Testing a few things
If anybody even browses this blog, desperately waiting for me to do an update, you might have noticed some theme changes. My plan was to eventually ditch WordPress to a flat file blog platform but I never have any free time to code up something myself the way I want it. I’ve made some quick changes to the existing ancient template I’m using to kinda match the site a bit better (updated logo and push button on the side) and a few alignment changes for wider screens.
Sadly, this site is (should be) SSL only so I have no clue if older browsers break on it. Comments are also re-enabled for the time being, though there’s nothing of value here to comment (yet). The spam filter within 30 minutes kicked out a bunch of weird tech support scam stuff with Indian IP addresses and emails, so who knows how long this will last. I really want to ask where are humans online anymore.
12 years in with this blog and I never really accomplished what I wanted to do with this, which was just vent and provide some other random content, like movie and book reviews. I’m a little sad at this, but I have nobody to blame but myself with it. I have a bit more motivation now to do something seeing that I don’t use any kind of social media so I don’t have an outlet, but we’ll see how long this lasts. I might be opening up publishing to a few other select people to post random stuff too like what was originally planned with my website ages ago.
In other news, I am in search of a few ideas on how to handle book publishing online. My original plan was to just dump text and PDF files on my site here for anything I write, but with the web as dead as it is outside of the social media walled gardens and spambots, I’m not sure I’d get any hits or visits. It basically removes my drive to do anything. My older stuff will still be html only in a sub page I’m going to be calling “The Basement” on my site but that’s a summer task when I have a weekend or two to toy around with things.
In regards to this, I’ve been picking up litrpg audiobooks on Audible lately while I travel for work and I like how a lot of amateur writers seem to have gotten quite a bit of attention, though I don’t know where any of these people started. I do see a lot in common with them, one of them grandstanding and making me realize that extreme political stuff needs to be removed from books as they’re a bit of an escape, and another with the frequent word order use. Example of this is an author using “x frowned” or the constant use of the word “juncture”.
Anyway, enough for now, I do have something I bought the other day that I will be doing a review with and posting on here whenever it arrives from China. I’m hoping that will be the first start to bringing this place back from the dead.
Messing With AI Art
With the new thing being AI art generation, I couldn’t help but give it a shot. After spending a few days trying to get Stable Diffusion to work with my GPU, I finally was in luck. Seeing I have no real place to post some of these besides here and in a few smaller communities (remember I don’t do social media), here’s some examples.
First thing off, was realizing you have to order your words exactly in a specific order or unexpected results occur. I thought bacon on a skillet would be easy… WRONG!
Having bacon after the skillet caused it to be part of the campfire. I got a massive laugh from it. Fourth try got exactly what I was looking for.
I tried to feed some ideas from my book writing times into it and see what it gave me. If it worked great, I could possibly not bother with trying pay an artist commission for book covers and a few web banners in the near future. Not really what I was looking for but still funny.
AI art generators, both stable diffusion and craiyon seem to have issues with real faces. Not a really big deal. It handled anime girls quite well though and paintings as well.
Now for some crazy stuff, because why not.
If I was told just a few years ago you could have art generated by a computer program by just text, I’d be skeptical that it could occur that quickly. I do have some concerns that as this stuff becomes more prolific, there will be restrictions of some kind restricting people from entering specific words or using it in a certain fashion. Where I am okay with metadata being embedded in the images saying they were generated is okay, that’s about as far as I go. Sadly, it’s not the stage yet where I think I can use it in some manner for here yet unless I want everything to look like anime girls, not that I have a problem with that. I’ll be following it for a while though.
Note: I’ve laughed my ass off while generating as many images as I could. This has been quite enjoyable.
New old site
So, after a bout with boredom, I decided to pull out my old computer from high school and play around with it. One of the things on my to do list for years was to fix this site, so I did that exact same thing.
So this is the result:
This was based off the original template me and some of my friends at the time had started with back in the mid 00’s that was originally ripped off from some template site. Not much of that original code remains, I’ve taken what I had laying around, fixed some of the bugs, did new buttons (they used to be pill boxes that never loaded… blame laziness with filename case sensitivity), a new logo similar to that of this blog and called it a day.
You might notice it was tested using Mozilla Firebird. I had a few old copies of Firefox laying around back when it was lean and efficient, and used that as the test bed. I also loaded the last version of Mypal (Pale Moon fork that got nailed by the developers drama) to test with a modern browser. The code is cleaner, more efficient than it used to be, and should work on modern browsers fine. I have a few more things I will clean up to make it work on mobile devices and a slight bug with wide screen displays (the monitor used was a CRT monitor so I never noticed this until I went over to my daily driver machine) but I’ll fix that eventually.
I have a few other things I want to put on there, and have the eventual task of migrating this blog away from wordpress, that task might take as long as it did for me to ever finish that template (2007 to now, so that’s what, 15 years?) but I have some motivation now to go further.
I had some content laying around, one of them being a horrible “Choose your own adventure” game that I started working on the 2016 election (I was drinking with a few guys the weekend before election day when I started working on it and all actions/consequences were done by committee) and finished it a few years later after it was brought back up by one of my friends. I decided to not do anything with it because of “cancel culture” or something like that then at the time… It’s totally meant to be a joke but whatever. I do have another one that is drafted up that is supposed to be a parody of one I vaguely remember flipping through a book when I was a kid but it’s not 100% done yet. I need a few more ideas tossed to me one night to finish it.
Right now that’s about it for content. I’ll eventually migrate the Space Junk Stories (what’s published) over to the site again away from the blog, and you can kind of see the long term plot I’m working on with them. I’m in the air as to if I want to do them for free (my original intention) or find a small publisher that would do a paperback copy, which with current climate, I’m skeptical I could find anybody wanting to help me with that and not get much if any kind of cut from them. I could publish a few more chapters to be honest, but there’s been one transition point around Chapter 4 that I have not been fond of at all during the whole lifespan of the story. I have a sequel also in the works, it’s about 25% done.
Coming soon: Some blog writeup entries of what I’ve seen going on with the world over the past few years and some more content to load in.
Side note: If you read the about page on that site… You’ll notice I mention I did this in Dreamweaver…
I wasn’t kidding.
Not dead…
Or as some people in the 90s/early 00’s would say, the site has always been under construction and you never know if I’ll finish what I want to do on here or not.
With what happened over the past year throughout the world, I do have a good idea what I want to do with these domains now, it’s just dedicating time.
Story progression (the real thing with hits, not counting my /pub directory that gets hotlinks to this day) … 70% complete, with a sequel also started. I’ve held back on uploading anything new mainly because there’s a part of me that has some remote consideration of doing some kind of physical publish of what I’ve written. Who knows.
More to come.
Old Projects
I’ve decided to start work on my old book project that’s been around from before 2007 and even earlier, so if you haven’t noticed (which is likely), I’ve re-added Chapter 1 of Space Junk to the site, new and improved.
The whole plot is technically done, minus some minor details, however since time has passed from 2007 (and this book technically was to take place already), I’ve had to rewrite large parts of the beginning to push the timeline out even further. I’m hoping to be done with the first book of the series by the end of next year so I can work on something else I have an idea of.
I’ll admit, I find it a bit of a struggle to write the beginning part over again as compared to when I was younger, I really don’t like injecting anything involving political stuff into things, but with how the society is set up in the beginning is kind of a central feature and they kind of tie into the second book in the series with the main characters.
I do have an idea for something besides this story, I kind of want to do some alternate history stories eventually, it’s just a matter of when I can find the time.
