Video Tuesday: Dancing Mecha Edition

https://youtube.com/shorts/XhTQ__CjtVY

A 40-foot mecha dances to Slavic-inspired folk music in this music video from the Hunter Healer King trilogy. The Armor of Arent has been waiting for a worthy pilot. Now it has one. 🎬 Created with AI tools (Midjourney + Suno) 📚 From the gaslamp fantasy series by Mel Dunay! The Hunter Healer King trilogy combines steampunk monster hunting with slow-burn romance. For fans of Patricia Briggs and Lindsay Buroker.

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It’s Midjourney Monday! And Suno Monday! And Cheesy Music Video Monday!

I’m kind of proud of the fact that it only took me about three hours to do this in the free editing software Kdenlive. What actually took longer was generating the different source clips in Midjourney one weekend in September when the end of the Midjourney billing period was approaching, and the words weren’t coming on Hunter Healer King 3. I’ve told the story behind the song before: I went to Claude asking it for a Suno prompt for a certain kind of music, and then I went and pasted the prompt into the lyrics area in Suno instead of the prompt area. I ended up liking it better than the songs I got with Suno prompting “properly” for what I wanted. (I believe I already had at least some of the footage, and felt like this song had a good tempo or rhythm that worked with the clips.) Anyway, silly little car chase with a fantasy premise that excuses some of Midjourney’s weirder tendencies. Never forget: we live in an age of wonders. Horrors, too, but we can’t forget the wonders.

Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys

Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.

More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient

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Frequently Seen Questions About Writing

Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…” 

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Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference

I had to use “Vary Region” on this image. Vary Region is a Midjourney tool which keeps most of the image intact and only changes one area in it. The first image below is the revised image, the second one below is the original. Can you see what was changed?

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Weird Wednesday: The Unfinished First Drafts of Jane Austen

The Watsons and Sanditon are generally published in a volume with either Jane Austen’s Lady Susan or her Juvenilia, but aren’t actually very much like either of them. The Juvenilia is a group of short, intentionally ridiculous pieces written “for the fun of it.” They don’t do much for me, but I find them easier to follow than what survives of the Brontes’ early fantasy worlds: Glass Town, Angria and Gondal. Lady Susan, on the other hand, is a complete novella, told mostly through letters, which was apparently circulated within the family for entertainment but not intended for publication.

The Watsons, meanwhile, is the opening of an unfinished novel,

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