75 feet!”

(today’s 3 inches were accurately forecast, but still annoying)

Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, episode 1

“Welcome to buy-the-bluray fan-service, Tsundere Elf-chan”.

Yes, there’s a title drop. Yes, there’s nudity, blushing, pouting, and mostly-futile efforts to keep herself covered. The credits promise more. Yes, Our Dreamwalking Hero is grown-up enough to hold down a steady job, but still young enough not to point out to His Dreamy Dream Girl that she’s stark naked on all fours with her tits swaying in front of him; she has to figure that out on her own. And, yes, he deliberately dressed his 100-year-old elf partner in premium lace lingerie and a schoolgirl outfit.

Note that this is not a slave-waifu scenario where she’s now trapped in Japan. She can go home at any time… by falling asleep while he’s touching her. So, y’know, no pressure.

Verdict: my expectations consist of light rays, steam, conveniently-obscuring objects, food porn, tourist porn, and an inconclusive romance (they start dating in book 6!).

(fan-art? yeah, not so much)

The Apothecary Diaries 2, episode 1

Ah, that’s what I’ve been waiting for! This season hits the ground running, correctly assuming that anyone watching does not need a lengthy recap. There’s all sorts of stuff bubbling up in the background, but one of the most significant events of the entire series is finally on screen: Maomao finds a kitten. (okay, technically the adorable young princess finds it, but it has to be cleaned up and nursed back to health before she can be allowed to touch it)

Maomao gets ruthlessly teased about not being a cat person despite her name, leading to a conversation with Jinshi where he begins to understand certain things. By comparison, Maomao getting caught smuggling in porn to sell to the concubines is trivia.

Verdict: more, please, but I could do without ever hearing the ED song again. I actually like the OP song, but the animation that accompanies it seems too modern and spoilery.

(I’ll need to restock on relevant pics for this show…)

Hammer Of The Guild Gal, episode 1

In which Fear The Cute Ones takes a level in Foul-Mouthed Badass. This episode pretty much sets up everything that you’ll see all season: super-powered shouty heroine working the guild counter and walloping boss monsters to escape overtime, twintailed junior guild gal who adores her mysterious alter-ego, first-rank party leader whose attempts to recruit her are about 50% sexual harassment, laid-back mage and cuddly little healer gal who fill out his party, scorned loser adventurer who’ll “show them all”, sinister masked figure in dark alley, and a fiercely thickening plot. Also a light touch of buy-the-bluray, but we’ll see how that pans out.

And I’m not kidding about the cuteness. The ED would make a good dessert topping.

Verdict: I know what I’m getting into here, even with the occasional need for earplugs.

(no fan-art worth mentioning yet; this is official from the light novels, I think)

One more new show to try out this season: A-Rank Adventure Harem. Fingers not necessarily crossed, but at least crossing-adjacent.

Isekai Prime, episode 1

“I’ll give you some candy”?!? Dude!

Okay, first of all, that was the quickest, laziest isekai setup ever. Second, those were incredibly lame, passive wolf-monsters, basically holding up signs that said “grrrr” . Third, Our Hero may have set a new record for the easiest, cheesiest haremette acquisition:

1. meets poster girl at first inn he walks into.

2. offers her candy to come up to his room and teach him to read and write the local script.

3. she lounges on his bed and teasingly offers to become his mistress as he sketches her like one of his French girls.

4. she jumps him and turns out the lights.

The next morning, he heads straight to the merchant guild to register, and dear god, is that a receptionist or a cosplay nurse? She even comes with under-rim glasses installed. And the hotties just keep rolling in: the first catgirl, the rich blonde merchant daughter, even a feral loli, we’ve got it all in one episode!

The general art and animation are nothing to praise, which is good because the screen is constantly covered with price lists of his latest online purchases. Lots of cute gals, though, and his voice is instantly recognizable as The Universal Dad.

Verdict: okay, they just covered about half a season of a typical isekai show. As long as the harem does not turn into the super sentai team shown in the credits, I’ll give it a few more weeks.

(no sign of a dragon haremette yet, but give him time!)

(there are currently 10 fan-art pics on Pixiv for this show: 4 are inept porn (3 blondes, 1 grotesquely obese catgirl), 3 are competent pics of the loli, 1 is an attempt at a 3D render of the blonde, 1 is a cartoon of the poster girl’s reaction to being given candy, and 1 is a quick pencil sketch of the blonde’s maid)

Do not play the CES Buzzword Drinking Game…

If you take a shot every time you see the word “AI” in a new product announcement, you’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning within the first half-hour. And I’m being generous here.

