Cold Creatures: Revisited. Or... Midjourney Again!

So lately my friends in the Vibe Nexus Discord server were raving about how great Midjourney is, and how fun it was to play with personalization, character references, and style references. Well, I used to use Midjourney but gave up on it when it stopped working for me really well. Version 6 just didn't know what I wanted, and Dalle seemed to fill the gap.

But I thought why not pick back up on Midjourney and see what everyone is liking. I decided to experiment with some Cold Creatures, which as you know from this eariler post, was one of the image themes I had the most fun making. Also, please see the banner image, it is also of a Cold Creature.

I tried experimenting with personalization codes, (mine and others) as well as character reference and style reference. Here are the fruits of this labor:

I will say this, so far Midjourney v6.1 and NijiJourney 6 are fun to play with, but when I want a serious image that I have more control over, I will use mage.space's Flux, or LimeWire's Imagen 3.

When The World Ends

There seems to be a new GenZ trend made popular on TikTok (of course) called, "Silent Walking" where one simply.. walks. No earbuds or headphones, no phone, nothing. Just walks, quietly. 

I rolled my eyes of course, being a GenX. "Silent Walking" to me was 1982 walking to a payphone with a quarter in your pocket. It's just walking. But what I realized about what this GenZ trend is trying to tell us, is that we're too dependent on technology in our lives. They are making apps that sound an alarm when you've been on your phone too long. Some TVs have the ability to shut themselves off at certain programmable times. GenZ people are trying to now distance themselves from their screens.

It got me thinking. What would happen if one of these cyber attacks took out the internet? Well, I got a slice of that life the other day.

Wednesday started out like any other day. Woke up, took my pills, drank some coffee, logged on to work. My S.O. works in my department but for a different team doing a different thing. Our office is under construction right now, so we are seated at a card table in our library. Sitting immediately next to each other. And our systems were both slow and laggy. Now, this is nothing new. Our company cut a lot of IT departments and money a few years ago, so the systems don't run very well. But this seemed a little too much. Our internet started disconnecting. Uh oh. I reset the Wifi, but that didn't help. We have T-Mobile 5G Home Internet, so it relies on T-Mobile cell towers for internet access. Then suddenly...*poof* it went out. And I couldn't get it back. In the beginning of a work day! We were incredibly stressed out. I called T-Mobile, (which was a miracle in itself, since our MVNO we subscribe to uses T-Mobile as one of their offerings which we just happened to have on our phones) who advised that two towers went down in my town - more specifically, fiber optic transfer lines. The ETA was 11:AM Central time (I'm in Eastern Time). It was 9am at that time. We had some ways to go. We just sat at our work laptops trying and trying and trying to connect. 

12 Noon (11am CST) came and went with no uptick in service. I called again. I was fortunate that their Voice services were fine, so I text my supervisor with updates and call for support. T-Mobile told me there was now no ETA but there was a technician out there attempting to repair the issue. 

The rest of the work day went by with us just sitting there attempting to connect over and over and over again, stressed out. When my time to clock out came, I got up, put the laptop to sleep and sat on the couch. I realized that everything we watch on TV is available via streaming only, so we wouldn't be able to watch anything. That's when we got on a ladder and hung the little antenna on the wall and scanned for air channels. We found 8. We watched Married With Children (yuck) and Roseanne (yay) for a while before bed. I would've picked up a book and read for a while, but it was too dark and I didn't want to hold my phone flashlight above a book for an hour. I think we used to have booklights, but I don't know where those went. Anyway...

I woke up in the middle of the night nearly (11pm) and the Wifi was back. I was so relieved. Another day of worrying about how to connect to work was going to be upsetting. 

What would we all do? I can't go back to the 80's or 90's. I refuse. Life is so much easier now. Everything is at your fingertips, information is flowing. Knowledge is a click away. Why would we ever go back to silence?

But if the internet went down... what then? What about those people who have kitchen appliances that rely on Wifi to be used? What if we need to do banking, with a company that has no brick and mortar stores? (before you say "phone call" you should know something about me: I. Do. Not. Make. Calls.). I feel like we are SO dependent on technology that if something were to happen to it, we'd all be lost. We are no longer built for the 80's. Our infrastructure, our society, is no longer that of the 1990's neanderthal. We couldn't do it.

Which is why I am so pissed that I kept trying to get into the cybersecurity scene, but it keeps kicking me out. If you don't have a bachelor's degree and at least one certification, sorry not sorry, you can't help.

I want to help! Because as I said.. silence is deafening, and we couldn't do it.

LimeWire: Yes, You Heard Me!

LimeWire!

Do you remember LimeWire, the file sharing program that everyone downloaded music from in the early 00's? It's back. But not in the way you'd think...

The new LimeWire AI art generator is not from the same company as the old file-sharing LimeWire. The original LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service, was shut down in 2010 due to legal issues. The LimeWire brand was later acquired by a different company, which is now using the name to launch new products, including the AI art generator. This new company has no direct connection to the original developers of the file-sharing service.

