Posts made by surreality

@Ghost There are a bunch of google collab things for Stability that are (relatively) self-explanatory, and if you don't mind slow and limited sizes, they can be fiddled with free or pretty steadily for $10/month for more reliable access.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1jUwJ0owjigpG-9m6AI_wEStwimisUE17

^ That one is pretty solid.

(It says 'no NSFW filter' but don't assume that's because it's for porn-hounds; they set up a NSFW autodetect that is notoriously and often hilariously buggy. You'd see buildings, clouds, rocks all censored to much gnashing of teeth in the beta because the autodetect thought it might be a nipple.)

It's worth checking out the possibilities with StabilityAI for this. It can do a pretty good job, or at least the best I've seen thus far.

Their site is up at https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/dream and nightcafe also has an option to use their engine. Neither is completely free, but they have free options available if you don't use them much. I think Midjourney has options for using it as well, though I have no experience with their setup for it or their server in general. There are some google collabs you can use free or mostly free that run it as well.

Unlike DALL-E, you can request likenesses if you want someone who sorta looks like whoever as a general appearance range or starting point. (DALL-E doesn't want people making likenesses on the whole, and you can lose your account for trying too much.)

(Seems like I've missed a lot of something I'm pretty sure I'm glad I missed, but back to doing something else for another year for me. This past year's 'something else' is relevant to the theme of this thread, so it was worth tossing the info out there. All the while tinkering with the Stability beta I kept wondering if people had suggested it for the hobby, and it's cool to see that's happening. It's neat, fun, addictive stuff.)

Hi. I'm still alive.

Anyway, I was bored as hell today and tinkering with an AI art generator and threw the first paragraph of the Nymeria desc into it, and the infamous Tracy desc into another one.

Tracy came out as gross as one would expect, so it's behind a spoiler tag.

***=Hilarious Nightmare Fuel***

click to show

Hope y'all are doing well in the hellchaos that has made reality way weirder than any of our fictions over the years.

I'm still not out and about or playing anywhere or doing dev on anything, but I couldn't NOT share that silliness with y'all.

P.S. AI art generators are fun for people who like to play with language. Sorry not sorry if this addicts someone else.

@crawfish I have no idea about the characters these are inspired by, but they're so nifty I don't care. I'm sure they'd be twice as awesome if I knew, but even not knowing, they still kick all the ass.

@aria That's the knitpicks Muse yarn, isn't it. (I just finished a momshawl in it with a color just like the magenta/violet/blue is why I ask!)

@cupcake This one makes me incredibly sad. I remember so many of her paintings, and IIRC she went to one of the colleges I did.

@carma I am really glad to see people coming around to this. I'd set up a similar system for on-wiki preferences that players could set and add notes to as needed, and it was a lot more controversial at that time. Definitely go for it with this.

Ran across this in another group I'm a part of. Since these issues are tragically common in the hobby, it seemed like it may be useful to share. It has a lot of information, including the upsides and downsides of some potential remedies.

What to do if you're the target of online harassment (from Slate).

In some ways, it hasn't been the kind of hell for me it has for my husband. I'm used to being home and generally isolated. I'm also lucky: my parents live next door.

It hasn't been an easy year, regardless. I'm dealing with different kinds of isolation than I'm accustomed to, and while that's 'like everybody else', they aren't the same things as most other people, which is unhelpful.

I'm watching a lot of movies and shows. I'm trying to design a perfect dream house I'll never live in just to do it. I keep waffling over designing a game or not, then getting distracted by something else. (I know what I want to do, it's the doing it that's... meh.) Still trying to help people deal with Qanon disinfo and chaos, harassment, and threats.

It's worth noting that if you grind your teeth in your sleep, ***Spoiler tag for people who have dental phobias -- you don't want to see this.***

Guess who learned this the hard way!

There was an actual game set in Hell -- not sure of the codebase. It started in the late 90s and went through... early 00s, I think?

As in, the actual website included the hierarchies and realms of Hell, and people could pick up named entities as FCs of a sort, or they could create their own hell-denizen. It was very L&L, from the few bits I ever saw from there, and it makes sense considering how that hierarchy is structured.

I ended up checking it out since someone wanted someone they knew to pick up their co-head of some group or another that no one had taken up -- I think the character was based on actual mythological Hel -- but the world and its pre-existing interplay was a little too detailed/etc. for me to just dive into it at that level and feel like I'd do a role like that any justice.

There was a Hell-set game ages back -- last I recall of it was 20 years ago. I never actually played there, though a few people I know did and I almost got around to it. It was very much a 'love it/hate it' place, iirc, per the folks who were there.

@JinShei This one really hammered the feels.

My husband sent this to me with the note: "I think I found our cat's previous owner." (Not really, thought it's funny that she's a dead ringer all the same.)

Murderflouf snowball of doom.

@GreenFlashlight This.

It isn't that person I'm necessarily worried about. It's their potential as a vector.

The disinformation around this virus is as deadly or more so than the virus itself, and disinformation in general has an astonishing network to be amplified and spread through.

It isn't just the anti-vaxxers and similar spreading it; it's going through a very active and growing propaganda pipeline that has become large enough to pose a genuine danger.

...I would have loved to see Charlie's adventures in Oz.

Dammit.

If it was anything but 2020, I'd be setting up for the art show we've done since I was in junior high right now.

While this was my one shot for actual income this year, nobody ever makes much at this show. Ultimately, that was never the point.

It was the show 'close enough to the holidays' that all the local artists would gather and mill around and chat and catch up with each other, barter things, and generally remain part of each others' lives, because there were fuck-all in terms of customers through portions of each day.

Many of them are much older than me, and I'm not young any more. A few would just... not be there the next year as it is, and there's less young blood filtering in. I don't really want to think about how many more empty places there will be next year where people with unique voices, visions, and gifts had been this time last year.

It was the two whole days of the year I didn't mind being social.

I had y'all and these people.

But, y'know. It's 2020, and this year couldn't suck more without serious effort.

@Kanye-Qwest Irony: it's usually exhausted but completely unable to sleep because the brain is zooming and the body is like, 'what?'

The brain looping the body 100x over is augh.

@SinCerely "I haven't finished <thing>" is literally the only reason I'm still alive right now, I'm pretty sure of that.

There are so many possibilities for what that thing is, though, I'm now afraid that some day I'll darn the right sock and just drop dead on the spot.

Or live forever.

I honestly do not know which is worse.