Just playing With Stuff

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sorry, guys. I’m running a fever, and I have absolutely no idea if it’s a real thing or “just” autoimmune. OTOH the panic attacks of the night before are explained. Not unusual when fever starts to take hold.

One of my ways of wasting time when I feel like I’m not doing anything productive is to play with midjourney. So, have some pretty pictures to look at, use for whatever you want, since I am not going to use them.

First a meme, related to yesterday’s post illustration (and maybe yesterday’s post.):

And that’s it. If one of these sparks an idea for one of you, I’ll be ecstatic.

I’m going to have some tea and maybe nap. The next chapter of NML is insisting on being written, so….

57 thoughts on “Just playing With Stuff”

  1. All that’s missing is the rope hanging off that lamppost and it’d be perfect. Maybe a bald Italian fascist guy dangling feet-first. I dunno. Art’s not my thing.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. Playing with stuff is fine. The problem is when the stuff is playing with you. [Crazy Grin]

    Oh, nice art. [Smile]

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Hmmm, the fourth one could be André and Rodney, or something following Jude. So, what would trail along after Jude without being chased off? Not a Familiar, he has one already. Rubs paws together.

    Eeeenteresting…

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Well, Letters lacks a Familiar and while being sane he doesn’t want one, perhaps somebody believes he needs one. [Grin]

        Don’t know what his wife-to-be would think of him having a Familiar.

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        1. How about a baby Dragon named Fred (short for Fredrick The Great) , Purrs like a cat only deeper in register when it’s belly is rubbed. Hatched by a little girl who knew it was a dragon’s egg but felt sorry for it and slept with it at night so it wouldn’t be lonely. So the baby Dragon has bonded with the little girl. Hmmm what could go wrong.

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    2. Alma, I could barely pick out the possible Rodney, and based on your descriptions of his bleaching, unless it’s a very early Rodney, there’s more than enough light there for his fur to stand out.

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  9. Hmmm…MidJourney seems to have trouble putting streetcars on their tracks. They all look to have left wheels on the right-side track and right wheels on the cobbles. Can’t see any tracks in the last image, and why is there a wire hanging below shoulder level?

    That first suspension bridge looks distorted, like the bridge tower is square-on to the camera while the rest of the bridge is at an angle. But hey, the redhead looks great! :-D

    In other news, I only see clear views of 2 1/2 hands. Maybe they avoid showing hands now? The ones that do show look mostly normal.

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    1. It is hard to get a trolley on the track. You first must know how it looks. It is like fingers, looks simple. It isn’t.

      How do you train an AI on the infinite number of relationships of wheel and track. Easy to show track. Easy to show trolley. Hard to match correctly.

      Be an interesting question to prove you are human. Is the trolley on the track?

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      1. Ummm, the tracks need to go under the middle of the streetcar, not off to one side. Images #14 and #16 in particular, you can see one rail passing completely beyond the car’s side. The driver in #14 is also plastered flat against the front window. Maybe that’s why he’s got such a pained expression.

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          2. I mean the right wheels should be on the right rail, and the left wheels on the left rail. Not the left wheels on the right rail, the right wheels who-knows-where, and the left rail not even under the streetcar.

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  11. The Reader thinks Skynet must have looked askance at the prompts Sarah used to generate these.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. I thought of the Tolkien vs. Lewis spat on the appropriateness of lampposts in fantasy.

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  14. Oh, my goodness, possible mistrial in Trump case. Bwahahahahahaha 🤣

    Talk about trying to scrape the cow poop off your face.

    Liked by 1 person

        1. I was wondering why the judge chose to actually send a letter to the parties in the case informing them of the communication. Then I realized that he’s trying to protect himself from personal consequences. His jury instructions, he clearly thought he could get away with without being sanctioned for professional misconduct: he danced up to the line, and it will clearly be overturned on appeal (if the appelate court is honest), but he could maintain a shred of plausible deniability that he’s doing his job according to the rules.

          But a communication on Facebook, which is going to get shared all over the place and the parties are going to find out about anyway… if he doesn’t send them the official letter informing them of it, he’s going to be in deep trouble personally. So this once, he actually followed the rules.

          Liked by 1 person

  17. heres a question that maybe one o yall can answer for me,

    how do you create images like these? Is it a splice thing? Combine different pictures and modify them with various accents? Or are they completely computer generated and tweaked to acheieve the desired look?

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  18. Found a nice little book shop this week. They’re open to selling indie books. thebookbungalow.com It’s in St George Utah. They said they do consignment deals. I checked their catalog, but they don’t have any of your books, Sarah. I posted about it on ALH.

    St George is a college town, and the book shop’s first room is dedicated to sci-fi/fantasy. Might be a possible market for the authors here.