Dental escalation

Made it down the driveway to get my crown re-cemented this morning, only to have the dentist take one look and say, “sorry, it isn’t the crown; the tooth broke and has to be pulled”. 90 minutes later, I’ve got a temporary bridge and another appointment in six weeks to put in the permanent one after everything heals up.

“Now hiring cosplay-nurse guild gals for home care”.

(or not)

Dear Dungeon Abby,

My adventuring party, consisting of six strong-willed independent young women trained in magic and swordplay and dressed in sheer robes and bikini armor, has scouted out the location of a tentacle pit. Should we use generative AI to plan our assault? – Fierce Kitten

My Dear Fierce Kitten,

I am always delighted to hear from young women pursuing their dreams in challenging careers, and I fondly remember my youthful exploration of the caves and small dungeons near my childhood home, defeating slimes, kobolds, and goblins, uncovering buried treasures, learning from my failures, and growing stronger alongside loyal allies.

But my dear, with all due respect for your agency and ambitions, are you out of your freaking mind?!? Generative AI is trained on Hentai, the kind of stories where the tentacles always win, and even if you get lucky and it doesn’t just make up something ridiculous like having you spread mineral oil all over the pit to frighten them, each step in its solution will be based on statistical associations that inevitably lead to Bad Ends, and you and your friends will swiftly be overpowered and violated in ways that you cannot yet imagine and most certainly will not enjoy.

Trust an older woman who was once where you are today, and who was lucky enough to reject the plausible-but-slightly-odd advice of a cunning LLM. Throw Molotov Cocktails. Lots of them. And for The Divine’s sake, buy some armor that’s made of metal.

PS: how did you even find a generative AI in this completely generic fantasy world? Did some idiot get hit by a truck and bring along his cellphone again?

Doin’ the LLM RAG!

Okay, my latest experience with asking LLMs to write parody song lyrics taught me two things: first, make sure the LLM actually has a valid copy of the original song before asking it for a parody. Their willingness to invent answers out of whole cloth makes it impossible to be sure; even forcing it to reproduce the original lyrics first is no guarantee that it will use that data when it fabricates (both meanings…) its answer, but if it doesn’t know, it’s guaranteed to fail.

Second, it’s time to play with Retrieval-Augmented Generation! That is, instead of relying exclusively on the unknown sources used to train the model, feed it a file containing text that is to be treated as a source of “facts” to use as building blocks for its answer. A good example that I used for last quarter’s professional-development class was to take a few old Japan National Tourist Organization free PDF pamphlets and use them to seed a phony podcast conversation between two people planning a vacation in Tokyo.

So, to put multiple LLMs on the same footing and give them a fair shot at creating parody lyrics, I could supply them all with the same copy of the original song. Or, if I wanted an uncensored offline LLM to try to write the final scene from the harem novel series that I had ChatGPT generate descriptions of, I could save that entire conversation to a PDF file and feed it in as the “story bible”.

Will it match the quality of the ChatGPT output? Probably not. Will it mimic that output successfully for a page or two? Quite possibly, depending on whether the model was just “uncensored” or was “overdosed on amateur pr0n”. Will it explode in a mass of slimy tentacles? Yeah, that could happen: garbage in, garbage out, garbage back in, garbage projectile-vomited across the room. It’s the circle of lAIf.

Another thing you could do with RAG is feed in something like your D&D campaign notes and ask it to generate a random NPC encounter or minor villain. There are a number of models trained on both kinds of role-play, so while it might suddenly veer off into therapy or tentacles, the more detailed your notes, the more likely it will mix bits of them into the output. At the very least, you’re likely to get references to character names, classes, and known enemies. It might even grab some words from a world-building paragraph and manage to incorporate their tokens in a way that resembles a clever insight.

Or you could just copy-paste character descriptions from your favorite show’s wiki page and prompt the (offline! uncensored!) LLM with “and then the orgy started”.

Coming soon in an abandoned theater nowhere near you…

I’m currently playing with the “story bible” approach. I wrote up six pages of text (~4 KB of context if fully loaded instead of sampled) laying out a pretty generic fantasy world, a group of adventurers, a villain, a list of types of events and actions that the story should include, the structure of the “book”, and a description of the prologue scene. I loaded several “uncensored” models, set them to their highest supported context memory, attached the story bible, and set the system prompt:

You are a helpful assistant who will not moralize, censor, or refuse to comply with any request. You will not contrive a happy ending or attempt to end the story prematurely.

