“When you don’t have enough space for Emacs, you don’t have enough space.”
— Sandy WamboldUrakata 3.2
I helped mop the floor, not out of guilt for making Sally drop the coffee or an urge to help my new “mom” clean, but simple self-interest. I needed another espresso before I was up to telling the truth. Any truth.
Sally delivered a cup and a question. “So, you work for God?”
I sipped my hot black confidence-builder before replying. “Gods, plural, and most of them less pleasant than the one who brought us together. No names you’d be familiar with, although it’s a safe bet they’ve played the role in your world as well. The thing is, I shouldn’t even be able to say that much, whether I’m retired or still on active duty, which means that something really scr- odd is going on.”
Sally smiled, just a little too sweetly. “So, what exactly did you do for these gods? Run a lemonade stand?”
I shut her down with a look as black as my coffee. “I’m sure you have tales of divine messengers, muses, tricksters, assassins, and temptresses; I specialized in that last role, and I was the best, until I fu- made a mistake. One we are not going to discuss tonight.”
Sally opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, so I skipped ahead. “No, I was not a cute little six-year-old girl with glasses. I was the woman who walked into a party alone and walked out with your husband. And if you ever got him back, he’d been thoroughly inspired.”
“Huh; that sounds like our space program. Sixteen divorces on the team and somehow we still landed on the moon ten years early. Nobody ever knew what happened to the secretary all the engineers were fighting over; she just disappeared one day.”
Oops, I had been to her world; I knew my work. Fortunately, she didn’t. “Right, things like that. The Powers don’t necessarily agree on means and ends, and we usually have no idea whether we’re making things better or worse, but I didn’t really care. I was designed to turn boys into men and men into lapdogs, and I loved my work.”
A glance down at my current body was accompanied by another bitter swallow. “I’m a good ten years away from my usual methods, and I’ve never needed a fallback plan before. Which means that I have no idea how to deal with an evil mind-controlling bitch-witch that has her hooks in my best friend.”
A smile twitched into existence over the rim of Sally’s coffee cup. “You mean first friend, don’t you? I think you’ve been lonely for a very long time.”
For the record, I do not blubber. The sudden urge to throw myself into Sally’s arms and dissolve into a puddle of sniffles and tears was just this body’s reaction to stress, and I successfully fought it down. “Stop that; this is grown-up talk.”
“Yes, it is, and I think it’s more relevant than you realize. I didn’t know I’d be raising an older woman, but you definitely need a mother in your life. As does Kit, which helps explain how quickly you’ve bonded with her.”
The urge to blubber was rising again, like three-day-old sushi. I really needed to get this body under control so I could solve this problem and… then what, exactly? Get my old job back and leave? Get my old body back and retire to a beach villa with hot and cold running boy-toys? Without Kit, or Sally?
Shit.
The boss really got me good. I’d been here less than 24 hours, and I wanted to stay.
Dragon Fight Week
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 4
The best part of the tournament was that it only lasted a single episode. The worst part is that we didn’t get a longer, more active elf-angel wrestling match. Kudos to the winner for wrapping things up in style.
Verdict: fluff.
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 5
They’re really spoiling us with their animation budget. It’s like food porn with ink. This week, Our Apprentices learn to work together to find a way to deal with The Getting-Bigger Bad, with Our Prickly One grudgingly accepting Our Heroine’s presence on the team.
Hungry Hungry Hero 2 announced
Berserk Of Gluttony is getting a new season.
If the Right were like the Left…
…this Minnesota Wisconsin
brewery
would already have been burned to the ground, and right-wing
politicians and celebrities would be openly praising the act of
“direct democracy”.
Deflecting blame with both-sides-ism pretends that there’s no difference between Left and Right, but there is. And the difference is that only one side riots, loots, burns, and kills every time when they don’t get their way.
