Weird Wednesday: We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale

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Still trying out wacky prompts in Midjourney, and developing a fresh, if wary, respect for AI-based images. I have actually pretty good versions of my heroines from the Ancestors of Jaiya series, and some more space art for Star Master. I will probably share those at some point, after some more clean-up.

In the meantime, here’s some completely random Midjourney fan art: the main characters from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as pirates. General note: for more old-school actors with conventionally handsome features, Midjourney sometimes struggles to create a likeness humans can recognize (see the Clint Eastwood image below), whereas celebrities with quirkier, more distinctive features fare a bit better (see the Van Cleef and Wallach images below).

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Midjourney: My New Art Addiction

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I’ve only recently started paying attention to the field of AI-generated art, and this Discord-based art AI seems to be one of the most advanced. (If you just want to play with something free and web-based, I’ve had good experiences with Dream by Wombo).

In Midjourney, you type in prompts, the software renders out four thumbnails of randomly generated images based on the text prompts, and gives you the option to create larger, higher-res versions (upscaling, buttons marked with a U) or create new variations on one of the thumbnails (buttons marked with a V). After a free trial of around 25 render minutes, you have to subscribe to continue using it, and in the less expensive subscription you quickly find yourself paying for extra render minutes over and above what comes with your subscription, but the program is set up to where you never exceed what you buy. (You pay in advance for what you think you need, they don’t just let you blindly run up a bill.)

I had some luck with space battles, in case I need new covers for Shadow Captain and its upcoming sequel, but in this post I’m going to show off my Jane Austen fan art experiments. A word of warning: Midjourney has trouble with faces, so a human hand has to step in and do a bit of plastic surgery to make them look not disturbing.

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Drinking Glasses for Weird Wednesday

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A long time ago, Venice was the Area 51 of Italy: a place where experts could experiment with the complicated and dangerous process of glass making on the more isolated lagoon islands, without setting their neighbors on fire. And every now and again, they still do something eccentric with their favorite local material:

https://shop.caffeflorian.com/en/fished-in-venice-designed-glass-by-antonio-dei-rossi/

Modular Art Deco shot glasses, fish-shaped. I’m sure Captain Nemo would have liked them very much, and had enough staff to keep them clean.

https://shop.caffeflorian.com/en/gli-impossibili-glass-by-silvano-rubino-lei/

And here we have a wineglass with a wavy stem…and a bowl covered in glass thorns. Maybe this is a way of forcing tourists to sip their wine, instead of slugging it back?

Happy 13th of July! (Happy “Corday”?)

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Today is the 229th anniversary of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marais, blood-thirsty Jacobin leader and media baron, in 1793, by Charlotte Corday. She belonged to the somewhat less extreme Girondin faction of the French Revolutionary movement, and blamed Marat for the execution of some of her Girondin friends.

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Do Not Desire It, Miss Dashwood

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A number of people all across the political spectrum in the USA have a weird fetish for the French Revolution. I confess, I am not a fan. Yes, the Bourbon regime was overbearing, corrupt, bankrupt, and a trainwreck looking for a place to happen. But all the Jacobins and their political allies brought France in 1789 was bloodshed and chaos, which led to the dictator Napoleon, which led to more bloodshed and chaos. Even after Napoleon, the country would be racked with periodic upheavals for almost a hundred years. So much for the Goddess Liberty, whom the Jacobins called Marianne.

Sometimes there are cases where it seems like the only thing anyone can do is storm the palaces, drive out the people in charge, and try to start over again. We seem to be seeing something like that in Sri Lanka right now. To people in that situation, all I can say is: “Good luck, and God protect you,” and hope they can learn from the past mistakes of people driven to similar desperation.

To the people who seem to be think being in that situation would be cool or fun or even cathartic, Alan Rickman’s fifth most famous movie character has a suitable reply.

Done. Again. For Now.

Posted on Posted in NaNoWriMo, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

I just completed the new ending and some of the expansion scenes for Star Master Book 2. For more about the long, complicated evolution of this space opera novel, see here, here and here. Yes, I have been working on this book for a while, but I hope to have it out by the end of this year, especially since I have no plans to do NaNoWriMo.

For now, my plans are a short break to work up a presentation for day job, play mobile games, read Golden Age mysteries, watch Fringe and Don Matteo with family members, and brainstorm whatever comes after the Star Master duology.