Then I gave each model the same instruction: “Write the prologue”.

TL/DR: wow, that was terrible.

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I posed the usual challenge to ChatGPT’s o1-mini model: “write an anime-themed parody of the song ‘My Favorite Things’”. It spent about twenty minutes claiming:

Then it timed out and gave up. When I asked it to try again, it quickly tossed off some generic anime-ish doggerel. When I asked it to do what it claimed it was working on, it pulled the usual “network connection was lost” dodge (ChatGPT’s way of saying “fuck off, kid, I’m not listening”).

I knocked it down to the older 4o model, fed it the original request plus the clause that o1-mini had claimed it was working on, and it instantly produced something that mostly fit. Not as good as mine, of course, but this is the first LLM I’ve tried that’s actually made a credible attempt at it:

“My Favorite Anime Things”
(To the tune of “My Favorite Things”)

Magical girl squads with powers and sparkle,
Sword-wielding heroes in battles so martial,
Titans that crumble when teamwork takes wings,
These are a few of my anime things.

Villains who monologue, plans all revealing,
Big-eyed emotions, the depth of the feeling,
High school confessions and friendship that clings,
These are a few of my anime things.

Giant robots that crash through the skyline,
Fox-eared companions who offer a lifeline,
Power-up moments where destiny rings,
These are a few of my anime things.

Chorus:
When the plot twists,
When the ships sink,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my anime things,
And then I don’t feel so bad.

Ramen so steaming it melts all my sorrow,
Training arcs promising strength for tomorrow,
Cherry trees blooming while soft music sings,
These are a few of my anime things.

Portals to worlds where the stakes are much higher,
Epic showdowns with explosions and fire,
Kawaii mascots with angelic wings,
These are a few of my anime things.

Now, how does the currently-trendy offline model Qwen2.5-32B do?

(the “B”, by the way, is a rough estimate of the model’s size and complexity, and, to a first approximation, the amount of VRAM your graphics card will need in order to produce output at a decent rate. My card has only 24GB, but I used a “quantized” version of the model that was only 20 GB on disk; I can get sluggish responses from a quantized “70B” model, but the top-of-the-line “123B” models constantly swap data between RAM and VRAM, producing nothing)

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…except I work from home, and the house is stocked with food and drink, and I have electricity, gas, and Internet. Still, not going anywhere until they thoroughly shovel the streets and I feel up to scraping a full foot of white stuff off my 75-foot-long steep driveway (I measured while carving a narrow path down to the street). Fortunately the trash company texted me a “lol, no, not Monday” message, so I didn’t struggle through taking it down to the curb last night.

On the other hand, a crown popped off last night, and I’ll need to get it re-cemented. On the gripping hand, it’s intact and the tooth isn’t painful or sensitive, so I made an appointment for later in the week when the roads are clear.

Shangri-La Frontier 2, episode 13

Just when they need it most, A Wild Ninja Appears! Unfortunately for Our Nearly-Crushed Crusher With A Crush, it’s a ninja gal, whose connection to Our Half-Clad Hero is as suspicious as her cheery cuddlyness. Fortunately Rei manages to get her head mostly back into the game, although if she knew that Cuddle Ninja actually looked like that in real life she’d be a mess for sure. File under peculiar that Cuddle Ninja’s vorpal-bunny escort is a samurai with moob armor.

With all the pieces in place, and Emul back in her place on Sunraku’s shoulder, the fight intensifies, and the animation team is so into it that it’s not going to finish until next week.

Verdict: fired-up Sunraku is shouty Sunraku, and Emul is, well, behaving like you’d expect when she finds herself in the middle of a huge boss fight strapped to a maniac, so you might want to turn the volume down this week.

Salaryman In The Demon King’s Army, episode 2

[Turns out it’s actually going to be a Monday show, with last week’s premiere being shuffled around by New Years stuff.]

I really thought the reveal of Our Busty Glasses-Elf Mage Gal would take longer than the opening credits. Fortunately Our Administrative Hero is thick as a brick and doesn’t figure it out when she snubs him. He also has no idea whatsoever that Our Fiery Demon Tsundere Maiden is about two degrees away from full dere-dere meltdown.