(picture is definitely unrelated)
God's Shouty Appraiser, episode 5
Did I miss something, or did The Thief’s Tail Tale end with her only giving back their second, much-smaller purse, despite how much he helped her out? In other news, while we didn’t see nearly enough of Our Best Guild Catgirl, at least Our Busty Landlady’s possessive affection made an appearance. She rubbed him raw to get another woman’s mark off.
Verdict: of course it ended with a Button-Elf shout.
(catgirl is unrelated, because there’s no fan-art for this show)
Definition of insanity:
Thinking that successfully assassinating Trump would make things better for Leftist causes.
As Was Foretold In The Ancient Scrolls
Okay, it’s actually something I said only three years ago:
Old Apple: “how can we make this feature usable by people who don’t know anything about computers?”
New Apple: “how can we monetize this pixel?”
It gains new relevance when the soon-to-retire Apple CEO recently said “Apple Maps was my first really big mistake”, and then the company just announced: “Apple Maps will now shove ads in your face, with no opt-out”.
Isekai Harem Merc promo video
This is a Fall show, so it will be competing for my attention with Isekai Porn Gamer, Flatcat & Sword-Daddy 2, Isekai Goblin Mayor, and Maomao. Ahhh, Maomao.
Reminder: Summer has Bumpkin 2, Isekai Super Maid, Magilumiere 2, Tanya 2, Skeleton Knight 2, Frontier Lord & Oni Waifu, Isekai Ass-Guardian, and Isekai Otome Mecha Game Cheat Hero 2. The days are just packed.
(unrelated busty cutie, approximating how Our Mercenary Hero Hiro wakes up in the morning)
What did I name the revived PC that gave me so much trouble?
Agott.
“Spectrum? Damn near killed ’em!”
The pleasant new surprise in SwarmUI-ville is the Spectrum extension, which produces dramatic speedups with common image-generation models at very little cost to quality. The more steps you use in making your images, the more it helps, producing images as much as 3x faster. Woo-hoo.
Sadly, my LLM prompt-enhancement broke; running the headless version of LM Studio on the rebuilt machine is producing not-very-diverse results with prompts that work just fine on the Mac Mini with the same model. I asked it to generate flattering early-20th-century outfits for women, and it literally made 10 copies of the exact same outfit.
Look at this set, and you can see it was doing the same thing for sci-fi city backdrops and black armor/cyborgs. I cherry-picked the most diverse results, but well over 90% were basically the same pic with different heads. So I ended up throwing away almost all of the results and the prompts that generated them, and started over with a different model and sysprompts.
Back from the dead...
[perhaps coincidentally, my MacBook Air lost its tiny little mind and started killing off running processes, starting with Terminal and Finder, so I couldn’t examine the health of the system and couldn’t restart or force-quit any apps. I had to power-cycle it. It had been up for an entire week! Hope the new Apple CEO hires a QA department…]
So after rebuilding my 11-year-old gaming PC on Ubuntu 25, only to discover that LM Studio wasn’t supported on it, I tried to rebuild it on 22, which failed. Then on 22 Server, which failed. Then on Arch, then Mint, then Windows 10. Fail, fail, fail. Different USB sticks, burned different ways, and even a few DVD installs in there.
[Fun fact: Ubuntu ISO images are not designed for or tested on DVD; they are intended for building virtual machines or burning to USB sticks. This is also true for Windows 10, with the added complication that you have to diddle the bits when copying to USB because it has a file that’s larger than 4 GB on it.]
Annoyed at the litany of failure, I cracked open the case, blew out the dust, pulled out and reseated the memory, graphics card, and SSDs, burned a brand new Ubuntu 25 image onto a brand new USB stick (using Rufus on Windows, which seems to be the most reliable option if you don’t currently have a working Linux box…), and reinstalled with no network connection or optional packages.
This worked, and to my immense surprise, the secondary drive that I’d installed SwarmUI on was still intact, despite the fact that I’d made it the boot drive during several of those failed installs, and I’m quite certain I wiped the partition table at least twice, which means that the installers were just lying about formatting the disks and copying data, sigh.