That's right, I said AI art generator. It also has an AI assistant (much like ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot), and text-to-music. You can edit your images as well as upscale and inpaint/outpaint. So, with all these features, how does it compare? I will be focusing here on the AI Art generating aspect since that's my specialty, but later at some point, we will go through the text-to-music and the soon-to-come image-to-music feature.

Upon entering the site, you get several options. If you click "Create Image" it takes you to the screen where you enter your prompt. Once you hit "generate" it takes literally 1 to 2 seconds for your image to appear, depending on the options you choose. I'm used to others like Midjourney and DALL-E, which can take upwards of a minute or two if not even more, to generate an image. So this was a welcome surprise.

You can also use negative prompts to provide a nuance to the images you'd like to generate. Each image costs 2.40 credits if you use certain Stable Diffusion Models, 3.00 credits for Google's Imagen, and about 4.50 for Stable Diffusion Ultra, out of 10 free credits given, but there are packages you can purchase for a subscription fee.

For $9.99 a month you get 2000 images and 400 audios. You get access to all models, and no ads, plus more. From there it goes to $29.00 a month for even more features. This first tier is comparable to the paid amount for the basic Midjourney which provides a limited amount of hours for you to generate at $10.00. It is also cheaper than DALL-E which is $20 with ChatGPT pro.  So, I would say this $9.99 is a good deal. Here's why:

The images generate quickly but are fantastic in quality. The prompt adherence is not as good unless using DALL-E 3, (which uses 6.00 credits), but better when you use the prompt adherence slider on some models, and also much better than Midjourney and others. It hardly matters though because you have the ability to tweak your image using some of their features that are available.  You can switch aspect ratios or dimensions, and on some models, you can select your prompt adherence values, as mentioned above. 

LimeWire's Discord server features daily and weekly contests, with the ability to win LMWR currency, which I have a note pinned to look into more for further details. 

I have been testing LimeWire's models, and I will share some of the images below.

All in all, LimeWire is a pleasant surprise. I will be using it a lot more, and hopefully soon will post a review for their audio features, as well! Try it out, I hope you enjoy it. 

http://limewire.com

I Am The Fox: Two Poems

"I am The Fox" 

In the moonlit woods where shadows play, I am the fox, with wily charm to sway, With a sparkle in my eye, a mischievous gleam, I dance through life like a whimsical dream.

My fur, a cloak of rust and gold, Stories of cunning and fun unfold, I’m silly, I’m spry, with a heart so pure, In the world of the wild, I am nature's allure.

Adorable I stand, with a playful grin, In the forest’s embrace, I feel akin, Loyal to kin, to friends so dear, My jovial spirit spreads warmth and cheer.

With every leap and bound, I’m free, A master of tricks, yet true to thee, In the whispering winds, my laughter sings, A fox’s tale of joy it brings.

So here I am, the fox, both sly and sweet, In the woodland’s heart, life’s rhythms beat, With cunning and joy, a harmonious blend, I am the fox, your eternal friend.

-- ChatGPT

"I Too, Am The Fox" 

I am the fox, just like the lore, cunning and more

I bounce and I play in the meadows and in the glade

I frolic in fun and I'm never done

Wily and free, I am the fox as silly as can be

Loyal with a mischievous streak, my yips aren't weak

I cry out for love, I cry out for fun

I cry out for nature, I cry out for sun

I am the fox, wily and free, just as carefree as anyone could be

- Me.

I wrote the 2nd one by myself. I know, it's crummier than that ChatGPT one. But I'm not a poet or a masterful AI chatbot, either.

Independence Day

Happy Birthday America!

We. Are. Doomed. 

Taylor Swift's muse timeline!

My mate just spent a lot of time and research on this blog about Taylor Swift's complete muse timeline. If you're interested, here is the link!

https://kit10phish-explains-it-all-45637244.hubspotpagebuilder.com/raw-my-uncensored-thoughts-and-opinions/combo-masters-taylor-swift-timeline

and a random image:

Cold Creatures

So today I went a little nuts making these creatures on Dalle that started as creepy little creatures holding glowing hearts in a ruined, smoking city. The gist was "cold creatures, warm heart". In other words don't judge a book by its cover; these creatures were offering warm hearts, despite their visual representation. I kept making these images though, one after another, using a prompt that I pieced together from other older prompts of mine. So the creatures evolved over time and it was no longer a heart they were holding, so I just call this series "Cold Creatures". 

I'm attempting to post some of the images here.

I Like Polar Bears

Polar Bears are my favorite animal. I have a favorite animal, a spirit animal, and a kindred-spirit animal.

Honey Badgers are my spirit animal. They are feisty and mischevious and get into lots of trouble. But they are cute. And Foxes are my kindred-spirit  animal, because they too, are mischevious, wiley, and sketchy but adorably cute. Just like me!

That is all I had for today.