AuthorInkwell @kbin.social Pseudonym of someone who should've known better. Occasional content creator, writer, optimistic waste of space.
A Simple Quest for a Swing Set
So I work at a home improvement store, and one of my co-workers does some contracting work on the side. He is trying to encourage one of his neighbors to put some simple small-park kind of stuff on a plot of land he owns so that he (my co-worker) can pick up some extra business installing it.
He's seen me messing around with Stable Diffusion on some web apps at work on my down time, and he asked if it was possible if I could take a photo of the site and use AI to insert some of these elements into it so that he could show it to this potential client and maybe sell it to him that way.
"Sure," I said, thinking to myself, 'I can just use inpainting to blend this stuff into the image pretty seamlessly. Easy-peasy.'
It took me almost a full day of on-again, off-again work to get a picnic table I could live with. But I CANNOT get any model, any prompt, anything to make a swing set that I can live with. I've been pecking away at this problem for several days now, and every single attempt at a swing set has resulted in something that is mangled, twisted, or some terrible hybrid of OTHER playground equipment that my co-worker definitely doesn't want in the scene.
At this point I'm just working on it for the challenge, but I admit that I'm stumped. Short of training my own Lora, does anyone have any advice on how to make a coherent swing set to bring into this image? \>\_\< Yes, this is a silly problem to have, I admit that, but I've also learned a great deal about how Stable Diffusion 'thinks' in the last few days, so I consider it a learning experience. Still, does anyone else have any ideas?
Don't threaten me with a good time. >_<
Whelp, I've got the setting of my next horror game figured out!
"We didn't want light to interfere with the POTENTIAL of this room! Just IMAGINE all of the possibilities! It's so much easier to visualize in your mind when you don't have to actually SEE anything."
And now we have plotlines for another few hundred Doctor Who episodes!
Damn, that sucks.
orders a double cheeseburger for lunch
Okay, firstly, I'm not sure Gurgaon exists. Yes, I looked it up, yes it appears to have its own wikipedia entry and all that. But that just SOUNDS like a fantasy kingdom ruled by an evil wizard. So I would NOT trust any callgirls from some evil magical realm, thankyouverymuch.
I keep hearing from lots of news outlets that "the economy really isn't that bad, guys", and sure, compared to the Pandemic or Great Recession, maybe... but the big elephant in the room, the thing that NOBODY is talking about, is housing. Housing is still utterly impossible to attain for most people, and I have yet to hear of any good solution for it other than "hope the market fixes itself-- but NOT with a real estate crash, that would be bad! ;-;".
Office real-estate is crashing because so many places are still trying to make WFH, well, WORK, and lots of people are asking (quite reasonably I think) "Why don't we just rehab those office blocks into housing?" Unfortunately that is an expensive endeavor that the big real estate firms don't have the appetite for, because it involves running new utility lines and doing lots of other changes to the structure of the buildings to make them actually livable. It's easier for them to build their McMansions outside of the major cities while the cities themselves start to rot away.
There are SO MANY solutions to this that don't suck, but no-one is going to try them because the profit margins are too slim. >_<
The moment I hear someone try to call ANY job "unskilled labor", I have to fight the urge to shove the tools into their hands and say, "Okay, YOU do it, then, since it's so simple."
Very cool! Thank you for sharing this! _
I would love to have one! ;-; Could you maybe just offer financing terms that I could afford? Please?
I, too, would love to play Xenogears!
If we could somehow get a collab between Namco and Square-Enix to make the missing Episode 4 that connects Xenosaga and Xenogears, that would be sweet, too. But I know better than to hope for that.
Rules for winning an Anime fight: Always bring a sword to a gunfight, your fists to a swordfight, and a small, furry animal to a fistfight.
Voxel Games Need to be Done
Okay, voxel games were cute, everyone loved Minecraft. But that doesn't mean that voxels are the solution to everything! I really am sick of getting excited at a new game on one of the major services (Steam, Epic, etc) only to have the phrase "voxel graphics" tacked onto the end.
Yes, I'm sure it's easier to design with than conventional graphics, and I respect that. Maybe you want to just get your game out there based on its other merits, like its mechanics or gameplay loop. Cool, I totally get that. But things like Urbek City Builder or Shadows of Doubt just make me cringe a little inside because it's an otherwise great concept mired in graphics that, to my eyes at least, look a little dumb.
Trio of Gamers
Random illustration for a story idea; the story idea may not pan out, but I was proud of how the art came out!
Steps: 40, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 10, Seed: 900795974, Size: 1536x1536, Model hash: 25ba966c5d, Model: aZovyaRPGArtistTools\_v3, Denoising strength: 0.3, Clip skip: 2, Token merging ratio: 0.5, Ultimate SD upscale upscaler: 4x-AnimeSharp, Ultimate SD upscale tile\_width: 512, Ultimate SD upscale tile\_height: 512, Ultimate SD upscale mask\_blur: 8, Ultimate SD upscale padding: 32, Version: v1.3.2
Great interview today of two queer pioneers on PBS!
Great interview today of two queer pioneers on PBS!
https://lauraflanders.org/2023/06/kinship-ties-holly-hughes-esther-newton/?mode=1
The Laura Flanders show is generally a good place for progressive stories, but this one in particular was about a lesbian couple, one of whom was a pioneering performer, and the other an anthropologist who studied the queer community as an anthropologist would-- which was revolutionary for the time, as queer people weren't even considered a culture then. A good episode!