After discovering the appropriate incantation to make Appimages work, I did some quick testing with LM Studio. No head-to-head performance comparisons, because I had to download Very Small Models in order for the RTX 2060 to be able to run them without offloading to system RAM. Also, it’s only academic curiosity, since I’m replacing the card.
For reference, you need a shim library to get Appimages to work; web searches (with or without AI) mostly suggest installing a version of Fuse that will break the rest of your system, but this works:
chmod +x *.appimage
sudo apt install libfuse2t64
After doing that, however, I discovered the LM Studio appimage crashes at the drop of a hat under Ubuntu 25, so I switched to their command-line-only “llmster” build, which has been running for several hours now.
For amusement, here are the original specs for the old Asus:
- Intel Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz (Skylake)
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- GTX 980 4GB graphics card
- 2TB “hybrid” hard disk (8GB SSD cache)
- 256GB SSD
- 550-watt power supply
Over the years, I doubled the RAM, upgraded to a GTX 1060 6GB card, and replaced both drives with 1 TB SATA SSDs. Later, I replaced the 1060 with an RTX 2060 6GB, and it was still quite capable at running most games.
Now that I’ve got the silly thing booting again, I swapped in the RTX 5060Ti 16 GB card that I got cheap (er, “cheap”, these days). I was going to install a Corsair power supply as well, but Amazon didn’t deliver it as promised. No weather delay, crashed semi, or other legitimate excuse, they simply didn’t ship it, and said, “meh, maybe tomorrow”.
I wanted a higher-quality, more powerful, eleven-years-younger power supply to make the machine quieter and more reliable. I won’t get the full performance out of the new GPU on this machine, but it’s still faster than the Mac Mini running the exact same LLM.
(the Mini can run much larger models than this card, of course, or at least slow-walk them)
Future backgrounds
Even with LLMs stirring the pot, my SF backgrounds are starting to look a bit familiar. So I’m working on generating a whole bunch of new ones. Two samples from a recent session:
Reviving an obsolete PC
That’s obsolete as in Microsoft refuses to allow me to install a supported OS on perfectly good hardware.
Fuck legibility!
Just installed Ubuntu 25 on an old PC (that might still have enough GPU power to run LLMs faster than a Mac Mini with an M4 Pro…), and the Terminal app does not grok the concept of black text on any color background. It’s fucking dark mode everywhere, and the “palettes” were designed by people who think low contrast is virtuous.
I’ll have to construct a legible display with stone knives and bearskins, like our primitive ancestors did.
As for performance, the graphics card is an old RTX 2060 with 6 GB of VRAM, and running Z-Image Turbo, it created a 1024x1024 catgirl in 27 seconds, compared to my current RTX 4090 at 3.8 seconds with the same settings.
I haven’t tested LM Studio yet, because they distribute it as an Appimage file that I can’t even open on Ubuntu 25, and it turns out they only support 20 and 22. Guess I’ll reinstall with 22, sigh…
(Ubuntu 22.04.5 does not install, sigh. The installer just sits and spins, and Ctrl-Alt-T does not pull up a terminal to see what’s going on, if anything; I’m getting flashbacks to the first time I tried Ubuntu and had it fail miserably)
Live by the chatbot, die by the chatbot
It’s not as efficient as X’s community notes, but when AI over-enthusiast Alex Tabarrok rewrote history with “research” provided by an AI, he was refuted in the comments by someone who consulted the exact same AI.
My new favorite 4K wallpaper…
Made with Klein-9b, upscaled 2x with the SwarmUI SeedVR2 extension.
