I don’t think this show is going to become less shouty. The slave dealer is a shouty freak, the furry bodyguard is a shouty freak, Button Elf Gal’s breast-obsessed lesbian maid is a shouty freak, and even God is a shouty freak.

Verdict: if you can handle the shouting, it’s better than most of the alternatives this season.

(there’s almost nothing on Pixiv for this one, and half of what is there is official art, but Miss Button Elf has been noticed)

“Thanks, God, For This Isekai!”

(with insincere apologies to John Denver)

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
This fantasy-land is kinda laid back,
Ain’t much a well-read high-school boy like me can’t hack,
Kill a few orcs, throw loot in my pack,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, my overpowered skills keep me from takin’ harm,
good-lookin’ gals all fall for me thanks to my divine charm,
minions who provoke me end up bitin’ the farm,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

 

When the dungeon’s cleared, and my status screen glows,
I spend all my skill points where my cheat advisor shows,
Level up much faster than anyone else knows,
And thank God for this isekai!

I’d play with my waifus all day if I could,
but the Demon Lord’s a-comin’ to my neighborhood,
so I diddle when I can, fight when I should,
And thank God for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai! Woo-hoo!

 

Well, noble folk givin’ me diamonds and jewels,
beggin’ me to rescue virgin beauties for some fools,
but I make ’em haremettes with my magic tools,
And thank God for this isekai!

Yeah, elven folk tried to hook me up with their queen,
She was three hundred years old but she looked like a teen,
Took her for a ride, ‘cause a Hero can’t be mean,
Thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Thanks, God, for this isekai, yessir!

 

Well, the Demon Lord came at me and just up and died,
took his daughter for myself, put a baby inside,
lined up my harem gals, made each one a bride,
And thanked God for this isekai!

Well, the princesses are virgins who don’t know much about cock,
need a lotta warmin’ up to make their thighs unlock,
but my Demon Princess, Best Girl, and my cat-girl rock,
So thanks, God, for this isekai!

Well, I got me a Best Girl, I got my cheat powers,
got a catgirl at night, keeping me up all hours,
sweet young princesses eager to be deflowered,
Woo! Thanks, God, for this isekai, yeah!
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

I got a little carried away with the prompt for this one, largely because I wasn’t having much luck getting a good image, even with a modern model like Klein that is generally quite good at handling complex prompts. Inevitably, it ran into counting problems, adding extra people to the image (male and female) or omitting one of the haremettes. It didn’t suffer from blended characteristics as much as earlier models, but it wasn’t unusual to get all catgirls, or a demon girl with both both horns and cat-ears. At least once, everyone had a cat tail. I ended up generating a dozen prompts and rendering each one half a dozen times.

Anyway, the prompt had so many targeted LLM calls in it that it took around 90 seconds to run on a Mac, generating ~600 words on average:

An epic fantasy illustration featuring @<makeover: a nerdy Japanese high-school boy>@ wearing @<fashion: a retro Japanese boys-school uniform>@, holding @<weapon: a magical sword>@, with a smug expression on his face. He is accompanied by three women: @<makeover: a sweet-looking medieval girl>@ wearing @<fashion: a a low-cut medieval peasant dress>@, @<makeover: a sultry catgirl>@ wearing @<fashion: a skimpy renaissance-inspired dress>@, and @<makeover: a sexy demon girl>@ wearing @<fashion: sexy black lingerie with red highlights>@. They are walking down a dirt road toward a distant castle.

(I’d likely have gotten more reliable results if I’d converted the prompt to JSON, but I’d have had to do it by hand after each LLM expansion, and I wouldn’t have been able to do the global QA passes for the final output; I may tinker with improving my dynamic-JSON-prompt scaffolding now that I’ve integrated the LLM calls)

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.

(as mentioned in recent comments, I’m going to give Appraiser a shot; a bit shouty so far, but with a hot catgirl guild-gal haremette)

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 1

A quick reminder of where we left off, then right into the story, so they didn’t waste an entire episode restating the premise and reintroducing the entire (huge) cast. Our Villagers are expecting a bunch of settlers, so they go to the trouble of building them a brand-new village, only to discover that their new population of minotaurs, centaurs, and wood nymphs can’t live in human houses.

This is about as serious as conflict is ever going to get in this series. No sign of leveling up to a proper harem yet, though, with Lu treated as Our Hero’s One True Waifu. At least we get to see all the cute gals, but I read the source material far enough to know that if they continue avoiding the fact that his divine blessings include superhuman sexual stamina and fertility, they’ll eventually have to start making up original stories.

Also, I’m pretty sure I remember the wood nymphs having a problem with the concept of “clothing”…

Verdict: should be watchable to the end.

Witch Hat Atelier, episodes 1&2

Double-episode release. The first episode is designed to inform the viewer that somebody really believes in this story, and is paying for good art and animation. Also to cover the entire premise of the story in enough detail that they should be able to just get on with it. Looks to be extremely faithful to the first chapter of the manga.

Our Heroine’s voice actor has only had a few roles, but does a good job establishing her character. Our Reluctant Mentor is perhaps best known as 9S, and I’ll just pretend that I don’t recognize any traces of Kitty The All in his performance here. Most of the cast are as new as Our Heroine, but we do get the voices of Xiaolan and Sein. The Mysterious Stranger who planted the seed of the plot in a flashback has a veteran voice actor who’s been working for at least 25 years but doesn’t seem to have many recent prominent roles, so I’m going to go with Junior from R.O.D The TV.

