Interesting and other stories

 

Two condensations

 

Age appropriate

 

Yesterday I said I would be letting the dioramas speak for themselves, but I do want to step in to note this significant arcana change:  I have aged up my cartoon character to a level rather more commensurate with, well, me, retired in the South of France. I think my character might have even gone a little past my age sometimes, but that's okay, I can grow into him, and he seems about right today.

Stories in boxes

 

We had hoped to have a restful interlude in our old Theoule Sur Mer apartment, watching the Winter on the water for several days, but some family health issues combined with the constant details of establishing ourselves in France and preparing our apartment are keeping us too relentlessly on the move. It's not great, but things are moving along in the right direction, and there are still moments everyday in these lovely places that feel like extraordinary hallucinations.

In my downtime I keep a constant stream of story boxes on the boil, a process that has about eight or nine steps to it, and at the end of an inbetween day like today leaves me with ten new ones finished. We'll be back to the city tomorrow and then maybe home here the next day after that, so I'll be running diorama stories here for the next few posts without much explanation since they tell their stories just as well on their own.

That said, we'll start with a little housekeeping, these being some earlier less articulate experimental versions from the past few days that haven't had their moment in the sun:

Three more souvenirs

 

And again

I am currently in one of those phases where I am making things faster than I can name them, organize them, or, certainly, present them here. But while I could offer up dozens of pictures today, which may be its own kind of fun, I like them too much at this early stage for that. I am reluctant to cast away their preciousness to me. So I'd prefer to offer just a couple of new images today and let myself find my way through all this work over the next days. These days are complicated anyway by another transition trip to our new apartment to get our Internet in and hopefully get some way along with making our kitchen equipped.

I will then let these two pictures tell their own stories:

 

Too many possibilities

 

I referenced all this yesterday, when I spoke of a new leap in complex artificial intelligence image generators, and therefore in the burst of images I excitedly make with them, but this leap might have finally scrambled my brain.

It is not a situation of "What can I do with this?" but rather "What can't I do with this?" Yes, there are things that this techno wonder can't do, things it gets wrong, things it does not do well, but they are hard to get to! And along the way, in the experiments mostly with past work, but also with new work, I am piling up so many amazing things to show you that I hardly know where to begin.

When I first began with this I worked with style changes of my photos, which were a leap better than earlier iterations, though not a total revolution, but I hardly understood the wealth of what I could be doing.

I'm not sure I understand it yet.

I started with image descriptions, characters, text, and famous people, and it was so good at all of that I had to try it out on my dioramas.

I'm currently stuck in the dioramas because they're pretty close to everything I've been aiming for and almost every one I try ends up in a delightful surprise. It's not perfect, but it is now possible the last bits could be done in edits, and even still, these are already far ahead of my earlier ones. And though I'm pretty sure I'm just scratching the surface here, I feel I'd better trot out some examples before I'm positively buried under my creations.

New tool bonanza

 

Whenever some new leap happens in the world of AI imagery there's usually a burst of new pictures here making use of the new tools. And so it was yesterday with some paintings made out of my cloud pictures. These weren't the best example of what could be done, but maybe today's commentary on yesterday's pictures is...

Cold snap

 

Taking a day of rest in our Theoule Sur Mer seaside digs, during this strange period where we have two apartments to live in, the temperatures have plummeted! When we started this epic traversal of the earth it was madly hot everywhere, and at least the first three weeks in Japan were slightly tortured by every single day being in the nineties. 

But time passes. I live in France with my dear wife. And the famously warm and sunny South of France is dropping dangerously close to freezing temperatures tonight.

These plants cannot handle it!

But don't worry! Everything is still pretty. There is a reason the greatest artists of the last century all moved here, the light is unbelievable. And when it gets cold it gets even better!

So I took a lot of pictures out the window, mostly of the clouds.

I'll try and find some of the good ones.