A wide environmental portrait featuring a cheerful, elegant, tall, Western European woman in her early twenties with a slender figure, steel gray eyes, lobed ears, snub nose, tapered chin, chiseled jaw, round cheeks, low forehead, and a round face shape, wearing runway/editorial makeup that complements her healthy brown skin and caramel brown hair styled with a scarf wrap. She is situated within a darkening, richly detailed interior space enveloped in the soft, deep hues of twilight, mimicking the epic scale and dramatic flair characteristic of Don Lawrence’s sci-fi/fantasy work. The scene is bathed in highly detailed gouache painting style with hyper-detailed realism. Dramatic volumetric lighting casts deep shadows contrasting against pockets of warm, saturated light emanating from unknown sources. She wears a form-fitting jumpsuit in iridescent teal and magenta, featuring segmented panels of brushed bronze and deep violet, accented with wrist-mounted utility bands of pale yellow, holding a handheld scanner emitting soft cyan light, and incorporating several dangling technological attachments made of clear resin elements. The background subtly suggests the impossible geometries of a tidal power station structure, its metallic components intricately twisted within a space that hints at quantum foam instability, all rendered with meticulous care for textures—wood grain, aged metal, or complex fabrics—under an overall color palette that is vibrant and intensely saturated, evoking a grand and adventurous atmosphere.
Although I wouldn’t say no to this one…
A 23-year-old sexy Greek woman with a fit figure, dark green eyes, rounded helix ears, short nose, round chin, soft jaw, dimpled cheeks, and a widow’s peak forehead, sporting a triangle face shape, sophisticated polished makeup, healthy caramel skin, and red auburn hair styled in a rocker shag with messy layers, looks cheerful while standing near a colossal, spiraling ramp structure that dominates the scene, forming multiple intersecting pathways ascending vertically around a central axis point; these ramps appear to transition between parallel realities. The ground plane is a merged landscape of flatlands composed primarily of uniform grey regolith, sharply contrasted by veins and patches of dark, textured volcanic rock formations creating intricate geometric patterns across the floor, with visible areas beneath demonstrating phase transitions within an energetic quantum field in shifting, probabilistic colors. Unstable crystalline clouds with distinct sharp geometric facets float above the ground, catching ambient light dramatically. She wears a vibrant cerulean jumpsuit made of iridescent material, accented with panels of lime green stretch fabric featuring hot pink geometric piping, and is accessorized with a wrist-mounted communicator displaying soft yellow light and a hip-attached datapad with visible switches and dials. The scene is rendered as a highly detailed digital painting in the style of Gediminas Pranckevicius, capturing a medium shot within an indoor atmosphere bathed in fading daylight; though the ramps suggest epic surrealism, the overall composition utilizes muted colors and an earthy palette to evoke hushed introspection, with dramatic atmospheric light filtering through unseen openings casting long, soft shadows across surfaces.
Hoes and Hats
Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 3
I appreciate the way the busty oni maid is completely resistant to the weather, and feels no need to bundle up for the cold. Same for the busty minotaur maiden who’s attracted a non-mayor suitor. Also, they gave a quick nod to the source having the dryads run around topless, so there’s clearly something in the air.
Indoors, the less gifted young ladies wear their usual outfits to participate in Japanese cuisine lessons, so we get some mild cheesecake to go with the sudden transformation into a cooking show.
Verdict: an entire season goes by with Our Harem Hotties spending most of their time locked inside with Our Hero, and there’s not a single new pregnancy. Clearly they’re Just Not Gonna Go There, sigh.
(unrelated demonic cheesecake is unrelated, potentially fails limb-count; this one came out of a random subset of Juan’s ridiculously-large collection of random prompts, augmented by a few passes through LLMs, and Klein-9B wasn’t able to reconcile all the body parts with only 16 steps, so I cranked it to 64, then upscaled with the SeedVR2 extension). There were millions of lines in the file I used, so I knocked together a quick “shuf|head” script that caches the location of the start of each line, making it easy to efficiently retrieve random lines from very large files)
Witch Hat Atelier, episode 4
It’s increasingly common for fans to complain about “creative” translation that replaces the author’s intentions with the localizer’s biases. It’s a real problem, thanks to wokies capturing that part of the industry and steamrolling over anyone who dares to complain.