Probably next week we’ll get to meet Our Sexy Test Administrator, voiced by the best-known name in the show, Kotono Mitsuishi. I’m guessing she won’t sound like Usagi or Excel for this one.

Verdict: so far, so good.

(speaking of R.O.D The TV, the series page on ANN is tagged “Objectionable content: Significant”; I have no idea what they could be referring to)

But first, an Amazon shipping change!

Two items ordered on Wednesday, promised for Friday. On Friday, one of them was moved to Saturday. So far, pretty typical. On Saturday, its status changed to “approval needed”, and I was asked if it was okay for it to be delivered Monday. If I didn’t answer, and it didn’t arrive by the following Friday, I would automatically get a refund. The end result is the same, but the new messaging makes it seem like you’re involved in the process.

Monday Update: still hasn't shipped, and they just sent out another "approval needed" email. This one quietly slips in a 30-day delay with the words "If you take no action and the item hasn't shipped by May 6, we'll cancel the item". Yeah, no.

Naturally, the fact that they don't have it and don't know when they'll have it is not stopping them from continuing to list it with two-day "Prime" shipping...

On with the cheesecake!

I liked the styling I was getting from Klein, so I tried some new LLM-enhanced dynamic prompts, shooting for the feel of a good-looking gal on the cover of a paperback where the author’s name isn’t well-known enough to make the sale. The initial batch had them in lingerie, because that’s where I got the horned horny covergal from the previous post, but I decided to see if Klein did as well at the “retro-SF uniform” look as ZIT did the last time I tried it.

Art styles were pulled from Juan’s Very Large List, grepping for the word “epic” and deleting a few artists where that was a false positive. I used the prompt-enhancing system prompt recommended by Z-Image Turbo to flesh out the random locations, plus two of my own targeted system prompts to generate clothing and physical details, plus a final LLM pass to do general cleanup. This would have been agonizingly slow on the Mac, so I ran it on the gaming PC in between image-generation runs (because SwarmUI and LM Studio both think they have the GPU to themselves, trying to run them at the same time blows out the VRAM, even though they should fit).

My system prompts were:

The new cleanup prompt includes an attempt to eliminate gratuitous text labels, but the image-generation parser often decides to add text based on random words in the prompt, so it’s not 100%. I didn’t want to use my usual collection of retro-SF costume prompts, so I fed the following to the fashion sysprompt:

“Sexy science-fiction uniform for women, incorporating bright colors, advanced technology, and a variety of futuristic textures and materials. Uniform may include abstract symbols and attached technology, but no text. Avoid shoulderpads. Do not use black or silver as the primary colors. You may include accessories such as sci-fi weapons, scanners, datapads, crystals, or glowing energy.”

Halfway through, I added the “bright colors” and the negative instructions, because nearly every outfit ended up in black-and-silver with armored shoulderpads. Sigh. This was all with the gemma-3-12b-it-heretic-x-i1 model, and now that Gemma 4 has been released, I’m going to see if it does a better job; it’s getting good reviews, and I think there’s already a few uncensored versions.

Out of ~600 images, just under 13% had obvious anatomy fails, with most of them being extra arms or legs. There were some I rejected reluctantly, because the rest of the image was really good. They might be fixable with variation seeds, but I’ve kinda gotten out of the habit of doing that; it’s easy to spend more time tinkering than it’s worth, and you can always just make another batch.

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Slime 4, episode 1

Last season talked the audience to death. How do they start this season?

By spending the entire episode talking, of course. The CGI-heavy OP promises a great deal of action, and the ED is filled with drama related to The Little Big Bad who seems to be behind all the promised conflict, but they have a history of getting bogged down in endless meetings, so I won’t hold my breath.

(this unrelated oni-girlie is a much better cook than Shion, and if she gets the treatment she deserves this season, she’ll be one of many pregnant haremettes)

Boxxo Or Bust 3, episode 1

Season 2 worked hard to alienate anyone who enjoyed season 1, by trying to convert the lighthearted and frankly absurd adventures of a sentient vending machine and his cute girlfriend into a tired beat-the-demon-lord story that the author came up with and abandoned after he ran out of new vending machines to write about. No idea if the idea of making a large group of allies into poorly-written turncoats was in his notes somewhere, or was completely original.

How do they start this season? The OP is 50% sparkles, 50% shounen action; I honestly expected transformation sequences by the time it was over. The ED is pure chibi cuteness, so it looks like they’re going to whiplash the mood again.

Rock bath!

Get clean with Ruri and Nagi:

(naturally, you can get takeout)

Quad9 versus Amazon

Precisely at midnight, Quad9’s DNS servers stopped resolving subdomains of the form $bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com. I had their DNS first in my Pihole’s config, so it looked to me like every image on my blog suddenly vanished. I was quite relieved to discover that it was just a DNS server failure.

I opened a ticket with them, and it was fixed in 3 hours.

Accidental retro-sf paperback covergal

I was just cleaning my dynamic-prompt script, when it suddenly went off:

I can’t decide if I want to read this novel or write it…

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”?