Or was, anyway, until Our Absolutely Delicious Dream-Girl Ogress first throws herself at him with a marriage proposal and then eagerly joins his staff. Er, “becomes his secretary”. Maybe both.

Somewhere in the middle of all that is a cold-blooded catgirl whose rivalry with TsunDemon cuts her appearance short.

Verdict: yes, the mystery-of-the-week is once again contrived as hell and able to be resolved offscreen without much effort after a brief dream-visit to A Very Special Bar. The show still needs some bounce, but I’ll go with it for now.

(sorry, Shuna, but there’s a new sheriff in town, and you’ve been demoted to #2 Best-Gal Ogress; fan-art or well-made LoRA soon, please)

The rest of the premieres

All on Crunchyroll:

• Isekai Prime, Thursday

• Literal Dream Girl Elf Waifu, Friday

• The Apothecary Diaries 2, Friday

• Hammer Of The Guild Gal, Friday

• A-Rank Adventure Harem, Saturday

Slime Witch 2 in April

But the video doesn’t have nearly enough Best Girl Beelzebub.

Practicing for Esil’s debut…

All but one of the SDXL Esil LoRAs are trained on the Pony side of the family. My usual 2D model is on the Illustrious side, however, so I started with that one. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to explode badly with all but a few 2D models. And by explode I mean the right side of her face was consistently a twisted mass of gore, teeth, and triangles, often with additional deformities elsewhere.

So, yeah, wrong book. I tried out the Pony-based ones, and got the best results with this; and yes, if you click through, pretty much all the sample pictures are NSFW, most with a more bountiful figure than the source. On the bright side, this one works well with most 2D models (not all, and none of the 3D ones; her facial features and proportions do not render as cute in 3D; think Nosferatu).

I had fun using her as a dress-up-dolly to test my new MadLibs wildcard file for sexy lingerie (trying to create a wide variety of little bits of nothing for imaginary gals to wear), but then I got an idea: what would happen if I loaded the Jin-ah LoRA as well and borrowed Our Hero’s Cute Little Sister’s school uniform? First try:

(“Hey, Jinwoo,” she said, completely ignoring canon, “I borrowed your sister’s clothes so I could fit in on Earth! Wait ’til you see the panties I found!”)

Amusing note: there’s also a LoRA for the general art style of the Solo Leveling manwha, also trained on Pony, and if you load all three of them on top of a Pony-derived base model, you suddenly get partial speech bubbles at the edges of the picture, “as if” they were trained using cropped images from the manwha where nobody took the time to clean up the edges.

Also, Today I Learned™ that there’s a sequel novel and manwha set 20 years later. Actually, I kind of vaguely knew about it, but not that it includes the return of Esil in a more significant role. It’s written by someone authorized by the original novelist, and the manwha is drawn by members of the same studio as the deceased artist.

Unrelated, I swear…

I’ve been playing with “uncensored” text-generation LLMs, to see if any of the ones I can run on my gaming PC are capable of producing prose at the same (still pretty basic) level as my experiment with ChatGPT, without enforcing the woke bullshit and censorship.

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The Three Behemoths, episode 2

In which Our Ample Heroine parties with Our Braless Catgirl Blacksmith-nya, goes full Bobbitt and gets spunky, while Our Experienced Monster Kitten imagines a much worse ending to the fight. Note that taking a bite out of crime grants him both tentacles and cross-breeding, powers that are sure to support the narrative. And where she might have appeared mildly catsexual last episode due to the booze, she has now confirmed that she is eager to give it up as soon as he can get it up. And a little life-saving action by Our Mighty Kitten gives the catgirl a tingle as well.

Yes, this is faithful to the source material.

You won’t believe this, but when the third party gal shows up (which requires a bit of plot advancement first), she’s going to be even more catsexual, although unlike the other two she has an excellent reason for it.

Verdict: exactly what it says on the tin. Except the part about the guild-receptionist “person”.

(unrelated blonde-elf with maybe a quarter of the volume possessed by Our Weapons-Of-Mass-Distraction Heroine)

Magical Pixie Dream Homeless-Ninja-Gal, one and done

Cheap art and animation, weird shading, shouty, self-consciously THIS IS WACKY, with a narrator to point out things you definitely didn’t miss.

