welcome to camp telophase

Two Twitter threads from Ursula Vernon on Midjourney and how it takes a lot of noodling around to get workable images.

Thread 1: https://mobile.twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1554684156784820224

Thread 2: https://mobile.twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1555017878629486592

I'm currently reading the first book of Brian McClellan's second powdermage trilogy. Haven't read the first trilogy yet because I wasn't grabbed by the Amazon sample, but I might go back to it.

Anyway, the MacGuffin in this book resembles the MacGuffin in mine fairly closely in form and effects, although not in its use in the plot except for one scene. Which is totally fine, because these things happen. But if mine gets published I can tell that I'm going to have people saying "Did you steal that from McClellan?" and I'm going to have to explain that no, I stole it from Glen Cook and gave it a faint whitewashing of Skyrim.

BTW, the Midjourney AI bot can now be invited to Discord servers with less than 1000 members. Caveats: you'd need a free trial account to use it with the 25-image limit, or a paid account to do more, the images are still subject to their content restrictions*, and the images would also be visible over on the Midjourney Discord (hence the content restrictions). But given how busy the server is, I'd be very surprised if anyone even saw it.

So: given those caveats, is there any interest in me spinning up a Discord and inviting y'all along with the bot?
It would allow someone with a free account a chance to mess with the AI without having to dive into the main Midjourney Discord, and look on and talk about it without a bunch of randos.

As these things go, I'd expect engagement in the near future, then we'd all forget about it and go elsewhere, but that's how they do.




* I've had prompts that generated results that looked vaguely like artistic nudity that haven't been removed. OTOH when I was rating images and came across one that I'm 99.999% sure someone used a copy of goatse to generate, you can bet I reported that puppy at the speed of light.

Last week I posted the response from the HOA when we asked if we needed to get approval just to remove dead bushes from our yard, the ominous "You do not need to submit to remove the dead."

I'm sure that some of you were "Uh, why would you bother to ask about that, it's self-evident that they'd want dead bushes gone, right?" and others, perhaps people drifting through since most of y'all who are regulars are pretty nice about this sort of thing, were like "This is why I'd never buy a house in an HOA!!"

To answer part 2 of that: this was the compromise between cost of house and distance from work, as in if we wanted a house not in an HOA, it was either spend significantly more, drop a metric ton of cash in renovations, or spend 45 minutes twice a day on angry Texas freeways to get to and from work.

For part 1 of the question, on Friday we got an answer from the compliance coordinator of the agency that the HOA uses to manage the business end of the organization. They're the people that do the driving round snapping photos of the dead bushes in your yard and sending you nastygrams, and things like that. Said coordinator told that no, we HAD to get approval just to remove, and copied a letter sent last year from the HOA to homeowners that included the sentence "All landscape and hardscape changes in front yard must be pre-approved by the Architectural Control Committee (ACC)."

Riight. So myrialux emailed them back saying that we'd talked to the board member in charge of that, and she'd specifically told us we don't need approval to remove the dead stuff. This morning the compliance coordinator emailed us back to let us know that they'd spoken to that board member and that she'd said yes we can remove the dead stuff. And said we could contact her directly if we needed additional information, helpfully telling us her name and giving us her email.

Yes, that would be the person we specifically said that we had talked to previously. GAH.

Anyway, today's ominous sentence is "yes you can remove the dead but need to submit for the replacement." I present to you, Midjourney's interpretation of both the previous Ominous Pronouncement and today's Ominous Pronouncement!

( hah I bet you didn't think you'd be forced to look at Midjourney stuff for an HOA post! UNDEAD Midjourney stuff, even! )

Looks like this blog is shaping up to be All Midjourney All The Time, so be warned.

Among other things, I've been experimenting with putting two disparate artist names into the prompt, to see what comes up.

( Read more... )

Experimenting with image prompts this time in the Midjourney AI...not prompts for images, but prompts of images. You give it the URL of an image to use as its base, then if you want you add a text prompt and whatever parameters.

This one is fabulous and I want to paint it.



Prompt: https://s.mj.run/2ubnqV8_7c4 veiled woman sitting on a crescent moon --iw .75 --ar 8:10

"--iw" is Image Weight, how much you want it to weight the image, "--ar" is Aspect Ratio.