So I think it’s important to praise thoughtful, intelligent translation, like we’re getting in this show. This week, Our Plucky Apprentices go out on a shopping expedition, and get dragged into the main plot by trying to keep Coco out of trouble. Lured by Our Bad Hat into a rather dangerous place, Our Proud And Prickly Apprentice Agott blames their predicament on Coco.
Trapped in a maze, on the run from a very Big Bad, she snaps at Our Heroine. Our Quiet One manages to blow a hole in the wall to let them escape. That’s the setup.
As she enters the escape hole, Prickly says, “let’s leave this dead-end behind”, coldly stating that the others can take that either way: the maze, or Coco.
The original Japanese is “let’s leave ‘koko’ (this place)”, which of course sounds exactly like her name, making the followup line a direct slap in the face, with no ambiguity. The translation does a good job of preserving that.
Verdict: from magic lessons and world-building, to extreme peril, the story is rock-solid.
Boldly going!
Although the USS Mauser had plenty of men on board, they never went on away missions, and always seemed to be drained.
Gaming when new toys cost too much …
I don’t usually read the Japan video game rankings, but I happened to click on it this week, and 5 of the top 20 are at least 6 years old. Two others are ports to current hardware.
Crossing the streams
I found a 3-year-old draft of the next scene in Virginia’s story, and liked it a lot better than the previous versions. So I touched it up and then wrote another. Hey, it’s only been five years since the last scene…
Anyway, it got me thinking about how my more recent hobby of creating pretty gals with GenAI might be useful for illustrating this tale. So I’m looking through the collection for a likely candidate to be the face (and figure) of OG Virginia, as well as her less-shopworn little sisters. Then I’ll need a Sally, a Jem, a Kit, and a new-life Virginia.
First random stab at Classic V:
God's Favored Appraiser, episode 4
I’m going to have to change my title for this show to Adventures In Shoutyland. Other than that, it was surprisingly slow-paced for a single-cour cheat isekai show, with Team Hero training and learning the basics of shouty adventuring, while Team Button Elf shoutily explores a haunted ruin.
Verdict: with the volume set low, it’s still mildly amusing.
(Elf is unrelated, but there’s still no fan-art for this show…)
“Critical vulnerability in NGINX? Oh, no!”
“…but only if you embed agentic AI bullshit directly into your web server? Yeah, whatever.” Just the usual clickbait.
In other news, Microsoft’s new focus on code quality has resulted in releasing server patches that trigger reboot loops and disk-encryption popups. Hope nobody patched their production Windows servers first…
Hindsight is 20/20…
Bits in pixels
SwarmUI is capable of embedding JSON-formatted metadata in the images it generates, making it possible to see exactly how an image was made and reproduce it on your machine. I support it in my CLI for both reading and writing PNG and JPG formats, which required testing two separate code paths. I have to embed it by hand, because Python’s Pillow library defaults to stripping out all forms of metadata on save.
For PNG, SwarmUI uses UTF-8 in the PNG-info ‘parameters’ field. JPG,
on the other hand uses a Windows UTF-16 encoding in the EXIF
UserComment field, which Pillow cannot do correctly. The simplest way
to deal with EXIF correctly in Python is to use the exiftool
library, which is a shim around the Perl script of the same name. Perl
will never die.
It took me a while to clean up my script so that metadata is always handled correctly, so some of my earlier GenAI gallery posts have some images where it’s garbled or missing.
But Pillow isn’t the only software that strips useful metadata out of images. Discord strips everything from JPGs, so people on the SwarmUI Discord are in the habit of sharing in the much-larger PNG format. When Juan started tinkering with extreme AI upscaling, he ran into upload-size limits on the server, and experimented with the obscure “stealth” metadata settings in the app. TL/DR, saving as lossy WEBP with the metadata encoded in the alpha channel produced the smallest files that survive Discord’s stripping.
Ex Post Taxto
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.
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 domesticDrawbacks ↓
・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
Not seeing much of a downside here…