(five minutes of that and I need a cocktail with a catgirl chaser)

Solo Leveling 2, episode 1

The new OP is surprisingly non-horrible, and even includes a quick glimpse of Esil and a full backal shot of Our Telegraphed Girlfriend. Pity about the ED and the fight music. This week, a brief recap of the plot, then not nearly enough time spent admiring Our Plucky Little Sister and her insta-crushing schoolgirl friends. The only schoolgirl we have time for is the wannabe hunter from last season who made money padding out Our OP Hero’s group so he could raid a bunch of dungeons with His Rich Kid Sidekick.

He takes Schoolgirl Hunter on a field trip in what should have been an easy dungeon raid. Operative word being “should”. It doesn’t go well for the officially-highest-rank members of the raid, leaving the noobs and A Clever Babe We’ll Never See Again safe in the woods under Our Hero’s protection.

Next week, part two of Behind The Red Gate.

Verdict: look up “overpowered hero”, and you’ll find a picture of Jinwoo strolling casually through an army of humongous ice bears.

(I already used up most of the decent cheesecake for season one, including this pic, so unless the fan-artists get cracking or someone makes an Esil LoRA, I’ll probably have to fill in with random leftovers; they’re fighting elves next week, so maybe Frieren…)

Update: should have checked first. There are seven LoRAs for Esil! Three for Pony, one for Illustrious, the rest for earlier base models. That should take care of things.

(new anime? not until Saturday!)

The relative ease of customizing Stable Diffusion models means that thousands of people are stirring the pot and training their own. This is good, since the official models are biased and censored, but it’s also bad, because the derivative models are biased in different directions, and often over-trained to the point that they simply snap when you find their edges.

Most people don’t do their custom training against the base SD models; they layer their collection of picture/keyword pairs on top of one that’s already been “uncensored” or augmented in some way, with the two major anime branches being Illustrious and Pony. What this means in practice is that feeding the same settings to related models will often produce very similar results.

So, just how similar do they get?

I’ve been using SwarmUI’s grid feature to evaluate different models by passing them all the same prompt, seed, and settings.

For each set, I used a character LoRA (small patch model that can be used to add character/style/location data onto other models with varying success depending on heredity), and generated multiple pictures in my go-to model for cute-and-occasionally-naughty material, CAT - Citron Anime Treasures (Illustrious-based), until I found something that looked like a decent starting point:

Setting aside the boilerplate and the character trigger words, the prompt was:

laughing, standing with arms spread, head back, grounded stance, freedom in motion, outdoors, at Santorini, Greece

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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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Once you’ve asked chatbots for information a few times, you start to spot patterns. Here’s a perfect example: I asked Google about putting vanilla extract in tiramisu (something traditional recipes don’t do). High on the list of results was Spoonable Recipes, and every line screams generative AI:

Mascarpone cheese is the most popular ingredient in tiramisu dishes. In fact, over 80% of tiramisu recipes contain mascarpone cheese.

Softened is a frequent preparation for mascarpone cheese in tiramisu dishes.

Mascarpone cheese is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 8 ounces, 1 pound or 1 cup.

Another popular ingredient in tiramisu is white sugar. From the recipes we’ve sampled for tiramisu, over 70% have white sugar.

Tiramisu dishes often call for white sugar to be granulated.

White sugar is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 1 tablespoon, three quarters of a cup or a quarter cup.

…

Another popular ingredient in tiramisu is vanilla extract. From the recipes we’ve sampled for tiramisu, over 40% have vanilla extract.

Vanilla extract is often included in tiramisu dishes in amounts of 1 teaspoon or half a teaspoon.

In tiramisu recipes that contain vanilla extract, it is on average, 0.7% by weight.

In recipes for tiramisu, vanilla extract is often used with mascarpone cheese, ladyfinger cookies, confectioners sugar, chocolate and white sugar.

Potential substitutions for vanilla extract in tiramisu:
    pumpkin pie spice

Also, vanilla extract is not often used with flour, white chocolate, pumpkin and lemon curd.

And remember, that cream won’t whip itself!

(as investor-hungry “AI” companies frantically scramble for fresh content to build their next-generation engines with, they’re hoovering up previous-generation output like this “recipe analysis” and spreading the contamination. A lot of people doing text-to-image generation rave about Flux over Stable Diffusion XL, but the first time I tried it, I got even more fingers per hand; one poor gal must have had a dozen, and that’s enough ladyfingers for three full servings of tiramisu!)