Adventures du jour!
I screwed up yesterday by using an image by someone who wasn’t me as part of a Midjourney prompt; fortunately, a friend caught me in time and explained why it was a terrible idea. I deleted the image previews off the Discord server, and fortunately they also came down off the MJ site. WHEW.
I sometimes forget that while I’m studying “how things work,” and doing a lot of play, that there are other aspects of the situation at work. Extreme focus = not always a benefit. I take plenty of pictures for myself; it’s not like I lack in my own images to use.
Writing went well last night, although I need to double back and add more sensory details in. The scene was Goth Girl and Sabotage facing off against each other, with Sabotage trying to evade, Goth Girl going for the throat, and Sabotage realizing that he could probably trust her because of how intense she was about it…but wanting to mess with her regardless.
Same, Sabotage, same.
Another night of poor sleep; I’m not at the level of insomnia that several friends are cursed with, but it was enough that I put some music on. Today Ray and I compared notes and decided we were fighting something off.–She wore the CUTEST dress today and it looked rather sassy with her new haircut.
Yoga: Yeah, all the wobble through that balance pose again. I’m hanging onto the back of a chair WITH BOTH HANDS and still tipping over. And I can’t actually get into the pose smoothly. And my legs are shaking after like five seconds. This morning I was dripping with sweat by the time I finished yoga, either due to the poses or the stuff I’m fighting off. Or both. I took the selfies before I started yoga, fortunately.
Walkies: Sabotage walked with me most of this morning! He’s the very direct friend who gives you shit and likes you anyway. Most of the walk was just getting familiar with each other.–He comes across as super-confident but has a couple of points of insecurity that Goth Girl found in like two seconds and went after when he tried to manipulate her. But he also is self-aware enough to realize that was why she went after them.–On the walk he said I need to give him a line in the story: “Sometimes being metal as fuck requires being tactful and polite, mkay?”
This morning was practical stuff. Then a huge nap. Then more practical stuff. Then a friend letter.
Midjourney: the fnord thing yesterday was probably not a success on a teaching-MJ-concepts level, but I did get a lot of good rolls off it. I rolled some papercraft flowers this morning while I was Not Sleeping and they were lovely, but I felt like I wanted to say something with them that I couldn’t do with random rolls. After some effort I got a series of images that serve as a transformation cycle, or at least what it feels like for me to go through one. I used papercraft flowers and bees as the prompts, along with a shift of colors from black to pink.
I feel like I used to feel like when I wrote a really good poem.–I stopped writing poetry after I got together with the ex. At the time I attributed it to switching from poetry to fiction, but eh, it was probably both.
At any rate, the series of images requires a really complex series of prompts to come up with. Most of them came out smoothly the first time–up to and including the orange one. But the orange one had the word “transformation” in its prompt. The red and pink ones, which did NOT include the word transformation in them, got weird and were a pain to roll up.
For the red one, I had to run a number of different prompts because I wasn’t getting the intensity right. Throughout each of the prompts, most of the bees had changed to butterflies, even though I had specified bees. I finally ended up on a deeply intense roll with weird moths on it.
For the pink one, the bees had been replaced with butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, moth-birds, weird flying chrysalis things, warped bugs, and even one toward the end with eyeballs in the center–which I’ve been talking about with Ray but not rolling on Midjourney or doing anything else with, online or otherwise.
I’m going to go with one with the butterfly on the main sequence, although I’ll post alternates as well.
Also of interest: most of the pink ones weren’t papercraft, but painted flowers. Whether that’s because MJ was getting warped for the night or whatever, a jolt went through me when I realized, well, the flowers had themselves been transformed.
Very cool.
I’ll probably post the actual prompts tomorrow. An interesting experiment.