    Liked by 2 people

  20. If any of you want to save these pictures to your hard disk, here’s a tip. Right-click and choose “Open Image in New Tab” (if using Firefox; if using other browsers the wording might be different). Look at the URL in the new tab; you’ll notice it has .png?w=1024 right at the end. Delete the ?w=1024 bit so that the URL ends in .png and nothing else. That will get you the full-sized 2048×2048 image, rather than the image resized to 1024×1024. More pixels = larger file size, but also more detail if you zoom in.

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    1. Um. Backs away slowly, fur starting to rise I think we need to put the bung back in the barrel. The contents seem a wee bit lively yet.

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    1. The Reader notes that trolleys off the rails resemble the light rail system in any city with one.

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  23. I pray you get well soon. I like intriguing commentary, and so far today, the Weather Channel has only shown me how they pay idiots to stand in hurricanes, advertise it like it’s a common thing, and proclaim their opinion of the climate is guaranteed, if you create data to support your theory. I think I need to go to Walmart for a reality check.

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  24. “If one of these sparks an idea…”

    OK, then, check that box. (Vignette follows, based on the last picture)

    Her hand tingled. In that very particular way — or rather, in one of all those myriad ways that were all different and yet all the same — so that even as she crossed alertly in front of the standing streetcar, Nell glanced down at her right hand, and the wand she so often held.

    And saw, as expected, the lovely invisible-except-to-her fireworks on the focal point of it, a beautiful quiet pageant of light that meant her Gift was being called upon by the wide Universe that’d given it to her.

    Now she’d need to go be someplace that wasn’t on the cobblestones of a busy street. (Of course they were all busy, at almost any hour, here in what the BPT’S useful but uninspired naming called Hong Kong 1753 of the mid to late 20th Century, for a decade or so longer till the prospect of a Second Sino-Nipponese War re-shuffled the streamlets of time here once again.)

    But, in a Euro-pan-Asian varietal Hong Kong so like her native own, there wasn’t likely to be much delay or bother finding somewhere nearby she could sit down and close her eyes and sort through her perceptions, look long on the particulars of her wand’s display, all to get her bearings relative to this latest hint from an omniverse she’d at last learned to Walk.

    Perhaps the Cafe Parisienne? It wasn’t all that truly authentic in detail; but it caught the spirit of this time-strand’s French Republic capital to a heartwarming degree. And they did know there how to mind their own business, as the British and Americans said. And only six streets east and two north from where she was walking. Well, more like one and a half north, by now.

    Nell smiled. Almost a metaphor, that, for navigating across planetime.

    Some people, only a few, were time-sensitive in some small way. Could feel those little jumps and skips as they passed, usually quite spontaneously, from one discrete streamlet of time to another. Found their memory taking careful (if often uncomfortable) note of the differences, as they did…

    And only a few out of all those few were properly planetime-sensitive or truly planetime-active; who could clearly perceive both the warp and the weft of time, the past-to-present flowing of ortho-time, and the shifting of chance and fate and circumstance that was para-time. Or even use that flow of immaterial but potent energy between all the filamentary, atomic strands of history and being, that across much of human history many had been pleased to call ‘magic’ — to travel freely, as the old quote said, to wander freely at will rather than dwell in perishable, narrow worlds. 

    People like Nell Alexine de Ruyter Antonelli Volkovna Chang, to give her most proper and correct name by the standards of the Bureau des Plusieurs Temps in Paris-Zero, whose France was an Imperial Republic wrenched from the grasp of the Bonapartes sometime around 1879. And who held sway (even if very loosely) over much of the nearby, and thus comprehensible, World.

    In the dozen years since reaching adulthood and inheriting her powers, she had been a courier, a lifter, a finder, a fixer, a fetcher, a scout, a hunter, and once or twice even an assassin (ought ‘merely’ helping to kill a really-bad-guy actually count?). Most of it at and in the service of the BPT, or anyways with its blessing.

    But this was what she liked best of all — commissioned not by officials in an office, but by the raw, native call of the World of Worlds, itself. Being a fixer meant understanding how someone somewhere, somewhen out there was in the kind of trouble only a Walker could fix… and then helping them.

    Already, she was starting to feel it; likely someone female, brave, in an odd timeline-specific way some sort of knight or paladin equivalent, in a setting that would almost-surely have scoffed at any such idea. And yet…

    Those tiny fireworks on her wand were the cheery but eerie light of a Very pistol of sorts; a flare fired across the skein of histories to call for help… and even a kind of summary or digest of who and what, and where and when and how. Exactly the co-ordinates that someone like her needed.

    Nell smiled, again, and quickened her pace along HK’s bustling sidewalks.

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