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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.
A look back at the past…
Since politics seem to be what everybody talks about right now, I thought it would be interesting to point out stuff not political that might be of educational value.
Something people take for granted in {$Current_Year} is their computers and the internet itself. A handful of people are widely known as pioneers for the modern age of computers, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and others. However tons of people have contributed to creating what people use daily and are not as widely known.
Some people of note:
Dale Heatherington and Dennis Hayes – Created the first PC modem, the 80-103A. Their company (Hayes Microcomputer Products) created the command set for modems that’s still used to this day.
Dennis Ritchie (who died at the same time as Steve Jobs and didn’t get as much media attention) – Invented the C programming language and created the UNIX operating system with colleague Ken Thompson. The C Programming language (in various variants) is used for creation of several software products widely used today. The technology created from the UNIX operating system is used in several computer operating systems to this day.
Vint Cerf – designed the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which is the primary data protocol used on the internet today.
Gary Kildall – Created one of the first programming languages for the Intel 8088 and 8080 processors, PL/M. He also created one of the first OSes for that processor, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). CP/M would later be copied by other companies using its reference material, one of which was Seattle Computer Products. That company would later license its OS, 86-DOS to Microsoft to be sold as MS-DOS.
There’s tons of other people out there, these are just ones that I know of from memory. Out of the ones on the list, I’ve been doing research the most on CP/M and its creator, Gary Kildall. In 2019, CP/M will be 45 years old, and mostly if not forgotten by nearly everyone.
A concern of mine is people not wanting to learn where what they use daily came from, or if they do come across information, see what was done and consider it inferior to today. In modern terms, it is technologically inferior, however things take time to build up and develop over time. So take some time, go look up one of those names and start from there. You might learn something new.
