Adventures du jour!
Last night, Midjourney had a meltdown and/or update that made it slow down massively, which was SUPER interesting to watch. At first I thought it was me, that I was doing something wrong. I would type a prompt, and it wouldn’t include all the elements I wanted. (Like, I’d type “unnatural creature” and “mountain trail” and just get the mountain trail.) I stripped back element after element, trying to de-complexify my image prompts, until I finally got a result (for “poison garden” that was so completely off-base that I realized something was going on. I thought stuff was just running slow because of overloaded servers; there are a lot of new people piling on every day.
Then, instead of anything resembling a garden, poisonous or otherwise, I got a stick with irregular purple grape-shapes on it.
Right, *maybe* things are going amuck…
Anyway, I reran the same prompt for the rest of the night, over and over again, and several times this morning. Because an AI like this uses such complex rules and inputs, very slight changes can have huge impacts. I had a seminar on non-linear order in college, a non-math person’s view of what might emerge from complexity and chaos.–That might be where I fell in love with AI stuff, although probably I would have been enamored regardless. I’m just that person.
Anyway, the images became more complex, less complex, integrated elements in messed up ways (the pattern of the cobblestones got transferred over to the flowers for a while), and acquired and lost any sort of creepy “poison” vibe, seemingly at random. TOO COOL.
The problems were supposedly resolved around midnight Eastern, but in the morning, images were not as responsive or surprising as I’m used to. They’re better now, and I’m getting some great stuff. I suspect the beta version was the most affected (versus the latest known stable v3 version; I tend to use beta). Before, rerolling results tended to give sort of random results that fit the original query; now, it seems like rerolling gives random results that fit the previous query. I’m experimenting with rerolling result #1 over and over versus rerolling successive results. I’m rerunning an old prompt that involves a lot of legs (the “knight of passion” tapestry stuff) to see if the AI handles legs better now, too. I’m not seeing the random-ass limbs that I’ve seen before, yet while seeing a lot of random-ass other stuff, which is nice. I don’t want to end up with 100% realistic results all the time!
Yoga & Walks: today’s focus was on the front bra-band area. My traps have been trying to work out the knots and kinks that have arisen due to better flexibility in my lower back, and were unhappy when I woke up. (Another headache, too.) I focused on upper back stuff, and…felt something spread out in my chest area. People with serious boobage are fighting a constant battle with gravity, with our bras as both weapon and torture device. I’ve chosen to follow a path without underwire (WHEW), but there’s still a lot of tension applied around my chest to hold everything in place. And my body holds that tension whether or not I have a bra on.
Today it opened up. I don’t know what the connection is, but if I release traps, release that bra band area, then release the neck, my sinuses drain. I think it might just be “reasonably correct posture achieved!” Whenever you’re doing something right with your posture in yoga, it seems like there’s an accompaniment of burps and farts…and apparently sinus drainage. I think Ray brought something home, but all right.
On the walk, Goth Girl came out. Definitely not as chatty as Mr. Assassin yesterday, but she actually took pictures with me today. She wouldn’t push the button, but she did tell me that I had to take the “Edward Scissorhands neighborhood” pic I posted earlier. She was telling me that she grew up in suburbia (in Omaha) and had a relatively privileged childhood, except that her dad was alcoholic and liked to scream and throw bottles. So now I want to look up some good neighborhoods in Omaha for that. I need to figure out where she would have been during the flooding a few years ago. I hadn’t even thought about it, but of course she’d lived through that. I think she must have been with her ex then.
She was NOT sure about the bra band thing, like, “How am I going to protect myself?” stuff. She didn’t say that, but she was just kind of radiating discomfort and disapproval whenever I was aware of holding myself differently.
Writing last night was mostly layering in details in a scene that was extremely dialogue heavy. Tightened up dialogue to cut out my throat-clearing, added in more action and setting. I need to reread it to see if it works or if it just comes across as nutty. But the Goob is telling his backstory directly, instead of having it come out in bits and pieces through other characters. His attitude about the whole thing is fascinating to me, because I’ve done similar things: thinking that bad things are less bad than they really were, thinking that neutral or even good things are actually terrible marks upon my character. OUCH.
I’m not used to writing such long projects (it’s at almost 120K already), so I’m particularly also using this moment as a checkpoint for the reader. “Here’s what you know so far.” You’ll see these kinds of checkpoints in longer works, where one character will sum up previous events or the current state of understanding (particularly about who’s a suspect in a mystery), and I feel like it’ll be particularly helpful here, before I start tossing the Psycho Cousin into the mix. But I haven’t written a lot of them and am struggling.